five bucks
Knight at Arms
No, they shouldn't. Armour was used in real life despite the great cost and the weight you had to lug around because it was effective at protecting you.Archers should absolutely massacre infantry units running straight at them with no shields. I don't see a problem here.
But even realism argument aside, archers are way too strong against too many troop types for good balance, as I said. Despite being cheap, they are strong against cavalry, against pike infantry, and against two-hander infantry. And they are even strong against shield infantry if they are distracted. Which means that an obvious best strategy (apart from horse archers) is just to spam archers with a small amount of distraction infantry to put enemy shields down, then let your archers pump arrows into them. It wins in every situation except against horse archers.
And because of the weakness of armour, horse archers are strong against EVERYTHING.
What archers should actually counter is horse archers. In real life, an archer on foot could fire and reload a more powerful bow/crossbow than a man on horseback, and more accurately. But in Bannerlord archers don't lead their shots against moving horse archers, and armour is too weak. So we end up with archers who counter multiple types of troop and have one counter; and horse archers who counter multiple types of troop and have no counter. It's a bad gameplay situation where no tactics or smart army planning is needed.
So there are two reasons armour needs to be fixed against arrows: realism and gameplay balance.
They're wearing armour made of metal, dude. If anything, it's really stupid that a wooden shield can take 30+ arrows, but lamellar steel plate armour can take only 4.Infantry running around with 7 arrows in the chest and still fighting sounds really stupid.
I'm assuming you say "really stupid" because you think it's not realistic to take 7 arrows to armour. In fact, even more would be realistic. This is a great read on the topic: http://myarmoury.com/feature_mail.html
"During the 3rd Crusade, Bahā'al-Dīn, Saladin's biographer, wrote that the Norman crusaders were:
...drawn up in front of the cavalry, stood firm as a wall, and every foot-soldier wore a vest of thick felt and a coat of mail so dense and strong that our arrows made no impression on them... I saw some with from one to ten arrows sticking in them, and still advancing at their ordinary pace without leaving the ranks."
Plenty more examples of this in that text. The highest quality mail armour with padding beneath it was considered almost arrow-proof. I think it's very reasonable, considering that, and especially gameplay balance to make this game have some semblance of tactical variety, to ask for arrows to take more hits to kill.
I would like to build a balanced army and know that I'm not gimping myself compared to just spamming Fian Champions or Khan's Guard. Until armour is fixed, they will continue to be the best choice in the game by a long shot.
Thank you!Thanks for the detailed information. Forwarded to the team!
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