No Good Ranged Units!!

[beans_on_toast]

Its annoying me beyond belief, Im playing as the HRE and they have no good ranged units, could someone recommend me a ranged unit thats amazing, I know longbowmen are good, but how can i recruit them for HRE?

[rvg]

They get Mounted Crossbows, which are VERY nice. As far as foot archers go, the vanilla variety should do just fine in Early.

[Peasant Phill]

You can hire longbowmen as mercenaries.

What about mounted X-bows?
What eara are you playing? If your in early no catholic faction can get decent archers (at least not in comparison with longbows). If your in high or late, crossbows and arbelasters can do the jow comparable with longbowmen (slower rate of fire but lasts longer). Besides Longbows are a special unit: fast firing archers with armour piercing arrows, and they can fight reasonably will to.

If you play a mod there could be other units with the archery skill that you seek. In XL SHC are HA with good melee skills and fast firing armour piercing arrows.

[caravel]

From Early: Archers, mounted crossbows
High onwards: crossbows, pavise crossbows, arbalests, pavise arbalests.

In the early period you're better off than say the French or English who don't have mounted crossbows.

[macsen rufus]

Definitely mounted xbows -- you really need to master these guys to get the best out of the HRE. Remember they are armour piercing, and fast (well manoeuvring they are, they still shoot slowly) and used properly can really whittle down the heavy enemy units. They really come into their own once the Danes start throwing huscarles at you!

[naut]

Start in the High era in the XL mod and you can get Bohemian bowmen IIRC.

[Ciaran]

Its annoying me beyond belief, Im playing as the HRE and they have no good ranged units, could someone recommend me a ranged unit thats amazing, I know longbowmen are good, but how can i recruit them for HRE?

You can´t, unless you hire them as mercenaries. If you have conquered Genoa, though, you can recruit Genoese Sailors, I think and they´re the best substitute you can get. They´re not armour-piercing as Longbows are, but they´re better than the vanilla archers. Anything else you´ll have to content with your vanilla archers until you get crossbows and arbalests. And until you get them, even the vanilla archers can do their job.

I´m not much of a friend of mounted missiles of any kind, but those who advertise them do have a point. I´m not sure (haven´t played an unmodded MTW for quite some time), but maybe you can dismount the mounted crossbows and get some foot crossbows before anyone else does. Or keep them mounted and use them similar to the foot variety, just remember not to move them about a lot, they don´t reload on the move.