missile fire at short range

[Sam Adams]

should not ever cause friendly fire. Is a trained legionary or archer going to shoot his friend in the back? of course not!

now I'm all for having archers and catapults kill your own other units if your not carefull with them, but archers shouldnt never kill themselves, and legions should never spear their buddies.

solution is simple. Disable the friendly fire out to a range of 10-20 yards.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

A pila is not exactly an easy weapon to control when you are throwing it into a melee, you will every now and then kill a buddy, especially if he is in another unit and moving about. Archers should kill other units within that range if they are moving or out of formation, The weapons were not like today's weapons you didn't just point a bow and fire, it required strength to draw the bow and there could be a mistake when you release the string. I do agree that FF should be toned down, but it should not be elimated at those ranges.

[Red Harvest]

Actually, at those ranges it should be eliminated. In the case you just described the units (or at least certain individuals) should not fire because they are masked by friendlies. Right now if you have an 80 man unit with 80 archers or javelins or slingers right against its back, and the missile units fire you will often take 7 casualties on the first volley with few casualties to the enemy. It is just whacked.

Firing into melee is one thing. Firing into the back of they guy standing in front of you is another.

[Kraxis]

But you must agree that the missile-man would know if a guy was to march in front of him if his unit came through. I can't believe an archer would be so focussed on his aiming that he couldn't see that a man was walking or running past him.
Mistakes, such as bad throws or bad shots of arrows could of course cause FF, but it would be far lower than it is now.
In MTW there was an inhibitor for archers that they would not shoot if there was something in the way within a set distance. Thus they would not waste arrows shooting them into houses or trees if those were in hte middle of their units, and they would cause very few friendly kills, even to marching units. But they would kill a man now and then so it wasn't totally eliminated, and that was good.
Such an implementation could be used again.

[Sam Adams]

"Firing into melee is one thing. Firing into the back of they guy standing in front of you is another."

exactly. I have no problem with killing your some of your men when you shoot into massed combat... but its the blatant shooting of unenganged friendlies that is a serious bug that needs to go.

[dismal]

I think MTW had friendly managed pretty well. If left on fire-at-will, archers would not generally try to shoot through their own men. If directly oredered to fire through their own men, they'd do it.

RTW seems to have the opposite philosophy. Left on fire-at-will, archers will fire volley after volley into the backs of their own men. I guess that's fine as long as I'm aware of it and have the tools to stop it.

My issue is that archers often seem to keep firing after I've told them to stop. (This may be the same group command bug that prevents you from getting a whole group to run at the same time.)

If I can quickly group order my archers to absolutely stay where they are and direct fire only at enemies I select then I can still use them effectively. I don't think that skirmish off, defend mode on , fire-at-will off quite gets this done because if I order my archer to attack a unit they seem to want to try and get in/stay within range.

[Blitz]

nonono, archers can be easily ask to stop, but u have to close your fire at will first. if its on and you ask them to stop they wil just keep firing

[Ar7]

This thread has a good idea, though removing the FF at the close range totally, is wrong, but limiting it is needed. I mean, I can not imagine a situation, where as a legionary I am standing in formation with archers 2 meters behind me. Then they shoot me and another 10 people in the back, I mean were only idiots recruited to become archers in those days?!?! Because any sane person with atleast some practise with a bow is incapable of doing such a thing.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

I did say FF should be toned down, but a rule such as: Archers cannot kill friendly units within 10-20 meters is totally wrong. It has the wrong idea but is not realistic. It would be better if a few archers in the unit would not fire if there were people right in front of them, this would allow most of the volley to be shot off, but you would not get as many FF losses.

[Lichgod]

I remember first time playing this game and experiencing FF. I was defending a town. Put my spearmen in a U-shape around the gate. Behind the unit directly opposite the gate, I placed my experienced Balearic slingers....

I was shocked to see my entire rear rank of spearmen drop dead from sling bullets in the back. Talk about learning a lesson the hard way.

After many games, I have seen some FF incidents that generate despair. I think the worst is when the missile unit kills its own guys (note to self - never volunteer to be in the first rank or flank file if assigned to a missile unit).

I also learned to be careful on hills. In MTW, missile units higher up on the hill is a good thing. RTW, my melee units get shot in the back as soon as the enemy gets on the slope with increasing FF losses as the enemy closes the gap. Have to put the melee at the base and the missile on the slope. Lose the melee "charging down a hill" advantage but avoid FF losses. Good thing most of the battle maps are relatively flat.

[patish]

FF only happens to me when i'm too tired or lazy to rearrange my troop lines however it makes perfect sense to me that the closer your melee and range troops are, the more likely for "accidents" to happen. there is an army term for keeping asafe distance from each other exactly for that reason (and against incomings).

[drone]

Accidents do happen, but what doesn't make sense is that the missile units will continue to shoot friendlies in the back. If I'm not mistaken, in M:TW at least they would stop after one FF volley. I believe you had to manually command them to shoot again.

It seems to me that when they switched to the 3D engine, they implemented real physics and target box interception for missiles. They just didn't implement the common sense for the archers who are aiming the arrow right at the back of someone else's head. A "target blocked, won't shoot" function for each shooter would be nice, but probably not feasible.

I looked through a lot of the config files looking for the default unit settings at the start of combat (guard, fire-at-will, skirmish, etc). No luck, I'm either missing something or they are hard-coded. So I just go through my checklist at the start of combat: turn fire-at-will off, take hoplites out of guard, etc. Now I remember why I use to play the Danes in M:TW, you didn't need archers... ~D

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Almost all of the bugs seem to come from the new 3D engine, but hopefully they will fix them in an expansion or in the next TW game.