BattleMaster Community
BattleMaster => BM General Discussion => Topic started by: Zakilevo on July 24, 2016, 07:03:08 PM
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Ever since Kurlock experimented with Rear infantry Front/Middle archers, the setting seems to be used by quite a few people. Must admit, when I used it for the first time, I wasn't sure if it was going to work but it worked like a charm and only got one dwarf killed. Now every realm with heavy archer armies are using it to maximize their firepower. During sieges, it seems to shine even more.
I've come across a couple generals who didn't want to use it but after witnessing the efficiency of the settings, they are now using it every time. It is getting old fast... Just like how archer opening was the way to go previously.
Do you use custom settings or marshal settings? What settings do you use and why do like them? What counters your setting? What requirement is there?
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unfortunately archers middle is just unexploitable. even cav cant reach them on the first round and infantry arriving in the second will take all the melee hits. its not the best line settings for every situation but it will never backfire. which i think exposes some very serious problems in the combat code.
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unfortunately archers middle is just unexploitable. even cav cant reach them on the first round and infantry arriving in the second will take all the melee hits. its not the best line settings for every situation but it will never backfire. which i think exposes some very serious problems in the combat code.
There are few ways to deal with this. You only need to think about unit behaviors a bit and think outside of box.
Also, changing your army unit composition will help too. There are three ways to do this. Give incentives for people to switch over. Or you can ask people to change. Ask for volunteers for this though. Tell them your current problems and suggest to people as a whole that you need more of this or that. Lastly, you can just get rid RCs you don't want your nobles to hire. Extreme but efficient. Will cost a lot though.
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There are few ways to deal with this. You only need to think about unit behaviors a bit and think outside of box.
Also, changing your army unit composition will help too. There are three ways to do this. Give incentives for people to switch over. Or you can ask people to change. Ask for volunteers for this though. Tell them your current problems and suggest to people as a whole that you need more of this or that. Lastly, you can just get rid RCs you don't want your nobles to hire. Extreme but efficient. Will cost a lot though.
That'll stop you from exploiting it, sure. Then you will get roflstomped by everyone who hasn't.
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That'll stop you from exploiting it, sure. Then you will get roflstomped by everyone who hasn't.
I don't quite understand what you mean by getting roflstomped by everyone who hasn't? Who hasn't what? Adapted?
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It's called tactics, Gundam.
tac·tic
ˈtaktik/
noun
plural noun: tactics
1. an action or strategy carefully planned to achieve a specific end.
synonyms: strategy, scheme, stratagem, plan, maneuver; More
2. the art of disposing armed forces in order of battle and of organizing operations, especially during contact with an enemy.
synonyms: strategy, policy, campaign, battle plans, game plans, maneuvers, logistics; More
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First of all, I think it's important to remember that it wasn't really all that long ago that people were widely discouraging the use of archers because, supposedly, they were strictly inferior to infantry, and would never be as efficient in practice.
And in most cases, they were actually right, because of a bug in the combat code that stood unnoticed for nearly a decade, causing archer damage to be inadvertently divided by 3.
So if archers are, given some careful experimentation and favorable conditions, now proving strictly superior to infantry in practice...I think what that means is that we've finally managed to undo the damage to their reputations that years and years of actual underperforming will do. And all it took was buffing their damage several more times after fixing the aforementioned bug.
I will make a note to look into nerfing archer damage a bit in the near future.
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Do you use custom settings or marshal settings? What settings do you use and why do like them? What counters your setting? What requirement is there?
Well the only place where I'm in charge of the army and it's extremely archer heavy, mostly because a lot of people kept losing their units time and time again and prob thought archers were safer. We fight our battles very differently because of it. In many cases I've actually used the "soften and charge" marshal settings.
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I will make a note to look into nerfing archer damage a bit in the near future.
Instead of nerfing archers, why not make them even more dependent on good weather? Give them a wider variance in combat performance depending on what the current weather is like. If the game tells me "there is no wind, archers will be deadly today", make them deadly. If the game tells me "we are fighting in a storm, archers will be worthless today", make them worthless.
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Instead of nerfing archers, why not make them even more dependent on good weather? Give them a wider variance in combat performance depending on what the current weather is like. If the game tells me "there is no wind, archers will be deadly today", make them deadly. If the game tells me "we are fighting in a storm, archers will be worthless today", make them worthless.
This is what I've been thinking as well. It would be nice if we had different weather zones where in some areas archers are not good where in others they are deadly due to not having any wind etc. But that would require too much work. Just making damage more reliant on weather is probably a nice solution.
Or maybe instead of damage, weather can affect their range instead?
No wind = longer range
Storm = reduce all range to 1?
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Instead of nerfing archers, why not make them even more dependent on good weather?
I'm willing to look into it, but archer damage is already fairly strongly affected by weather, IIRC, and I'm hesitant to make changes that, at random, without any way of preparing for it, either make you super-deadly or super-useless.
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I'm willing to look into it, but archer damage is already fairly strongly affected by weather, IIRC, and I'm hesitant to make changes that, at random, without any way of preparing for it, either make you super-deadly or super-useless.
Why not Divide areas like climate regions. Some Stormy, some dry, some windy, some not so windy. Not 100% etc, simply add a higher possibility of a certain weather occurring.
Coding wise, I'm pretty sure you just increasing the percentage or add a few copy and pasted variables. (That's just what I think, I don't truly know)
This will add a new strategy of learning the different climates and also require new
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Why not Divide areas like climate regions. Some Stormy, some dry, some windy, some not so windy. Not 100% etc, simply add a higher possibility of a certain weather occurring.
Coding wise, I'm pretty sure you just increasing the percentage or add a few copy and pasted variables. (That's just what I think, I don't truly know)
This will add a new strategy of learning the different climates and also require new
Coding wise, it would be vastly more complex than that. Weather right now really is very, very simple.
I'm not really interested in messing with the weather system beyond very basic/necessary tweaks or bugfixes, unless it's to add a much more complete weather model, where you could watch storms roll across the continent (and, in general, could have at least some chance of predicting what the weather will be...).
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Coding wise, it would be vastly more complex than that. Weather right now really is very, very simple.
I'm not really interested in messing with the weather system beyond very basic/necessary tweaks or bugfixes, unless it's to add a much more complete weather model, where you could watch storms roll across the continent (and, in general, could have at least some chance of predicting what the weather will be...).
Feature creep. I think we can hold off on a more complete weather model as BM is not a weather-based simulation and there are many other core areas in BM that could use loving attention before we add 'complete weather model' feature.
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Feature creep. I think we can hold off on a more complete weather model as BM is not a weather-based simulation and there are many other core areas in BM that could use loving attention before we add 'complete weather model' feature.
I completely agree. :)
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a few fixes id suggest to improve archers and make combat more realistic:
1. in battle rounds where one side has archers and infantry/cav/anything that takes hits before archers in the same row, and the other side has melee units attacking that row, the attacking melee units will ignore the archers and focus all attacks on the melee units. this makes sense on its face as infantry would step forward to shield the archers and the archers would fall back a bit.
what doesn't make sense, and is a major handicap in favor of archer heavy armies vs infantry heavy, is when the melee becomes crowded in the above scenario and attacking infantry are apparently just standing around getting hit with arrows and waiting for their comrades to finish off that pesky inferior infantry force. this allows very small infantry forces to protect huge archer forces and actually fully negate a portion of the larger infantry force's potential damage.
what the attackers would do in reality is charge around the melee and attack the archers, forcing them either to stand and fight or flee.
so suggestion one is to allow infantry to attack archers in the "defending" row when the melee becomes crowded. this immediately allows melee heavy forces to run infantry-forward settings that actually stand a chance against the ranged middle, inf rear setup.
im sure i could have worded this better but hopefully you get the point.
2. nerf the effects of crowded melee slightly in general, ie allow more units to attack rather than stand around when the enemy melee force is smaller. nothing more frustrating as a commander of an infantry heavy army than watching an inf force a third your size hold you up for two or three rounds while their massed archers chew you up.
3/4: cap archer armor by range with longer range units having lower and lower caps. doesn't have to be a ridiculously onerous cap, but longbowmen in full plate armor makes no sense to me and i have been in many realms and seen more archer rcs with 70+ armor than infantry.
this will also help with archer damage by reducing their cs by range, which i think should be a consideration in how archers get rebalanced - longer range should have certain drawbacks. this will not only be better for balance but also open up some interesting tactical considerations - do we go for more powerful short range archers or the more tactically flexible but less impressive at close distances long range archers..?
5. make archers not hold up in melee combat nearly as well as they do now, i feel like they go toe to toe with anything but an overwhelming infantry force far too easily. they seem to actually get bonus damage in melee by landing hits in both the ranged and melee segments of each round.
6. give "breaking through the frontlines" a purpose or eliminate it as a feature, as of right now it seems to grant no advantage to the side that does it
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1. in battle rounds where one side has archers and infantry/cav/anything that takes hits before archers in the same row, and the other side has melee units attacking that row, the attacking melee units will ignore the archers and focus all attacks on the melee units. this makes sense on its face as infantry would step forward to shield the archers and the archers would fall back a bit.
I wouldn't mind seeing units running past smaller infantry in the front to get to archers. Lets say if 2 inf are before you while there are other archers farther back then maybe your army should leaving twice as many men behind to wipe that enemy infantry units while the rest moves forward. I think the game already does this to a certain extent though.
2. nerf the effects of crowded melee slightly in general, ie allow more units to attack rather than stand around when the enemy melee force is smaller. nothing more frustrating as a commander of an infantry heavy army than watching an inf force a third your size hold you up for two or three rounds while their massed archers chew you up.
Sorry but I think infantry is good where they are. If we lower this too much, we are back to the good old inf best type era.
3/4: cap archer armor by range with longer range units having lower and lower caps. doesn't have to be a ridiculously onerous cap, but longbowmen in full plate armor makes no sense to me and i have been in many realms and seen more archer rcs with 70+ armor than infantry.
I don't think this is a major problem. Archers tend to panic when infantry units start hitting them anyway.
5. make archers not hold up in melee combat nearly as well as they do now, i feel like they go toe to toe with anything but an overwhelming infantry force far too easily. they seem to actually get bonus damage in melee by landing hits in both the ranged and melee segments of each round.
Trust me. They already suck in melee. You will be able to slaughter them quite quickly if you can get to them.
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Add fatigue and maybe alter the frequency of cavalry breaking through the front lines (since we can't flank which is how real cavalry dealt with archers).
Infantry and mixed fatigue at a rate related to armour quality and training, ranged fatigue at a rate related to range and training, cavalry experience minimal fatigue (which was part of the point of riding horses), special forces align with their respective unit type, but fatigue less.
A big issue is infantry in box to stall the enemy while R5 ranged keep firing. By round 10 when the enemy approach the ranged units, they should be fatigued and not dealing incredible damage.