AI archers are pretty pathetic. Not sure how you manage to feel overpowered by them. All these cries comes from players who spam t5 or even t6 archers.
Can you explain what is "incredibly bipolar AI"?
So in the first sentence you claim that you don't try to justify arrows doing less damage then other weapons and in the second you do exactly that. Can you choose one or the other?
Archers have no shields and no spears. Therefore their advantage in rage is balanced and fair.
Any bow definitely could and should scratch a cataphract. Even cataphracts have weak spots in their armor.
Any weapon have to do at last some damage to any target otherwise game would be impossible to play. It would be frustrating for player at low levels to fight higher tier enemies and on high level player would become invulnerable.
Unit with 80% damage reduction is 5 times more durable then unit without armor. If you add difference in weapons and damage output, t5 unit is wort about 10 recruits. Not considering any tactical advantages like surrounding and so on. That's reasonable for me.
If 5 or more recruits could not down a t5 unit when they gang up on him, there would be something horribly wrong with the game balance.
No.
Don't exaggerate.
You have been arguing about "nerfing low tier bows". Fians don't use low tier bows. So what do you want?
This just show where the problem with this whole argument for nerfing bows-buffing armors lie: it's not about low tier archers destroying high tier units, no, it's about players spamming Battanian Fians and complaining about dominating AI armies that are composed of 40% recruits and t1 units without shields and NO ARMOR. Nerfing crappy bows or buffing armor isn't going to help with that at all.
Now try to spam t1 archers with "crappy bows" and tell us how overpowered that was.
Battanian Fians don't use crappy bows.
When you show me battle where you have wiped out floor with equal or higher number of t5 AI units using low tier archer spam with "crappy bows", then I will agree that you have a point and there is something wrong with arrow/armor balance.
1) Bipolar ambigiously suggests that sometimes they work and sometimes they dont. The AI dont deploy archers properly most of the time, but even despite that they still shred infantry.
2) I literally said par from balance, what do you mean?
3) Archers not dying and thus accumulating into the hundreds shows that their survavability far surpasses infantry because they arent getting into fights or shot at enough to even need spears or shields most of the time. Infantry get **** on even if they have shields.
4) Have you actually seen the amount of armour that cataphracts have? Lamellar on top of scale on top of mail. Literally nothing conventional is going through that, and as I said, weakspots consist of mail armpits and small eyeslits I suppose. And considering that 95% of the time you are going to be hitting random heavy armoured ****, it isnt a stretch to expect them to take little to no damage from low tier weaponry including bows. From a balance perspective, how hard they are to actually obtain, somehow finding Viglas and then somehow ranking them all the way up, they should be extremely overpowered in the same vein that Fians are. You even admitted that Fians are overpowered in a roundabout fashion, yet a handful of tier 2 archers should be able to take out a cataphract with a few feather pokes apparently.
5) ? If you are low level you wont be fighting many high tier units and whats extra funny is that this crumbles your argument about 'muh challenge' earlier on to justify noble armor being trash. That point comes across as very null and void now that you are afraid that some targets might actually require some input to put down. Which is it? Challenge good or bad?
6) It can somehow take less than that though, and no I dont think its outrageous that 5 recruits will struggle to take down a tier 5. Consider the effort and time taken to obtain a tier 5 unit than literally 5 trash peasants. A few clicks vs constant battles, constant money, constantly not losing battles.
You arent looking at the larger picture and this is your problem.
7) You are right, in my ideal Bannerlord, armour would be buffed to the extent that Fians dont automatically delete everything they hit. But lower tier weaponry would be impacted more.
8.) Thats an outrageous comparison though. Im not under the belief that low tier archers can beat high tier infantry on an absolutely equal playing field, the imbalance doesnt have to be
THAT stark for it to still be a problem worth addressing. You didnt tell me to match up t5 archers vs t5 infantry because you already know the outcome of that.
9) What I still dont understand is why you are happy to use a scapegoat of player spamming archers as to why there isnt a problem when itself exposes issues. Why isnt player spamming infantry also overpowered as hell? Maybe there is a reason for that.
Hell, playing RBM where archers are massively nerfed they are
STILL very powerful and a determining factor in victory. It just shocks me how people can defend archery in native Bannerlord, jesus christ.