First Post: Introduction and Request For Help Getting Up To Speed

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by markmayhugh

2. From what I read, Longbowmen are supposed to be amazing archers. But I have two squads of 40 archers that maybe damage 2-3 enemy per turn, and not very heavy damage at that. It seems that ranged units are not very effective, even against unarmored barbarians. Are my expectations too high?

As vfb said, it does help if you use other (shielded) units to block them long enough for the archers to hit them at point-blank range. Even so, unless you're hitting low-Prot + unshielded targets like barbarians, archers are less for killing things than softening them up and routing them. 80 longbowmen are likely to damage 50 heavy infantry moreso than kill 20 of them, and the routing algorithm pays a lot of attention to who is at partial HP.

Wind Guide and Fire Arrows improve longbowmen significantly. Overall, though, I think your expectations are too high because longbowmen are not so much "amazing" archers as the best archers available. (Well, crossbowmen are better in some cases.) They still have to hit a square with an enemy, and win the dodge check, and do more damage than he has Prot, in order to do even 1 point of HP damage. Generally that's less damage per longbowman than you would get out of a foot soldier with a mace or something--although longbowmen also scale better.

-Max

[markmayhugh]

Thanks for pointing out that the dom3_db documents item slots in AllUnits. I had looked in Pretender Summary, which did not have the info.

Suddenly, some pretenders are looking more interesting, like the Crone with 4 misc slots. Before seeing this, I was not sure why anyone would ever pick the Crone. Anyway, the slots are important to know to plan appropriately. I ended up having to use Empowerment to boost Earth in my current game because my plan was based on using boots to boost Earth on an Arch Druid with no feet slot.

As for archers, I noticed in several battles that they were not having that much of an effect on the battle compared to melee units. When I attacked an independent with 20 barbs and a commander, I paid close attention because I wanted to see the effect of weak armor. My 80 archers only damaged 5 units before they got into melee range, which I thought was pretty poor performance. Once in melee range, they were decimated so quickly I could not tell if the damage was from archery or my melee troops.

Other battles against larger forces (usually armored), even at close range the archers seem far less of a factor than my melee troops. Just my initial observations as a newbie.