Archers & Ballistics Kill ratio

[Fearless]

What do the forum members think of the kill ratio for archers and ballistics. Personally I feel they could be tweaked up a bit. I have never seen any decent carnage from a catapult/catapults and archers on a hill don't appear to be as effective as the samurai archers in STW. Right or Wrong?...............lets hear it

[Kraxis]

That is right enough as in STW units did not have as heavy Armour as they do in MTW (Naginata 5 Armour and Lancers 9). Even Spearmen have quite heavy Armour if they face the fire. Most STW units didn't have 3 Armour unless they were cavalry.

Catapults are simply too inaccurate.

[chunkynut]

Definatly right.

But then this would have you bring maybe 3/4's of you army as missiles and many would argue about balance etc.

i think that CA or a modder should give out a realism missiles patch this would make me really happy http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif which would of course be optional.

[spiffy_scimitar]

Actually, I would encourage any of you to setup up a custom game with 1 ally against 3 foes.. and then give your ally nothing but catapults.
I can guarantee you the catapults will finish with at least a hundred, maybe even several hundred kills, and the enemy forces will rout nearly on contact with your forces. (I suggest highly defensive infantry units however)

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[Orda Khan]

Scissors, paper, stone.... the thing that made Shogun a better game. Archers could kill well enough in mediaeval times and as I have stated many times, not all units were heavily armoured. What is heavy armour anyway? Total head to toe? Not many owned that unless they were of Royal blood.
It's no good including units that can't achieve anything

......Orda

[de la Valette]

There are tweaks you can do both pre and post (so i believe as i haven't patched yet) patch that can address this issue. Whether its more ammo, lowering armour, changing unit movement speeds and that is without the tweaks you can do to the range and power of missile units.

Also define decent kill ratio? On average i get 65-85 from archer based units, slightly more from xbow based units (given the time to fire all their ammo) and about 45-75 from catapults when defending. Anything more would turn the game into a missile fest which would be dull.

[econ21]

For me the problem was ammo. I've modded all archer ammo (not artillery) to 96 and am very happy with the result.

Before, the archers - and especially longbows - dried up far too quickly in the big battles you tend to face against the AI. I found they had a very marginal impact for their price and the game became rather a painful melee slogging match. Even with the change, they still dry up after about two waves of AI attacks but do tremendous damage in the interim (plus at that stage, the depletion of the AI morale and strength means that they can be effectively replaced by bringing on just 1-2 reinforcing archer units). On the defense, they are what gives my outnumbered forces their edge - 2-3 archer units + 2-3 catapults combined with a compact front can give you a local concentration of force. They need the protection of spearwall of course - the amount of damage vanilla archers can do to charging enemy is miniscule (because they tend to overshoot and because they have so little time to fire). However, safely behind a spearwall they can lower the enemy's morale if he closes or even better if he stands off.

On the offence, I find ranged weapons directly less useful - primarily I use them to make the enemy move and turn an offensive battle into a defensive one.

Even with low ammo, arbalesters are brilliant, of course. Conservation of ammo, long range, firing in rain and scything through heavy armour meant that I never missed my longbows when playing as other factions.

Given the change I've made to ammo, increasing the effectiveness of archery would imbalance my SP game. If you feel archery without tweaking is too weak - as I do - then just change the ammo; I think you'll like it.

[ShadeFlanders]

In SP I am quite happy with missle units: pav arbs, treb arch and bulg brig are all very good missile units. In MP missile units are too weak.

[TheLastEuropean]

Archers could do with a bit more range imo. Siege weapons I haven't used much in a battle because they don't kill infantry/cav that well, which suits me. How many medieval battles had a catapult on the field?

[The Green Knight]

i was defending on a steep slope in wallachia and had 80 some archers de[ployed with two inf units as back up and the rest of my troops were concealed in woods

the ai tried to attack with royal knights and peasant and horse archers but retreated twice. and then withdrew from the battle

i have never seen such a result before, there werent many kill tho

[LordKhaine]

Archer units are fine as they are in sp. Many a battle I've fought has been dominated by missle fire.

I'd quite like to see shields have more effect against arrow fire tho.

[Maelstrom]

I would have agreed with this until last night, when my unit of spearmen backed up with 4 archers and 4 horse archers wiped out almost 600 HRE spearmen and urban militia on a bridge for the loss of 19 of my spearmen....

The horse archers then chased down another 200 as they routed.

[A.Saturnus]

The difference with Japanese warfair is that they didn`t use shields. I think that even a wooden shield could deflect an arrow when it doesn`t hit near 90°. And the quicker the arrows are, the greater the deflection (believe it or not, bullets can be deflected by grass). In MTW many units have shields. So I think in SP archers are effective enough. I play Egyptians and use a lot of nizari and mamluk archers. They have usually a lot of kills. Of course it depends where you direct your fire, heavily armoured troops are nearly immune against archers, but light infantry is a prefered target.

[Sainika]

Once in the bridge battle two units of my arbalesters (60 men each) killed more than 350 enemy soldiers.
I think simple archers and crossbowmen are too weak and I never use'em. But specialised archers (genoese sailors, desert archers, nizari, bulg. brigands and treb. archers) are more powewrfull and worth to hire.

[hoom]

Post patch, you actually do need to use the vanilla archers instead of just making do until you have crossbows.
I have found them to be reasonably useful.
I definitely wouldn't go into a defensive battle without them if I had the choice.
If you score a lucky hit with a catapault, then you get lots of kills. I have had a catapault go from 0 valour up to 2 in one shot.