I did some extreme testing of archery tonight (63 missile attack vs. no armour, no shield peasants.) I wanted to get a feel for the "accuracy limit" of archers, distance effects, target formation effect, and whether or not the "lethality" stat played any part. I've seen some incredibly accurate archery at range and wondered what the limits were to this.
Conclusions first:
1. There is no apparent raw "accuracy" factor for archery. Accuracy seems to be determined by collision calcs. and attack/def without an accuracy fudge factor. I've seen up to 50% of a volley produce kills vs a moving target. 80 archers (+2 non firing officers), 40 kills in one volley. (Remember this is EXTREME testing.) When I refer to kill rate it will be based on the archer count, not the target count (target was intentionally more numerous than the archer unit.) Considering that many arrows would hit forward targets at the same time in a single volley, at least 50% of the four deep target should be behind a "meat shield."
2. There is no apparent factored distance reduction on penetration, lethality, or on accuracy. (There is a chance that the very high attack is influencing this, so it warrants another look. However, I've noticed the same basic appearance in campaign from the beginning.) Reduction in lethality at distance seems to correlate only with arrow trajectory and whether or not the arrow is in the invisible hit box. So there is some reduction in accuracy at distance for geometric reasons but it correlates with additional "miss area" available due to depth playing a factor rather than just frontage (1 dimension vs. 2) or a fudge factor. For my testing, point blank accuracy was ~46% while 150 meter accuracy was ~30%. If impact energy, dispersion, etc. were considered I would expect kills to fall several fold at max. distance.
3. Target formation spacing has less impact than expected. I doubled horizontal and vertical spacing, so that the target formation took ~4 times as much area (2x2.) This resulted in a reduction of kill rate at 150 meters from 30% to about 19%. This suggests that frontage and formation depth were more important than total spacing, even at max range.
4. The archer primary weapon "lethality" stat had no noticeable impact on achery kills in the range 0.01 to 1. That is a 100 fold factor and should have been enough to compensate for the crazy high missile attack.
Methodology:
Grassland map, midday, calm, 3 tests per setting.
Large unit size, medium difficulty
Achers: Roman Archer Auxilia modded to 150 meter range, 63 missile attack.
Targets: Greek peasants set to 1,1,2,2,4 square formation. No armour, no shields. For formation width/depth testing stats were 2,2,4,4,4 square formation. The target was moving in all tests.
P.S. I've got another thing to try...noticed it in the projectile stats and want to see how it works.
