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

[Jagger]

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....

[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...

[Bob the Insane]

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...

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

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???

[andrewt]

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.

[Steppe Merc]

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.

[hoof]

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.