​Battlefield Role: Firearms Infantry (Low Accuracy)
Weapons: A flintlock musket and a longsword. Many of them also carry pistols and bayonets for close quarters.
Outfit: A leather coat, adorned with furs and roses. Thick gloves, reinforced boots and corset.
Skill level: Moderate skills with firearms and melee weapons.
Affiliation: City-State of Thorn Gardens, in the Athenian Fields
Doctrine: Athena's Way of the Warrioress
Strengths: A volley of musketry is just as lethal as it is terrifying. The bullets pierce armour and devastate entire enemy front lines.
Weaknesses: Muskets aren't very accurate, take a hell lot of time to load and do not work well in wet weather.
Elysian Musketeers
The City-State of Elysia is quite famous for its vast rose gardens and vineyards, which attract so many romantic tourists to the region. The local culture and traditions are strong, but the creativity of its citizens is also very praised due to their inherent open-mindedness. No other City-State is so open to embrace new ideas, so it's not a big surprise why the Thorn Gardens' Military Forces was the first (and also the only) army within the entirety of Arandolia to put aside their strict bellic traditionalism in order to adopt the use firearms.
​
For the rest of the amazon nation, those loud, filthy, smelly and clumsy weapons are a shame and a dishonour to be wielded. Many people also see them as largely impractical and overly expensive, but not the amazons of Thorn Gardens! Through acquiring contraband of flintlock pistols and muskets from the pirates of Westmarsh and hiring the best alchemists from Aglaia to locally produce their own blend improvised black powder, the armed forces of Thorn Gardens are able to successfully field and equip entire regiments of Amazon Musketeers. They already got to the point of completelly replacing their archer regiments for Musketwomen, turning the armour of all their enemies largely useless.
As such, the effectiveness of Elysia's armies in wars suffered a great impact. Though many argue that such impact isn't necessarily a positive thing, there are arguments both in favour and against their experience with firearms so far. While the thundering explosions of hundreds of muskets being fired simultaneously is undeniably quite deadly and terrifying, the guns demand a stupidly long time to be loaded and aren't all that accurate at all. Moreover, unlike bows and crossbows, muskets fire in a straight line, being completelly unable of shooting in an arch above allied troops onto the enemy lines. All the musket regiments must then be positioned at the vanguard of the army instead of behind the safety of the infantry shieldwalls, leaving them rather exposed to cavalry charges.
​
The use of bayonets helps to compensate this vulnerability by turning the muskets into improvised pikes, but an attached bayonet further slows down the already slow muzzle-loading process of the gun, making its rate of fire even worse. Also, wet and rainy weather fucks up the black powder and the flintlock mechanisms, negatively affecting the muskets. All that would make those primitive firearms quite useless, if it wasn't for their implacable effectiveness at piercing armour and causing a lot of bloodshed.
In the end, the adoption of firearms is still a great controversy within Arandolia. But for good or for bad, the Thorn Gardens Musketeers are one step ahead of the rest of the nation at this.