Handguns, Albarests, and Arqubusers...Paive and ot

[Panzer Bane]

I am curios on everyone's views about Handguns, Albarests, and Arqubusers...Paive and otherwise.

I am new to the late era, have always played early.
By the specs the cheaper handgunners seem the most cost effective. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/idea.gif

Feel free to compare the Trezbiond Archer unit into this comparison also, as they are a strong choice too, (don't need alot of infrastructure to start up with.).

[Tony]

Handgunners I found quite useless. They are rather non-lethal and have get almost to touching distance to shoot. Whenever the AI uses them against me I wait for them to get close and about to fire - then charge them with just about any melee unit. Result is usually handgunners diced and sliced into handy chunks. Does anyone use them in mp?

Crossbowmen are a pain - shortish range and slow rate of fire are big handicaps. I will usually not bother with them and use archers instead - particularly when playing a faction with decent vanilla archers - Desert Archers and Trebeziod Archers for example.

Aquibuisers (sp?) have much better range, but also seem rather non-lethal. There has been a lot of talk in the forum in earlier threads about upping their accuracy figure in the projectile config file. I rarely use them so I have no opinion on that myself.

Arbalasters - the gods of missle units. Long range + hard hitting + armor piercing. Perfect to target your enemy knights and other high value units. Heaven help a unit of royal knights that dallies within range of my arbs - they get skewered in short order. Do not waste their bolts on peasants and other such battlefield clutter. They should be used to take out the big boys. They are also the perfect answer to those pesky Mongol light cav archers.

The pavise gives them a survivability against return missle fire that other elite missle units lack (e.g. longbowmen).
Only in melee and rate of fire are longbowmen noticeably superior to PAs (and I view my PAs as much too valuable to use in melee in anything other than a dire emergency).

[Gregoshi]

The Org welcomes Panzer Bane with a 21 gun salute. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

Alas, I can't help you with any comments on guns. I always play Early and have progressed a campaign to gunpowder yet. Sad, ain't it?

Edit, regarding the double post: since Tony had already posted to the second one and I to the first, I merged the two topics.

[Heraclius]

welcome to the .org panzer bane http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif -damn you gregoshi http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif -good to have you here. i'm afriad i may not be much help since i'm mainly an eastern player but i've found most guns to be expensive and hard to use and crossbows to be too slow. i like to stick with the various varieties of compisite (is that what they're called) bowmen. arbalesters and pavise arbalesters (who i personally find overrated, especially in mp) on the other hand can really be devestating when protected by spears and used in combination with other composite (?) bowmen. hope that helps. ;

[Brutal DLX]

Handgunners can be useful in online battles. In the SP campaign, you can use them as defensive units as they are heavily armoured. Just watch the morale.
The other types, well, it's always good to have some kind of missile troop in your army (handgunners are not really a missile unit), and methinks Pavise Arbalesters are the best choice.

[vodkafire]

To make all the units useful, i suggest modding the accuracy of arquebusiers to .3, make longbowmen as powerful and accurate as crossbows as well as longer range, and make crossbow reload 10 instead of 15. Crossbows should really reload easier than arbelests, imo, it's even in the arbalest description. But for multiplayer, that's another story.

[Shahed]

I love all gunpowder and bow armed units.

I prefer to have arqbusiers over handgunners. In some cases I replace late era missile units with artillery. So where I may have taken 4 arqbusiers, 2 pavise arbalesters I will instead take 6 serpentines. If on an MP team where duties are divided, I may take 8 serpentines. In this case the range battle will begin before the enemy missile units are in range. Once the enemy missile units are in range I usually either pull back some and let them attack my artillery or simply attack.

For bows, I love the Longbows, Nizaris, Janissary Infantry.