The Missile Thread - Hints, Tips and Information

[Bramborough]

Disclaimer up front; nothing particularly revelatory or unexpected here. Mainly just reinforcing from a separate perspective what others have already observed.

I did several custom battles' worth of testing yesterday with various missile troop types. Used Ostrogoth units: Germanic Hunters (short bow), Germanic Archers (long-range bow), and Germanic Crossbowmen. Was my first time experimenting with crossbows, hadn't used them in campaign yet (because Saxons don't get any, lol). For infantry "test subjects", used Germanic Spearmen on both sides (53 armor).

1. Confirmed my already-strong impression that the cheap short-range archers (35 damage) are pretty much garbage as far as killing power is concerned. Even when using Heavy Shot. They do have the flaming and whistling capabilities, of course. Overall, my impression is that slinger/hurler type units are better early-game, with perhaps one unit of archers for their flame/whistle capabilities.

2. The longer-range archers (45 damage) are more useful. The 200 range is awesome, of course. Killing power a little better, although still not as good as the higher-end archers in R2.

3. Yes, the Whistling Shot does affect own troops' morale...which is rather annoying to me. Same with Flaming Shot. I guess I can understand the rationale. If fiery arrows are raining on you out of the sky, I guess you don't really give a crap exactly whose bow they came from. Even so, using archers to tip the morale balance in a close melee fight strikes me as a dubious proposition, as the morale effects seem to cancel each other out.

4. Crossbows obviously best of all, particularly against armored troops. They can indeed fire over the heads of troops directly in front of them (although not if already engaged in melee). With the flat trajectories, however, they do seem much more sensitive to minor undulations in terrain...even areas that look reasonably flat with the camera panned out, and you can't really see the folds in the earth unless you zoom in close for the eye-level view.

5. None of the missile troops were effective at firing from directly behind the infantry line at targets already in melee. About a 30 degree offset seemed enough to at least let them fire at such targets with some effect, but full 90% needed for full effect without friendly fire.

With my playstyle, I usually like to go with a 4-unit missile complement in a 20-unit stack. Right now, I'm thinking the way to go early-game is 3xSlinger / 1xArcher, and then later when crossbows & higher-end archers are unlocked, to go with a 2x/2x split. I'd generally use the archers to go after the enemy's own missile line, and use crossbows on the flanks vs their infantry.

Again, I don't think I'm saying anything new here.