archers get you lose a battle

[Hesus de bodemloze]

so losing battles becous of archers that just wont run where you tell them to go. i encountert this manny times and i gets me verry angry. most of the time when you place them on walles and tell them to fall back at the city center thy just wont go there. why not? i dont know at one point i even seen them just run out of the gates to the enemie out side of the gates. is this normal? i dont think so. any one had this problem to? is it fixeble ore is it just bad luck?

[Nevins]

Did you have skirmish mode enabled? Skirmish mode makes them unable to come within a certain distance of enemy troops so if the wall exits are blocked they will be unable to leave the wall.

[NobleNick]

Nevins nailed it.

This happens to me all the time. Archers do very crazy things with skirmish mode ON (which is the default at start of battle). If you need them to move somewhere, and any part of their path falls within close quarters with the enemy, you need to turn skirmish off, first (or else they just run around like headless chickens).

[Hesus de bodemloze]

thy always run around like headless chickens :d i curse those archers

[Rabain]

You cannot control more than 1 unit at a time on a wall. If you select two units on a wall and tell them to go somewhere...they don't! You have to do it one at a time.

That together with Skirmish mentioned above seems to be all of your problems.

[NobleNick]

Ah, yes. How did I miss the fact that you said they were on the walls. Rabain has another good point: units do weird things on the walls.

The problem is that archers do weird things, archers near enemies do really weird things, troops on walls do weird things, and troops on walls near enemies do really weird things. So, if you have archers on walls near an enemy, with skirmish mode ON, you are are at the pinnacle of weirdness.

What I do, is

1.) PAUSE the game,
2.) Select ONE unit (if not a ranged unit, go to step 6)
3.) Disable skirmish if the unit is a ranged unit, and skirmish is not already disabled.
4.) UNPAUSE for half a second,
5.) PAUSE again,
6.) Click on the ground right next to the nearest exit from the wall,
7.) UNPAUSE the game,
8.) WAIT until I am sure the unit is headed the way I want it to go,
9.) If the unit is not doing what I ask, REPEAT steps 1 through 8, until they do.
10.) And then (not before then) REPEAT steps 1 through 9 with the next nearby unit. (No wait is needed between units if the units are not near each other.)

Although this looks like a long list, the actions are simple. If you use the pause button, this is the fastest way (least amount of battle timer) to get your troops to do exactly what you ask.

[Lionel-Richie]

Yeah, when getting archers off the wall in this I end up having to give the order no less than 5 different times

[snuggans]

pressing (or was it holding?) space helps you identify a situation when a unit does not register a move order, whatever the reason may be.

[FuriousSpurius]

I just avoid using archers. You get more kills by keeping an extra unit of spears or swords around for about the same upkeep. Archers don't get nearly as many kills, even when they're defending a castle. All they're good for is getting mowed down.

That's something I think CA *still* needs to work on is leveling out archer damage.

[DaLeGiOnArY]

it would usualy be an instant kill if on the upper torso/neck/head.. lower torso would need two hits and arms/legs would be a few hits before death.
lets make a mod so arrows are instant killers

[Boz]

The perfect archer is the archer on horse. Mind, they also get moving problems, but it compensates the terrible damages they do.

In cities the archers are very useful, I have win battles in sieges with practicly only archers and 1 or two units of town militia.

The tactic is: you attack with the town militia the troops that are carrying the rams and ladders, they will flee rapidly, but with the archers in the walls the losses they inflict are high. Then (in case of two walls) you go to the next wall. When the enemy comes to the second wall, usually the only carry 1 ram/ladder. The you repeat the operation with the rests of the town militia or archers that they have finished their munition. Never tell the archers attack with arrows the ram in Kingdoms, is totally useless. Send the town militias to destroy the rams and even the archers, fisically with spears and swords (they destroy'it suprisingly fast).

When the enemy gets to the walls with the ladders, even if they are Knights, their moral is so low and their losses so great that with a good number of archers in the wall you can win the battle.

If you only got one wall, after retreating from the wall go to the plaza and die there. With luck and some decent units, you can win the battle. (In a battle against the teutonics, they were 3 armies mainly of cavalry, with mangonels and only rams. I putted all the archers in the walls, send town militias to the rams, they abandonned the rams and tried to pass by a hole in the walls, but with all the archers resisting and some other units I winned the battle. The image of the battle:

[FuriousSpurius]

In my experience, archers typically just don't do enough. They suck at taking down rams with flaming arrows (even if I have five different groups firing at it) and in field battles, they only spray off one or two volleys before I have to pull them out.

Even in sieges when they're sitting on the walls unloading, unless they're firing at poorly armored units, they're just not doing enough. It's terrible to watch 60 arrows strike down into an enemy group and see three or four men drop. Against lightly armored opponents, a group of archers on top of a wall should be devastating.

[Oberhut]

( Normal ) Archers where quite inefficient in warfare - that is the reason they where only ever used as auxillary unit. This does not include composite bows ( need dry climate + experienced archers ), Longbows ( need very experienced archers ) and x - bows ( slow reload, expensive ).
Fact is, if the simple bow would have been a killer firearms would not have become so popular so fast.

[Nevins]

if you put the archers on the walls that flank approaching troops, they will hit them in the sides/ rear and will have a greater chance for a kill.

[Sonny WiFiHr]

Never. Only if you prefer mounted ones.This is answer to the topic

[Salahiddin Ayoubi]

Another thing that could inhibit the mobility of archers happened to me a couple of times, when playing is Byzantines on Vh. The Turkish artillery bombarded my citadel's walls, and in doing so, they broke the walls that surrounded my guard archers. this prevented my archers from getting down, and this made their status as "fighting to the death". I tried to retreat them, but it was no use. I ended up losing this battle in the end.

[an_do_89]

Yes in Kingdoms don't use archers to put the ram on fire , in 20 sieges as Lithuania I fired only one ram.
They are very good at taking cavalry down , low armored troops .
And in a siege put the archers where no ladders or tower arrive , let the enemy enter a bit in your town maintaining the line with spearmen and pepper them from the wall and see that archers make a big deal . Or take the archers on the flank of an engaged army and watch .

And yes it gets annoying when they just don't listen the orders but this is CA fault.

[Smeghead]

Come to think of it, I never noticed the low kill rate of my archers until i read this thread, and have since come to reconsider their worth... I have actually never gotten far enough in the game to use anything but archer militia, lithuanian archers and horse archers... Perhaps professional archers such as Longbowmen or Sherwood Forresters are better...

Archers who can lay down pikes, however, are very valuable in certain situations... When i first played the original Medieval II Total War, I used almost-full stacks of Lithuanian Archers (as Poland) in order to defeat the Mongols... The Mongols NEEDED to cross a bridge close to Kiew in order to enter my lands, so i set my armies up there, and before each battle I laid pikes at the mouth of the bridge...The vast majority of Mongolian horses crossed the bridge and were obliterated by them... The infantry were then killed in a shower of arrows and catapault fire as they crossed, and any stragglers who made it through the pikes and arrows were dealt with by my general

So they were useful

[Pontifex Maximus]

Use the archers to get in the way of advancing troops (but if the infantry are heavies dont try it). once the lights are locked in battle, bring in your heavies and then the battle begins.

[FriendoftheDork]

I think some of you are using archers completely wrong. In most battles I play archers are NECESSARY, even when I'm attacking. The damage archers causes are pretty high IMO, alot higher than it used to be in medieval 1 and shogun. Back then you were lucky if a volley killed 2-3 enemies.

Now I find a good volley easily kills 4-12 enemies, and with their rate of fire they can decimate units fairly quickly. And even if not, having to march through missile fire lowers the morale of the enemy so that when you do charge them.. well you know

Most times I've failed to use archers properly is when the enemy advances on me quickly and I have archers in the front line. If you try to trust the skirmish ability the enemy (even infantry!) is often able to charge your archers and eat them for breakfast. So make sure you manually put them behind the lines when the enemy is starting to approach (before they start running preferably), especially if the enemy has cavalry.

Archers will however be best if you can get in a situation where an enemy doesen't want to move, either because doing so forces them to run uphill or away from dangerous melee units that may flank them. In a battle with the English (using milita archers) I inflicted 170 casualties on the enemy army with a single unit. In that particular fight I was attacking a bridge from two sides and my reinforcements were able to get up on a hill behind the enemy and rain arrows on their light cavalry, and the enemy couldn't just turn and engage because then my main unit could easily cross the bridge.

In the rest of the Britannia campaign I usually got about 100 kills PER longbowman unit in a regular battle, when the enemy was not stationary. Cavalry still got most the kills, but archers came way over my infantry. Archers do the firing, cavalry do the riding, infantry do the dying.

When defending walls archers are usually even more useful. Yes, you may have to sacrifice a few archer milita units but they can do heavy damage on the enemy before they get over the walls. Better archers and siege units should be used in the safety of the town square where they'll do bloody murder.