Archer elevation

[Tamur]

Another day, another 3000 dead infantry...

Hypothesis:

Archers are deadlier when firing downhill

Method:

therother brought a lot of Bow Ashigaru, I brought a lot of Loansword Ashigaru, and we met on a mountainous map. I can't remember the name, but using any map with varied elevation (which, it must be said, is not too hard in this game!) you should be able to reproduce the results.

We ran two sets of tests.

First, I lined up single units of Loansword Ashigaru six ranks deep at what I estimate to be a 40 ft elevation drop from therother's archers, who were in 2 ranks and normal formation at the top of a ridge.

Second, I lined up single units of Loanswords, again six ranks deep, at the same elevation as the archers, who were again in 2 ranks, normal formation.

In both cases, the general was present to keep the infantry from routing too early.

Results:

I even labeled my graph this time...



When I was typing in the data, and then looking at this graph, it appeared that the elevated archers might have a slight edge though the difference didn't look striking. To examine that further, I summed accumulated kills across time, and here's the result:



You can see that kill rates are about as smoothly aligned as experimental results can get. The difference in every test case was that the downhill units routed one round earlier, even though their population was identical to the unit on flat ground.

Conclusion:

It appears that our hypothesis was wrong -- archers do not kill any more when shooting from high elevation than they would otherwise.

But, it also appears that units downhill from archers suffer a slight morale penalty which led to the earlier routing.

As always, more testing and other data is very welcome.