Defending archers do not do enough damage in siege.

[gardibolt]

So far I haven't seen any sign that CA is either aware of or cares about this bug. I wouldn't expect it in the final 1.2, or maybe even in the eventual 1.3.

[John_Longarrow]

DaveyBaby,

I'd be very surprised if CA went to all the work and effort of doing as you suggested. Were I the programmer, I'd just spawn the arrows going at a pre-defined angle with a pre-defined speed from each bow. Each arrow would have an "Affected by gravity" property which would simply be incremented every second. This would tell it by how much to deflect the arrow down. Then simple collision detection would ID who (if anyone) it hit and you can then do the “Did it hurt them” calculation when it hits.

That way you don’t have to worry about updating arrow paths as the target moves and it does explain why units besides the one you’ve targeted take casualties. Much easier than trying to figure this all out ahead of time then hope the player doesn’t do something to mess with your predetermined results.

If you tried pre-calculating the results, you’d have a nightmare of a time if you have more than one unit at the same location, let alone what would happen if the target gets hit by a cavalry charge before your arrows land. Much simpler to do it dynamically.

[Daveybaby]

Believe me, the way i described is far less work for both programmers and the CPU/graphics card. And, there's nothing 'simple' about collision detection - particularly when you have thousands of models, thousands of arrows, and complex terrain to take into account.

[Didz]

Personally, I prefer the collision detection approach. I think its one of the strong points of CA's system that missiles in TW hit whatever they hit rather than merely act as eye candy to support a predetermined result.

[LennStar]

There is definitly no pre-shot-calculating in Rome, and I haven't seen it in MTW2.
In Rome its easier to see:
Your General attacks spear-throwers. He retreats. They throw spears. What do you do? Moving ahaed and get hid by the spears? No, you make a turn and with a bit of luck NO spear hits your general - they all fall down far ahead of him (or left or right...).
In the same way your auto-fire rangeunits can kill your general just because you altered his target after the shot and he got in the way.

[Didz]

My favourite trick was with STW bridge defence battles.

Placing musketmen along the river banks allowed you to fire at the enemy troops close to the river, but looking closely you could see men way back at the rear of the enemy army being hit by stray overshots. I much prefer this to some other games that pre-determine casualties on the target unit and allow you to fire without risk even in to swirling melee's.