Archers: Gameplay Tips
All of the attacks (melee or ranged) hit 100 percent of the time except when the attacker is suffering from a debuff (e.g. blinded). Then the defender rolls for resistances to see if the damage is reduced to 25%, which means it was a glancing hit.
Ranged weapons have a stat called Accuracy. The range of a weapon is its accuracy X 2. It will hit for its normal damage up to its accuracy in meters and then damage will start gradually dropping off. Beyond accuracy x2 your archer will simply not shoot.
Ranged attacks are effected by line of sight. You can’t shoot through your own people for instance.
And last but not least as mentioned before arrows are deflected by shields as long as the person bearing the shield has at least 1 shield point left. Deflected means the attack gets blocked without any damage and loss of shield points.
There are multiple ways of dealing with archers. You can rush them and get in their melee range for instance. Since shooting at another enemy will trigger an attack of opportunity that will lock them up. Or you can advance at them with your princeps protecting your light infantry. Or you can keep your distance since their damage would be minuscule beyond effective range.
Ranged (or melee) attacks having a chance of missing is a game convention (comes from D&D). A combat system in a game is an abstraction and different designers abstract different things. We emphasized the chance to defend instead of the chance to attack for several reasons. But if you want a reason rooted in realism, here’s one we got from our HEMA advisor:
We assume the characters in this game are proficient at using their weapons. At this relatively short combat range an actual archer would hit a melon sized target 100% of the time. As the distance increases a human target would still be tagged 100% of the time but not with that precision.
The damage drop off simply simulates the archer’s inability to hit a vital body part. And beyond that our archers simply will NOT shoot.
the most anoying thing about archers is the availability of fire arrows. a fire arrow can be deflected and still set you on fire. that is absolutely cancer in a long fight because burned health cant be healed without a dedicated medic.
The game was good, not insanely hard for the difficulty I pick. I pick Pompeii hard :). It’s about positioning, except there seem to be no crouching to dodge missile attack :D, beside running behind cover or shield.
The warehouse mission was easy, the fight along the mountain pass make me fight more than on the warehouse. The main warehouse, I flank them from the left so there was only 1 archer to deal with at the first few turn, the other archer didn’t bother me until later, I suck so I got 2 guy injured from sniper :D. They make it a little bit easier to kill just 6 guards instead of have to kill everyone in there, then that would be bad as the entrance to the top warehouse have like 6 guards alone there + 2 on the right side.
First time i did the warehouse mission i had a rough time entering through the front. The easiest way to deal with this mission is to go around the warehouse close to the beach and initiate combat from that position.
From then onwards you should rush everyone into the warehouse with the Greek fire and block the front door with a shield character. Once all your characters are inside move the principes further inside so you can flank whatever enemies that enter, and this way the archers won’t be able to perform well against you. (nobody got downed on hard)
I want to emphasise the importance of elevation as well. Height confers a very substantial bonus to the range of archers. Enemy archers have no more range than your own archers, so always think about placing your archers on high ground relative to their target – and if the combat situation places you far beneath enemy archers (as it often does when you’re attacking a well-defended position), you should position your units carefully and use cover to negate that advantage.
Many good tips here that can help take down archers. I will give you another one: Use cover. Archers cant hit anyone in cover. They need line of sigh also, so anything you can get between you and the archer works.
I play on hard and havent had any issues with archers or anything else yet when I went through the demo, but I do rush quite quickly.