Quote Originally Posted by Carl
Position: This is where the real difference between the two systems seems to be. The old system probably used a system similar to what I described for Non-Absolute accuracy and it's attendant type 1 positional offset.

However, in the old engine, (according to you, I can't confirm I'm afraid), the target position was always the point occupied by the man at the time of firing.

In the new engine however, it is the target man's current point, or the positional offset point relative to the CURRENT position of the target man. Thus no matter how the man moves, an offset of zero will always cause a hit and an offset of 5 meters to the east will always cause the arrow to land 5 meters east of the targets current postion.

The purpose of this is pretty clear to me. It ensure that no matter how much someone may move, the absolute minimum number of hits never changes. No matter what at least some will hit the target. They probably did it to stop people wasting someones arrows by running into and out of missile range all the time.

Now that i understand how the old system did it, it looks a lot like it uses the old system, but with positional tracking added on.
In the old system, some volleys get no hits. That's because the error due to the accuracy of the weapon is added to the trajectory of each projectile at the time the projectile is fired, but the hit or miss isn't determined until the projectile arrives at the target location. In this system, it's harder to hit a moving target, and that's realistic.

The accuracy parameter is a weighting factor applied to a random number probably linearly distributed in the range of 0 to 1 for every individual projectile. Also, the target has a size. Horses are bigger than men, and therefore the chance of hitting a horse is higher. You can clearly see this effect in tests.

If the archers in M2TW can only shoot an additional 20 meters beyond their open fire range, that isn't much of an issue. However, it could be exploited because a shooted can advance say 5 meters and force a non-shooting enemy unit to retreat 20 meters. This isn't intuitive. Intuitively, you'd expect that you could retreat the same distance that the shooter advanced in order to get back out of range.