surpriuss

"They cost stone" Well this is not exactly true. While the need for stone can increase the amount of time required to create slingers, all you need is to start gathering it from the beginning. Also with the stone provided even in the low resources configuration it is possible to have extra units at the cost of only food and some wood, this basically explains why slinger rush is so successful and widely used among those so called "professional players". I really believe that the existence of overpowered slingers is something to diminish the gameplay and some well known issue among the game user base. I'm not sure if the developers are aware of it, but until something changes most players will be sticking to slingers and relying on them as their main strategy.

I still can't understand why ppl care so much about ratings.

I must say that I partially agree with this, but I believe that the goal of this game is not to be played hardcore, like badosu said? don't waste your time trying to practice and improve with something that's unbalanced by nature ! if you really want to play this at it's state-of-art level, like others fellow players, why not start playing with the same civilizations they do!? take Athenians for instance, they have everything you need to become overpowered: slingers and catapults. If you mix them both you become unbeatable ! others civilizations are just too weak and most people never play with . Mauryans, Kushites & Carthagians are some of then. Now let's talk about reality . the Carthaginians ruled the world in North Africa , I believe that Romans had a really bad time to conquer then! And what do you you know about Celtics conquering other civilizations ? And despite this in this game they get a really unfair degree of tribal warfare , I mean common! Slingers can even defeat heavy infantry just throwing rocks at them, no wonder why most people just play theses . And what about formations!? They're meaningless. Have you even seen how your spear units perform when they're on formation? They bug, and they leave formation, with no cohesion they simply die fighting alone every man by himself, and this once was the most effective way of ancient war in the past . In this game 'bullets' from slingers thrown at ~200km/h can penetrate any soldier's armor and kill him. It's unreal and unfair. This game is meant to be played with friends who doesn't take it too seriously because you can clearly see that some civilizations are more predominant than others.