Slinger

The slinger is an Arabian ranged unit recruited from the mercenary post in Stronghold Crusader.
==Description==
Slingers are fast and cheap units. They hurl stones from their slings to the enemies from a distance. They cannot cover as much distance as an archer and deal less damage than an arrow against most targets, but they have a much better firerate to make up for it.
What makes the slinger a viable unit to use is that they are very inexpensive and so their weakness is covered by their numbers. They are useful for raiding and they tend to perform passably versus slow, armoured soldiers, due to their fast rocks. They are also effective against lightly armoured attacking troops such as macemen when placed on walls.
File:SH C Slinger.png|A slinger spinning up to fire
==Usage==
They are a good unit to recruit if a player has little starting gold and needs to defend their fortress, but they should not be kept on walls or the keep, but kept near the castle campfire, behind walls where they will not be fired upon. They can then be moved onto walls if enemy troops are advancing near to the walls or are already trying to hack them down, but make sure they are supported by archers in the same area of wall. It is wise to use them against marching armoured units when your starting out with little gold, for slingers can penetrate armour and deal descent damage against armoured units trying to hack down your walls.
Slingers are also a cost-effective way for harassment. Disrupting worker lines by killing workers with their stones can prove valuable, as it forces the enemy to spend time and units to shut them down. Even if they are sacrificed, the lost resources and production time can be an a major achievement.
Against clusters of buildings, groups of slingers can prove surprisingly effective. Combining the high firerate with the high number of attacking units, they can whittle down structures' health in a relatively short time.
Slingers also fare surprisingly well in melee, dealing a passable amount of damage for a ranged unit, even though they are quite fragile. Their low cost and high speed allows them to simply overwhelm many other troops or storm a keep with numbers, and any that are not engaged will sling stones into the melee.
==Trivia==
*In single player skirmish mode, this unit type is only used by The Sultan and The Snake, sometimes for raids but mostly for defending their castles and outlying buildings. The Snake only uses a few, supported by many archers, but the Sultan uses large numbers of them and somewhat unwisely relies on them for castle defence. In the campaign, a mass of slingers prove vital in completing the first Saladin mission (Damascus) and particularly in the second mission (Kerak), where they are used as a means of distraction.
*There is a glitch with slingers: when commanded to attack an area while selected with archers, Arabian bowmen, horse archers or crossbowmen, the slingers will shoot their rocks as far as the bowmen.
*Units killed by slung stones have the same death animation as those killed by stones from a catapult, trebuchet, or mangonel or bludgeoned with a mace or staff.
*In Stronghold Crusader Extreme a favored tactic by CPU when they have access to slingers is send slingers to areas defensive archers can't reach to deny players economy such as between buildings or similar.
==Navigation==
de:Schleuderschütze
ru:Пращник
Category:Units
Category:Stronghold Units
Category:Stronghold Crusader Units