Archers and decoys in MP - questions to experienced players

[thejeff]

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

[Corwin]

Thanks a lot guys, it's very helpful.

Few clarifications - are all of you 100% sure that "fire at none" work exactly the same as "fire closest"?

I could have almost swear that when in the past (2 years ago, when I've used to played Dom3 MP a lot) when I had scripted my archers to "fire none", they would mostly ignore the archer decoys (who were positioned closest to them), and instead were firing at seemingly random targets all over the place. At least that's how it looked like to me, if I remember correctly.

Am I mistaken and are those false memories?

Another question - how exactly "fire at large monsters" order works? Will at always attmept to fire and lock at the largest enemy unit on the field? What if there is size 5 enemy unit within the firing range of your archers, and there is size 6 unit beoynd the range in the back - will your archers fire at size 5 enemy, or will they advance and fire at size 6?

And does it matter what exactly is the size of the "large" enemy unit? (for example, will it fire at the size 3 cavelry of the rest of the enemy troops are size 2)

Last question - let's say your javelins were set to fire at archers, and they have done so, but now they are out of missiles, so they will go to melee. Will the revert to "attack closest" order, or will the continue to perform "attack archers", only now in melee? Same question for your commanders.