As part of what many of us call the weakest roster in Rome: Total War, the desert infantry unit has a special place in my heart. Obviously its a unique unit to Numidia, and you pretty much rely on them as your main infantry unit until you unlock legionairs at tier 4.

So to answer the question, I think they are underrated. As a baseline I'm comparing them to the roman equivalent of their tier, which in this case are the Hastati. They are a tier 2 unit, with decent to good stats overall. Their morale is high (8) and this means they have a better morale then both hastati and principes (6). Attackwise they are just as strong as the hastati and principes. In defense they are equal to the hastati. They don't have pilum, so they can't thin out enemies from a distance.

They have good endurance, I assume because of their light weight armor, they are able to keep on fighting longer then more heavily armoured enemies and its makes them good in chasing down routing enemies.  Obviously not as great as cavalry.

Talking about cavalry, they are actual spearmen (and also classed as heavy infantry). So they do have a bonus fighting against cavalry. Chartage's round shield cavalry will fall fast if they charge into your frontline with these men up front.

Fighting within deserts give them a small culture bonus of +1 attack. Since their unit specifies that they get bonus combat in desert it could be possible they get another +1 bonus attack.  Which means a +2 attack in total whenever they fight within Northen Africa and Anatolia. In my defense, I'm not sure if I interpert the modifiers correctly. So correct me if I'm wrong.

Concluding, they actually might be one of the strongest tier 2 unit in Rome: Total War, but because they are part of the weakest faction and judged by the overall weakness of the roster they get underrated.

Tell me what you think? Are they as strong as I'm projecting them to be?

Desert Infantry overrated or underrated?