Horse Archers

[iamdanthemanstan]

How effective do you find horse archers with this mod? In the basic game they were never very good, the AI basically couldn't hit anything. But archers in general seem much more effective with the mod. If horse archers are good what stops them from just sitting out of range and peppering all the other troops with arrows?

 

[effemb]

typically 3 things stop horse archers. (in no specific order):

1) your own artillery.  because foot missile troops will be better skilled and hit their targets much more often than horse missile troops.  the best anti-horse-archer artillery that ive seen is throwing weapon troops with shields, or the rhodok xbowmen.  the throwers have the huge advantage that, while they might take longer to shoot down the horse-archers than the xbowmen...they dont take damage while doing so because they have shields to block all the arrows while they return fire.  nords and sarranid are great at disabling enemy horse archer skirmishing.

2) cavalry.  horse archers cant shoot behind themselves.  to shoot a bow/xbow on horseback you need to turn your horse so that your target is between your left side and front side.  its about a 120 degree arc id say? beyond that, you cant fire a bow/xbow, you have to turn your horse.  this means that horse archers are always having to circle around, reposition themselves, and ultimately they actually move around rather slow, because they are always turning and zig zagging.  cavalry are able to simply charge head on and either use lances to pummel the horse archers or normal 1h/2h weapons to melee them on horseback.

3) fighting in hilly/mountainous terrain.  horses cant move for crap on hills, and foot troops will in fact have the advantage in mobility.

it is plenty easy to take out horse archer armies with purely foot troops, just have to try and make best use of positioning, terrain, and as i said above, you will have to have some method of throwing/shooting something back at them.  the AI isnt super smart though and will often make mistakes and get into melee range.  so even a bunch of spearmen with a few shield infantry to block the arrows, could eventually catch the horse archers and spear them down rather quickly.

 

[Shapic]

Making your horse archers work is simple:
Don't let them charge. Even if they will take out bow, they will ride too close to pikemen from time to time.
Instead make them follow you and ride in circles around enemy troops. Counterclockwise. Even enemy's cavalry will be quickly dismounted. And arrchers will mostly miss you. 

 

[effemb]

Making your horse archers work is simple:
Don't let them charge. Even if they will take out bow, they will ride too close to pikemen from time to time.
Instead make them follow you and ride in circles around enemy troops. Counterclockwise. Even enemy's cavalry will be quickly dismounted. And arrchers will mostly miss you.

hehe his question was actually what method would be best to STOP horse archers from simply wiping out your foot army without risk of any loss.
but ya, getting them to work well as skirmishers and harrassers was never an issue

oh and there is 1 more thing that stops horse archers:
4) when they run out of ammo.  you can edit the ammo amounts in tweakMB, or using morgh's tools (search for "bolt" and "arrow" and youll get all of em).  personally though i find it sortof silly having 30 arrows in a quiver, considering how fast the archers fire them in MnB.  i upped my quivers to 60, and 70 for the really elite arrow types.  i did this primarily so that me and my companions wouldnt run out of ammo, and wouldnt have to sacrifice 2 weapon slots just for ammo, though....not so much for the troops.  but a pure archer unit imo shouldnt run out of ammo in a fight.  thats sortof like saying your infantry axeman can only swing his axe 10 times until he is out of breath and needs to go back to camp and sleep.
no thanks.  thats the old RPG mana/stamina crutch that i never liked.

 

[Duh]

It always annoyed me that so many games have a limited amount of weapon slots, rather than basing it on the weight and player strength.

Especially when on horse back it shouldnt be a problem to have several bags of bolts/arrows.

 

[Caba`drin]

Especially when on horse back it shouldnt be a problem to have several bags of bolts/arrows.

We could always toss in a trigger (if we determine that the sheer number of battle triggers isn't what is causing some of our issues with battle-feature consistency) that checks mounted archers and refills their ammo one time. Would be equivalent to them having an extra sack of arrows attached to their mounts.

 

[Duh]

Guess we could, although simply giving them a quiver with a bigger size might indeed be the simpler solution

 

[Shapic]

I consider all this cheating. Leave as it is. Everyone can use item editor to enlarge quiver size. If he wants it. Way to make your archers shoot longer is hold your fire/fire at will commands. It's a bit pointless to let them shoot when enemy is too far.
Still, since I play on easy damage settings, and melee/lancer never been in such situation. I kill them faster
Omg, endless javelins flying around me would be hellish.

 

[Ikaguia]

you could make something like this:
while in the battle, you could look to your horse(or an unused horse) and hit "r" button to reload your quiver
you could do this a certain number of times for each horse(could be based on horse weight)