Archers need a nerf.

[Maximum997]

Little things like this are a good way of pointing out how the apparent effectiveness of a unit depends on more than just its damage potential in relation to other units, and why I'm not a fan of using the AI in testing. That is inherently testing with the added variable: how effective the AI commands.

They are really bad.

Archers without face direction will try to reform line to face enemy and will just run in circles. I noticed it against cavalry heavy factions. My archers became morons right after enemy cav flanked me.

When you use face direction command they will just turn their bodies around and shoot.

I found that archers are the best counter play against cav, and spears was almost useless.

In campaign i found that archer spam is best way to go.

1) They are most costeffective unit. my 50 archers always deals more kills then my 100 infantry and 50 cav. Even when cav killed running enemies.
2) They take almost no casualties.
3) They are the most easy troops to lvl up becouse they always do a lot of damage and almost never die
4) They are best and easiest counter to cav heavy factions. Spearmen are horrible against horse archers+lancers spam.
5) they are immune to stupid reinoforcment system issue that ruins heavy infantry play.
6) And they have magic "get out of melee and restore all ammo" button. But i never use it becouse it is too broken even for cheeze lover like me.

 

[Bannerman Man]

Gotcha. I wish there was more consistency across the parallels. I don't understand why they would need something different for custom battles other than starting conditions for the AI.

Yeah, me too. I'm guessing custom battle mode was either created earlier in development, or quickly thrown together just before launch, and certain parameters were hardcoded rather than properly synced up with singleplayer. I think I recall reading somewhere that custom battles would be one of the last features to get full attention during the development cycle.

 

[Dabos37]

I do agree with custom battle AI feels worse than campaign battles AI, I especially notice It for cavalry vs infantry. Cavalry is insanely good vs infantry in custom battle while in campaign It feels like infantry is able to do a decent job against cav.

On the other hand, archers are OP everywhere IMO and this is the most valuable unir by far in all my campaigns. They are simply too good and decisive currently.

 

[Bronk the Raven]

Yeah, me too. I'm guessing custom battle mode was either created earlier in development, or quickly thrown together just before launch, and certain parameters were hardcoded rather than properly synced up with singleplayer. I think I recall reading somewhere that custom battles would be one of the last features to get full attention during the development cycle.

If it's true they are waiting to update custom battles until the end, that is a huge mistake in their roadmap imo. As long as they are representative of the SP AI and game mechanics, custom battles are so helpful for players to not only become familiar with the functionality of the game, the balance of unit types, specific troop types (right now only with mods), etc., custom battles also allow beta testers to test the current state of all combat mechanics in the sense of: is this working the way it meant to, and do we enjoy it? The easier it is for the beta players to try everything out, especially in customizable, repeatable settings, the easier it is for us to give adequate feedback for the state of the game.

 

[Apocal]

Are those your tests? No way in hell I believe that 150 cav fought 150 archers and only took 4 casualties without player interference, or biased terrain. The cav would take more casualties then that from the arrows on the charge before the initial clash, even if they immediately slaughtered all of the archers on contact.

Cav with shields and armored mounts take minimal casualties on the way in. Frequently zero.

 

[flavior flavius]

Cav with shields and armored mounts take minimal casualties on the way in. Frequently zero.

Again, bull... Unless you are turning fire at will off on the archers or activating shield wall on the cavalry. I find it impossible that out of the initial charge, and the ensuing melee that 150 archers can only kill 4 cavalry. It goes against everything I have seen in game regarding archer performance, and against all of the other evidence posted in this thread including recordings of other battles.

Please post a recording of the battle to show how you obtained this unbelievable result.

 

[Apocal]

Again, bull... Unless you are turning fire at will off on the archers or activating shield wall on the cavalry. I find it impossible that out of the initial charge, and the ensuing melee that 150 archers can only kill 4 cavalry.

1. I said nothing about the ensuing melee, only that minimal losses on the initial charge (possibly even zero, although not typical) was a totally normal outcome for shielded cav with well-armored horses, even in test runs where the archers managed to kill a substantial number of cavalry.
2. I did say that terrain played a factor earlier:

The latter is important to note because it is a caution against putting your archers on the military crest of a hill (and possibly hilltops in general) because it allows the cavalry a line of attack that shields them from arrows until they can get much closer.

Please post a recording of the battle to show how you obtained this unbelievable result.

Sure.

2020-06-09 06-23-12

Watch "2020-06-09 06-23-12" on Streamable.

streamable.com

(thanks to MnB Discord for help getting the selectable troops mod working again)

Again, using 1.4.0 because selectable troops isn't working yet with 1.4.1.

 

[flavior flavius]

1. I said nothing about the ensuing melee, only that minimal losses on the initial charge (possibly even zero, although not typical) was a totally normal outcome for shielded cav with well-armored horses...

Except that the zero casualties on the charge isn't because of how armored the cavalry are, but rather that you put the archers behind a hill so that they couldn't shoot at all until the cavalry were right on top of them.

That is hardly an objective test. How can you seriously use that data in good faith to talk about archer balance when the terrain prevented the archers from firing any arrows? I had a hunch that either player interference or terrain bias was going on and I seem to have been proven right on the second count.

Still, I am surprised the Fians only killed 5 cav in melee after the charge, this is the complete opposite of the video I posted that shows Fians wrecking in melee vs cavalry. I think this has a lot to do with the hill blocking LOS on regrouping cavalry and ensuring that unengaged archers can't fire shots.

Also, no offense intended but your FPS is very low, maybe this has something to do with it? We know that weapon collisions and AI targeting are calculated on a per frame basis, so a low framerate may be affecting the balance in this regard... like making a Fian champion miss a charging horse on a swing due to how slow the frames are coming in (and thus how quickly its aiming parameters are updated), whereas a computer with better FPS has no such issues and the Fian would be able to land the hit.

 

[Apocal]

Except that the zero casualties on the charge isn't because of how armored the cavalry are, but rather that you put the archers behind a hill so that they couldn't shoot at all until the cavalry were right on top of them.

I didn't put them behind a hill.

That is hardly an objective test. How can you seriously use that data in good faith to talk about archer balance when the terrain prevented the archers from firing any arrows? I had a hunch that either player interference or terrain bias was going on and I seem to have been proven right on the second count.

Still, I am surprised the Fians only killed 5 cav in melee after the charge, this is the complete opposite of the video I posted that shows Fians wrecking in melee vs cavalry. I think this has a lot to do with the hill blocking LOS on regrouping cavalry and ensuring that unengaged archers can't fire shots.

Anyway, I was wrong about terrain masking making a difference. Top of the hill, they did slightly worse.

2020-06-09 06-41-34

Watch "2020-06-09 06-41-34" on Streamable.

streamable.com

On basically as flat as you could reasonably ask for in this game, same outcome.

2020-06-09 06-49-51

Watch "2020-06-09 06-49-51" on Streamable.

streamable.com

The only difference I noticed between this and 1.4.1 is that cavalry spread in every direction after charging, rather than staying in one clump if terrain allows.

Also, no offense intended but your FPS is very low, maybe this has something to do with it? We know that weapon collisions and AI targeting are calculated on a per frame basis, so a low framerate may be affecting the balance in this regard... like making a Fian champion miss a charging horse on a swing due to how slow the frames are coming in (and thus how quickly its aiming parameters are updated), whereas a computer with better FPS has no such issues and the Fian would be able to land the hit.

Obviously when recording and through encoding my FPS drops quite a bit but even when I'm not recording, the outcomes don't really change. That was one of the first things I checked but even on sub-5 FPS (seriously) I can force situations where the archers will reave the cavalry by mismatching tiers, so it isn't that hits aren't registering at all.

Like I said, something screwy is going on and I don't know what. If custom battles are using different damage calculations than campaign -- I'm not sure how much that matters -- it probably has something to do with it.

 

[geala]

I tried several approaches to projectiles till now. Using mods which made armor stronger, changing ranged damage to "cut", increasing or diminishing air friction, changing the damage behavior against armor classes, and so on.

Meanwhile I think archers should mainly stay as in vanilla. Although reference to the "real world" does not really help (there are very contradicting sources for archery from the 5th to the 12th c.AD, reporting of armor being very protective or of very little use against strong bows), I would say that they are a bit too strong against armor. But I think they have to.

Otherwise I fear the very cheapness and overabundance of well armored high tier units (and the extremely high percentage of cavalry with armored horses) in the game cannot be dealt with. At least not without severe interventions which a lot of players would not like. Extremely long training times coupled with high costs for top tier units would be great but do not fit at all with the weird recruitment mechanic which is baked into the core game. The game only knows total loss after a lost battle. Do you really want to grind for a long time again and again in the later game? Alternatively never take a risk and watch battles from afar. I for myself would even opt for hard caps, like fixed percentages of well armored/noble troops in parties according to historical findings, but I hardly think more than a few people would appreciate this.

For me I have found a setting which makes archers viable but not too strong: handling speed of bows is lowered by 20, to battle the absurd machinegun shooting (crossbow speed is more than halved). Accuracy is lowered by 10 (crossbows remain unchanged here). Most recruits have shields. And I use a mod which makes the AI really use the shield for protection. BTW I also use a mod to correct the truly most annoying feature of M+B, weak spears.

Archers are mostly helpless against shielded heavy infantry from the front or cavalry charges without protection from heavy infantry. They are good against the pesky twohanders, infantry from behind or flank and against cavalry which fights for longer time in front of them. I usually have the top tier archers achieving the same kill rate as my top tier heavy spear/shield infantry which hold the shield wall and/or attack.

 

[Gelimer]

Guys you are running circles in this discussion...everyone camps on their position

Bottom line is it is a game and game balance is also important.

As i said initially, what is required is a slightly more pronounced "rock paper scissor" mechanic.... buff horse collisions and spear damage from cavalry and that is it... no unit class is OP anymore as mass archers dominate mass infantry that hasnt elite armour and horse archers, mass spear infantry and 2handers dominate melee cavalry, and mass cavalry will dominate more clearly mass archers....

I love realism, dont get me wrong but you have to make it work gameplay wise as well.

 

[hruza]

As i said initially, what is required is a slightly more pronounced "rock paper scissor" mechanic

Why does this game needs mechanic of a simplistic top down tactical games if it's not a simplistic top down tactical game? "Rock paper scissors" is a fantasy that have nothing to do with actual combat.

In real combat there were no "anti-cavarly", "anti-infantry" and "anti-archers" units or weapons. In real combat spears does not beat horses, horses does not beat arches and archers does not beat spears. In real combat there is only anti-cavalry, anti-infantry and anti-whatever tactics. Square formation beats cavalry not spears. In combat archers behind stakes beat cavalry.

For some reason you won't find mention of "rock, paper, scissors" in any military tractate.

.... buff horse collisions and spear damage from cavalry and that is it...

Horse collision damage is one of the most stupid mechanics of the previous MB games that made using any sensible tactics irrelevant. Just raise army of Swadian knights and charge them at the enemy and they will collide everybody to death ...that's the combat for simpletons. Getting rid of it in Bannerlord is one of the best improvements of the combat in the entire series and makes use of combined arms army a viable tactics and horse combat enjoyable, as it should be. You are finally riding a horse and not a steamroller. How you ride it now suddenly matters because just riding in to things won't going to do it anymore.

no unit class is OP anymore as mass archers dominate mass infantry that hasnt elite armour and horse archers, mass spear infantry and 2handers dominate melee cavalry, and mass cavalry will dominate more clearly mass archers....

This entire threat is about people showing evidence that archers are not OP. Yet here you are ignoring all of it and just repeating the same mantra again without addressing it.

I love realism, dont get me wrong but you have to make it work gameplay wise as well.

Except what "gameplay wise" is, is subjective to every player.

 

[Gelimer]

Realism is even more subjective to every player than gameplay balance.

Archers in game are of course much stronger than in reality despite what some claim in this thread simply because the game doesnt model gambeson resistance to projectile and armour resistance to projectile are not well modelled ( any angle of the arrow penetrates, arrows never bounce, arrows never fail/break) .

That is warbow, not your average bow and keep it mind the guy using is well fed , slept very well, doesnt lack vitamins and is not under combat stress and fear for his life :



Archer damage in general ingame is representative of the most powerful warbows used by highly fit and experienced archers that would take years to train. Their accuracy at distance is very high , their shooting speed and endurance is insane especially in cold weather, and they can take out entire lines of infantry and cavalry in a few volleys which is of course not right whatever way you want to twist this based on how you fantasize history.

The truth in Europe is that outside the English longbowmen in Europe ( which is a specific phenomenon, commoners being forced to train for years and equipped with powerful bows and very expensive arrows by their King ) , elsewhere in Europe from the 9th century tall the way to the 15th century, archers were never deciding any battles like they do in the game and very few archers were used historically in royal/feudal armies if you study the accounts of the major battles covering all this period , whether it is in France, Spain, Italy, HRE, Poland, Bohemia etc. simply because your average archers could not do cut it most of the time ( unless behind fortifications) against armoured infantry and heavy cavalry which is not the case in our game.

More rock paper scissor means that Cavalry in this game is underpowered under the AI usage.... and archers are slightly OP , so the idea is to make cavalry charges more deadly ( which will be more realistic by the way ) to archers. It doesnt mean a nerf to archers is needed so you can take it easy and relax as you seem itching for a fight in this thread

 

[flavior flavius]

Like I said, something screwy is going on and I don't know what. If custom battles are using different damage calculations than campaign -- I'm not sure how much that matters -- it probably has something to do with it.

Okay, you got me. I have no idea why your custom battles seem to be so disconnected from my experiences in campaign. Straight up, that is the opposite to my experiences of archers mowing down pretty much everything that moves in their sight range (even cavalry), and then being pretty good in melee to boot. I run completely vanilla btw, no mods.

I notice in your videos that the archers are seeming to run forward rather than to sit back and fire as the cavalry approaches them. Would you mind running a test where you control the archers on flat ground, put them in loose formation and have them stand in a straight line facing the oncoming cavalry?

Why does this game needs mechanic of a simplistic top down tactical games if it's not a simplistic top down tactical game? "Rock paper scissors" is a fantasy that have nothing to do with actual combat.

Because mount and blade is ultimately a game, not a medieval combat simulator. The game isn't accurate enough to real life in order to do the type of balancing you want where "things just are the way they are", it is an abstraction with weapon damages, stats, and item tiers. Every type of soldier needs a use (situational or otherwise), because players will just find the mathematically best soldiers and spam them. This is why you don't see spearmen taken at all, and players having armies built around archers.

 

[Dabos37]

Realism is even more subjective to every player than gameplay balance.

Archers in game are of course much stronger than in reality despite what some claim in this thread simply because the game doesnt model gambeson resistance to projectile and armour resistance to projectile are not well modelled ( any angle of the arrow penetrates, arrows never bounce, arrows never fail/break) .

That is warbow, not your average bow and keep it mind the guy using is well fed , slept very well, doesnt lack vitamins and is not under combat stress and fear for his life :



Archer damage in general ingame is representative of the most powerful warbows used by highly fit and experienced archers that would take years to train. Their accuracy at distance is very high , their shooting speed and endurance is insane especially in cold weather, and they can take out entire lines of infantry and cavalry in a few volleys which is of course not right whatever way you want to twist this based on how you fantasize history.

The truth in Europe is that outside the English longbowmen in Europe ( which is a specific phenomenon, commoners being forced to train for years and equipped with powerful bows and very expensive arrows by their King ) , elsewhere in Europe from the 9th century tall the way to the 15th century, archers were never deciding any battles like they do in the game and very few archers were used historically in royal/feudal armies if you study the accounts of the major battles covering all this period , whether it is in France, Spain, Italy, HRE, Poland, Bohemia etc. simply because your average archers could not do cut it most of the time ( unless behind fortifications) against armoured infantry and heavy cavalry which is not the case in our game.

More rock paper scissor means that Cavalry in this game is underpowered under the AI usage.... and archers are slightly OP , so the idea is to make cavalry charges more deadly ( which will be more realistic by the way ) to archers. It doesnt mean a nerf to archers is needed so you can take it easy and relax as you seem itching for a fight in this thread

Good post, I definitively agree with It.

 

[Bannerman Man]

It's an interesting situation, because we as the player can't see the damage being done to each unit by another unit, only the casualties. So if archers deal 90% of the damage required to kill a unit during the approach, but then the infantry mop up the remaining 10% hp when the lines meet, it will register as a kill for the infantry, even though the archers were a more instrumental part of the victory.

If archers dealt a substantial portion of the total damage inflicted each battle, but didn't rack up the kills like they do, then people would probably create threads about how useless or underwhelming archers are, because you yourself can't easily observe the effect they're having. The fact that archers score such a significant number of kills each battle probably indicates that archers are even more overtuned than people realize, because they also likely dealt a considerable amount of damage to the units that they didn't kill in the end.

It's just a fault of human psychology that we won't give credit for any kind of impact something has unless we can directly observe the results. Maybe they should add a "Damage Dealt" column to the battle report for each unit type to give us a better understanding of how impactful certain units are.

 

[flavior flavius]

It isn't just that cavalry are undertuned... archers are also overtuned and need firing rate nerfs at least. 24 arrows per minute is nuts. That's almost an arrow shot every 2.5 seconds.

 

[kweassa]

It's an interesting situation, because we as the player can't see the damage being done to each unit by another unit, only the casualties. So if archers deal 90% of the damage required to kill a unit during the approach, but then the infantry mop up the remaining 10% hp when the lines meet, it will register as a kill for the infantry, even though the archers were a more instrumental part of the victory.

If archers dealt a substantial portion of the total damage inflicted each battle, but didn't rack up the kills like they do, then people would probably create threads about how useless or underwhelming archers are, because you yourself can't easily observe the effect they're having. The fact that archers score such a significant number of kills each battle probably indicates that archers are even more overtuned than people realize, because they also likely dealt a considerable amount of damage to the units that they didn't kill in the end.

It's just a fault of human psychology that we won't give credit for any kind of impact something has unless we can directly observe the results. Maybe they should add a "Damage Dealt" column to the battle report for each unit type to give us a better understanding of how impactful certain units are.

Rather, a simple trend of writing down HOW MANY ARCHERS YOU HAD in comparison to HOW MANY ARCHERS THEY HAD in the general order of battle would probably very simply display just how ridiculous and meaningless these "Archers are OP" opinions are.

I've already mentioned it in this thread.

Players create an army which certain function/strengths can be focused up to levels the AI either cannot attain, or does not aim for. In a typical battle supposing a clash between two armies consisting of around 100~150 men each, typically an AI army will rarely have more than 20~30 archers in the roster -- whereas players consciously build for a ranged-heavy army consisting of easily over 30 men, sometimes around 40~50% of the entire force.

Pit a nearly all-infantry army (usually what the AI forms) against any army chockful of archers (usually what the player forms) and OF COURSE the archers get like 90% of the kills and usually decimate around 30% of enemy forces even before getting into a melee.


Which is why I sarcastically issued a "challenge" to see how well the archers are doing if your army is made up like the typical AI army: rarely more than 20 cavalry, rarely more than 20 archers, and 70~80% infantry with around 20% of them recruits.

For reasons understandable, nobody has taken up that challenge and displayed how their archers can still land something like 90% of the kills and decimate 1/3rd of the enemy before melee phase.

So I throw this question once more:

"Is it really the archers that are OP, or the NUMBER OF ARCHERS you are using in contrast to the AI army that is ill-equipped to counter such?"

My hunch is with the latter, and so far, there's been nothing in this thread that has brought my conclusions any closer to the former.

Just a lot of "oh, my archer-heavy armies always decimate everything, so it must be OP" anecdotes that have no numbers, no analysis, no details, no order of battle, basically nothing except the claim.

 

[Maggot Toes]

Tactics matter, I just did 250 Sturgian Hardened Brigands vs 250 Battanian Heros, just F1, F3 with no other commands and I wiped out the archers with 176 cavalry left. Then I switched to me being the Battanians, put my archers in loose formation, backs against the red zone and on a hill with face direction and I made it out with 120 archers left alive.

My take from that is cavalry are superior if they can be given the worst possible situation they do even better than archers do when given the ideal situation.

That matches my campaign experience, where I usually wreck superior numbers by parking my archers on a hill with a shield wall in front, except against cavalry heavy armies where I can kill maybe 5 horses before they reach me and then they cause havoc on my archers behind, except I usually have 40-50 lancers and 30 or so Cav archers on the flanks to run around and kill off cavalry behind me.

Edit: I take most of that back, seems picking Sturgians for being weak was the wrong move, Aserai and Sturgian Cavalry wreck archers because of Javelins, Empire is almost even but the others all get slaughtered even on F1-F3 as me being the attacker.

 

[flavior flavius]

Just a lot of "oh, my archer-heavy armies always decimate everything, so it must be OP" anecdotes that have no numbers, no analysis, no details, no order of battle, basically nothing except the claim.

Except the videos posted in this thread of pure archer armies devastating pure cavalry armies and pure infantry armies.