Bows are WAY too accurate.

[kekkuli5]

High accuracy with a bow isn't really a problem to me, but more of the bows doing too much damage.

In real life, most arrows would just bounce off heavy armor. But bows in this game does massive piercing damage, even the arrows do piercing damage. They literally shred through heavy armor like paper. I'm at almost 50 armor but even those militia archers are destroying me without a shield.

Can we fix the bow so the damage type of bows is cut instead of piercing? Leave the arrows to do piercing damage.

Well they are supposed to destroy you if you let them shoot at you without a shield. The heavy armor of that period had a lot more weak points and gaps than plate armor of late medieval period. Besides the game would would just become trivial if you at some point became basically immune to arrows. Lower the damage received to your character if you find it too big problem.

 

[mikeboix]

Tottally true. Please devs, balance this soon because it's an easy fix.

 

[duchuy613]

Well they are supposed to destroy you if you let them shoot at you without a shield. The heavy armor of that period had a lot more weak points and gaps than plate armor of late medieval period. Besides the game would would just become trivial if you at some point became basically immune to arrows. Lower the damage received to your character if you find it too big problem.

Oof, you just reminded me that I was on 100% damage setting. That said, the damage is still a little too strong, especially when you're in full lamellar armors and you got kill in 4-5 shots. The bow damage in warband is laughable, but it's too much in bannerlord. It'd be nice if it's somewhere in the middle. Piercing damage is really brutal especially when most ranged units in the game has super high archery skill, which also increase the damage dealt by bows.

 

[Ichon]

Bows should be a bit less accurate when at low skill but the main difference should be damage output. If you have only 50 archery skill you might have practised with a bow a few times but not developed the muscles and coordination to use a heavy bow that can penetrate armour short of plate.

The weapon tiers on bows mean almost nothing. If you need archery 50 for tier 2, 100 for tier 3, 150 for tier 4 and the base damage was half normal/half piercing and the arrows had tiers that need to match the tier of the bow but did piercing damage that would start to get more interesting.

Also, there absolutely has to be a bigger difference between crossbow and bows on the total amount of damage potential. Crossbows fired much more slowly but could output hugely more damage. Before guns a high-power crossbow could 'sometimes' penetrate weaker plate as could the most powerful bows BUT crossbowman could do that with barely any training while an archer took a decade to reach that level.

This is a game and to make the skill curves equal it should be that investing time into crossbow you get the most ranged damage output but you will also be fighting in melee a lot more as you get time for maybe 1-2 shots. Investing in bows skill you can wipe out low armour enemies very quickly, get massive numbers of headshots in sieges that can one-shot kill(except vs the highest level enemies), and fight with the strongest bows from horseback (that alone is worth levelling bow over crossbow to me).

There should be some light crossbows that are hand-drawn that fire almost as fast as bow but do even less damage at low skill/weapon tier but are more accurate and can be used on horseback. The trade-off with crossbow is that as the power increases by tier 4 they can't be used on horses anymore as it requires a lever/winch to draw. That will let players develop crossbow skill and accumulate wealth grinding looters etc and trading at lowerer levels/earlier in a campaign but eventually to 1 shot higher level enemies you need a crossbow and to be on foot.

If you want to one-shot armoured enemies at long distance you need a crossbow AND a rest to set the crossbow on to be stable. So you will either have to be stationary or moving slowly but if you spawn into a battlefield and position your soldiers to protect you with a small core of rest operated crossbowmen they can shoot one-shot non-shielded all but the highest tier enemy from pretty far (not all battlefields have good line of sight from the spawn point so not as useful as it might sound). During sieges a crossbow on a rest is just going to be a target and not mobile on the walls while a bow is mobile but can one-shot only with headshots and not vs the heaviest armour.

 

[BattanianDruid]

Money is basically free after some time. Fact is that in real life bows just can't penetrate plate. That is just physically impossible. Guy in plate could take hundreds of arrows and they would do absolutely nothing.

Being archers is easy mode in this game. Horse archery doesn't take any skill at all. Starting character can without any effort kill anything without bows or crossbows.

I think good balance would be that with best bow in game you could one shot peasants without armor, but against plate it should take 10+ shots. Against plate heaviest very slow to reload crossbows would be good as well as armor piercing melee weapons.

You know there isn't any plate in the game right? This is an era of mail and scale armor and very heavy warbows can and did penetrate armor of that quality historically.

That is why shields dominated European warfare in that time. There wasn't any armor in the world you could wear that would render you impervious to a hail of arrows.

So a high level player archer (emphasis on player, who already becomes at least mildly superhuman by the late levels) should be able to take down most standard troops in one or two shots with the highest quality bow and arrows one can afford.

After all, if it still takes 3-4 shots to kill most armored infantry why even buy a high quality bow and the top quality arrows? To one-shot looters who don't matter at that stage in the game? Sometimes balance and fun take priority over realism, and in this case it isn't even that unrealistic.

 

[black_bulldog]

It's not just bows all projectile weapons are super accurate. I noticed in arena practice if you don't have a shield and are going towards an archer or spear thrower you have to perfectly dodge or you'll get hit. I'm ok with high level enemies who have really high skill to hit reliably but when I'm on a horses and dodging like mad I don't expect to get pelted by a bunch of looters with rocks.

 

[BattanianDruid]

It's not just bows all projectile weapons are super accurate. I noticed in arena practice if you don't have a shield and are going towards an archer or spear thrower you have to perfectly dodge or you'll get hit.

To be fair it really should be a challenge to approach an archer from a distance without a shield. In Warband it was far too effortless. To the point that an archer shooting at me in an arena was basically a free kill. I really like that I need to pay close attention to the timing of the arrows and bob and weave as I approach.

Plus it feels so rewarding when you get into the archer's face and rip them a part.

 

[black_bulldog]

To be fair it really should be a challenge to approach an archer from a distance without a shield. In Warband it was far too effortless. To the point that an archer shooting at me in an arena was basically a free kill. I really like that I need to pay close attention to the timing of the arrows and bob and weave as I approach.

Plus it feels so rewarding when you get into the archer's face and rip them a part.

I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but atm if you don't dodge while the projectile is in air you'll get hit period. I also agree that dodging in Warband was way too easy. I just feel like just any npc shouldn't be handed a bow and now can shoot like robin hood.

 

[mamastoast]

I think bows should deal more damage, but the more reduced by armor rating. Any mid tier bow and up should be able to 1 shot looters imo..

Similarly, I think bows should be able to become much more accurate than they are now with enough skill, but but start out way less accurate at the beginning of the game.

As others have brought up, you really don't get that progression of going from an absolutely idiot with a bow to being the demi god of archery that you got in warband.

The quality in bows aren't dramatic enough either, like most gear I feel like the tiers don't do enough.. low tier bows should be much worse and higher tier bows should be considerably better

 

[HolgerHardrada]

I hope they at least do something about the 180 instant turn and headshot

 

[zeidrich]

It's a game. People in real life don't have hit points. You also didn't take farmhands from villages, run around killing looters for a few days and then give them full plate armor.

Armor was very effective, but also incredibly expensive, and there were other challenges to wearing it. And when you were well armored, there were still weak points. If you got shot in the neck with an arrow you died whether you were wearing a breastplate or not.

I tend to think of hit points as being kind of like a probability. If you've got 100 hp, and you're taking 30ish damage per hit, that means that you've got about a 30% chance per arrow that connects that it's going to hit something that will kill you.

But there's too many parts to any game that's not really awkward that means that you can't entirely truly model what a battle between archers and armored knights would be like. First of all, you would never be just running around for months at a time with a band of 40 knights who wore full plate armor 24/7 that you recently pulled out of the farms before upgrading them by spending a few hundred denars on each of them.

The game needs to be fun, and things like being able to hit your target when you're standing still is generally fun, and it's OK to have less accuracy when you are moving. If you had archers be so mitigated by armor and have less accurate shooting, and armor was as easy to get ahold of as it is in this game, and everyone starts 100 paces away like in this game, and everyone begins the battle fully equipped in their armor as it is in this game, then archers would be useless because it's too easy to find fully armored knights.

On the other hand, the game does need to be fun, and I do think that archery is a bit strong in the current game. However, I think I've got bigger issues with Javelins, all told. I'm super glad that archers don't 1-shot generally, because there's nothing more frustrating from a gameplay perspective to be in a hideout raid or in a skirmish and have a single javelin come from behind you and take you down when you were full health. Archery is alright mostly, in that you can survive a hit, and as a player after I survive one hit I can generally start to play really cautiously to make sure I don't take a second. Having to play super-paranoid to try and avoid ever taking the first hit just wouldn't be fun.

 

[BattanianDruid]

I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but atm if you don't dodge while the projectile is in air you'll get hit period. I also agree that dodging in Warband was way too easy. I just feel like just any npc shouldn't be handed a bow and now can shoot like robin hood.

I'm not sure that has been my experience. I definitely feel like I've juked just before the NPC loosed their arrow and watched as it went wide at least a few times.

Also consider that these are probably 30 pound target bows and most of these men have probably learned the basics of archery at some point in their life and I feel their accuracy is pretty reasonable. It isn't hard to hit a target moving toward you at middling distances.

The real issue is how frequently archers spawn and the fact they can spawn without a sound and snipe you in the back without you ever knowing they were there in the first place.

 

[black_bulldog]

I'm not sure that has been my experience. I definitely feel like I've juked just before the NPC loosed their arrow and watched as it went wide at least a few times.

Also consider that these are probably 30 pound target bows and most of these men have probably learned the basics of archery at some point in their life and I feel their accuracy is pretty reasonable. It isn't hard to hit a target moving toward you at middling distances.

The real issue is how frequently archers spawn and the fact they can spawn without a sound and snipe you in the back without you ever knowing they were there in the first place.

If you're a good distance away I guess but mid to short range no way I've done plenty of practice in the arena. LOL when hear the plunk of an arrow hitting next to you it kind of freaks you out.

 

[White Ahroun]

Bows aren't too accurate. If anything, the player is too accurate. Doesn't ring true with my level 10 archer. AI archers miss all the time.

 

[MegaYama]

I agree. Bows are NOT too accurate. I did archery in real life too and I can tell that bows are highly accurate in a certain distance.
The AI is a mess with bows. They don't hit their targets well. Except well trained / elite archers.

 

[kekkuli5]

I agree. Bows are NOT too accurate. I did archery in real life too and I can tell that bows are highly accurate in a certain distance.
The AI is a mess with bows. They don't hit their targets well. Except well trained / elite archers.

I can literally hit a guy from about 100 meters away, who's on castle walls and i can only see his upper body, 3 times to the head in a row easily. There is barely any variation in the arrow trajectory if you don't move your mouse and loose the bow early enough. Robin Hood has nothing on your typical bannerlord hero with low bow skill.

 

[Gunter von Krieg]

I don't know what game your playing but in the one I am playing the AI doesn't miss, like ever. Even at long range, even if the target is moving erratically they still hit better than 9 out of 10 shots. The same goes for my character in the arena to some extent. A character by the way who never used a bow in his life beforehand. I know that because if he had he would have more than the minimum skill level and I would have chosen one of the options at character generation that said this person has used a bow before'. For the people who are saying that that level of precision is easy to obtain, I am willing to accept that you picked up a 160lb warbow one day and were getting bullseyes in a few hours, but if so, it does raise a big question. Why were English men required to practice the bow EVERY Sunday? Surely a few days archery practice before campaign would be plenty... or maybe being able to hit a target on a range is not the same thing as doing it after a days march, when your heart rate is up because you had to sprint the last 150 yards to get in position oh and by the way, the target is moving... and shooting back... It is important to remember that every single archer you have heard of that consistently hits the person they are aiming at are fictional and even in the fiction they occupy they are understood to be exceptional.

In summary, I feel that both for game balance reasons and for the sake portraying historical combat archery, the accuracy of bows should be moderately nerfed, at the very least the accuracy needs to be far more dependent on character skill.

 

[Orkmann]

From gameplay perspective, I hate that bows are so deadly. It is very much reminding me of Prophecy of Pendor, which was my favoutite mod in Warband, but elite archers were like machine gun wielding robots with laser sights. Archers in medieval inspired combat should shine in special circumstances like sieges or defending on hills, but otherwise should play supportive roles only. In the current state of game they are the king of battlefield.

This is a game, so I fi d ameplay balance much more important than realism, but I see huge issues from the perspective of realism as well. For sure you can have very strong, very accurate, and very quick bows, but these will be three different instruments, and the game currently combines this all. Horse archers were able to fire extremely quiclly, but their range was short and those were inefficient against armour. The famous longbow was good against armour, but the rate of fire was like 1 arrow per 10 seconds. But in the game you can shoot about three times quicker witht the strongest bows. The accuracy itself should very much depend on the distance as well. Realistically, I do no think archers could effectively fire aimed/direct shots over 30-40 meter, especially against moving targets or against targets with shields. On a longer range they were shooting indirectly, eg. a formation of archers targeted an area or a fomation of enemy.

 

[Senko]

Bows aren't too accurate. If anything, the player is too accurate. Doesn't ring true with my level 10 archer. AI archers miss all the time.

Maybe horse archers will miss some shots, but forest bandits for example will not miss that often, and they are just supposed to be some low level bandits with bows.

Battania Archers will destroy anything.

 

[eddiemccandless]

From gameplay perspective, I hate that bows are so deadly. It is very much reminding me of Prophecy of Pendor, which was my favoutite mod in Warband, but elite archers were like machine gun wielding robots with laser sights. Archers in medieval inspired combat should shine in special circumstances like sieges or defending on hills, but otherwise should play supportive roles only. In the current state of game they are the king of battlefield.

This is a game, so I fi d ameplay balance much more important than realism, but I see huge issues from the perspective of realism as well. For sure you can have very strong, very accurate, and very quick bows, but these will be three different instruments, and the game currently combines this all. Horse archers were able to fire extremely quiclly, but their range was short and those were inefficient against armour. The famous longbow was good against armour, but the rate of fire was like 1 arrow per 10 seconds. But in the game you can shoot about three times quicker witht the strongest bows. The accuracy itself should very much depend on the distance as well. Realistically, I do no think archers could effectively fire aimed/direct shots over 30-40 meter, especially against moving targets or against targets with shields. On a longer range they were shooting indirectly, eg. a formation of archers targeted an area or a fomation of enemy.

Right, but imo Pendor is actually ok, because at least the troops that are like that are high level troops. Looters (that in Pendor have bows) are laughable as soon as you get devent armor, Ravenstern Archers are okish against lower level troops but not really much to write home about, and Ravenstern Rangers are devastating. This imo is fine. I do expect Fiann troops, Palatine Guards and such to be terrors with a bow.

What I think needs to be fixed is low level troops being as effective when it comes to offensive power. A line of tier 2 archers shouldn't be as strong as it is now, and their shots should tickle a knight in full armor even if they hit.