Hiya all
First post at the .org, took my sweet little time indeed. Brace yerselves.
This would belong in the Dungeon, but I'm such an infrequent poster that I might get to post there around the time Total War IV comes out.
Anyways. As far as I know, all the footarchers in the game use the same SBOW missile type. There shouldn't be any other stats that affect missile performance than the stats in the projectilestats file, right? Currently, the LONG type is exclusive to the Longbowman and the MTLG type is used by all cavalry archers.
Simply put, all this means that the compound bows that give these soldiers an advantage thanks to their range, accuracy and penetrative power don't exist in MTW. (The above quotation is from the description of Trebizond Archers, IIRC.) I'm wondering if it was an intentional abstraction, that the devs felt there wasn't enough of a difference between shortbow and composite bow effectiveness, or if it was cut for other reasons.
I'd personally prefer to have the composite bows modeled in the game, so I'd like to ask the expert modders here for ideas, help and/or a finished solution to this.
The jury-rig fix I was thinking about involves using the MTLG (mountedlongbow in the stats file)
missile type for all compound bow units, including the horse archers, and upping it in accuracy to the level of other bows. Perhaps an armor mod value of 0.75 or thereabouts would simulate the greater power of the composite bow when compared to the short bow. The other stats of the various missile types could be tweaked as well, as Kraxis and undoubtedly many others have done. Also, I feel the effectiveness of cavalry archers should be increased; and, as they have to come to a stop to fire their shots, there's little reason why they should be less accurate than foot archers.
I already did a lot of tweaking with the projectilestats file, but I'm not going to bore you with the exact modifications in this already pretty long post.
There's also the problem of deciding which units should have these compound bows. Most of them are pretty obvious, but it might be necessary to make some compromises due to balancing reasons (and yes, I'd like to have a reasonably balanced game even if they're only my personal SP stats... ). Ah, one quick question: do actual unit (or in this case, missile) stats affect the auto resolve combat?
I'd like to hear comments on this. Could it work? Would it be worth it? Has someone already done this?
-Cran
Edit: the term compound might be misleading, as it usually means modern compound bows. The game uses it, however, so I stuck to it except for a few instances when I used the term composite, which should be the more correct one.
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