Norse Bowmen: a bit overpowered?

**akodo** · 12-08-2006, 17:01

Well, i've been playing with the danes for a bit and came across a strange discovery.
It all happned when I sent an army consisting of only a general and about six archer units (4 peasants with 2 norse archers) to battle a strong force of rebels that popped up in my lands. The rebels had about 3 units of vikings, a norse swordsmen unit and a fuedal knights general. I remebred that in RTW this kind of situation was easily won with some micromanagment and a timely cavalry charge.
Anyhow, I swiftly found that M2TW is diffrent, and was running away from the vikings with my 2 norse archers and a peasent archer (while the others stayed to the side and sniped them from the flank...) but was about to be cuaght by the knights. As a last effort, I used the peasents to break the knight charge and than charged my norse archers at the hated enemy (all my archery only cost them 50 men at most). as one would excpect the peasents were butchred and ran, so only the norsmen stayed with thier swords and shields.
However, I was totally surprised that they held their own against the much more numerous and deadly enemy until help came, and actually broke two viking units themselves, badly maimed another, held back a norse swordsmen unit and killed half on a fuedal knights unit, only losing about half thier numbers!
I don't know if there were some other factors that I didn't notice and might caused this to happen, but even if they had some help they still did better than normal infantry!
I am now building a full stack of these to see if thier really effective, but did anyone else noticed the awsome power of this unit?

**Slaists** · 12-08-2006, 17:10

Well, if we look at the stats (and we know that stats mean less in MTW2), norse archers have really great melee stats and crappy missile attack. So, they are melee troops with missile ability.

**professorspatula** · 12-08-2006, 17:15

They do have excellent stats for archers. I don't really like the way the stats are in M2TW. You have militia who are hopeless at fighting, then proper troops who even if they're just archers/skirmishers have enough melee prowess to take on knights and swordsmen. There's very little middle-ground stats as far as I could make out. I wouldn't be surprised if massively heavy norse bowmen armies could wipe out just about every other army in the game. Except for those rocket launcher elephant ones!

**Kraxis** · 12-08-2006, 17:16

Yup I found out the hard way when I met them the first time... Learned to keep my distance.

They are low tech, easy to obtain and relatively cheap. So they are a strong menace when you have to face them. But a good cavalry charge will usually break them.