Archer Accuracy Experiment

[hellenes]

This is one of the bizzare no brainers from CA....WHY REMOVE ARCHER EXPERIENCE BONUS? The more guys this men kill the better they become....
A big step back from RTW....

[ataribaby]

I reckon the experience bonus for missile units should benefit their Missile Attack attribute; e.g. for every three chevrons you get +1 Missile Attack value. As it is you've got a small boost to melee attack and the usual boost to morale.

The melee boost is usually neither here nor there as you don't deploy archers to fight other infantry hand to hand. The exceptions are dual-role archer/melee units such as Ottoman Infantry or Norse Archers who are designed for a bit of hand-to-hand action.

The morale boost is good as most archers have a morale of 3 - 2 below the average - so any gain helps in the unit not giving up immediately on contact with enemy cavalry until help can arrive from other infantry.

But as archers are there as "a woman's strategy, to throw things at us" surely it is their throwing ability that should get the experience boost.

p.s. I'm still pretty sceptical about the idea that accuracy is improved from the fact that accuracy is coded to be tied in with projectile-type.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Well I think there's definitely something in those results. I couldn't just be a coincidence could it?

[ataribaby]

Weeell... ah ok. It looks pretty convincing, and it would be really nice if it were the case; it makes that Woodsmens' Guild HQ all the more worthwhile.

[PBI]

I suppose it does make sense though that experience affects accuracy but not missile damage; if the archers are too far away to aim for specific body parts or weak points, then the damage would depend only upon the type of missile and its velocity, neither of which are improved by experience, but the chance to hit the target in the first place would improve with the skill of the archer.

Still, good to see experience does seem to have some meaningful effect for archers; I'd actually taken to not expending all my arrows on the units in the town center towards the end of a siege, and instead sending in the heavy infantry since I assumed the experience would benefit them more. I wonder if this is different for siege weapons, since I believe it was established that experience made no difference for them?

Also, it's still strange that weapon upgrades only affect melee abilities; they really should improve missile damage.

EDIT: I'm pretty sure accuracy was tied to projectile type in MTW also, and experience very definitely did affect accuracy there.

[Old Geezer]

One very interesting thing which I noticed on the last series of trials which for some strange reason had 6 rainy days was that the archers shot one to three volleys and then advanced to point blank range as soon as the rain got visibly heavy. They invariably had misreable results and got only a couple of hits if any in the heavy rain at extreme range. I strongly suspect that the talk that I have heard on the forums about weather not affecting accuracy is also wrong. This will be hard to establish because the intensity of the rain is hard to guage and the archers advance at different times depending upon factors which could be one or several. i.e., the number of hits in a volley, total hits, intensity of the rain, the forecast, and who knows what else. Why can't CA just tell us these things? Do the designers, developers, and playtesters ever communicate with one another? I guess they don't have a common language. I didn't mean to start a rant. I need to save that for "The Final Patch".

Really though, M2TW has a lot of staying power. I am still learning so much basic stuff that I'll not be ready for Empires for a couple of years.

Can anyone think of a way to test artillery so that we can get some reliable trials?

[PBI]

Can anyone think of a way to test artillery so that we can get some reliable trials?

I have an idea.

The problem is that to test artillery against units, it's impossible to get the units to stand still long enough or consistently enough to get off enough shots at roughly similar range. Perhaps we could mod the unit's movement speed down to zero for the purposes of the test? Alternatively we could try modding the terrain movement speed multiplier to achieve the same thing.

Similarly with the weather, it might be possible to mod the probabilities of rain etc for different climates, in order to create one with guaranteed constant rain of a certain volume.

[Rhyfelwyr]

One very interesting thing which I noticed on the last series of trials which for some strange reason had 6 rainy days was that the archers shot one to three volleys and then advanced to point blank range as soon as the rain got visibly heavy. They invariably had misreable results and got only a couple of hits if any in the heavy rain at extreme range. I strongly suspect that the talk that I have heard on the forums about weather not affecting accuracy is also wrong. This will be hard to establish because the intensity of the rain is hard to guage and the archers advance at different times depending upon factors which could be one or several. i.e., the number of hits in a volley, total hits, intensity of the rain, the forecast, and who knows what else. Why can't CA just tell us these things? Do the designers, developers, and playtesters ever communicate with one another? I guess they don't have a common language. I didn't mean to start a rant. I need to save that for "The Final Patch".

Very interesting. Why do CA undersell themselves, couldn't some PR guy just stick a post here and there to tell us about all these less than obvious features?

[ataribaby]

They invariably had misreable results and got only a couple of hits if any in the heavy rain at extreme range. I strongly suspect that the talk that I have heard on the forums about weather not affecting accuracy is also wrong.

I can definitely say that rain (heavy especially) has an adverse effect on archers. They seem to fire as many arrows at the enemy but more of the arrows seem to just disappear into the enemy unit without causing injury.

There's always been a hint of archery + rain = nerf in the unit descriptions, especially where composite bows are concerned (they're meant to disintegrate when the rain dissolves the glue aren't they?).

But it's only recently I've noticed the effects of weather when experimenting by choosing rainy battles. Sieges are definitely easier as fire arrows are less able to burn rams and towers. Archers firing flaming arrows seem to have even less effect in heavy rain (so it's good to siege assault at night in a storm when the AI has flaming arrows switched on). I've also noticed a distinct effect on visibility; the AI tends not to engage your troops until you get very close, which includes archers as their range is effectively reduced.