Archers and Crossbowmen performance insanely good in 1.5.5

[Dabos37]

I have reported this issue in general forum but I think that it is also a good idea to report the situation here.

Archers have received massive buffs in 1.5.5 + first hotfix to a point that they are performing x3 or x4 times better than cavalry and infantry units.

The AI has not much to do against player’s archers because there are not enough shields to keep troop safe, so now winning battles is extremely easy, not enjoyable at all, and game progression is much faster than intended. The player is able to exploit the game getting tons of ranged units and killing much stronger armies without any effort and farm renown and gold pretty easy.

Plus even if the player does not want to exploit the game and just get some archers (30% of the total army or so), these archers end all battles with tons of kills, almost zero losses because they hit the enemy from distance, and perform insanely better than other kind of units, even if these units are noble T7 units.

Please fix this issue when you have time. Than you very much.

 

[MArdA TaleWorlds]

Forwarding to the designers. Moved the topic out of the bug section. Thanks!

 

[Medivhtratos]

Maybe the reason, at least for the vlandians sharpshooter, are that they can penetrate shields by now.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Please fix this issue when you have time

Please fix the issue of infantry and cavalry sucking so much and dying so fast too. Thank you

 

[Vattghern]

But the problem is not in archers, from 1.5 to 1.5.5 archers were imbeciles who first took a bow in their hands. Now they are working fine, it might be worth changing the accuracy a little. Who should counter the archers is cavalry and infantry with shields. Cavalry is the worst unit at the moment. The AI is also not smart enough to push archers with shield infantry while distracting them with cavalry.

 

[Dabos37]

Cavalry AI will get some improvements soon according to what I have read in Multiplayer section.

Concerning shielded infantry, they are barely able to win archers now. For example, I have tested 100 legionaries vs 100 Palatine Guard and the battle were pretty even, Legionaries lost +70 men or so (in shieldwall). And this is not about infantry AI, it is about shields do not cover 100% of soldiers’ body and ranged units and insanely accurate and fire too fast.

 

[Dabos37]

Here you have an example about how broken archers are in 1.5.5:



I want to clarify that it was a lucky try and most of the times Legionaries are able to win this battle but taking huge losses (+70-80% or so). This game is not even well balanced for captain mode and archers are pretty OP.


For people curious about how I did run this test:

1- I enabled cheats.
2- Take my brother in my party.
3- Got 100 Legionaries and 100 Palatine Guards.
4- Create a new party with my brother as leader and gave him 100 Legionaries.
5- There is a bug when you talk with your brother and select the first option, and then you start a battle against him.

 

[Vattghern]

Here you have an example about how broken archers are in 1.5.5:



I want to clarify that it was a lucky try and most of the times Legionaries are able to win this battle but taking huge losses (+70-80% or so). This game is not even well balanced for captain mode and archers are pretty OP.


For people curious about how I did run this test:

1- I enabled cheats.
2- Take my brother in my party.
3- Got 100 Legionaries and 100 Palatine Guards.
4- Create a new party with my brother as leader and gave him 100 Legionaries.
5- There is a bug when you talk with your brother and select the first option, and then you start a battle against him.

IMHO:
Their rate of fire is now ideal. Look behind one archer, how can you say that he shoots like a machine gun, he has a completely normal rate of fire. There are just a lot of them. And the enemy has only infantry that goes under a hail of arrows. I think it is only natural that many legionnaires will die before they reach the archers. If they had a small troop of cavalry capable of distracting archers, the legionnaires would be more successful. Plus, because of the stupid AI, the legionnaires do not go in the shield wall, they have a charge turned on and everyone raises the shield at their own discretion, and not all at once. They do not march in close formation with their shields raised, but run like barbarians each on their own in an unorganized heap. In addition, they try to throw throwing weapons, thereby opening up.

 

[Medivhtratos]

What I see here, is that if an Agent(Legionary) is hit, he will drop the shield for nearly a sec(cause of pain?), leaving room for other 2 Archers to shoot him down.
2. They throw Spears during the Shield Wall approach=leaves room for missile hits
3. The loosing line(archery) is longer as the Spear Wall=> resulting that the flanks(shieldwall) looking at the flanks of the archery line=>can be easy killed by the archers in the middle, cause there is no shield protection anymore.
4. The Shield Wall Formation was too late, change a Formation while under Fire will always cause casualties

 

[Dabos37]

IMHO:
Their rate of fire is now ideal. Look behind one archer, how can you say that he shoots like a machine gun, he has a completely normal rate of fire. There are just a lot of them. And the enemy has only infantry that goes under a hail of arrows. I think it is only natural that many legionnaires will die before they reach the archers. If they had a small troop of cavalry capable of distracting archers, the legionnaires would be more successful. Plus, because of the stupid AI, the legionnaires do not go in the shield wall, they have a charge turned on and everyone raises the shield at their own discretion, and not all at once. They do not march in close formation with their shields raised, but run like barbarians each on their own in an unorganized heap. In addition, they try to throw throwing weapons, thereby opening up.

Most of archers in Battle of Agincourt were able to fire 12 arrows per minute (some few sources say that the most skilled archers were able to fire 24 arrows per minute but 12 is the number which most of sources do agree), and Palatine Guards are firing +20 arrows per minute with insane accuracy which is totally unrealistic. They are able to head shot specific unshielded units while firing at max speed. This is not a good AI, this is a pretty unrealistic AI.

On the other hand, you are failing to get the biggest issue here... This video shows how Palatine Guard are simply much more effective that Legionaries. Archers are able to kill a lot of legionaries before engaging in melee (25 or so) while some other alive legionaries were under full HP because they were injured, so the result is Palatine Guard being able to kill all these Legionaries where they are supposed to be one of the units which should beeffective against archers.

Cavalry should not be the only counter for archers and shielded infantry in shieldwall formation should not have much problems to defeat static archers.

 

[Dabos37]

What I see here, is that if an Agent(Legionary) is hit, he will drop the shield for nearly a sec(cause of pain?), leaving room for other 2 Archers to shoot him down.
2. They throw Spears during the Shield Wall approach=leaves room for missile hits
3. The loosing line(archery) is longer as the Spear Wall=> resulting that the flanks(shieldwall) looking at the flanks of the archery line=>can be easy killed by the archers in the middle, cause there is no shield protection anymore.
4. The Shield Wall Formation was too late, change a Formation while under Fire will always cause casualties

Sure, but take in mind that this is what happen in every SP battle. Infantry under AI command will always throw spears (if they have any), and flanks will always be exposed due to shield wall (if these legionaries would not use shield wall, they would have wrecked in seconds).

According to the points you have mentioned, do you find this balanced? If not, have you some suggestions to make this better?

BTW, concerning the AI using shieldwall too late, it is something that I have been complaining since a lot of time ago but it looks like devs prefer to do not modify this for some reason. Probably because archers deal less damage at max range and it is better for the infantry to rush ahead faster without shieldwall at that distance.

 

[Medivhtratos]

Sure, but take in mind that this is what happen in every SP battle. Infantry under AI command will always throw spears (if they have any), and flanks will always be exposed due to shield wall (if these legionaries would not use shield wall, they would have wrecked in seconds).

According to the points you have mentioned, do you find this balanced? If not, have you some suggestions to make this better?

BTW, concerning the AI using shieldwall too late, it is something that I have been complaining since a lot of time ago but it looks like devs prefer to do not modify this for some reason. Probably because archers deal less damage at max range and it is better for the infantry to rush ahead faster without shieldwall at that distance.

I would change the AI behaviour in a Shield Wall=>Under heavy missile Attack they should approach in a more safier way
=>Should stop throwing
=>Should "round/chamfer" instead of "edging" their flanks when the missile unit line is longer
=> Should start the Shieldwall earlier

But i think that these thoughts will make the shieldwall to strong again. With maybe 5 losses before the melee fight starts.

I would like to see a Video against the sturgia spearmen, since they have no range weapon(i think)

 

[Terco_Viejo]

Good debate.
I think that one way to explore and consider is through animation also. Technically it is possible to shorten or extend the time of aiming by altering some values (parameters-> additional_time_for_perfect_ranged_ready); this is basically what they have done with the new update.
However, in addition to those 20 shots per minute on average of the Palatine Guard, totally unrealistic by the way (it could be done, but with a much much lower precision); instead of nerfing the precision I would nerf the duration of the animation. An animation delay to simulate the effect of taking out an arrow from quiver, put the arrow in the right place (pinch the nock in the string), draw the string, aim and shoot.

 

[relam10]

Archers should be fine just making armor realistic and increasing reload time.

Aswell, applying this change https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...rrow-flight-trajectories.435301/#post-9589871 should reduce hits since the arrow take more time before land.

There are a lot of ways to balance this, but I don't see a major problem here sice its an easy change. If taleworld dont fix it, a mod will do in no time.

 

[Dabos37]

I would change the AI behaviour in a Shield Wall=>Under heavy missile Attack they should approach in a more safier way
=>Should stop throwing
=>Should "round/chamfer" instead of "edging" their flanks when the missile unit line is longer
=> Should start the Shieldwall earlier

But i think that these thoughts will make the shieldwall to strong again. With maybe 5 losses before the melee fight starts.

I would like to see a Video against the sturgia spearmen, since they have no range weapon(i think)

I know how to modify the AI to make the shieldwall starts earlier. I will do it later and check.

loosing 5 men before engaging in melee is ok and even not great IMO. Take in mind that infantry units move pretty slow in shieldwall, and archers could easily flank them if you split them in two groups, or you can send cavalry or other units to distract these infantrymen and kill them easily with archers.

Good debate.
I think that one way to explore and consider is through animation also. Technically it is possible to shorten or extend the time of aiming by altering some values (parameters-> additional_time_for_perfect_ranged_ready); this is basically what they have done with the new update.
However, in addition to those 20 shots per minute on average of the Palatine Guard, totally unrealistic by the way (it could be done, but with a much much lower precision); instead of nerfing the precision I would nerf the duration of the animation. An animation delay to simulate the effect of taking out an arrow from quiver, put the arrow in the right place (pinch the nock in the string), draw the string, aim and shoot.

Great info mate, going to check this parameter and test too. I was looking for a way to mod the game fast by myself and fix the OP archers issue, different to reduce the weapons damage which is a pain. I have also found that increasing thrust speed for weapons makes the aiming time animation slower but it is also pretty time consuming and does not work well for Crossbowmen.

 

[Dabos37]

First test, vanilla game without any modification, 100 Palatine Guard vs 100 Vlandian Sergeant:



The result is pretty sad to be honest... How the hell could devs think that this is balanced... OMG...

I will be posting some battles with the suggested moddifications.

 

[Ling*]

First test, vanilla game without any modification, 100 Palatine Guard vs 100 Vlandian Sergeant:



The result is pretty sad to be honest... How the hell could devs think that this is balanced... OMG...

I will be posting some battles with the suggested moddifications.

The infantry took maybe 15-20 casualties before engaging in the melee, how is that considered bad? Should they tank 100% of the damage and not even be injured? I don't understand what the problem is here other than the infantry ultimately losing the fight. I don't think them killing 10-20 people in that massive crowd of infantry over that great of a distance should be considered imbalanced, imo that's pretty damn good.

The problem seems to be that heavy archer classes are overperforming in the melee of the fight, and not overperforming as archers. Otherwise you would expect to see the bulk of the casualties happening during the ranged portion of the engagement, which is not at all what is shown in this video, but rather the archers winning the melee engagement and the bulk of the kills happening there.

If Tw is to change anything they better fix the overperformance of heavy class archers in a melee engagement, because If they dial back the archers accuracy and ranged performance again I'm not touching this game again.

 

[Dabos37]

The infantry took maybe 15-20 casualties before engaging in the melee, how is that considered bad? Should they tank 100% of the damage and not even be injured? I don't understand what the problem is here other than the infantry ultimately losing the fight. I don't think them killing 10-20 people in that massive crowd of infantry over that great of a distance should be considered imbalanced, imo that's pretty damn good.

The problem seems to be that heavy archer classes are overperforming in the melee of the fight, and not overperforming as archers. Otherwise you would expect to see the bulk of the casualties happening during the ranged portion of the engagement, which is not at all what is shown in this video, but rather the archers winning the melee engagement and the bulk of the kills happening there.

If Tw is to change anything they better fix the overperformance of heavy class archers in a melee engagement, because If they dial back the archers accuracy and ranged performance again I'm not touching this game again.

This is actually pretty bad. This makes infantry uttery useless at all in singleplayer. Why would you even care to get infantry at all if archers are able to do the job like 3 or 4 times better and get tons of kills from distance? It is even worse when you think that shielded infantry are actually one of the units which should be used to deal with archers, because unshielded units get massacred in literally seconds.

What you are clearly failing to see is that 20 heavy armored and shielded units are getting killed fromm distance, while a lot of other ones are getting injured, and they die faster in melee for this reason.

Plus archers are not overperforming in melee at all as you can see here:



The problem is 100% about ranged units insanely overperforming at range and not in melee.

Concerning you do not touching the game again, I have already stopped to play this game in SP because it is currently broken IMO. This game is pretty much about battles and they are simply not enjoyable at all because archers are killing pretty much everything at distance (take in mind that the AI gets about +50% unshielded units in armies), and there are not really counters for the broken archers currently.

It is pretty clear for me that Captains mode and Singleplayer should be balanced in a different way, because these captain mode pleayers who probably represent less than 5% of the player base (assuming for active matches, etc) are asking for changes which are ruining other game modes.

 

[Ling*]

Make infantry better. Make archers worse in a melee.

Don't touch the Archer accuracy again or Captain Mode WILL die, that I gaurentee.

 

[Dabos37]

Make infantry better. Make archers worse in a melee.

Don't touch the Archer accuracy again or Captain Mode WILL die, that I gaurentee.

What about balancing the game separetely? Seriously, it looks like captain mode players need archers being OP for some reason, so it won't never work for both game modes balancing the game at the same time. Archers vs Infantry performance in melee is pretty much ok in my view. 100 Vlandian Sergeant should not be able to kill 100 Palatine Guards without any single loss, and losing 22 guys is ok.

If archers need to be OP in captain mode due to shock infantry, why do we should keep shock infantry OP too? Shock infantry is also overperforming in SP as some people have complained in other threads. Making archers OP to deal with OP shock infantry sounds like a nonsense for me.

BTW, I am checking again the battle and Palatine Guard killed close to 30 Sergeants befor engaging in melee. Not just 15-20.