Literally impossible to find a crossbow?

I'm on something like the 250th day in my game, am a well-like vassal for the Khergits and have an elite army with about 100 troops. I have quite a few heroes and I've trained a couple of them to be siege tanks but I can't find crossbows or bolts in any town. Are they limited to one faction's towns or? I've visited so many towns and never encountered one crossbow and usually battle loot doesn't have any either. Currently have my crossbow guys using bows which is super inefficient.

Thanks for the help in advance. 

Rhodoks are the only legit faction that officially use crossbows. Try looking in their towns.

Hanakoganei said:

Rhodoks are the only legit faction that officially use crossbows. Try looking in their towns.

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Just went to war with the Rhodoks and after taking a town I found that they sold crossbows however they're very bad, only worth 20 denars. I got my other companions with top tier bows kinda sucks if the only crossbows available are low tier ones used by peasant archers :/

After looking at the item list there apparently exists some really good crossbows like the Arbalest however I can't find them, I think they may exist but not really exist such as the case with the firearms in the item list.

The Arbalest should show up in stores eventually. It's one of the semi-rare ones. Not too rare really but each faction I think is only allowed to spawn a certain number of ranged items within a random chance. So if all you see right now is the more common stuff, the rare stuff won't spawn until the next time they restock.

Don't look at price. Look at actual damage + speed for DPS. Even the bent/cracked weapons can still be good if you don't have/can't afford the better ones yet.

If you don't have the optional patch yet, check this out. You only need the item_kinds1.txt file. You don't need it and I highly recommend you back up the original file of course, but it adds some of my fixes to archery, which I feel are very useful especially for balancing out the "cheap" weapons, among other things. They are fairly minor really and you might not notice anything much. But it will make the lower level bows and crossbows more useful. It becomes a question of utility (speed+accuracy) versus raw power.

Hanakoganei said:

The Arbalest should show up in stores eventually. It's one of the semi-rare ones. Not too rare really but each faction I think is only allowed to spawn a certain number of ranged items within a random chance. So if all you see right now is the more common stuff, the rare stuff won't spawn until the next time they restock.

Don't look at price. Look at actual damage + speed for DPS. Even the bent/cracked weapons can still be good if you don't have/can't afford the better ones yet.

If you don't have the optional patch yet, check this out. You only need the item_kinds1.txt file. You don't need it and I highly recommend you back up the original file of course, but it adds some of my fixes to archery, which I feel are very useful especially for balancing out the "cheap" weapons, among other things. They are fairly minor really and you might not notice anything much. But it will make the lower level bows and crossbows more useful. It becomes a question of utility (speed+accuracy) versus raw power.

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Wow those fixes look great and apparently the only thing I'll be missing out on by using a current save is the lord stat changes which isn't a big deal to me, they're pretty minor. Definitely looking forward to playing the game with this archery modification and the minimod.

Quick question before I go: If I disable companion complaints will they stop leaving my party? I have a very small army in comparison to most vassals so I use companions as my elite kill-everything-quickly squad and it's annoying to have them randomly leave me for a few weeks because they don't like how companion #1-10 smells. 

The option list says it will be disabled however the effects caused by it won't be. I assumed that meant they will still leave me however the changelog for 2.54 says they won't...

EDIT: Oh another thing! lol...You said you made "crossbow" usable on horse however it's text still says it can't be. Do you know what's up with that? From what I could tell your tweak made all bows usable on horse however the pattern bows arent D;

Se7enex said:

Quick question before I go: If I disable companion complaints will they stop leaving my party? I have a very small army in comparison to most vassals so I use companions as my elite kill-everything-quickly squad and it's annoying to have them randomly leave me for a few weeks because they don't like how companion #1-10 smells. 

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Yes, disabling companion complaints will prevent them from leaving the party.

Crossbow? Hmm. You're right. It seems somebody else had tweaked it somewhere along the way and uploaded the tweaked version instead of my original.

It's an easy fix though. Allow me to introduce you to Morgh's Text Editor.
Follow the instructions and boot it up. Edit the items and look for the Crossbow item (use the filter at the bottom left). In the Flags section just remove the check in cant reload on horseback.

you can find the arbelest in the cheat menu

Alfredthegreat said:

you can find the arbelest in the cheat menu

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Only noobs cheat

Or modders.

The cheats in this game are more like dev tools really, and are designed for making mod testing easier. Also the items in "Find an item..." have no prefix mods, and you buy them at full price (no discounts from Trading). If there was ever a cheat that didn't feel like a cheat, that's definitely it.

I updated item_kinds1.txt for 2.55 and made some minor tweaks particularly for the "practice" bows. They're a bit more accurate now. Some minor nerfs and buffs here and there. The stronger bows were untouched though.

Other fixes included:
- Hunting Crossbow and Crossbow now available in all faction shops. No guaranteed stock as they'll still have to compete with the other ranged weapons for a spot in the shop.
- All normal bows are usable on horseback again (let me know if I missed any). Light Crossbow, Hunting Crossbow and Crossbow now also usable on horseback as intended. Siege Crossbow not usable on horseback anymore as intended.

You can download this file here. It should be save compatible. Just overwrite your item_kinds1.txt file with this one.

- edit:
Before other people start complaining again that my archery tweaks broke Warband somehow, all weapon and missile speeds are based on Native values, with a difference of less than 3 if at all. So if it's broken with my tweaks, it's broken in Native and normal Floris too. The AI is not 100% accurate, and neither is the player no matter how good a "sniper" you think you are. This is intentional game design and hardcoded to be linked to the relevant Proficiency rating. Since in Floris we have no troops with 600 Proficiency, expect them to miss a lot.

The Accuracy ratings are higher than Floris back in 2.53, which had all bows at 85 Accuracy by default if I remember correctly. My tweaks do not make AI troops less accurate than that.

The ideal hit rate at a medium range (75 meters or less) for a troop with 300 Proficiency (top tier troops) is something like 5-10%. That means that for every 100 ranged troops, about 5-10 of them will hit a target in the enemy line per shot if the enemy line has about 100 troops as well. This is actually phenomenal accuracy and much better than real life. Obviously the hit rate gets better as the distance gets shorter. For the average A3-A4 archer with about 150 Proficiency, you can expect much less.

Hanakoganei said:

I updated item_kinds1.txt for 2.55

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Are arrows supposed to have 1-3 +dmg?

It's that way in both, 2.55 from nexus and on that update of yours. The dropbox file listed in minor fixes thread (posted in february) got damage ranges around 10

Or is there somewhere a newer version that i did miss.

The tweaks I introduced that got implemented into 2.54 upped the damage on arrows in general, with varying values. It's much higher than 1-3 damage. I'd say it's like 6-14 I think.

So 2.55 should have 6-14 damage on arrows?

2.55 in nexusmods got 1-3 dmg. (here)
The tweaks you posted in April 15th got 1-3 dmg (here)
The tweaks posted in February got 6-14 dmg (here)

I take it that the last one is correct one for 2.55, and that I've been shooting my bow for many (in-game) months for far less damage than intended 

Yeah sorry. Somebody had tweaked the 2.55 file and I was using my own version (the original tweaked version) even when 2.54 was out. I didn't know they were different. Heck I didn't even know at the time that they would implement it officially. It was originally just a submod. So they probably tweaked it to their liking.

Anyway you can copy the arrows and bolts part of the February file and replace those parts of the April file with them. Just back up all files in case you make a mistake. Nobody added new items so it should all be save compatible.

Worse comes to worst just let me know and I can upload a full-tweaked version (actually a combination of both files).