Archer targeting

[Zakky]

That's not a year, it's a season or two.

oh right. So 84 days is a year. That is actually decently long. Almost 3 months. Not sure you want people to keep lots of militia units for that long.

[Zakky]

You are accurate that 60k armies are rather hard to get together.

I've never seen one in all my years.  The largest armies I've ever seen are the 40k armies that Sirion's Northern Alliance has been pushing around over the last year.  And I've been in a lot of wars.  Most large armies in my experience are around 20k, and that has stayed true for the last decade.

40k CS is pretty big but there were ones a lot bigger over the years. If you haven't seen anything bigger than 40k CS, you probably missed few big battles that happened. Here are a couple examples:

http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Lapallanch_Family/Zakilevo/Epic_Battle_of_Oberndorf
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Lapallanch_Family/Kurlock/First_Siege_of_Taselak_City
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Lapallanch_Family/Kurlock/Second_Siege_of_Taselak_City

With the game's reduced noble count, it is harder put together 40k CS since we now only have 1 character per continent.

The difference is that those armies are increasingly being made up of smaller numbers of larger units as the player base shrinks.  I remember a time when 30 men was a good standard unit.  Now if you can't recruit to 60 men you are a poor piker.  The income is simply going to fewer people so each unit is getting stronger.  But at the same time, less money is going to the nobles now since regions don't generate as much income for small numbers of nobles.  So a lot of gold is lost to inefficiency.  But it still results in smaller numbers of more powerful units.

What you've failed to notice is that I've agreed that militias are a problem.  They've been a major issue for most wars of conquest for at least the last couple years.  The only way to break a realm is to surround and starve it out, but if it has allies selling it food and sending money, you can't do that.  Oligarch ran into that issue while trying to take the Sirion City near it during the Sirion Civil War.  Oligarch could beat the Sirions every day of the week in the field but couldn't break the city.  Then Sirion ran into it when they tried to break Oligarch.  The Southern Alliance ran into it while they were rolling over everything north of Highmarch.  And Sirion is probably going to run into it soon with Perdan.  Lots of wars over the last couple years at least have seen this problem.

I don't agree that it is unfair for the militias to do what they do.  They've done it for every realm for years now.  That's an equal fairness.  Or perhaps an equal unfairness.

What I want is the game mechanics fixed so realms don't abuse them, while fixing the militia issue so it balances things better for all nations.  I want equal fairness for all so everybody can have fun playing without unreasonable or unrealistic battles being fought that tug at the willing sense of belief we all put into this game.

The game will always have some flaws. When people discover them, they will use it to their advantage. That is just human nature. Maybe I am getting a wrong idea here but you seem to want people to have a very simplistic approach to the warfare aspect of the game. You want people to bring an army and just clash it head on. Maybe once militias(both normal and peasant) are not as problematic as they are now,  we might see new changes.

I don't really see any good approach to the current problem of baiting infantry out with archers. To be honest, it is pretty easy to counter it. You can usually see it coming. The biggest issue was that Oligarch at the time only had archers while relying completely on militia infantry to hold the walls.

With new archer changes, they will no longer just shoot what is in front of them so baiting out infantry units isn't as efficient anyway. Overall, the game needs a better siege mechanic so sieging is not as simplistic and headache inducing. Maybe once that market system change comes, we will actually see cities starve again.

[Medron Pryde]

And once again you either fail to understand what I'm saying or purposefully make stuff up about me.

One of my first actions as a player in this game was a young player in Tara when we and Cagil built the alliance that would later dominate the Atamaran continent.  I saw some rather amazing battles there.  But even then, Cagil rarely sent out more than 20k at a time.  We had another 5 or 6k.  Maybe 10k in Foda.  The entire alliance may have approached 40k marching strength when we brought soap and water to the screaming goatworshipers not long after.  But I don't remember us being any larger than that.  And later on, at the height of Tara's power in the end days of Atamara as I and others were tearing down the alliance we'd built and starting the largest civil war in the bloody game, we still didn't go past 20k in size.

I remember seeing reports or rumors of 50k armies on some continents and just shaking my head.  That's just not a size that is generally supportable.

Beluaterra and Dwilight realms have rarely gone much over 20k or so in deployable army sizes.  Usually once a nation gets big enough to support anything over that, they generally split into two nations because some rich duke wants more or the realm is so spread out they can't hold it all.  It's just the way things work.  On the continents I've played on of course.

The war islands get rather interesting, but I haven't played on them for a long time.  I prefer role playing and politics to straight up powergaming and such.

As for your continued untrue statements about me.

I obviously don't want a simplistic bash and bash war approach.  That you would even suggest that is my goal says far more about you than it says about me.

And Oligarch had far more than just archers.  They had a mix of archers and infantry, like most realms do.  Because just archers without an infantry wall seriously do not work.  You cannot win a battle that way under any normal or rational circumstance.

As for how to fix the archer pull infantry issue.  Simple really.  In concept of course.  And previously talked about by me in this thread.

1) Have Archers flee in panic if they don't have an infantry wall in front of them.  The way they used to and it appears maybe don't do as much anymore.
2) Have Infantry hold to the walls for longer when battles start, like they used to in my experience.  Of course, nobody tried the archer only attack in the old days, so maybe this would have happened back then too.  I do remember many battles in the past where the infantry would hold to the ramparts until usually turn 8 or 9 and then sally forth to attack what remained of the enemy.  That used to be the standard I saw in city battles all the time.

Those two things, both using code that exists now and more tweaking it rather than going wholesale addition to the battle code, would help to curtail the tactic and make the battles more realistic.

[Zakky]

You are overlooking the fact how wars were fought back in the days. We are seeing more SFs and higher quality units than ever before. Back in the days RC stats weren't as high as now so CS was lower. Not to mention the number of men you could command with your petty income. Now with less people around, people can field larger units. AT was using the old system for most of its lifespan until few years before it closed down. Other islands got the changes that created the current power inflation on the other hand. The only realm on Dwilight that ever got over 30k was Astrum I think? LN might have done it at some point as well but I wasn't there to witness it so can't say much. Dwilight was different in the regard that it only allowed 1 character. AT on the other hand mostly allowed 2 characters.

As for Oligarch, let's not joke about Oligarch having more than just archers. You guys only had archers when the whole archer drawing out infantry happened. Why do you think I even told General of Sirion to do that in the first place? Only 2 people commanded infantry out of 12 nobles Oligarch had while the rest commanded archers. All your other infantry were militia units.

They already panic and flee when there is no infantry. If you are suggesting that archers need to stay behind infantry all the time you are making one of the most used marshal settings obsolete. I think the game should stick with archers staying on the field until infantry units start to slaughter them.

Infantry units are holding the walls just fine. That is why I used to add an infantry unit or to and put them in the rear while putting all my archers in the front to decimate infantry militia units. The mechanics haven't changed much over the years and people just didn't attack with only archers because archers were utterly garbage.

It is simple really. You just need few cavalry units to counter the whole archer tactic. If you don't have one like Oligarch, that then yeah you are probably forced to do that with infantry.

You can make infantry hold the walls all you want but at the end there are always ways to work around the newly added mechanics. If infantry units hold walls longer, I'd just put cavalry in the front along with archers and shoot the hell out of all your units since they won't leave the walls. When they finally do, my cavalry units will smash what little is left of your infantry.

Like I said, unless we get an option to fully control our unit behavior over 20 rounds - doubt any dev would want to grant people that option since that would be too complicated for most of our players - you will always have an issue with unit behaviors.

You need to see a bigger picture than one incident that broke your realm. You need to understand the whole archer only tactic wouldn't have happened if the city was siegable through different ways. If Oligarch could only put 5k militia units at most, why would they have bothered sending only archers to draw out infantry? It is a result of multiple factors not just people exploiting some broken behavioural pattern of dumb infantry code. It is not that simple. It happened due to multiple factors coming together.

1) Militias playing too big of a role in defense
2) Archers being too strong - To be honest I think archers should be really strong for the first couple rounds then lose their effectiveness as they run out of arrows or maybe we can get WIP Anaris suggested which will resolve most of these old issues  ::)
3) Oligarch lacking cavalry to stop archers
4) Sirion's reliance on archers (Their army was at 7:3 archer to infantry ratio at the time).
5) Sieging with infantry not as effective - sieging with siege engines is probably one of the dumbest way to take a city when siege engines are hard to comeby and you need x2 the infantry to effectively siege the walls.

I just hope we will get more tools to work with. Apparently the tools we have aren't really efficient at getting the job done.

[Chenier]

You are accurate that 60k armies are rather hard to get together.

I've never seen one in all my years.  The largest armies I've ever seen are the 40k armies that Sirion's Northern Alliance has been pushing around over the last year.  And I've been in a lot of wars.  Most large armies in my experience are around 20k, and that has stayed true for the last decade.

The difference is that those armies are increasingly being made up of smaller numbers of larger units as the player base shrinks.  I remember a time when 30 men was a good standard unit.  Now if you can't recruit to 60 men you are a poor piker.  The income is simply going to fewer people so each unit is getting stronger.  But at the same time, less money is going to the nobles now since regions don't generate as much income for small numbers of nobles.  So a lot of gold is lost to inefficiency.  But it still results in smaller numbers of more powerful units.

What you've failed to notice is that I've agreed that militias are a problem.  They've been a major issue for most wars of conquest for at least the last couple years.  The only way to break a realm is to surround and starve it out, but if it has allies selling it food and sending money, you can't do that.  Oligarch ran into that issue while trying to take the Sirion City near it during the Sirion Civil War.  Oligarch could beat the Sirions every day of the week in the field but couldn't break the city.  Then Sirion ran into it when they tried to break Oligarch.  The Southern Alliance ran into it while they were rolling over everything north of Highmarch.  And Sirion is probably going to run into it soon with Perdan.  Lots of wars over the last couple years at least have seen this problem.

I don't agree that it is unfair for the militias to do what they do.  They've done it for every realm for years now.  That's an equal fairness.  Or perhaps an equal unfairness.

What I want is the game mechanics fixed so realms don't abuse them, while fixing the militia issue so it balances things better for all nations.  I want equal fairness for all so everybody can have fun playing without unreasonable or unrealistic battles being fought that tug at the willing sense of belief we all put into this game.

We used to have a lot more players, who could play twice as many nobles, in realms with much greater tax efficiency. Before estates, because reduced capital radius.

Now, you basically have one 200 man unit instead of four 60 men units, the latter having much more CS than the former not only because it's more men, but because the CS/man is much higher pre-60 than post-100.

Meanwhile, nothing has changed for militia. Heck, people use more of it than they used to. Which further means less gold for mobile units.

5) Sieging with infantry not as effective - sieging with siege engines is probably one of the dumbest way to take a city when siege engines are hard to comeby and you need x2 the infantry to effectively siege the walls.

I just hope we will get more tools to work with. Apparently the tools we have aren't really efficient at getting the job done.

People used to siege with a lot of siege engines. Now people don't want them at all anymore. I'm not sure what changed the meta, but maybe we should buff siege engines?

[Anaris]

In the medium-to-long-term, I'd like to buff both walls and siege engines.

This is all still very nebulous, but I have Ideas about changes to the system that would make it effectively impossible to take a defended city without a significant number of siege engines. One is to make the height of the walls affect archer fireâ€"in both directions. So, for instance, every 2 levels of wall would increase the range of archers atop the wall by 1 line, and reduce the effective range of archers shooting up it by 1 line. This would mean that with range 4 archers on both sides, in a city with level 5 walls, the archers on top of the wall would be able to hit the archers below 4 lines before they'd be able to hit the defenders.

But as I say, that's all still very nebulous, and none of it is in my short-term plans.

[Zakky]

People used to siege with a lot of siege engines. Now people don't want them at all anymore. I'm not sure what changed the meta, but maybe we should buff siege engines?

Archers changed the meta. It was actually a lot easier to siege a city with archers than with siege engines. Archers could weaken enemy infantry units before the infantry line hit the city wall. Before archers became useful, people would do front infantry to get to the walls ASAP. The problem before was that infantry was too good. Maybe with that armour change on infantry, maybe they will make a huge return since 25% is rather significant.

[Schancke]

Would it be possible to make militia archers go scattergories when it comes to targeting enemies while noble-led archers are more accurate and focused?  I don't know how the code handles them, so don't know if they can be separated in that way, but if they can that may be a good idea.

For the case for my character currently in Ete City, that would not be fitting. The city gets hit by between 2 - 15 k CS of rogues every turn. Every soldier is a veteran by any measure.
Both militia and noble commended units just keep wasting their arrows on enemies in the back lines (at very reduced efficiency)- allowing the front units to advance and climb the walls.
Why would they do that?

To top it off, archer militia often can't find targets within their range the first turn

EDIT:  Did not read about the recent changes - I am eagerly anticipating tomorrow mornings battle!

[Zakky]

In the medium-to-long-term, I'd like to buff both walls and siege engines.

This is all still very nebulous, but I have Ideas about changes to the system that would make it effectively impossible to take a defended city without a significant number of siege engines. One is to make the height of the walls affect archer fireâ€"in both directions. So, for instance, every 2 levels of wall would increase the range of archers atop the wall by 1 line, and reduce the effective range of archers shooting up it by 1 line. This would mean that with range 4 archers on both sides, in a city with level 5 walls, the archers on top of the wall would be able to hit the archers below 4 lines before they'd be able to hit the defenders.

But as I say, that's all still very nebulous, and none of it is in my short-term plans.

I don't mind seeing walls granting extra range but SEs definitely need to compensate for their crappiness. I think infantry should have built in SE that will allow them to scale walls but actually buying one should increase the effectiveness by a lot. Maybe explosive charges should be changed a bit so units carrying those can punch a hole or something. Or at least add a way to damage the walls from a range with trebuchets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIeAXKAAKv4

[Chenier]

Maybe militia could get a generic debuff, combined with a buff against rogues? So that they are weaker against human armies than they currently are, but at least just as strong against rogues as they currently are? Mobile troops should always be strongest, though, because otherwise that will incite some realms to dump even more gold into militia at the expense of the players.

[Zakky]

Maybe militia could get a generic debuff, combined with a buff against rogues? So that they are weaker against human armies than they currently are, but at least just as strong against rogues as they currently are? Mobile troops should always be strongest, though, because otherwise that will incite some realms to dump even more gold into militia at the expense of the players.

They need to be nerfed and that's it. They should be worse against both humans and rogues. Being worse against rogues will help both BT and Dwi to shed some realms.

[Chenier]

They need to be nerfed and that's it. They should be worse against both humans and rogues. Being worse against rogues will help both BT and Dwi to shed some realms.

Given how rogue prone those continents are, not having effective militias would mean everyone would have to squat their capitals just in case a huge horde comes in. I don't think that's an improvement.

[Zakky]

Given how rogue prone those continents are, not having effective militias would mean everyone would have to squat their capitals just in case a huge horde comes in. I don't think that's an improvement.

That is what those continents need. They need to achieve 3 noble to 1 region ratio. People are still resisting.

[Chenier]

That is what those continents need. They need to achieve 3 noble to 1 region ratio. People are still resisting.

Yea... if BT ends up with nothing but Thalmarkin, OS, and Angmar, I don't care how dense those realms would become, that's not an improvement.

[Schancke]

They need to be nerfed and that's it. They should be worse against both humans and rogues. Being worse against rogues will help both BT and Dwi to shed some realms.

They are already !@#$ vs rogues:

- Don't fire on enemies within range the first turn
- Sprays missiles among available targets on the row furthest back.

Hell, this morning they did not even bother to fight the rogues, but let the monsters kill peasants, the undead hurt production and damage the fortifications. I assume that is a bug, though.

@Anaris: If the recent update was about increasing the ratio of units to target the enemy on the front line before moving on to targets further back, I do not notice much difference.
In the most recent battle, the front line unit suffered only about 15 % casualties the first round...quite far from an overkill.