Samurai Archers..

[Nerouin]

Today was the first day I've noticed this- I've been playing for two years, and I've never seen Sam archers do stuff like this!

I've been playing as Takeda, and thus by my central position warring a lot. Kai is my only province left in Western Japan (I let my other two originals go on the first turn- they were poor provinces anyway, and I wanted the Kanto!), and it has been under constant attack by a Mori-Shimazu alliance for the past twenty years. I've repelled maybe a dozen big attacks in that time, hence I have quite a pool of experienced archers.

I just repelled a force of mostly Yari Samurai and Ashigaru. My main battle line was three Naginatas and one Yari Sam protecting four units of archers.. I had six units of heavy cav running around wreaking havoc where they could, but that's not the interesting part.

Once the enemy infantry got close in, I let my archers shoot.. it was crazy! They dealt 50 casualties in about 30 seconds. Nuts. They ripped apart a group of Yari Samurai, then slaughtered the enemy general's unit of 60 no-dachis along with the general himself.

Granted, that was four units of archers.. however, I had another battle earlier with only one unit of archers shooting from a big hill... once again, I had the archers hold their fire until the unit was well within range, then fire. On their first volley, the one unit took out something like 20 Ashigaru! I was amazed, and needless to say, very pleased!

[Papewaio]

Yes going from Samurai Archers to MTW Archers was a bit of a shock.

Samurai archers are much more deadly in archery and a lot more deadly in HTH.