Missile disruption

After hearing about all the complaints of missile units being too weak, I decided to go fool around with some of them, and realised, that M2TW archers serve a totally different purpose from the archers of the previous games.

Firstly, the 'perfect charge'; we all know that infantry can kill almost 20% of the other infantry unit when they get it, and heavy cavalry can kill almost the entire unit. However, the formation needs to be very neat, and it is usually done by double clicking only at the last few moments, or single clicking, letting them reform and auto charge.

This is where missile units come in. If they shoot at a certain time, of which I have not tested, but I believe it is when they start the run up, even if they kill nothing, some of the enemy units would get stunned and fall back, leading them to attempt to reform almost directly infront of your units, given your units the ability of a free perfect charge into their mess of a formation.

Therefore, missile units are not weak, though they kill little themselves, they help your melee units kill plenty of others. This still requires much more testing though, with archers, crossbows, and maybe firearms units too.

I have yet to believe that missile units are weak. Granted, I AM playing as the Turks, so I have no other choice...but my army of horse archers utterly decimated the enemie's infantry army, without ever engaging in melee (this wasn't even the passive AI bug, either! Careful placement as well as some well-timed retreats led to avoiding melee.)

That is true, firing upon the unit as it charges disrupts it, making it loose effectiveness in the following combat.

Kill a man or two, or just push them back, and an enemy unit can't even put a decent charge together. It will stand there tidying up while getting shot to pieces. I had that happen with nights against Irish Kerns last night.

This works both ways in a sense, at least in a few tests I ran yesterday. I don't remember them all, but in general I picked spanish or jannisary musketeers and went up against other various units. The ones that stand out in my mind were me (w/jannisary) against scot's guard, sherwood foresters, and musketeer elephants. When against the elephants, I picked the bone flat grass, and the game gave me clear weather. Positioned my unit well back and in two lines with skirmish off and autofire on. My unit got off two rounds, the 1st of which damaged 8 'phants, the 2nd of which killed two of them. I suspect that I could have beat them, if not for the elephant riders began to fire on me. In doing this, my unit line lost cohesion when bullets hit and they tried to reform, and never got another shot off. I also lost to the scot's guard and foresters through this same means. Not the same as charging, but range unit disruption when firing is definitely possible. /shrug

Cheers!