Low Gaul morale

[WinsingtonIII]

Not just that Stu. The toxotai can use flaming arrows to demoralize enemy units. The best option would be to combine and have both slingers as well as archers in one's army. We already know slingers pierce armour and flaming arrows demoralize enemy troops.

EDIT: Scato mentioned one critical thing and that is how archers can be positioned behind your own troops as their trajectory is higher than slinger trajectory.

I usually try and have both slingers and archers, however, I almost never use toxotai, if I'm campaigning in Hellas I'll just recruit merc Kretans, and everywhere else that has toxotai available generally has a better alternative nearby (Skythians, Syrians, Persians, etc. are all near/in areas where toxotai are recruitable). Truth be told I only use flaming arrows very rarely anyways, so I tend to see sphendonetai as all around more useful than toxotai for me personally, but obviously, others may have different tactics.

Scato, that is a good point about friendly fire, I didn't really think about how the game allows that. I'll admit I do generally take advantage of that exploit, usually without really thinking about it.

[A Very Super Market]

Toxotai happen to be a truly terrible archer unit, especially when you take their recruitment area into consideration. To the East lies vast expense of Asia, filled with all sorts of nasty characters with terrifyingly powerful weapons. To the North are the massive forests which reduce their effectiveness to nil. The only faction they can stand toe to toe with are the Romans, who don't even have their own archers. Truly a sad, sad existance.

Arrows will still cause plenty of friendly fire if they're too close to the melee. But slingers fire their bullets at a nearly flat trajectory regardless of distance, so there is no alternative.

[vartan]

Throw at me all the slingers you have. You shall have no room to talk once your slingers are lying on the ground because they have been shot down by arrows. They are for winning the missile fight and overall against barely armoured units. (Note: When it comes to units, among other aspects of the game, 99 percent of my brain is thinking from a multiplayer point of view, so you'll have to excuse me.)

[WinsingtonIII]

Throw at me all the slingers you have. You shall have no room to talk once your slingers are lying on the ground because they have been shot down by arrows. They are for winning the missile fight and overall against barely armoured units. (Note: When it comes to units, among other aspects of the game, 99 percent of my brain is thinking from a multiplayer point of view, so you'll have to excuse me.)

I'm pretty sure sphendonetai can defeat toxotai in a missile duel...

Most archers will certainly defeat most slingers in a missle duel, but I'm saying that sphendonetai specifically are better than toxotai specifically, and I stand by that statement, because toxotai are terrible.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Truth be told I only use flaming arrows very rarely anyways

To be historical, my house rule is that I only use flaming arrows when I'm defending. When you're defending a fixed position, and the archers just wait for the enemy to come into range, the fires (braziers, hot coals, or trench filled with burning oil) that they need to light their arrows are right there, just where they want them. But the archers couldn't realistically run around carrying those fires around with them. So if the archers move position, I imagine they move away from their fires and therefore they can't fire flaming arrows anymore.

Simply put, I roleplay that archers can only fire flaming arrows as long as they don't move after the battle starts.

[Cute Wolf]

To be historical, my house rule is that I only use flaming arrows when I'm defending. When you're defending a fixed position, and the archers just wait for the enemy to come into range, the fires (braziers, hot coals, or trench filled with burning oil) that they need to light their arrows are right there, just where they want them. But the archers couldn't realistically run around carrying those fires around with them. So if the archers move position, I imagine they move away from their fires and therefore they can't fire flaming arrows anymore.

Simply put, I roleplay that archers can only fire flaming arrows as long as they don't move after the battle starts.

Interesting aspect of roleplaying.....
Well, did they don't have matches at that time?

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Interesting aspect of roleplaying.....
Well, did they don't have matches at that time?

Nope, no matches. They had flaming torches, but you can't hold a lighted torch and fire a bow at the same time, so the archers would need a slave to carry the torch. You'd probably need one torchbearer for every 4 archers.

[vartan]

Simply put, I roleplay that archers can only fire flaming arrows as long as they don't move after the battle starts.

There are many things EB's MP veterans would be upset about if they saw it occur in battle, but going around using flaming arrows wouldn't be one of them. It would be just fine!

[Duguntz]

There are many things EB's MP veterans would be upset about if they saw it occur in battle, but going around using flaming arrows wouldn't be one of them. It would be just fine!

Those are really, people used to win every single battle in campaing and then frustrating when they see that a player outsmart them! I mean... to say that clicking benind a phalanx to make your units run threw is cheating, ok (though i've some issue with that one too) but to say that fire missile is treachin... I mean common, what's the next step? soon we'll hear... Ha no, you cannot use heavy infantry against my Legions, it's cheating. Fire arrows is a ''special ability'' and ought to bu used wherever and whenever the player wants. If it dosen't make sens for some of u, well, use your imagination and imagine there's 1 slave per 5 archer carrying touch and that's it... The hell with cheating dad gummit

[Kival]

Those are really, people used to win every single battle in campaing and then frustrating when they see that a player outsmart them! I mean... to say that clicking benind a phalanx to make your units run threw is cheating, ok (though i've some issue with that one too) but to say that fire missile is treachin... I mean common, what's the next step? soon we'll hear... Ha no, you cannot use heavy infantry against my Legions, it's cheating. Fire arrows is a ''special ability'' and ought to bu used wherever and whenever the player wants. If it dosen't make sens for some of u, well, use your imagination and imagine there's 1 slave per 5 archer carrying touch and that's it... The hell with cheating dad gummit

I'm relativley sure Vartan told us to use flaming arrows is no problem in multiplayer ;-).

[antisocialmunky]

Yeah. The barb charging tactics we use involve 1 unit with fire arrows.

If we were to complain about anything it would be that fear penalties don't rely on numbers so 1 set of flaming arrows or 1 unit of Gaesatae scares pretty much all units in a certain radius that is about 1/2 your main line.

[Kival]

Yeah. The barb charging tactics we use involve 1 unit with fire arrows.

If we were to complain about anything it would be that fear penalties don't rely on numbers so 1 set of flaming arrows or 1 unit of Gaesatae scares pretty much all units in a certain radius that is about 1/2 your main line.

So it does not make sence to use more than one scaring unit in your army?

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

I'm not saying it's cheating to use flaming arrows. Just that I like to roleplay these things, some people don't, that's fine. Each to their own.

My understanding of fire arrows is that their use was relatively rare - it was much more common for archers to fire an ordinary arrow than a flaming one. Otherwise accounts of ancient battles involving archers would nearly always include descriptions of flaming arrows streaking across the sky. If it was easy to fire flaming arrows, you'd want to use them most of the time because they are scary, and demoralise poorly-disciplined enemy troops. But relatively few accounts of ancient battles specify that flaming arrows were used, so I assume that they were relatively rarely used because using them was not easy for some reason, and firing ordinary arrows is much easier and faster.

My houserule just enables me to keep my use of fire arrows to a minimum, and not use them all the time to scare the AI troops and give me easy victories.