Quote Originally Posted by Omisan
It's a bit silly that they wait until the enemy is in range to start the loading animation and then fire their first shot.

It makes sense with bows, but not with the other missile weapons as far as I know.

Because of this, the short ranged missiles units with slow reloading like catapults, ballistas and ribault miss an opportunity to fire at least one extra shot at approaching enemies.

There should be a button to manually do this or at least the AI should start loading when it detects incoming enemies soon to be in range.
You may be able to fix this with careful tweaking of unit ranges in the EDU and projectile velocity stats in descr_projectiles.txt. Basically what I have in mind is making the unit physically able to fire a shot out to what you want its max range to be by adjusting the projectile velocity, but then setting the range in the EDU to something longer than that by 10/20m or so. AFAIK none of the units currently work like that - instead, they artificially limit the range to something less than the velocity would actually allow the unit to fire. My thinking is that if a unit can actually be "in range" of archers without the archers actually being able to take the shot yet, it might trigger the archers to load, and then maintain readiness until they in fact can physically hit the target. There's no real evidence to support this happening though, it's just a hunch of mine based on what I've observed of the game.