Archers on walls bug - fix on the way?

[briny_norman]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's tired of seeing my archers fire straight up into the sky instead of at the enemy when positioned on castle walls.
It makes their arrow volleys much less effective and takes away much of the advantage that castle walls are supposed to give you.
And it looks plain stupid.

Has anybody heard CA acknowledge this as a bug that will be fixed in a coming patch?

[Musashi]

It's not a bug. Think about it... only the guys at the very front of the unit would be able to lean way out over the parapet to fire straight down. The rest of te squad would be firing blind.

[Kraxis]

Yup... it is very important to spread out the archers into a single line.

Also imagine the crossbows, how are they supposed to shoot down when there are two guys in front of them blocking the view (and access)?

[briny_norman]

No, sorry. It happens no matter how much I spread them out.
Even spread out as a single line all along the breastwork at least half of the archers will fire straight up into the air.
At least that's what happening in my game - are you telling me that you don't experience this phenomenon at all?

[Sir SillyDuck]

Maybe because of the ramparts? not all archers will be in front of a 'hole' in the ramparts.

I do see the same, but I thought it was because of this no clear line of sight thing.. Though I only took notice of it with archers in the field..

[Kraxis]

It happens... but not to that extent. There are the guys that are behind the parapet and then there are the guys that might be out of range or has their vision blocked.

If my archers don't get involved in melee, they will generally get about 150-200 kills. Not bad at all. That is in fact a bit better that in the best field battles where 120 kills seems more normal.

[Spino]

I think the problem lies with the minimum angle at which archers and other missile units can fire their projectiles. Basically once an enemy unit is within a certain range a missile unit either standing on the walls or positioned on much higher ground can no longer depress their weapons low enough to take a 'direct' shot at the enemy. The engine then forces the unit to compensate by increasing the angle of fire to such a degree that the missiles 'rain' down on the enemy as opposed to being shot straight at them. Think indirect fire instead of direct fire. Hopefully modders will be able to change the minimum angle of attack once the patch is issued and appropriate files can be extracted from the packed data files.

It may look unusual but archers firing at such extreme angles is not ahistorical; at the battle of Hastings Norman archers were instructed to use high angle, indirect fire against the Saxons when it became painfully obvious that their direct fire was seriously handicapped against the Saxons who were standing on higher ground and deployed in their famous shield wall formation.

[todorp]

I was shocked to see that my musketiers shoot up fromw the wall as well, when the enemy is just below them

[dcd111]

It makes their arrow volleys much less effective and takes away much of the advantage that castle walls are supposed to give you.

I doubt that it is hindering their effectiveness in any way, since the graphical representation of how they are shooting doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how the calculations are performed, at least as I understand how it works. The game calculates whether a particular shot will hit its mark or miss, and then it displays graphically what happened in the calculations, it doesn't use collision detection after firing the shot to determine whether someone was hit. Although it might be indicating that it is difficult to hit someone standing directly below when you're up on a wall as others have said here.