Horse archers NKVD!!!

[hellenes]

Well with RTW 1.3 ive found out where the Soviets got the idea of shooting fellow comrades in the back!!
The missile collision bug is BACK with vengence!!! But only from angled shots, ie when the HA are aligned and their target stands in the middle of the line...
Now do we need a 1.4 patch or not?

Hellenes

[hoof]

Strange. My experience with archers is different. I've lost maybe 30 men due to friendly fire unless they fire into a melee. Of course, I still try to make sure that missile units do not share space at any time. But I've even gotten comfortable with archer units behind by front line (as long as I turn them off early enough before the enemy line hits mine).

But even when horse archer units were co-mingling, my casualty rate is miniscule. It's still enough of a threat to affect combat (no more x-bowmen behind spearmen that were the backbone of my MTW strategy).

I've also never had a problem putting mounted archers behind footsoldiers in BI. It makes sense from a realism standpoint (the archers are several feet higher, in the case of elephant archers, much higher). I get the sense that RTW takes into account the height of the archer in some way.

Basically, I'm no longer paranoid about friendly fire, as long as I obey a few logical rules (such as don't put friendlies close to targetted enemies, don't put foot archers right behind infantrymen unless they're told not to fire, etc). I'm particularly impressed at the lengths the AI goes to scare your archers away. Whenever I put a line of archers up front, the AI goes after them (instead of just taking the arrows and dying). Unlike previous RTW, AI generals/cav usually stop short of my spearmen as the archers run behind them. It becomes a contest to see how much I can disrupt their lines and them denying me the effective use of my archers. This behavior is much better than before (where the AI would either become a pincushion or impale itself on my defensive line as the archers withdrew behind them).

One amusing thing that goes in my mind when I engage the enemy with missiles is a line from the series Battlestar Galactica (the new one). "Don't stray into Galactica's Firing Solution", yelled when a viper strays too close to BSG's flak zone. In BSG, the ships defences work by putting up a wall of fire between the battlestar and the enemy capital ships. Anything straying into this area gets chewed up. This appears to be their primary defence vs enemy ship fire, with the fighters handling flanking fighter defence. In RTW, whenever my missile lines open up, I mentally mark that zone as the "flak" zone. Sometimes a cav unit chases a unit into this zone and I can hear in my head the general yelling "don't stray into the archer's firing solution!" If they continue the pursuit, they usually take casualties from inbound fire from my archers (and deserve to die for disobeying my order to stop pursuit :) )

[Doug-Thompson]

I haven't noticed any problem like this.

[PseRamesses]

Pursuing routing units is the problem not friendly fire as a whole. My losses to F.F is minimal but staggering when pursuing routers. The damn missile-units never stops/ changes targets. So now I only run alongside routers and pick up when my missiles is out of range.