ATTENTION CA: A reasonable suggestion to fix Friendly Fire!!

Ok so we have all heard how annoying it is to be shot in the back by your own archers, but here is a small solution to alleviate a small part of it. How about allowing missile troops to have multiple settings of minimum range where they do not engage anything when set to fire at will? For instance, you may have your archers set to fire at will behind your main battle line, you can then click and drag a circle or line that shows the minimum distance to start shooting. Anything behind that line or inside that circle they will not fire at. I think this could be done and will be a big improvement for the friendly fire issue! :charge:

edit: I think a line that you could "bend" would be best to set so they wont even hit the troops on the far flanks outside of a "circle" area.

i would think a simple fix also would be to stagger the lines of archers, or are they staggered already? or maybe just set them to 'loose formation'? does that help them any? or maybe just make the lines further apart from each other? actually, you might be able to change one or more of those things in the files ourselves. earlier TW games had a way to change how close each man was to each other in the formation.

K.

Thats not the problem. The problem is when you have them behind your main line, and the enemy gets in close they will simply throw a volley into the back of your main battle line instead of targeting farther troops or stop shooting alltogether. It becomes a micro managing nightmare to handle this when you have several units of archers and even artillary.

lol. ok, that's a bit of a problem then. turn your infantry on your archers and have them beat a few senseless and see if that improves their aim ;) i take it this only does this on the 'fire at will' setting? if you actually target an enemy unit with them does it then work ok?

K.

I agree. It's awfully annoying to have your archers shooting without distinction in the mélée, or not even considering that there is units blocking their view and shooting through them.

I just had a river battle. Put a wall of phalanx on my end of the bridge, with five units of archers on the hill slope. The enemies coming were utterly massacred by the wall of spears and the rain of arrows. But these cretins take the closest units as target, while they are fighting hand-to-spear my phalanx, and not the units a bit beyond, who are clear of any friendly units.

Result : the enemy was crushed, and only inflicted me 23 casualties.
My own archers inflicted me 210.

Yeah...

It is not as simple as that either. I have seen my horse archers shoot one of their own when chasing off routers. One guy in rear of unit shooting his mate a few yards in front!!!!!!! This has to be mad. Shooting into melee and killing your own will always be a bit iffy and I would expect friendly kills. Whenever possible archers should target approaching units only on FAW, when there is h2h in front of them they should consider dropping back to cover flanks, with FAW off now of course

......Orda

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Originally Posted by Kraellin

lol. ok, that's a bit of a problem then. turn your infantry on your archers and have them beat a few senseless and see if that improves their aim ;) i take it this only does this on the 'fire at will' setting? if you actually target an enemy unit with them does it then work ok?

K.

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Well thats another problem. I dont want to have to hit pause every 2 seconds when the battle starts raging to micromange the archers and artillary. I want to enjoy it alittle. And since I cant even save my damn replay in single player... Plus im sure this would help the multiplayer crowd alot who cant even pause it.

Also, this is a step down from MTW, I remember in MTW if your archers saw friendly units near the enemy they wouldnt target those enemys. Or if they launched a volley and caused friendlys they would target something else. In RTW they are simply mindless turrets that kill anything they want too.

Personally I think Shogun had the smartest archers, if you wanted archers in shogun to target engaged units you actually had to tell them to even if they were at fire at will. If I remember correctly once the enemy was completely engaged they would quit firing(been so long since I played it) even if they had ammo left. So correct me if I'm wrong since its been so long. Usually it is'nt too bad for engaged units where a big problem is is when they route. oh yayyyyyy lets target where they currently are and when the arrows come down they will hit our own guys........ they dis us anyways for killing the enemy at a distance and call us cowards and all ......... so we'll show them.

Where it needs to be toned down is missle units need to stop INSTANTLY (not even firing that round that was about ready to go) when a unit routes.

I know historically the most deaths happened when units route but was'nt it the routers who got killed and not the pursuars ~:confused:

The other part that needs to end is if the arrow/ javelin is in the upward flight it should not be able to kill your units,(I could even live with it if it did'nt kill enemy units in the upflight as long as there is an enemy intended for its downflight) as units may not have had good aim knowing exactly where it was going for the down flight but I'm sure if someones big fat head was in there way they would either side step or wait for them to get ahead of them.

Now I have had some good results and bad ones on engaged units. But they definately need to tone down the friendly fire as most captains in charge of the unit would make a good decision when it is good to fire and when not to. Unfortanetely the A.I. cant figure out when is a good time and when not to.

The other problem is this game is toned down on army sizes(not so much unit sizes if you play on large) And when there were huge armies engaging in combat there was a dense enough formation that they could hit men that were a bit away from the melee that was ensuing.

I think the best solution would be to decrease there lethality on friendly units by about 1 tenth.

Archers are also unresponsive when ordered who to shoot. Sometimes, they refuse to follow orders and still shoot who they're currently shooting. Sometimes, they shoot 2-3 volleys before following your orders to change targets.

Wow I expected this idea to get more enthusiasm... Seemed like an ingenious idea to me... :embarassed:

I think Archers should be a bit smarter or like the Shogun Archers - if they are not told specifically to shoot without regards to friendly losses, they should pick another target.

The archery engine looks weak compared to STW or MTW. Everyone fires even at bizarre angles (like columns vs. rows). I'm not seeing much evidence of distance effects (reduction in accuracy and velocity/effectiveness.) The only plus I've seen is the lead targeting is improved. Of course, that is being used to more effectively shoot your own men in the back...some improvement.

In MTW you could hit your guys by targeting an enemy in melee, but the AI would avoid doing it if you let it do target selection. You could hit folks when arbalester were behind the lines of course. MTW's friendly fire made much more sense.

The failure to follow orders is really maddening. You order ceasefire, and they shoot your men in the back instead. I cannot for the life of me see how this made it past beta testing. I suspect it was submitted as a problem, but not fixed. (I've seen that happen from the other side, in development.)

I've now resorted to predicting 2-3 volleys in advance when I need to change targets or disable fire at will and halt. :/

My horse archers also inexplicably move closer to routing units, if they are in the vicinity, when firing. That makes everybody else hit them.

Also, you kill the last man of a unit and they would still fire off 1-2 volleys at the spot. Very dangerous especially when using cavalry to chase routers. They would switch targets on their own and target the already completely annihilated unit.

Personally I don't find an issue with friendly fire as it is now... You just have to be careful with the placement of your missile troops, don't let them get mixed in with other units or you will pay a price. Consider switching off fire at will until they are in position...

And as for embarrising incidents of you cavalry getting cut down by you own missile troops when engaging the enemy... Even in WW1 they would stop shelling the enemy before sending their own troops in... ~;)

Missile troops are dangerous and require a little respect and careful use..

I wish they would fix this problem. I have also noted battles in which my archers caused more casualties than the enemy.

My solution, for the moment, I use the archers at the very begginning of the battle. They are in front and in a long thin two man line. The moment they fall behind my forward lines, for whatever reason, I turn them off. This usually takes care of my archer problem.

I suspect I still suffer a lot of friendly fire casualties to javelins.

I remember in an early game, one friendly 80 man Iberian mercenary unit standing in front of a forester archer unit for the entire battle. At the end, I noticed, 40 friendly casualties. They just stood there while they were cut in half by friendly fire. And the archers just kept firing. It was madness.

I modded speed, killing rates and missile effectiveness. My remaining problems are friendly fire and ping pong cavalry turn rates. And I can't mod those factors....

Bob obviously you haven't played the Parthians or Scythians yet... I suffer more causaulty from my horsearchers shooting each other when chasing routers than my enemy inflicts upon me...

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Originally Posted by Steppe Merc

Bob obviously you haven't played the Parthians or Scythians yet... I suffer more causaulty from my horsearchers shooting each other when chasing routers than my enemy inflicts upon me...

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You are right, I have not tried that yet.... Next game.. ~D

Are you saying units cause FF to themselves?? I have not seen this.. Or is it when you have multiple units of HA mixed up chasing routers??

Have you tried taking them off 'Frie at Will' and making them melee attack the routers???

Well, I've seen horse archers lose units chasing down routing units so I sometimes just let them fire at routers until they die. The problem is that, sometimes, when the routers are near them, they would move towards the routers before firing and get hit by arrows from their buddies.

There's also incidents where I would tell them to fire at somebody else because I'm using a melee unit to chase down some routers and they would still fire at those routers.

Horse archers fire on the move, even when there attacking some one. Taking fire at will helps a bit, but not much. The worst is when all the enemies are dead, but they still keep on firing... Not cool.

I've been having a lot of fun with horse-archers in my current Parthian campaign. Most of my casualties are due to friendly fire. Not only do my horse archers ignore my "halt" orders, but I can disable "fire at will", hit the "halt" button, and they'll *still* shoot. I want a "cease fire immediately upon penalty of death" command. This became much more of a problem when I got Persian Cavalry as I'll charge them into an enemy at appropriate moments. Its' very frustrating to tell all the horse-archers in the area to stop firing (both with the halt button and turning off "fire at will"), charge my cavalry in, then watch as arrows streak in and kill my cavalry. Now I've gotten in the habit of ordering those horse archers to the far reaches of the map at high speed, wait until they've left the area, *then* order the charge, as that's the only reliable way to get them to not fire.

Another annoying horse-archer trait is the skirmish mode. When they decide to skirmish, you cannot order them in another direction. I've had the AI use a pincer move on me (as in have two anti-cav units on opposite sides closing in on my unit). While I was impressed with the AI of the enemy, I was not impressed that I lost half my archers because they refused to obey my order to run perpendicular to the pincer axis. Once I figured out this skirmish problem, I started cancelling the skirmish mode in this situation (turn off the mode, then issue the evasive maneuver). The downside is that if you get distracted before reactivating skirmish, they won't skirmish later and will ignore approaching units.

But slaughtering twice my numbers of enemy with only a handful of casualites (all friendly fire) is very satisfying :) Horse archers are a deceptively powerful unit.

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Originally Posted by Akka

Result : the enemy was crushed, and only inflicted me 23 casualties.
My own archers inflicted me 210.

Yeah...

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And what are numbers for desert war?

This is called realism ~D

I find that the main issue with archers is that they fire in a lower arc than in medieval, so positioning troops in front of them is a bad move.

Really though the best troops to have behind your main line are skirmishers. Archers deserve to be out front or on the flanks peppering the enemy as they advance, that is their role in this era. (it can also be argued that bows in this era are not as accurate)

I am also pleased that friendly fire is now much more of an issue. In Medieval you could win a battle just by positioning some spearmen in front of your archers and shooting away til your content... It was a little too easy.

Even in medieval it was best to manually target archers to get the best results, so I see no reason to change it. (and yes I have played as Parthia, Britannia and Egypt)

It has probably been said here before, but is there ANY way I can stop my archers from engaging (the stop firing button does not seem to work at all for archers...). Now, I always end up putting my archers a million miles away behind the lines when I dont' need them anymore so that they don't shoot my own troops...

Quid

I don't think there is a problem with friendly fire, you are always going to incidents when you're archers accidently hit your own troops, to combat this I never have archers on fire at will.

As for horse archers hitting their own troop, this is a perfectly credible accident, but I do think these incidents should be reduced as units gain experience. Also when chasing routers it is naive to think you wont take any losses at all, just because a man is running away doesn't mean he wont hit back.

All in all I like the challenge of controlling all of my troops at the slightly higher speed and without hitting pause.

i can definitely confirm that Horse Archer;s will hit their own units, i had three units on a hill once just acting like normal archers (facing up a hill, twas in a city ok) and by the end of the battle i'd lost 25% of them thing is, noone came near them and he had no archer units. It was also a wooden palisade city so no archer tower fire to explain it either :(
ps:- i've said it before and i'll say it again. HA's rock in this game, they're everything the goldon horde from medieval shoulda been
pps:- ditto about the desert warfare/friendly fire/collatarol damage thing ~;)

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Originally Posted by Ja'chyra

I don't think there is a problem with friendly fire, you are always going to incidents when you're archers accidently hit your own troops, to combat this I never have archers on fire at will.

As for horse archers hitting their own troop, this is a perfectly credible accident, but I do think these incidents should be reduced as units gain experience. Also when chasing routers it is naive to think you wont take any losses at all, just because a man is running away doesn't mean he wont hit back.

All in all I like the challenge of controlling all of my troops at the slightly higher speed and without hitting pause.

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Well im glad you alone like to pause every 5 seconds to adjust archers. I dont know about you, but I usually carry 4 units of archers with me, and on defense place them 20-30 feet behind my battle line. I would expect them when on fire at will to NOT shoot the units engaged with my front line units as this would clearly shoot them in the back. I dont want to pause every 2 seconds to adjust my archers targets, with all the routing, rallying and shifting going on. The suggestion I made would avoid that and if you still want to micro manage archers go right ahead.

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Originally Posted by King Azzole

Well im glad you alone like to pause every 5 seconds to adjust archers. I dont know about you, but I usually carry 4 units of archers with me, and on defense place them 20-30 feet behind my battle line. I would expect them when on fire at will to NOT shoot the units engaged with my front line units as this would clearly shoot them in the back. I dont want to pause every 2 seconds to adjust my archers targets, with all the routing, rallying and shifting going on. The suggestion I made would avoid that and if you still want to micro manage archers go right ahead.

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I don't use pause ~:cheers:

It would be nice if CA toned down the friendly fire a bit but I can live with it. Now I would feel a whole lot better if AI controlled units knew enough to stop firing when enough friendlies are in the target area!

However, friendly fire when a unit is inflicting casualties on itself is totally unacceptable. CA needs to get rid of this completely.

I can deal with my archers accidently shooting down my pursuing troops as they run after routers, that's my fault for not turning off fire at will. But it's utterly ridiculous that if two archer units are overlapping even a little, they'll start shooting each other point blank in the back! If this logic applied to archers within the same unit, I'd lose 90% of them because only the guys in the back row will survive! To fix this, I think that arrows and spears shouldn't become "hot" to your own men as soon as they leave the bow/hand of the firer, only after the downward part of the missile's trajectory (this wouldn't apply to enemy units). You can owe this to the common sense of the archer to, you know, not shoot his own guys in the back from two feet away.

As it is, this is a game ruining bug for me. I say it's a bug because there's absolutely no way that you can justify missile units shooting friendly troops in the back, point blank. I say game ruining because I have just stopped making missile units, and I never order my men to throw their pila. Fix this please.

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Originally Posted by Ja'chyra

I don't use pause ~:cheers:

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WOW YOU ROCK DUDE! :confused:

I don't see a problem. Control your units better. Don't leave them on fire at will in a bad position.

Having units behind your main line 20 feet behind is not bad positioning. I shouldnt have to target everything manually cause my archers are too stupid not to shoot guys right in front of there face 20 feet away. Besides I dont see how this suggestion if implemented would effect you or uber dude above.

Unfortunately, it's not that easy knowing where everything is at the same time and archers still fire off 2-3 volleys after you turn off fire at will and tell them to stop.

I also don't see why they feel a need to shoot off a few more volleys at the last position of a completely annihilated unit.

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Originally Posted by Bigwig

I can deal with my archers accidently shooting down my pursuing troops as they run after routers, that's my fault for not turning off fire at will.

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No, it is not acceptable even like that. (Hint: they won't stop firing when you tell them too either! They still shoot your men in the back. That is beyond assinine.) Fire at will indicates the unit makes its own judgement about what is "safe" vs. what is not. In MTW the archers had to be ordered to fire in a way that cleary endangered friendlies. In RTW "fire at will" means they stand their shooting their own men in the back and of their own free will. Their natural inclination would be to hold fire, rather than hit friendlies. People generally want direct explicit orders from higher up when they think they are about to kill some of their own in collateral damage. "Fire at will" is not authority to kill more of your own men than of the enemy and take pot shots at your faction leader, etc. When faced with the choice of shooting the closest engaged, vs. the closest unengaged. It should go for the safe target.

I challenge the current nature of friendly fire as being completely unrealistic from the viewpoint of typical military command doctrine.

Archers, (sigh), how nice it would be to have them. Played as Carth H/H twice, short and long campaign. Carth does not get archers, only slingers. Want to have some fun? Put your Balaeric Slingers in the 2nd row behind your infantry....

I did learn from this board about the mercenary Cretian archers. Took Crete to get as many as I could. Also was able to get some Camel Archers near Egypt.

With Slingers, I learned to shoot until the enemy closed then run them far to the rear with their backs to the enemy. Why backs to the enemy? Had a 2-3 soldier enemy unit routing to my rear persued by a 40 shield cav unit. Facing forward, some Balearic slingers thought they would help. Lost at least 10 cav in their volley.

Slingers are useful (especially when you cannot raise archers) but require careful management. I suspect slingers are not effected by weather and they seem to drop heavy troops pretty well. Only use Balaeric unless the normal slingers are going to be garrison troops for a stone walled town.

I wonder if a General gets a vice by losing more troops to friendly fire than the enemy kills? Reminds me of the movie Braveheart and the English King letting loose his archers to fire on the general melee.

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Originally Posted by d6veteran

I don't see a problem. Control your units better. Don't leave them on fire at will in a bad position.

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I think you mean "micromanage all your units of archers".

Even without fire at will, you get friendly fire. I'm sure this has been done to death in this thread, but it still really annoys me. In one battle last night, I had two grouped units of archers and had given them a nice sensible formation. Their target was about an inch out of range on the battlefield. Lazy, feckless idiot that I am, I thought it would be safe to order them to attack the unit by moving up and shooting.

Fool. I should have got them to move and then got them to fire. With one lazy click I had instructed them to move together and overlap before firing, causing huge friendly fire losses. And these units weren't just mingling, they were practically sharing tunics. I know it's a lonely life as a solider, but you don't need to get that intimate with your your comrades :worried:

At least missile troops can hit moving targets now. That is a huge improvement over MTW. If target selection would work like it used to we would be OK, i.e. no firing into a melee without a direct order.

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Originally Posted by Nelson

At least missile troops can hit moving targets now. That is a huge improvement over MTW. If target selection would work like it used to we would be OK, i.e. no firing into a melee without a direct order.

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Well, it might have been an improvement...if you could use archers safely. ~;) In MTW my archers did hit moving targets. They weren't as accurate and had trouble with faster units, but they did hit, even if they were not doing lead computing. Arbalesters were not really harmed by this because their projectiles were so fast, had a flat trajectory, and long reload meant you couldn't fire at moving targets at oblique angles anyway. RTW archers/missiles would be in bad shape without lead computing, because the units move so fast. I think lead computing became a necessity, because of the speed changes. So to fix the archer targeting problems caused by the speed increase, they HAD to have lead computing.

The archer friendly fire I can accept...

I manage them this way:

o Turn FAW OFF before battle starts
o Move them to position with at least one unit's depth between them and those in front of them
o Enable FAW when in position, disable it and hit the backspace key (to make sure they stop firing) when enemy units decide to close with friendly melee troops.

Friendly fire incidents from roman pila carrying troops are much more difficult. I almost never have them fire at will, and only tell the cohort directly facing an attacking enemy to fire its pila. I get too many friendly fire incidents when using FAW freely with these troops. If its a whole battle line charging my front line, they normally don't have time to fire their pila, so I just use flanking to achieve the desired effect.

I once lost 1/2 of a cohort (about 40 men) to pila landing in their midst from adjacent cohorts. FAW and roman cohorts is rarely useful (the only time I really use it is when I'm assaulting a town square where I heavily outnumber the defenders, so I know they won't charge.. the pila just cut down those poor beggars.

Given my current in game experience, I'm now down to very very few friendly casualties for each battle, whilst inflicting horrific casualties on whoever I face. Auxilia archers are truly frightening to behold when used correctly.

I am convinced that if I can figure out how to get one launch of the pila during an enemy charge and then get them to immediately switch to melee I can even be more effective, but that is an awful lot of micro just as the battle lines are closing (when normally I'm a) microing my horse to sprint into flanking positions just before the lines contact; and b) microing my archers to prevent massive friendly casualties due to their stupidity).

Lookie Here

See all those dead horse and Archer bodies? Friendly fire. :dizzy2:

I wish archers didn't fire into friendly melees like MTW.

Among all the unpleasantries of missle troops in this game, I also find it impossible to get a unit of archers to fire at the enemy troop that I, yes, I want them to fire at! The AI is smart enough to put the garbage in front, and my archers will NOT fire at the heavy infantry right behind or beside them. They ALWAYS seem to fire at the closest target when directed to fire at anything. 'Tweren't that way in MTW. Those longbows could smell a "good" target a mile away. RTW archers are so bloody independent, I'm seriously considering turning off limited ammo. Maybe there'd be an arrow or two left for the actual enemy when he comes in.

My biggest problem with the friendly fire is that it was BETTER in MTW.

In MTW, archers on Fire At Will had to be directly ordered to shoot at men that were mixed in with your own men. They would simply stop firing if it was too dangerous.


In RTW, they just fire away at whatever is closest to them in range. It never matters that there is 3 Naked fanatics fighting my 100 cohorts - they're fire straight at them and kill 30 of my own guys.


Why can't it just be like MTW was? Did anyone really complain about their archers NOT firing into their own men?


My second biggest problem with it is that they just DON'T STOP.

I take Fire at Will Off and then hit HALT yet they will ALWAYS loose 1 or 2 volleys straight into the enemy. I realize that command and control not being instant is realistic but how hard is it to get the order across of

"STOP SHOOTING YOU'RE KILLING ALL OUR MEN!"


The archers always seem to think that "Well, I have this arrow already near my bow so I might as well fire off one more for good measure."

This really sucks when the enemy is charging because the second volley goes straight into the backs of your own men.

What about making the archers AUTOMATICALLY STOP SHOOTING when they calculate that the trajectory of the missiles will hit friendlies? And if you don't care, order them to fire again to make them continue firing? I remember in Shogun my muskets would stop firing when there is a unit in front of them.

Erm. Friendly Fire.

Before I played Rome: Total War, I did not realize how hard it must be to avoid hitting your friend standing about three feet in front of you. I just never knew...

Yeah. CA, could you please fix this? Pretty Please?

What's funny is that a unit is immune to there own fire. I remember 1 router in the middle of hastati and they were at fire at will. So they launch 160 pila's into the middle of there formation and not a single 1 died.