Will the Battanians get Commoner Archers

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Battanians are in the awkward spot of specializing in Archery, yet not having a peasant archer branch in their Troop Tree

Is this fixed already? If not when can we expect such a change?

 

[ThorheimAP]

"They are masters of the longbow, the night raid, the sudden wild charge out of the woods."
Probably not, it because they do have the best archer in the game.

Sidenote: Sturgia has more forests than Battania and is less open. Which hinders their movement inside their own nation

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Hey guys I hurd you need some archers?
https://mountandblade.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Archer
Me and my friends are all over the map, just waiting to be recruited! So what if we only got 1 stack! If we run out of arrows before every other ranged unit.... you can just retreat and miss out on all the loot and troops exp..... come on you're pregidust are you?

 

[Antaeus]

Forest bandit recruitment. And once you have the right leadership traits, they'll upgrade all the way to Fians. Combined with the close proximity to Vlandian crossbows and Battania are so OP with archers that they're one of the strongest factions.

 

[Userre]

I actually agree; battanians should have a main tree archer. The issue is that if I want to play with battanian culture, I obviously want to prioritize a strong archer backline with a solid infantry frontline. The issue is that it's not particularly easy to get noble units, and even worse, it's kind of random. It's difficult if not practically impossible to force a village to start spawning them, and with wars, villages get raided and it becomes more and more difficult.

In my experience, noble units are something you get other time to supplement your main army. Over time, you might gather more and more, but it's very difficult, especially in the early game, to really build out an army with noble units as a main part of your force. Sure, with Veteran's Respect it can be done, but you'd need to join a kingdom and run an army for some time before that's even an option.

And so given my experiences, it makes a lot of sense to give battanians some mainline archer. As of now they have a weird tree anyways with two cav units and three infantry units in the fifth tier. That's a very strange fact, especially given that their cav aren't particularly powerful and they are intended to be great with bows. Some tier 5 bowmen would be nice.

And obviously I realize I can grab archers from other cultures, but many players love to play mono-culture, and so every faction should be relatively inclusive to that fact.

 

[Eadwulf Slecgwyrhta]

Battanians don't need any regular archers. They have access to good skirmisher troops. If you keep your fights in woodland you have a good advantage with this type of troop. With the woodland speed bonus, you can catch most opponents on the campaign map when chasing through the forest and dictate when you want to engage. If you get a battle in a sparse forest you just retreat and try again until you have a favourable map to engage on. You can supplement with a few forest bandits early game. By the time you get your clan to tier 3, you can get a 100+ party with about 20%-25% noble archers. You don't really need more than 20% fians in the party for an effective force.

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

Battania has a borked common troop tree that leads to all sorts of stupidity. The amount of cavalry they end up with because of it is ridiculous, and is largely responisble for their tendency to snowball. There's no lore to support the cavalry force they can muster up, so it makes absolutely no sense. They're better off losing their ****ty Battanian Horseman line. Those can be replaced with regular archers, with a bit of adjustment.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Battania has a borked common troop tree that leads to all sorts of stupidity. The amount of cavalry they end up with because of it is ridiculous, and is largely responisble for their tendency to snowball. There's no lore to support the cavalry force they can muster up, so it makes absolutely no sense. They're better off losing their ****ty Battanian Horseman line. Those can be replaced with regular archers, with a bit of adjustment.

I know, even the lords waddle all over the map without a horse.

 

[vonbalt]

The archery specialist faction doesnt have any common archers.. it makes no sense and thankfully we have tons of mods fixing this basically since day one but it should be in the vanilla game too.

 

[McDadden]

There seems to be a lot of clamoring for this one, and I think it's going to be a tough nut to crack for the devs. I know it's not easy to grab as many noble archers as it would other factions, but the fian is just so dang good that in the grand scheme I believe it balances out. If you take out a cav unit for an archer unit then that hamstrings the battanians ( which I know brings up cav in autocalc debate ) and will end up making them be the victim of the snowball. I also don't want to open up the fians are op can. I love my fians and I don't want them to change.

 

[Terco_Viejo]

Battania has a borked common troop tree that leads to all sorts of stupidity. The amount of cavalry they end up with because of it is ridiculous, and is largely responisble for their tendency to snowball. There's no lore to support the cavalry force they can muster up, so it makes absolutely no sense. They're better off losing their ****ty Battanian Horseman line. Those can be replaced with regular archers, with a bit of adjustment.

You see it as what we talked about here ([Discussion Area] Redundant Units in the Troop Trees + Noble Branch tier simplification ), it's not such a far-fetched idea.

Spoiler

I sincerely doubt they will change their troop tree. ? ? ... But hey! It'S eArLy AcCeSs

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

You see it as what we talked about here ([Discussion Area] Redundant Units in the Troop Trees + Noble Branch tier simplification ), it's not such a far-fetched idea.

Spoiler

I sincerely doubt they will change their troop tree. ? ? ... But hey! It'S eArLy AcCeSs

I mean, Sturgian Shock Troops don't exist anymore because enough complained about them, even if they were literally the greatest part of their common roster. Who knows, we might just see the Battanians get themselves some common archers.

There seems to be a lot of clamoring for this one, and I think it's going to be a tough nut to crack for the devs. I know it's not easy to grab as many noble archers as it would other factions, but the fian is just so dang good that in the grand scheme I believe it balances out. If you take out a cav unit for an archer unit then that hamstrings the battanians ( which I know brings up cav in autocalc debate ) and will end up making them be the victim of the snowball. I also don't want to open up the fians are op can. I love my fians and I don't want them to change.

Its the opposite if anything. Given the chance, Battania basically snowballs hard thanks to their ability to spam hordes of mediocre cavalry that autocalc treats as any other cavalry.

Again, it looks completely stupid and it can't actually be the dev's intent for Battania to have so many cavalry in their armies. Especially to fight them too.

I don't care about the fians and whether they stay or go with the existence of regular archers. There's simply not enough of them to make Battania feel anything like an archer army, period.

 

[McDadden]

@HalfMetalJacket : I do agree Battania is doing well in the build right now, but that will be fixed in their code for army composition. I also agree they shouldn't have that much cavalry. It doesn't make sense with them in mostly forests and mountainous areas. I guess my biggest question is how their normal archers would work. How would they make them different or compare to the other faction lines? What would be their gear and skills?

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

@HalfMetalJacket : I do agree Battania is doing well in the build right now, but that will be fixed in their code for army composition. I also agree they shouldn't have that much cavalry. It doesn't make sense with them in mostly forests and mountainous areas. I guess my biggest question is how their normal archers would work. How would they make them different or compare to the other faction lines? What would be their gear and skills?

You can't fix it by just changing their party comp xml alone. The AI will recruit units and thanks to the numerous nature of their cavalry on the roster, Battania will just end up zerging on them anyway.

Their normal archers wouldn't be hard to implement. Shirtless woad lads with longbows and the occasional great axe. Glass cannons that will move really fast and bully slower infantry with their speed, but will melt under enemy archer fire. A literal glass cannon unit.

 

[McDadden]

The more I've thought about this, I do believe there is a precedent in the game for giving a redundant normal troop on top of the noble line i.e khan's guard over heavy horse archer and vlandian vanguard with banner knight. I would add my concern is balancing to not make them too powerful and make other archers irrelevant. If they fixed the autoresolve issue along with some other cav fixes, I'd be all for Battania only having one cav unit.
I do wonder though. Would it be a good compromise for people if instead of adding an archer unit they instead made the wildling a better skirmisher? Instead of a polearm, give them a second stack of javelins. If you want spearmen, go with the oathsworn and use the wildlings as strickly skirmishers. This way they'd perform even better in woodland environments. It would make them the only foot soldier with two stacks of javelins.

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

The more I've thought about this, I do believe there is a precedent in the game for giving a redundant normal troop on top of the noble line i.e khan's guard over heavy horse archer and vlandian vanguard with banner knight. I would add my concern is balancing to not make them too powerful and make other archers irrelevant. If they fixed the autoresolve issue along with some other cav fixes, I'd be all for Battania only having one cav unit.
I do wonder though. Would it be a good compromise for people if instead of adding an archer unit they instead made the wildling a better skirmisher? Instead of a polearm, give them a second stack of javelins. If you want spearmen, go with the oathsworn and use the wildlings as strickly skirmishers. This way they'd perform even better in woodland environments. It would make them the only foot soldier with two stacks of javelins.

I mean, that's what I did for my mod. Helps differentiate wildlings and oathsworn better.

But for vanilla, why not two javelins wildlings AND common archers? Just having skirmishers won't do it, they are not archers for the archer faction.

 

[Yertyl]

+1
A lot of Battania's design (concept art, home terrain, faction bonus, description of the battle of Pendraic, no riding in tournaments) seems to imply that their thing is "ambush in the woods", with an emphasis on two-handed weapons and archers, and very little cavalry. Which makes sense, since trees and hills are a good natural counter to cavalry and protection for archers and non-shielded units. And it's a lot of fun playing them this way, catching enemy parties in forests due to faction bonus.
But on the other hand, two of their regular T5 units are mounted, which is more than any other faction besides the Khuzait, and archery is restricted to the noble line. And thus we have AI fielding very cavalry-heavy Battanian armies.

The more I've thought about this, I do believe there is a precedent in the game for giving a redundant normal troop on top of the noble line i.e khan's guard over heavy horse archer and vlandian vanguard with banner knight. I would add my concern is balancing to not make them too powerful and make other archers irrelevant. If they fixed the autoresolve issue along with some other cav fixes, I'd be all for Battania only having one cav unit.
I do wonder though. Would it be a good compromise for people if instead of adding an archer unit they instead made the wildling a better skirmisher? Instead of a polearm, give them a second stack of javelins. If you want spearmen, go with the oathsworn and use the wildlings as strickly skirmishers. This way they'd perform even better in woodland environments. It would make them the only foot soldier with two stacks of javelins.

Sturgians have both regular and noble melee cav as well.
Why not both? Wildling as the skirmisher, and replace the mounted skirmisher with an archer. One cavalry unit for battania is more than enough. It would IMO also fit Battania to have two unshielded infantry units, if those did not suck so hard in the current meta.

 

[Neofd10]

Personally, as much as I love the fian warriors, I would prefer to have archers in the main troop tree as bows are a very common and accessible weopon in the game (along with the fact that the majority of the bandits, who are commoners themselves, all have bows). Horses on the other hand are expensive and I would be happy to recieve Noble cavalry instead in exchange for commoner archers. This would also better reflect the cultures who the battanians are inspired by (Welsh, Scottish and Irish) as their nobles usually fought mounted- particularly the Welsh (due to Roman Influence). Infantry nobles should be saved for the nords who should be added to the game.

 

[Kyias]

The strength of the Batannians is their skirmishers. They are some of the best in the game. If you pair them with oathsworn and Falxmen, you have a very powerful and flexible infantry.

they don’t get commoner archers because of this which is perfectly fine. They are meant to be close up, throwing weapons with powerful shock troops. You have their cavalry for harassment and again, another skirmisher

they are not the English

 

[Death2Tyrants]

Battania has a borked common troop tree that leads to all sorts of stupidity. The amount of cavalry they end up with because of it is ridiculous, and is largely responisble for their tendency to snowball. There's no lore to support the cavalry force they can muster up, so it makes absolutely no sense. They're better off losing their ****ty Battanian Horseman line. Those can be replaced with regular archers, with a bit of adjustment.

If I recall, this was a result of TW choosing a simple solution for a complex problem.

In the beginning, Battanians were absolutely hammered because the autocalc (which all AI uses) gives the advantage to cavalry and they had none.

So, rather than improving the autocalc, which by all accounts is very basic and not at all what you'd expect it to be at the min, i.e. actually resembling the results of a fight that would have occurred had you joined and simply delegate immediately; it seems they've preferred to give every faction more cavalry.

At the rate we're going, perhaps it will not be too long before Sturgians get horse archers. That ought to stop the Kuzait steamroller!