A Question About Modding the PROJECTILESTAT File

[Sensei Warrior]

It's more of a question about planning than a technical question. I've been a closet modder for awhile now, with a good amount of success. I have finally gotten around to putting a solution to the absence of Mongol Bows in my Mod.

We all know that the ninjastar entry gives us an extra bow slot to fuss with. Thats where my Mongol Bow and probably everyone elses is going to go. I figure the stats for it is going to be darn close to the stats for Longbow. Now there are 2 types of units that these Mongol bows will be dispersed to Mounted and Infantry. I wanted to keep the flavor of the game partially intact by making sure the Mounted Units didnt fire quite as far (or accurately) as the Infantry units, but alas I only have one slot . Whats a modder to do?

Well, I started looking through the various list and shortbows have tons of units attached to it, Mountedlongbow does too, but Longbow only has one unit (those crazy Longbowmen from England). That kinda ticked me off. Why are they so special?

So here is my tentative plan: I was thinking of giving my Infantry archers (the ones not mounted) the Longbow (considering my Mongol Bow plans on having very similar stats), and then modding the Ninjastar line to be a slightly tuned down variation of the Longbow to give to my Mounted Missile Units.

Now, before I enact this little scenario I figured I would bounce it off the more experienced (and better) modders kicking around the forums. What do you guys think? Will it work? What have you guys done when tackling this little problem?

EDIT Corrected grammar and spelling errors that just kind of snuck in.

[Puzz3D]

We all know that the ninjastar entry gives us an extra bow slot to fuss with. Thats where my Mongol Bow and probably everyone elses is going to go. I figure the stats for it is going to be darn close to the stats for Longbow. Now there are 2 types of units that these Mongol bows will be dispersed to Mounted and Infantry. I wanted to keep the flavor of the game partially intact by making sure the Mounted Units didnt fire quite as far (or accurately) as the Infantry units, but alas I only have one slot . Whats a modder to do?

After extensive play testing in Samurai Wars we ended up giving the mounted units the SBOW that the foot units use. The mounted bow units were not cost effective when given less range and less accuracy than the foot bows. This works out quite well in the gameplay because horses are a larger target than foot men, so a mounted bow still looses to the foot bow, and you can adjust how badly it looses by changing the armor rating. Since the battle engine mechanics requires that all units halted when shooting, it's hard to justify reducing the range and accuracy of the mounted units anyway. So, giving the foot and mounted the same bow frees up the MTLG for use as the composite bow. The ninja star remains as is for use with the battlefield ninja. As a side note, we also increased the number of arrows from 28 to 36 to improve the overall effectiveness of bows.

Well, I started looking through the various list and shortbows have tons of units attached to it, Mountedlongbow does too, but Longbow only has one unit (those crazy Longbowmen from England). That kinda ticked me off. Why are they so special?

The longbow was larger and had a higher draw weight than a standard bow. It could shoot farther and the arrows were larger than standard bows so it had good armor penetration which is reflected by the 0.5 armor modifier. The Mongol archers had high range with the composite bow, but their arrows were much lighter so the 0.5 armor modifier of the longbow doesn't seem appropriate.

So here is my tentative plan: I was thinking of giving my Infantry archers (the ones not mounted) the Longbow (considering my Mongol Bow plans on having very similar stats), and then modding the Ninjastar line to be a slightly tuned down variation of the Longbow to give to my Mounted Missile Units.

This will work fine as long as you don't mind the 0.5 armor modifier being on the Mongol bow.

[Tyberius]

Something about Bows:

1.- There's no such thing as a mounted longbow, you could never shoot a longbow from horseback, the only closest thing to a mounted longbow is the japanese asimetric yumi, so the MTLG is a composite Bow, not a longbow

2.- No Bow in the entire medieval world gets even near in effective range to the welsh/english longbow (200 yds.), since longbows were as tall as their wielders, and required a long training for a man just to draw their full lenght (some LB's were calculated to have a pressure of 95 lbs!) Again, the only second place is for the yumi (160 yds.) (these japanese people really did good bows!) the other difference was that as puzz3D stated, longbow arrows were longer, heavier and used the (in)famous bodkin tip (ask the french chevaliers!) the japanese yumi used arrows even longer than LB's but they were thinner and lighter and had really big feathers in the tail so the japanese arrows sort of "Flied" more compensating the less pressure of the yumi, but had less armour penetration.

3.- Composite Bows didn't have too much more range (140 yds.) than a short bow (120 yds.) indeed, some composite bows are really small even compared to a western shortbow, the fact is that they were just more powerful (that gives the extra range) because of their strong and very flexible construction (incorporating animal bones and nerves) they lost little effectiveness at long range compared to sbows.

So, you can give the shortbow to all western (and some arab) (not turks) units (including western horse archers)
(range- 5500, velocity- 175, accuracy- 0.7, lethality- 0.7, power- 1, armour mod- 1 reload time- 5)

the mtlg to the turkish (and some arab and eastern european) foot and mounted units.
(range- 5750, velocity- 190, accuracy- 0.75, lethality- 0.7, power- 1, armour mod- 0.8 reload time- 4)

and the ninj (mongol composite bow) obviously to the mongols, cumans and volga bulgars
(range- 5850, velocity- 195, accuracy- 0.8, lethality- 0.75, power- 1.5, armour mod- 0.6 reload time- 4)

and leave the longbow for the british (and maybe you can add some french longbowmen too) yes, french had a little quantity of longbowmen from brittany and normandy...
(range- 7000, velocity- 200, accuracy- 0.75, lethality- 0.9, power- 2, armour mod- 0.5 reload time- 5)

cheers,

Tyberius.

[Puzz3D]

Maximum range would occur when the arrow is fired at a 45 degree inclination. You can achieve this trajectory in the game by using the formula:

max range = (velocity/2)**2

You can then set the effective range of the weapon to something lower than maximum range, and that will flatten the trajectory. To make the battles play as though they were taking place on a larger scale, the ranges used in the game have always been something less than the historical ranges.