LOS and archers?

[babydoc]

Any word on how archery will work with the new LOS?
Are the days when archers killing units that cant be seen behind a wall or a hill over?

IMO archers shouldnt hit something they cant see.
Sure, you can fire on a general area and make a few kills. But not as we have it now in the other TW games where you fire on unseen units and hit bullseye.

[theDaedricPrince]

I just hope there's more diversity when it comes to animations for archer units. From the footage we've seen, the archers fire like robots. All with the same animations.

Please make archers diverse ._.

[alQamar]

I just hope there's more diversity when it comes to animations for archer units. From the footage we've seen, the archers fire like robots. All with the same animations.

Please make archers diverse ._.

Mr. Lusted said they cannot make all fighting animations more diverse as the have memory budgets (32bit game)


Good post babydoc agree. But when an enemy is spotted by another unit it is ok. As general and troop leaders will report archers aprox. Distance and if they hit. So in case of los they shouldn't be able to fire only when themselves see the enemy.

[TR00PER7]

Perhaps when you select a missile unit to fire upon an enemy unit, it should indicate whether the enemy unit can be seen or not and if it is unseen, the missiles will be less effective.

Although I wouldn't imagine that being in the game, that's what I feel should add a little bit of realism.

But I thought one of the ability's of archers over most other missile unit is that they could fire upon enemy's they could not see. Maybe not with great accuracy but with a surplus of missiles or with little opportunity of direct fire I would imagine it would still aid in causing havoc without harming.

[babydoc]

Another thing is the ballistics.
Archers firing at crazy angles which shouldn't kill eg. when they are close to the enemy and a friendly unit is standing infront of the archers.
They simply fire over their heads or straight up and over walls. I read somewhere that an arrow need the speed to kill.
An angle of 45 degrees should do the trick.

Maybe not with great accuracy but with a surplus of missiles or with little opportunity of direct fire I would imagine it would still aid in causing havoc without harming.

Agree.

[Raimeken]

Another thing is the ballistics.
Archers firing at crazy angles which shouldn't kill eg. when they are close to the enemy and a friendly unit is standing infront of the archers.
They simply fire over their heads or straight up and over walls. I read somewhere that an arrow need the speed to kill.
An angle of 45 degrees should do the trick.
Agree.

Archers don't do that anymore. In Shogun 2 they always keep a low firing arc, however the price is that if a unit is in front, the front rows may not fire.

[Amatiel28]

This was THE worst aspect of shogun 2.

The computer or my campaign buddy would bring an army to a siege that far outnumbers me in archers, and he would just sit outside my castle firing arrows over the wall with pinpoint accuracy despite the fact there is no way those archers could see what was happening inside the fortress.

it resulted in me putting all my melee units into loose formation and micro-running them around the fort to dodge these arrows while my opponent fired his "laser-guided arrows" at my troops.

Stupid. Senseless. Nonsensical.

I hope it will be fixed in rome 2

[BigHairyMelon]

You have to bear in mind that if you fire something up at a high angle at initial speed x and then the it goes up in the air until gravity brings it back down, it is going to land with a similar speed it started with. So if an arrow is fired into the air and it then lands on a unit that is at the same elevation as the shooter it will probably still kill them because it will get back most of its speed from the descent. If the enemy are higher then the shooter say on a wall and the arrow falls on them then it probably wont do much if they are wearing armour because it will barely have any speed. While this method may not be accurate, given enough arrows and a dense enemy formation it will still hurt.

Also if the enemy are close and a friendly unit is standing directly in the way it would be better to fire at a higher angle depending on how you want the arrow to hit the enemy.

[JaM]

that wont be problem to get fixed.. its caused by high accuracy of bow projectiles.. you can either increase the dispersion or reduce lethality. From real world perspective - if you shoot arrows indirectly, at 100m+ your dispersion will be in 25m radius, which means you can forget about pinpoint accuracy. Even English longbowmen didnt shoot for accuracy, but to saturate certain area with arrows.. For accurate direct shooting from bow, you would have a problem to hit human size target at distance above 60m due to wind conditions. (yes, hits at greater range were possible, but not on reliable basis.. those "magic" hits you can see in youtube are made with modern bows and modern precisely manufactured arrows. in ancient and medieval times, every arrow was different/unique/could behave differently.. Anyway in war, that was not the problem, because archers were indirect fast firing "artillery", not snipers...

[Amatiel28]

The archers can see through the walls and ground, into the centre of the fortress where my infantry are standing and hit them with pinpoint accuracy.
I guess im gonna have to spell out a scenario to make you understand.

-Playing a campaign with a mate.

-My armies are engaged with an AI enemy on my northern border

-On my southern border, which I share with my mate, he realises that now is a good time to break our alliance and attack me.

-However I prepared for this, upgrading the castle that he must take or siege to enter my clans heartland, and keeping a garrison of 4 samurai archers, and 6 melee troops (both ashigaru and samurai) to ensure that any assault would cost him dear, making a prolonged siege the best way for him to minimise his losses, and allowing me time to redirect armies to counter him. I cant afford to keep more units than this garrisoned as we like to play on the hardest difficulty, and I am fighting a powerful enemy to the north.

-He attacks me in full force, with half his army being archers of some sort, the other half being a mixture of heavy infantry, cavalry and his generals.

-Ok, so things arent looking good, at least he shouldnt be able to take more than that castle as if he wants to take it straight away, that means an assault, which means heavy losses for him as his army does not have any siege units.

-He besieges me and assaults the fortress straight away.

-In the opening of the battle he moves his archers within range of my walls, we both concentrate all our archers in this fight, yet inevitably, due to being vastly outnumbered my archers on the battlement are reduced to almost 0.

-He takes many losses, yet still has quite a considerable archer force left say 4-5 units.

-Now, I assume he will be forced to scale the walls, and doing so will send his troops into the waiting swords and spears of my melee garrison waiting to move up to the walls to defend them. He will most likely win due to sheer weight of numbers, but it will incur heavy losses for him, yes i will have lost the castle, but his army is not going to move for a good while afterwards, as it has been significantly weakened and he no longer has the strength to take any more land from me, he must bide his time for now. This gives me breathing room to reorganise my clans armies and time to prepare a counter offensive.

-WRONG! you we dont need to see your forces to shoot them with pinpoint accuracy! What he does he simply moves his remaing archers up to the base of my wall while the rest of his army sits back and watches as his archers commence firing on my melee troops currently standing in the centre of the fortress, back from the wall, DESPITE the fact that there is no LOS from ANY of my opponents forces, he can just sit there and shoot away until his ammunition is spent, or all my forces die.

-So begins the only thing i can do to counter this... psychic magical bombardment of my forces. I put all my units in to loose formation, bunch them all up into a tight ball, and get them running from end to end of my fortress, changing direction after each volley to minimise losses. This goes on until he runs out of arrows, at which point my remaining forces are exhausted, and despite my best efforts have taken heavy losses. He scales the walls and burns down the gate with his fresh, full strength units that until now have been sitting back watching the fight and of course he takes the castle with minimal losses. Leaving me wondering why I even bother with fortifications.

-His minimal losses mean he can continue his march next turn and take further cities from me using the same exploitative tactic.

Hope that puts things into perspective for you

[babydoc]

That pretty sums it up.
I have high hopes for this new LOS system.

[JaM]

i know what he is want to say, and that is why i tried to explain why it is happening.. vanilla S2TW has archers too accurate, with arrows having very high lethality factor, and projectiles have low dispersion.. Bombardment shooting was a norm, anyway chance to destroy enemy units with it was small, it was only able to disorganize enemy but not wipe them out... simply said, arrow armor penetration, hit probability and lethality is higher than armor resistance of defending units.. in reality, it was the opposite, but CA chosen this to make battles faster paced.. and i dont doubt same thing will happen in Rome 2... in the end, every TW game had this before... to this day i cant forget seeing Gothic Knights wiped by English longbowmen... while in reality, Gothic armor was designed to be impervious to arrows and bolts and you needed heavy muskets to penetrate them from very short range...

[W4SPY]

If any of you remember the original shogun....if you had archers on a hill they could shoot further....now its just stats..i miss that from shogun

[jamreal18]

If any of you remember the original shogun....if you had archers on a hill they could shoot further....now its just stats..i miss that from shogun

Agree!

[alstl]

My thoughts on this, having played every total war game since the first. If you are being shot at by arrows it shouldn't be hard to figure out where they enemy is by tracking the arc of the arrow, therefore even without LOS you should be able to accurately fire on the location of the enemy archers.

Regarding melee troops inside a fort, IF the fort is higher than any surrounding terrain then you should not be able to fire accurately on the melee troops. They should be treated the same as troops concealed in a forest in battle. However if there is a hill outside the fort, a competent commander could send a troop to the top of the hill and signal the location of the enemy inside the fort. Few artillery units can see the location of the enemy, they rely on a third party to provide the location. In those instances perhaps the game "assumes" the enemy has a spotter.

A feature I liked - was it in empire? - was the ability to put troops inside buildings. That would be a way to protect troops inside a fort from missile fire and when the enemy begins scaling the walls, bring the troops out of the buildings to defend. Even if your troops can't enter the buildings, the presence of a few buildings would give them something to hide behind until the missile barrage stops.

I probably don't need to tell anybody this but the best way to prevent being slaughtered by missiles when defending a fort is to have some cavalry available to leave the fort and attack the people firing missiles at you.

[General Sherman]

The potential for the game having OP archers is probably my biggest concern. Especially since historically, archery played a minimal role in most of the armies of the era. I'm not sure what new LoS system is supposed to give me hope, but my thoughts are generally similar to the OP. Archery was OP in Shogun2, regardless of whether or not you think historical accuracy should be emphasized, I hope this issue will be corrected with Rome2.

[alstl]

The potential for the game having OP archers is probably my biggest concern. Especially since historically, archery played a minimal role in most of the armies of the era. I'm not sure what new LoS system is supposed to give me hope, but my thoughts are generally similar to the OP. Archery was OP in Shogun2, regardless of whether or not you think historical accuracy should be emphasized, I hope this issue will be corrected with Rome2.

Truth is we are all guessing until the game is released, but take a look at the recent naval battle video. There is a segment where a ship is approaching another ship for boarding and is being bombarded with arrows from the front and side. I saw minimal damage to the troops being shot at, in fact hardly any damage. It looks like they automatically hold their shields over their heads to reduce damage from arrows.

But one thing people tend to forget is it's a game. If historical accuracy means a big mosh pit of infantry in every battle hacking away at each other, that could get stale in a hurry.

[JaM]

Truth is we are all guessing until the game is released, but take a look at the recent naval battle video. There is a segment where a ship is approaching another ship for boarding and is being bombarded with arrows from the front and side. I saw minimal damage to the troops being shot at, in fact hardly any damage. It looks like they automatically hold their shields over their heads to reduce damage from arrows.

But one thing people tend to forget is it's a game. If historical accuracy means a big mosh pit of infantry in every battle hacking away at each other, that could get stale in a hurry.

Ancient armies used other types of skirmishers. Javelin was the main skirmish weapon of that era. It had much higher effectivity than any arrow could (no chance small 40g arrow could match 600-900g heavy javelin in penetration capability, let alone 1000-2500g heavy pillum...)

[nubcaker]

That archer looks like it's getting hit by watermarks. Oh lord.

[craziii]

LOS from what I have seen of the videos works pretty cool. we all must applaud ca for that. give credit where it is due.

I hate the fact the firing cone introduced and needed by the gun powder units in etw n ntw is retained for the archers units in S2 n rtw2.

I hate it with a passion.

it seem every TW game got something I hate. rome 1 got the formation line up bug on the battle map(very minor non issue ). m2 got the 2handed + archery bugs(big problems imo). etw was just sad(first tw game that ctds on me). I really have no complains for ntw that I can think of S2 got the craptastic samey campaign map and the archery cone. R2 looks set to have the craptastic samey campaign with artificial choke points n designated army paths + archery cone. I find it annoying that CA repeats some of them, really annoying.