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.
They don't shred my infantry. No matter how AI deploys them. AI archers are so pathetically easy to counter that it's not even fun.
2) I literally said par from balance, what do you mean?
I mean that you contradict yourself in two sentences.
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.
And what problem do you have with that? They are ranged units, they are not supposed to get in to fights. Only difference is that player can do it much better then AI. In both protecting his own archers and engaging enemy archers.
Archers are units that normally take casualties only when player looses battle. Which of course is not very often. Game is rigged to favor the player.
4) Have you actually seen the amount of armour that cataphracts have? Lamellar on top of scale on top of mail.
You're exaggerating. Only some parts of body are covered in scales or lamellar. And there are parts that are not covered by anything. Parts of arms and legs, eyes, crotch. And then there are gaps between scales and lamellas.
Literally nothing conventional is going through that,
If that sentence was true, they would newer bother to invent plate.
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.
This is getting repetitive. Why don't you actually demonstrate example. Take bow and arrow of a t2 archer, take it's skill to calculate damage, decrease it by average distance, then take elite imperial cataphract, get it's chest armor value, calculate effectiveness against piercing, get the resulting damage that goes through, divide it's health by it to see how many arrows t2 archer have too shoot to down a cataphract so that we can see how overpowered t2 bows are.
Or make a test by placing single cataphract in front of t2 archer and count how many arrows it takes to kill him. Run it couple of times and make an average to even the hits in to different parts of body with different protection.
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?
There's difference between "challenge" and "nothing conventional is going through" that you advocate for.
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.
Except you're going to loose couple of those recruits doing so. It's not 5:0 equation. Not to mention other stuff like party size limit, food consumption, movement speed and so on. You can't win in Bannerlord by using recruit spam.
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.
You're not going to be deleted by a singe hit from Fian in high tier armor. You're probably not going to be deleted with 3 arrows either.
If you let Fians fire at you until they do you in, then that's problem of tactic, not armor.
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.
Yes I know, because I did it before:
1. I order my t5 infantry in to shieldwall.
2. t5 archers lose.
Fians are exception because they are very good at melee. But you get what you pay for when using them. They are elite.
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.
Yes, because using infantry is pretty straightforward and doesn't require more complex AI. Infantry needs to close to melee, which means they are always going to both dish and take hits. Using archers properly requires to keep them in situations where they dish damage without receiving it. That's the whole point of archers. And AI isn't very good at that.
Fian spam works by shooting AI before it closes the distance and engages in melee. And that's trivial thing to do because AI doesn't close distance well to begging with and doesn't use shieldwall properly. It will happily place recruits without shields in to front ranks.
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.
"Very powerful" is your subjective opinion.