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Originally Posted by Baalz
Also, note there is a bit of squishiness sometimes with archers firing at all. Under some conditions (I'm not entirely clear what those are) they will advance rather than firing even when they have ammo and a valid target is in range. One obvious time this happens is if enemies are close enough for them to run up and immediately engage in melee. I've seen it happen though when there is no obvious reason.
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I've also seen archers close and fire when their target group is engaged in melee. This happens most often with indy defenders. I believe I've also had it happen semi-reliably by leaving archers on default orders. I haven't tested that recently though, so my memory may be bad.
It can be useful, since they'll close to behind your front line and friendly fire drops off drastically at such short range.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Baalz
They will choose the closest group and fire at it until it routes or they can't. At that point they will drop back to "fire closest".
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This applies to all troops, right? Your orders only apply to the initial target choice. After that they just drop back to default, which behaves like "fire closest" if they have a range weapon and "attack closest" if they don't.
This was particularly frustrating when I tried to use Crystal Pegasi when I had a F9W9 bless. They'd fly up, slaughter the first group and then start shooting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Baalz
Archers are generally questionably effective against smallish enemy groups who are able to very effectively use archer screening (and other anti-archer) tactics. Against larger enemy armies archers are much more effective as the chaos tends to gum up the archer screens and you can often choose targets that are hard to screen. Also, you often have critical mass of archers so smallish amounts of archer screens can often be pincushioned in a couple turns.
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And in large battles everyone tends to bunch up in the middle of the field anyway. Archer screens don't help much if they're in the middle of the troops you'd wanted to target anyway.