Author Topic: Archer targeting  (Read 24699 times)

Zakky

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Re: Archer targeting
« Reply #15: July 31, 2018, 09:17:05 AM »
The mobile army was in Oligarch at the time.  Somewhere in the 5k to 10k range as I remember.  There were around a dozen active players at the time.

It could not win in a stand up fight against the 20k to 30k armies of three or four dozen nobles the North was sending at the time, but it could raid and stuff like that.

Along with the 20k militia, it could hold the city against even the mega 30k armies and four dozen nobles the North was bringing against it.

And when the beaten Northern armies went back home to refit, we could go out and retake regions or raid for food and gold and the like.

Oligarch was a very rich city which could grow a lot of food inside its walls, and we had support from the Southern Alliance.  Mostly economic and food related.  Though we did see the occasional Southern Army rolling through after Sirion called all of their allies into the field against us.  It generally made us a very hard nut to crack.

There is your problem. Oligarch being able to fend off 30k CS with the help of militia units mainly. That was never the case back in the days. 12 nobles fending off 30+ nobles not because of walls but because of militia units. The game has tried to balance itself in many ways but it has failed mostly. To name a few:

1) Large realms making a lot less gold due to region restrictions. Small realms can generate gold efficiently. More so when you only have a city. Then you can milk the damn thing. Which doesn't make much sense but it is there to discourage realms from getting too big. This should probably be fixed to encourage realms to be more dense even if they are big. As long as they can keep the density, realms should still generate gold efficiently but for now that is not the case.

2) You have a problem when your primary defense relies on your immobile militia units. The game needs to separate actual soldiers from militias. Actual stationary soldiers need to be limited harshly depending on your noble count while remaining militias need to be treated as guardsmen or 'police' if we are to use our existing mechanics and make police units perform a lot worse than they are now. Militias were never meant to be your 1st line of defense. Your first line of defense should be your own army. Your last line of defense is your peasants which devastate your realm from even using it once. It is quite lenient on its punishment for using it at the moment. War in BM is essentially a joke at the moment because most people rely on non-controllable units to defend them rather than actual people. Too many artificial garbage prevent realm deaths. I get why they want to do so but it is at a point where it is hurting more to have them around than not due to some extreme cases. Maybe these extreme cases need to be addressed by implementing some kind of cap on how many peasants can spawn. At the moment big cities are too difficult to siege when that city happens to be your capital and your realm is small enough to summon them endlessly.

3) Sirion with their allies brought more than most realms in the game could bring to siege the city yet they still failed. That is a problem when the game's biggest CS army is not enough to bring a single city. It is just a failed design that needs to be corrected. At that time, Oligarch had too many layered defenses. You bring the city down with everything you have then you get pushed out by peasants who had more CS than most of the realms on the continent put together. And let me tell you that I am not a big fan of Sirion and their allies. You complain about how unfair it was for them to use such a tactic to draw out militia units but in fact you should be complaining about how flawed the game is since it forced some players result to abuse the game to siege one damn city. When all traditional methods fail, all you have left in your hands are non traditional ones. I really hope the game will provide more ways to siege a city or balance the broken system because simply put militias are bloody broken and they need to be fixed ASAP. That will help the dev team's plan of shrinking realms down quickly. Militias are just way too outdated and they need to be updated accordingly as we no longer are playing the game someone of us joined a decade+ ago. With only 400 players, Militias need to be weakened to 1/5 since the game is using the same militia system from the time when it had 2000 players.

Then Sirion used the archer-only abuse to suck the infantry out to get slaughtered, and threw enough wounding magic scrolls at the nobility to keep half of the nobles in comas for a week or two at a time.  Then they would attack with their infantry when we only had a handful of remaining nobles to rally and there was just no way to fight them at all.  They could sack the city for days at a time with their constant magic attacks against the nobility while burning the walls and economy down and basically making it impossible for our players to even play the game.  That's the real reason Oligarch was abandoned in the end.  Sirion did that two or three times in a row, and there was just no way to play the game against them.  The game just wasn't designed with those tactics in mind and it gave Sirion an overwhelming advantage that simply could not be played against.

When someone is attacking your realm with 3 times the number of people no wonder they are overwhelming. Oligarch lasted more than it should have because the system was broken. Without having any allies, it was inevitable that one day Oligarch would come to an end. Oligarch was abusing both militias and peasants. Can't really blame someone for doing the same.

Very similar to what Sirion did with the portal event that stripped the walls from Perdan City and the surround regions, erased their best recruitment centers, and gave walls to Sirion allied regions.  That has been partially dealt with via a responding portal event to return at least the walls, but it's endemic of the effects of magic in what is supposed to be a low-magic continent.  That is another subject though.

Whoever did the portal event probably had a vendetta against Perdan. Because portal events should have never had so much impact on the game especially on EC. The devs had somewhat deviated from the BM's theme of having low magic. Magic has run rampant recently and I hope it gets reduced soon meaning no more silly portal events on EC at least. It is getting ridiculous. We are apparently playing a high fantasy game when it is supposed to be a low fantasy game.

The main thing I was focusing on is the archer-only tactic they used in drawing out the infantry by abusing the code that sends infantry out to charge after the attacking infantry is decimated.  It's really odd because there used to be code that kept the infantry on the walls for several turns before ALLOWING them to charge out.  I remember old battles where they wouldn't charge until turn 8 or 9.  Now they charge on the opening turn against intact archer squads.  It just makes no sense when that happens.

Much like the "suicide squad" tactic used to suck all of the archers to attack a single suicide squad deployed ahead of the army.

Basically, I take notice of tactics that change the way entire wars are fought.  Some of them are just smart tactics.  Some of them are abuses of unintended side-effects.  And just like we need to find a way of balancing militias against the new, smaller player base.

Some people are just more observant than others and noticed how units react during sieges. You need to think why people had to result to the way of luring infantry units out of the walls. You didn't notice the difference before because you've never seen realms attacking cities with just archers. For a very long time, archers were useless. Only in the past 2-3 years, they started to be more useful thanks to many buffs they received. With losing so many people, we are also seeing archers being more effective. Being able to attack every round is always better than walking toward your target for 4 rounds then attacking. It is just more efficient to have many archers. That is why you are now seeing buffs to infantry. Maybe cavalry units need to be buffed so they take a lot less archer hits. Then they might actually start to be a great counter to archers.

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The Southern Alliance ran into that issue actually.  We could smash Northern armies again and again in the field, but taking a city was nearly impossible even with our entire army.  And then 5k and 10k militia units started appearing out of no where when we marched into their regions, and that made things difficult for us.  Basically, militia is an issue we need to deal with.  It is too powerful for the present player base.  And if we're being honest, many very small realms with three or four nobles are basically depending on militia to survive.  I don't think that was ever the intention of the militia system.

Peasant militias are too significant. They need to be reduced. Those random militias you encountered are probably from regions hating your realm. The problem is there are too many coming out all of sudden. If the dev team wants to really utilize this feature then they will need to slash off 0 from every region's population to limit the number of peasants that are showing up because there are just too many spawning when regions hate you. Looting is starting to be less viable and realms really need to have more diplomats when we are lacking players to even lead troops.