archers seem a bit buggy

[dowdpride]

whenever i go into battle my horse archers and normal archers always shoot straight up and do almost no casualties to enemies right in front of them. my enemy doesnt have this problem but it is getting annoying because it does almost no damage.

[Hidden Sage]

whenever i go into battle my horse archers and normal archers always shoot straight up and do almost no casualties to enemies right in front of them. my enemy doesnt have this problem but it is getting annoying because it does almost no damage.

Tell me, do you have the archers on fire-at-will? It tends to be true when that's running that once your archers open fire on a certain unit, they keep firing at THAT UNIT until it's dead, or it moves out of range. The only way to get that low-arch close-range death-ball is to manually control their target designation.

It's no harm to initially have them in FaW, but once they begin shooting, disable it. That way, you can manually change their targets whenever needed (such as when that spearman group is only ten feet away and you want to run them through).

And while you're at it, check your targets. Heavy infantry have an insane damage threshold, and there's only a handful of archer units (those that do better than ~7 per missile attack) that can deal significant damage anyway. Same is true for heavy cavalry, although to a lesser extent, as their armor points are always about ~8 points lower than equivalent heavy infantry.

If you want to capitalize on archer use, aim for medium-defense units (spearmen, other horse archers, light infantry). They fall en masse to arrows, but you're still removing a lot of offensive punch from the fight.

[dowdpride]

i was playing as the mongols, and my archers with fire at will off would just shoot randomly, at kazaks and peasents and do no damage. on a side note, mongol light lancers are freaking insane :O

[Imladrik]

I think the way archers and thus horse archers shoot has been altered in the latest versions of BB, I think. In this way archers can actually be useful in sieges, where in the past they would often be 'firing missiles' without actually doing anything. I might be mistaken though.

Is there a way to change this back for horse archers only? Or even better, could you be able to switch between shooting arcs?

[Taiji]

Imladrik (and Dowdpride if you're talking about BB), thanks for the feedback

I agree that the new high arcs of fire aren't really working that well for HA.