Two Good Newbie Questsions

[The Mad Viking]

Hi

I'm new to MTW, and addicted.

Two things bothering me.

One, I play with limited ammo, but I notice that the AI has about 3 to 4x the ammo I do. (Desert archers shooting 100+ salvos at me...)

Two, can anyone explain how unit support works? Is there a multiplier? EG: the docs say 3 Florins for Clansmen, and I pay 45 I am using large unit sizes (120 instead of 60) and playing at normal level.

Thanks

[Demon of Light]

I've often suspected that the AI has more ammo than I do but its hard to prove. Sometimes only half the AI's unit of archers fire and I don't know if that doubles the salvos.

Unit support is pretty straight forward. 100 peasants cost 33 florins for upkeep so 3 peasants cost 1 florin for upkeep. I have no idea what documents you got 3 florins from for Clansmen but every clansman costs 0.75 florins. A unit of 60 is 45 florins a turn.

[torsoboy]

You probably have your archers in a better position than the AI manages to do so ergo apropos vis a vis concordantly your archers are spent earlier than the AI's.

[ichi]

Welcome to The Org http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif Mad Viking

The AI has just as many arrows as your guys do. Archers only fire if they can see and hit the target, so as torsoboy says, they seem to last longer because you are better at positioning your guys.

Try a custom battle with just a few archer units on the steppes, and you can verify that missiles are equal. The number of missiles for each unit vtype is defined in the Vikings_Unit_prod file (for VI).

ichi

[Quokka]

Unit Support

To work out the unit support is straight forward.

The unit support cost in unit_prod is a multiplier. Each man in a unit has a support cost of .125. To get the full cost of support is then;

(# of men) x (support value) x .125

For a list of the support costs for default unit sizes in VI check this (http://www.totalwar.org/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=7;t=12653) thread.

In your case just double them.

[Gregoshi]

Greetings and welcome to The Mad Viking. Is that mad as in angry or mad as in crazy? http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

Nearly everyone has the same impression that the AI archers have more arrows and so it seems. What we probably miss during the chaos of battle is when the AI archers stop firing for a time before resuming while we tend to keep our archers firing as much as possible.

[Magraev]

Ah - one of those vinland vikings following Leif den Lykkelige. Nice to see you're still alive overthere, I thought you all got killed by indians.

[Loki]

Magrev,

As another descendant of Leif, here in Vinland Greetings. I guess you're living in Europe or you would have seen and heard of the occasional blue eyed indian They are very common up here in the frozen tundra......

[Hajduk]

Hello & welcome aboard MV

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

[Lord Of Storms]

Greetings Mad Viking and welcome to the ORG, I hope you enjoy your stay with us, I know what you mean when you say Addicted its easy to get hooked on MTW, Have you tried the Multiplayer aspect yet, its awhile new experience...LOS

[The Mad Viking]

Thanks to all Tusind Taks

Alas, I am not descendent from Leif; my forefathers sailed not in wooden longboats but in loud, oil-burning craft of steel.

I don't no why I didn't figure out support cost math, but now I know.

I will try the custom battle; but I counted salvos in a campaign game, and one unit of archers fired over 50 salvos and had started shooting before I started counting - however, perhaps only half the archers fired for each salvo...

I am working on a unit characteristics download that should soon be ready. I think most of you will like it. It prints out in Word, and is more user-friendly to me than the excel table I downloaded, although it takes a little practice to understand what the numbers in each position mean...

[The_Emperor]

Welcome Mad Vikinghttp://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif

On your question about Archers I did a Treb Archer VS Treb Archer battle. After looking at it I saw that the AI's constant redeploying habits give it an overall slower rate of fire than Archers under the control of a human.

For example whenever the AI moves its men into a Loose formation (and then back again into Close formation), moves forward (or back) a little bit, its men have to reload and prepare to fire all over again, and that costs valuble shooting time.

But human players tend to just sit their archers down and let rip with volley after volley without moving or redeploying the unit, so overall the human has a higher rate of fire over the same timeframe... Thus he will run out of ammo before the AI will.

This is of course assuming that all archers on the field have the same amount of ammo.

Of course it is equally possible that the AI does get an ammo bonus on the higher difficulty levels.