Archery poll

[Saber Cherry]

Please read this post - but not the rest of the thread - before answering the poll

This is a poll about archery in Dominions II, to help guide the Recruitable Rebalance mod.

For reference:

g means 'gold'
ap means 'armor piercing'
sn means 'shield negating,' caused by the '#flail' command. Normally, missiles must roll versus shield defense to hit a unit.

The questions are usually phrased as, "Is unit x too weak, just right, or too strong?" This should be answered in relation to other possible uses of money and resources. In other words, if you think that the combat effectiveness of slingers feels just right, but that they are too expensive... or if they have the right cost and power, but eat too much food or don't have enough strat moves... please answer "too weak."

Also, please answer all questions based on default Dominions II, not based on modded units. And feel free to explain or qualify your responses in this thread - that's really more valuable than the poll results! Wombats and others posted some excellent historical data on various bows and crossbows in the Recruitable Rebalance thread that you may want to consult, but answering the poll based on gut instinct with no knowledge of anything but strategy games, RPGs, or fantasy novels is fine too

If you are unsure about a question, please choose answer 2, which (unless I made a mistake) means you like the current value of the unit or weapon.

[Boron]

There are imho some problems with missile units that lower their efficiency :
1. and most important you can use decoys . If you place your troops e.g. like that :
Code:

---

  

rear                 front 

                  xxx    x  <-- decoy

                  xxx

         xxxx

         xxxx       

         xxxx 

                  xxx

                  xxx    x  <-- decoy

---

Then likely a few volleys are wasted on the decoys for no effect at all . With scripting of archers you can avoid this a bit but not completely . PD archers can't be scripted and will always waste their volleys on the decoys .

Then there is the next problem :
2. Archer protection and storm :
If you have no staff of storms some strong fliers like devils or fiends of darkness will slaughter your archers quickly . If you have a staff of storms then your archers are protected but less effective because of the storm .

So basically archers are weak imho , but there is the exeption wind guide + flaming arrows .
With these 2 buffs archers are quite powerful .

But to that there are other counters . The various kinds of archers are all low hp and low protection . If you use wind guide + flaming arrows you normally try to gather 50-100 archers . This leads to supplyproblems . You can cure that with vinebags etc. but this leads normally to a quite big army : 50-100 archers , 20-50 fodder troops at least and at least 1 wind guide and 1 flaming arrow caster .
This kind of army is a good target for flames from the sky , ghost riders , ashen angel etc. .
And the archers are quite bad in battles , any of the massive damage spells wipes them out quickly .
While knights etc. can survive earthquake , rain of stones , flame storm etc. the archers die extremely easy to it .

And last but not least they do massive friendly fire casualities .

[Saber Cherry]

The targetting algothrithms have gotten better through Dominions II, but decoys are still a major problem, and FF casualties happen often. And, as you say, food, fliers, and frailty are disadvantages, not to mention arrow fend. Still, some of these problems affect other units too, like battlemages and infantry.

[Boron]

Yeah so i would say make the archers quite strong .

Cause as it is any decent infantry like principes owns archers in combat without enchantments .
2 principes cost 30 gold , so do 3 archers .
The principes own them .
If you do 40 principes vs. 60 archers then you use decoys to your advantage and they own them even more .

Balancing them is quite difficult though because otoh the longbow of accuracy is cool . It hits almost always .
Imho giving all archers +2 precision and +3 damage would be a good first try .
I think you suggested this already also yourself in the other thread :
Giving x-bows a rather short range like 20 but an extremely good precision would be worth a test also .
So new x-bows fire every 3 turns , have 20 range but 14 ap damage and at least 25 precision .
They were the ancient sniper rifles imho .

[Gandalf Parker]

I figured everyone would be down on slingers but I find them useful. Not so much as deadly archers, but I think they serve a purpose and it is in line with their logic. I find that I can cheaply create a cloud of small rocks flying at an army. This is sufficient to rout many of the cheaper bulk units (yeah I know, you disdain using them also) and things like elephants or Call of the Wild. They also get archer benefits for patrolling. I think upping their damage would be illogical. Like many aspects of the game, their lack of use is not from lack of usefulness but more from lack of experimentation. IMHO


As for the decoys and friendly fire comments, I think if you use the page-down key and up-arrow key in a battle replay you will see that they are fairly realistic. If you stick a big statue up front, I will shoot it. If you put me behind your infantry, I will shoot them (setting to the side, or in front with a fire-retreat tactic, or having the target rear units avoids alot of friendly fire)

Gandalf Parker

[Huzurdaddi]

Gandalf Parker said:
I figured everyone would be down on slingers but I find them useful. Not so much as deadly archers, but I think they serve a purpose and it is in line with their logic. I find that I can cheaply create a cloud of small rocks flying at an army. This is sufficient to rout many of the cheaper bulk units (yeah I know, you disdain using them also) and things like elephants or Call of the Wild. They also get archer benefits for patrolling. I think upping their damage would be illogical. Like many aspects of the game, their lack of use is not from lack of usefulness but more from lack of experimentation. IMHO

Are you really trying to say that there is any circumstance in where a person who understands how the game works would rather make 7 gold 3 resource militia instead of 10 gold 8 resource crossbowmen?

I think not.

When someone who understands the game has the misfortune of receiving militia they sent them to their slaughter as soon as reasonabily possible.

Your never ending platitude that "every unit has it's place" is tiresome. Some units are simply better than other on a cost basis given the costs and abilities in the game today.

[Cainehill]

I think there are several flaws with the poll, but I've been working 12+ hour days so I may not be reading / thinking right.

First : Asking whether units were underpowered / useful / overpowered, without mentioning whether people should be compared to normal, recruitable troops, or considering summoned creatures and whatnot. ( On the one paw, a person might think it was normal recruitable troops, but on the other paw, banefire archers were included in the poll. )

Second : All the questions about "what damage should X be :" were .... Well, lets just say that I didn't have time or energy to look up what their damages currently were, so simply picked choice #1 for each and every one of those. From a methodology POV, too many questions is a bad thing, especially when all questions need to be answered to see the results. Especially when giving any old answer for them gives the instant gratification of seeing the results. Bad wolf, no cherry. Bad Cherry, no wolf.

[quantum_mechani]

Cainehill said:

I think there are several flaws with the poll, but I've been working 12+ hour days so I may not be reading / thinking right.

Ouch, that would explain why you haven't been around for blitzes...

[Saber Cherry]

Cainehill said:

I think there are several flaws with the poll, but I've been working 12+ hour days so I may not be reading / thinking right.

First : Asking whether units were underpowered / useful / overpowered, without mentioning whether people should be compared to normal, recruitable troops, or considering summoned creatures and whatnot.

Yep, I realized that a couple hours after posting the poll... I meant "Compared to recruitable units," but as you say, I should not have included Banefire archers in that case. I wonder what people have been assuming?

Well, lets just say that I didn't have time or energy to look up what their damages currently were, so simply picked choice #1 for each and every one of those.

Fortunately, I didn't make that error The top post says:

Please read this post - but not the rest of the thread - before answering the poll

... (middle stuff) ...

If you are unsure about a question, please choose answer 2, which (unless I made a mistake) means you like the current value of the unit or weapon.

So, that should at least exempt me from a bad methodology accusation

[Ironhawk]

I thought this was a good poll, SC. Was nice to just get a rough feel for everyone's opinion about the state of missle weapons.

My only comments so far:
Slingers aren't hampered so much by damage as short range. Their range is so short that you can't even (reliably) place them behind a screen of infantry and expect them to stay there and fire, like you can with all the archer units.

Arbalests need to have thier accuracy bumped WAY up. Cause in a normal battle you will get one, maybe two volleys off if you are lucky, so you cannot waste a single bullet. I realize this is not perfectly historically accurate but I feel its necessary given the dom2 rate of fire of the arbalest.

And I wasnt sure if anyone had responded to Boron: yes, slings are effected by flaming arrows. Any missle weapon (slings, arrows, javs, ballista bolts, probably boulders??) are all effected.