Ranged units in city assaults

[R'as al Ghul]

How do you use Archers in siege assaults?
My problem is that they don't seem to be able to shoot due to limited sight.
When I position them outside the palisade while I ram the walls with other units, I would expect them to shoot at the defenders units behind the fence. But I never get the green arrow. On fire at will they sometimes shoot a volley but even if you tell them to target that unit again, you can't. Is it just that the wall is too high? Is line of sight important for archers who shoot in an arq? The same is true when you already breached the gate and your archers are inside.
Are ranged units useless in city fights?

R'as

[Magraev]

I've seen my archers shooting it out with archers on the walls (my archers lost as they should, but the enemy archers didn't bother my legionnaires later...). I've also seen my arhcers (and peltasts/velites) shooting over wooden walls at defenders inside.

You can do some cheezy stuff with archers in the end-battle. March them up close to the city square and shoot the remaining defenders - often they will just stand there and be shot down like dogs - rather absurd.

[R'as al Ghul]

Interesting observation. What kind of walls were they?

I tell you what's cheesy. The cavalry flood.
Select 4 light cav and double click on the last phalanx unit occupying the piazza. Go make yourself some coffee, return to find the city is yours.


R'as

[The_Emperor]

Ranged units are great for capturing sections of wall where there are no enemies. if you send them up a siege tower with towers of heavy inf eaither side to protect them, they can capture towers easily and then proceed to shoot the enemy in the streets from the battlements!

In assaults on wooden wall defences they can easily shoot over the walls most of the time, and this can be great fun at clearing out the area before your battering rams are done and your troops are ready to move in.

[Magraev]

Interesting observation. What kind of walls were they?

The regular stone kind.

[R'as al Ghul]

Ranged units are great for capturing sections of wall where there are no enemies. if you send them up a siege tower with towers of heavy inf eaither side to protect them, they can capture towers easily and then proceed to shoot the enemy in the streets from the battlements!

In assaults on wooden wall defences they can easily shoot over the walls most of the time, and this can be great fun at clearing out the area before your battering rams are done and your troops are ready to move in.

I'm doing something wrong then. Although I did capture towers before and they probably shot at the defenders I haven't seen it.
I had great problems shooting over the wooden walls with my Pharaohs Archers from several ranges.

R'as

[GFX707]

What I don't understand is why they can't attack buildings with their flaming arrows. I mean if they're going to give them flaming arrows in the first place....

[foop]

My problem is that they don't seem to be able to shoot due to limited sight.

I think it's a line of sight thing. I was trying to get a handle on how it works in a small siege last night. I was playing the Julii, and had some roman archers trying to shoot German spearmen the other side of a wooden wall.

Oddly, I could target the Germans when they were very close to the wall (which didn't seem realistic). And when they were about a unit's width away from the wall (which seemed realistic). But not at intermediate distances (which just confused me).

[GFX707]

Add that to the fact that they'll just shoot arrows into the wall....or into the backs of your own units. There's jobs waiting for them in the US army....

[mfberg]

I set my archers up in two lines at right angles to each other both looking through the gate or gap the enemy is guarding. They will shoot some and the enemy has been backing off.

I have had 1 problem in a seige. I had 1 unit of hastati and 1 general sitting outside on the left flank. No matter where I put the infantry they were getting shot by someone (I lost between 20 and 30 men to that fire). I never found out who was shooting, but the enemy had 2 men left over in the end battle report. They are the only forces I have had killed outside during a seige.

mfberg

[R'as al Ghul]

I set my archers up in two lines at right angles to each other both looking through the gate or gap the enemy is guarding. They will shoot some and the enemy has been backing off.

Good tip. I'll try that one tonight.

I have had 1 problem in a seige. I had 1 unit of hastati and 1 general sitting outside on the left flank. No matter where I put the infantry they were getting shot by someone (I lost between 20 and 30 men to that fire). I never found out who was shooting, but the enemy had 2 men left over in the end battle report. They are the only forces I have had killed outside during a seige.
mfberg

Actually those little towers of the wooden palisade shoot at you. It's not much and I hardly noticed it the first time but they shoot.

R'as

[RedKnight]

To me it seems pretty clear that it's a line of sight thing. One thing that can seem confusing is that AFAIK the gate of a wooden wall is considerably taller than the walls beside it - probably bigger even than it looks, for line-of-sight (LOS) or really arc-of-flight (AOF) calculations. In other words, I think that gates might be a bit buggily bigger than they should for AOF calcs - so it can be confusing when your archers are standing right on the other side of it.

You can tell this is so because if you e.g. line up 5 archer units outside an enemy wall, centered on the gate, some of them will, and some of them won't, be able to shoot an enemy unit that's standing a bit behind the gate, just on the other side of the wall. But all 5 of your archers will be able to shoot an enemy unit that's standing the same distance "behind" the wall, but is off to the left or right, a ways down the wall (and not behind the gate relative to your archers). Your archers need a relatively low AOF to shoot somebody right in front of them on the other side of the wall - and that's right where the gate is standing higher, if both the enemy and your archers are on opposite sides of a gate area.

I will also line up, say, 5 hastati right next to the wall, centered on the gate. (Archers stand back from the wall more, so there's plenty of "room" for the hastati not to be crowding them.) If they're set on auto-fire, they will all be able to javelin an enemy that runs past them all, along the other side of the wall. The arc of the heavy javelins is much higher.

More archer seige stuff...

For one thing, I found that my archers were often killing themselves through friendly fire... I'd often have a handful of archers die in each unit, even though they never fought per se, only shot. It would be even worse if they were e.g. on the side of a hill, shooting up and over it (which puts them in each others' way more). Nowadays I set them to Loose formation whenever possible, and haven't seen any more of this "friendly fire". Apparently it's using some quite realistic model, at least in the sense of, it's following individual arrows, and they can and will hit whatever they can - but it's unrealistic inasmuch they sometimes hit the back of the head of the guy in front of them. Putting it on Loose solves this. You can't always do it inside a city, because those narrow streets won't like wide Loose formations. But you can try. If you have the timer on your side, even if the streets are narrow, you can march up one archer unit at a time, let him shoot his arrows and then pull him back, and rinse and repeat til all arrows or enemies are used up - whichever comes first.

Another thing I like to do is have all my archers hold their fire until they all have a target that is sitting still, and which they can all target (green arrow icon). I will tell them all to fire on that unit - and then cancel the Fire order (Backspace) as soon as they unleash their first volley. In seiges, enemy units that aren't meleeing will usually run for the plaza when they start getting shot at, so this method lets all my archer units get in lots of accurate shots. Meanwhile, they will move up some other "full" unit to a position near where you're threatening the wall, to replace the one you just shot up. Thus, I rotate my fire, one volley at a time, through the sitting-duck targets. In many wood-wall seige scenarios, if you have 5 or more archers, the enemy will be in tatters before long (before the timer's halfway done) if you keep rinsing and repeating like this - so much so, that you can just set your archers to auto-fire, because they still have half of their arrows and there's little left of consequence to shoot. IOW, they can waste their arrows now.

Also, your archers have longer reaction times to a Stop (backspace) command than in MTW. So if you are going to melee somebody your archers are shooting at, you need to Stop them (or turn off auto-fire) considerably before your melee troops reach the targetted enemy.

Some thoughts... conquer on!

[R'as al Ghul]

Some thoughts... conquer on!

Some very interesting ones. Thanks for sharing.


R'as