Melee with Ranged Autocast on Cooldown

[HerrDave]

Howdy folks
I'm working on a map with a special Footman replacement called a Centurion

He fights with the standard Sword & Shield, but is intended to automatically throw a Javelin as his very first attack and resort to Melee until the cooldown is finished (30 seconds).
This is to circumvent manually casting something like Firebolt and forcing the player to Micro-cast this ability a ton of times instead of focusing on their heroes and spellcasters.

I've been experimenting with Searing Arrows, but that just results in the Footman running up and delivering a particularly strong punch.
I was unsuccessful in getting Firebolt to become autocastable as well

My next plan is to try using the Quilboar's Frenzy (Since I think that casts itself the moment the unit enters combat) and have a trigger that spawns an invisible dummy who throws the javelin at the Footman's target, but that's sort of a last resort and I'm not even sure if that'll work or not.

 

[Chaosium]

I suggest using Faerie Fire with a blank debuff and a 0.001 duration, units autocast it on any enemy in range (an alternative is Curse but I believe they only use it on enemies with an actual attack), then you can easily detect whenever your spell is cast and create a dummy to launch the real spell, that's a system I'm using and it works just fine