How to render archers more attractive?

Qgqqq, they are Archers, not marchers. Axemen would be marchers

I don't mind an initial no-tech-required Training Yard that allows Archers/Axemen/Horsemen.

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My idea for archers is probably as thus

Civ Traits

Dexterity (ljos civ trait)

free Mobility1 and Woodsman1 promos to Archer units

Sinister (svart civ trait)

free Flanking 1 and Drill 1 promos to Recon Units


Buildings

Palisade: +10% defense, Walls: +40% defense

Promotions

Flaming Arrows (enchantment 2): +1 fire damage, +50% city attack

UnitCombatchanges

Archery Unitcombat: Access to Shock 1-2, Formation 1 only, Cover 1-2.


Units

Archer

4 str, 1 move. 20% withdrawal, access to flanking.

25% vs melee, -25% city attack, +25% city defense

free 'Defensive' promotion.

targets Melee first in combat


Longbow

7 str, 1 move. 20% withdrawal, 30% max collateral, 3 max units affected

+1 first strike, +25% defense in hills, -25% city attack

free defensive promotion


Firebow

5 str +1 fire damage, 1 move. 20% withdrawal.

+1 first strike, +25% defense in hills

free defensive promotion, flaming arrows promotion (+1 additional fire damage), fire2 promotion\

--> firebow would start 5 +2 fire, while max Longbow would be 7 +1 fire

--> firebow would have +50% attack vs cities, lacking the same city attack penalty as the longbow, yet also lacking its natural collateral. Instead FB collateral comes from its fireballs.


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then Axemen would have +20% city attack, and Champions would have +10% city attack

Melee units could only gain Cover1, but could get Formation 1-2.

*** was thinking of giving Archery Unitcombat a special version of Formation1 that requires combat 2, as formation 1 does currently.

And! giving normal formation 1 a boost by only requiring combat 1. That way, melee have access to formation1 earlier than archers do, in addition to being the only line with access to Formation 2.


**Note: Archers can attack melee first in combat outside cities, but longbows cannot. Why? The longbow, with its collateral, is already a strong enough contender, not to mention having 1 extra strength than a champ assuming no metals. In Civ4 (and FFH) 1 extra strength can be huge ... maybe not as huge as raw numbers, but still a pretty big deal. Having access to 7 str while being cheaper than a ranger (aka same cost as a champion) can be quite significant.

Crossbows would remain unchanged except for their free Defensive Promotion.

Marksmen wouldn't get the free defensive promo (will only get that if upgraded from archer rather than assassin) but will gain 2 natural movement instead of 1, and will have a requirement of only level4, rather than level6.

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Stables: +2 mounted exp +1 trade route @HBR. Archery Range: +2 archer exp +10% defense @Archery. Barracks: +2 melee exp +10% healing rate @Bronzeworking.

These buildings would be required for the t3 and t4 units of their respective lines.

Training Yard: +1 happy w/ Nationhood, requires no tech.

allows the building of Axeman, Horseman, and Archer. (once you get their proper techs).

A specialized city can still get the respective building (Stable/Range/Barracks) if they want +2 exp for that particular unit type. These specialized buildings therefore come at the same tech that enables the t2 unit, even though they are only required for the following t3 unit and beyond.

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additionally catapult cost should be lowered to 60 or at least 75. (imho)

Warriors can upgrade into Archers, Axemen, and Rangers. In this way you can get a Ranger with March more easily than using a disciple of leaves.

In this way, with proper tech investment, your early game could be switching back and forth between the three 'martial' disciplines. Would imho make the early-game combat more streamlined and interesting.

generally speaking, archers would beat melee, melee would beat horses, and horses would beat archers. However, combine the boost to walls with the defensive promo, and archers would pretty much hold a walled city against anything. Walled cities would need Seige + Melee to take, at least early game. An alternate strategy would be massed mounted units with flanking promos.

In my opinion this would only serve to encourage mixed unit tactics ... at least for the nations that are in a defensive or losing position. I would consider this an improvement upon the original game.

Relax that's nothing to do with the ai (which does suck...) that's to do with the fact that you never need defences in unexposed cities (though I did notice that the hippus in our sg were far to forgiving of exposed workers/cities - there should be something where if they have greater then 70% odds to ease a city with non valuable units they take it...)

tks Tasunke for your ideas.. neat one too.

I've copied/linked yours and Terkhen's in the 1st post.

I'll have to think a bit.

oh.. and somehow, I'm sure the only way to see which version is really improving the game in terms of appeal for the ranged line would be to mod them and play-test.

oh, by the way, I would give elven archers the woodmen 2 promotion. (so they can take woodman 1 to improve it again... even if, for special reasons, they didn't go FoL)

An interesting post, Tasunke. I have updated my proposal a bit taking into account some of your points. Since I would prefer to avoid big changes, I'm trying to not go very deep with my proposed changes. With "Defensive" promotion, do you mean Homeland?

Updated proposal:

Calavente said:

oh.. and somehow, I'm sure the only way to see which version is really improving the game in terms of appeal for the ranged line would be to mod them and play-test.

Click to expand...

I plan to implement this in some way for ExtraModMod, although not soon and the details are up to discussion until then. I would not mind creating a version for vanilla More Naval AI too (it would only require me to develop it against MNAI and then do a trivial merge), although given that my proposal assumes EitB changes it may not work that well with MNAI.

nope, he doesn't mean "defensive", but "defender"
it's a promotion that doubles fortification bonus:
the units that "fortify" get +10%/turn until they have +50%defense instead of the +5%/turn until 25%

Can you exempt heroes from the promotion limitation?

It has been a while since I've played FfH2 or any of it mods, but this is my experience from the base FfH2 game.

Archers were always meant to be the "city" defenders. Melee units technically could work better, but those who go on the attack tend to have the bonus vs melee units more often than the "Cover" promotions.

Now, all things being equal, if you rule out all possible promotions and weapons upgrades, archers were competitive with melee and horse units (of the same tier) on their basic bonus of city and hill defense. But they were never meant to be base attack units.

When you start working in promotions, you can making an "attacking" archer, but they will always be situational; Foresty promotions for greater attack/defense on forests, guerilla promotions, etc. They will never be the best to attack cities, but they are good for an offensive defense.

I do agree with giving them a few of the flanking promotions to make them "skirmishers". But again, this should be by experience gained, item promotions (MoM has these), or even by building if necessary. It should never be a base bonus for the unit-class, but they should have access to these promotions if you want a skirmisher.

I also have my archer carry the medic promotion to help heal a stack. This way, my attackers focus on promotions to defeat other units. My archers take defensive promotions and the medic promotions to help them recover, and cover them from counter attacks. It also makes me wonder why they naver get access to the guardsman promotion (great chance to defend the stack).

If archers are all you have to make due to lack of resources, yes you are at a disadvantage, but you are far from helpless.

As far as the bronze, iron, and mithril weapons are concerned; in the base game I thought tier 1 units could only have bronze weapons, tier could get iron, and tier 3 were the only ones with mithril. I could be wrong here as I am only remembering from the original FfH2 game. To me, this was balanced. So if you had 3 archers defending a city, no three other units of the same tier were going to force them out in 1 turn. In the open field, where an archer is exposed, those three other units of the same tier could destroy them, but its not a given. To me, thats a balanced function. Now, if you have 20 attackers against three archers in city, that's an imbalance of production, not unit strengths.

The only proposition I could see for more offensive archery is for archery units to have access to the flanking promotion without a pre-req. This way, they can skirmish for their experience as needed.

I'll have to play some of these newer mods just to see how they play out.

In the current game, warriors cost 25 and archers need 60 hammers plus a special building. Archers do not have access to copper, so the choice becomes a 4/4 unit that is good at defending cities and attacking, or a 3/5 unit that is really just for defense. The math is clear on that when you use abusive aristocracy.

In some of the mods, the cost problem is adjusted to obsolete warriors, but then you are given a new choice: build 5/5 attackers that can defend in a pinch, or 3/5 defenders. You already have to make attackers and the training yard, so are you also going to spend time making an extra building just to make some defenders where warriors will do?

Also keep in mind, even with the current AI improvements, you don't need to bother with defending your Towns that are not on a border.

Edit: maybe one of the changes could be to reduce axemen/swordsmen to 4/3 strength?

hmm. Now that is an interesting idea.

now sure how it'd work when compared to horsemen now ... but certainly an interesting idea. ^_^

I think the advantage archers have is from the strong scaling of the city guard promotion line. I started a different thread on this forum focusing on crossbows, and how I was having real difficulty even hurting highly promoted ones. The reason I had problems with those crossbows was because through wars with other civs, they had gotten to CG3 and possibly some drill and defensive strike promotions on top of that. I would say that for their purpose, which is city or stack defense, crossbows are great units. Situational, but good at what they do.

The problem is that for archers, bronze warriors do almost as good of a job at a significantly lower cost. Maybe the answer is to give the base archer some stronger bonuses to make them better than warriors at city defense on a cost basis. Perhaps increase the strength to 3/6, or increase the promotionless city defense bonus to 40% or something, or give them an inherent defensive strike so they are effective against big stacks as well.

archers and longbows are the real units that need a bit of tweaking, not the tier 4s I agree.

For marksmen in particular though, I feel 2 movement is appropriate, as well as making it only require level 4 (rather than level 6). -> Imho I feel marksmen require a bit of a boost, and I think this was the appropriate boost. EitB's lowering of the cost of precision does nicely as well.

As far as longbows, they just need something interesting to make them different than champions.

I feel 7 str, no weapon access, and a bit of collateral damage on the attack (as well as perhaps some withdrawal) does this nicely.

For archers however. The base unit ... this is where I feel the must substantial change is required. I still haven't fully decided if a change to the base strength is necessary or not. My proposal was 4/4 ... but at least including the withdrawal and the target-melee-first would certainly do some good. Would make them have at least *some* attack potential even if the strengths weren't changed.

If people think this is somehow a nerf (to go to 4/4) I suppose we would try out 4/5. A bit less consistent with the terms 'rebalancing', and would still require the change to dextrous (imho), but perhaps there is some merit to keeping 5 defense on the archer.

at 4/5, the archer could still have -25% city attack, making them essentially their old '3' strength when attacking a city. If 4/5, probably no reason to add a base 25% vs melee, but the target first and the withdrawal would still do nicely. Would make them primarily defensive (which perhaps some disagree with) but would still add new functionality. I feel that this would be a more moderate approach than my original suggestion.

Either way, after a series of FFA games, I am growing increasingly fond of Kietch's idea of having all 3 'martial' tiers sharing Training Yard as their base unit (tier2) building.

Therefore, I believe the next patch of my mod will at least include the building changes.

I would also suggest that the Barracks supply +2 exp to all ground units instead of just melee. I don't know if it needs the healing bit, as the herbalist already does that job?

Anyways, I am looking forward to downloading the next version of EitB!

Barracks *don't* give +xp to any units (in MNAI and EitB at least) the only building that gives xp is the command post.

Please see Tasunke's changes above.

Stables: +2 mounted exp +1 trade route @HBR. Archery Range: +2 archer exp +10% defense @Archery. Barracks: +2 melee exp +10% healing rate @Bronzeworking.

These buildings would be required for the t3 and t4 units of their respective lines.

Training Yard: +1 happy w/ Nationhood, requires no tech.

allows the building of Axeman, Horseman, and Archer. (once you get their proper techs).

A specialized city can still get the respective building (Stable/Range/Barracks) if they want +2 exp for that particular unit type. These specialized buildings therefore come at the same tech that enables the t2 unit, even though they are only required for the following t3 unit and beyond.

Click to expand...

Edit: to avoid confusion to others, I was assuming warriors were T0 units, Tasunke has labeled them as T1.

Kiech said:

Anyways, I am looking forward to downloading the next version of EitB!

Click to expand...

My mod is called ETMP

however, I regularly play both ETMP and EitB v9.

EitB v10 is in progress, however includes the Kuriotates OOS issues that More Naval AI currently has.

therefore I have sought to create a different branch of the mod, one which will become, imho, best for simultaneous play.

That is where ETMP comes in. It takes what EitB v9 is, and seek to make something out of it that is my own. This includes considering changes proposed by others, namely Thirlan and now Kietch, as well as making certain necessary changes for the format. For instance, Blind and Entangle must be changed to a promotion based spell somehow, because the current implementation is simply broken for simultaneous play


In summary, ETMP is a very fluid creation, and as such has many dangers yet also many potential in having a single creator. That being said, I am certainly open to group think, as I feel that ideas have a tendency to build off of one another. Sometimes to get a good idea you just need a little speck of sand, and it can accumulate into a large boulder of group-think. Then once you have the boulder, you sculpt it into something playable (and hopefully balanced). That is one of the reasons for play testing, to see which sculpture works best.

I certainly hope you follow both EitB and ETMP ^_^

EitB has gained quite the following at Realms Beyond, as they tend to use the mod for their 'play by e-mails.' It also uses much of the code from Tholal's More Naval AI mod. I believe v10 will have the enhanced AI that you would be familiar with from MNAI 2.41

Meanwhile v9 and ETMP use an earlier version of MNAI's AI, and therefore have a slightly weaker AI performance. The reason I use it is because it has much less OOS issues, and for me, someone that likes to have 3-6 players with a few AIs (usually) sprinkled in, OOS for me is a key issue, and something I like to minimize above all things.

--> Currently I have found out that the human Hyborem OOS doesn't occur if 'no city razing' is selected. Typically therefore for larger games I select this option, as it is more likely someone will potentially switch to Hyborem in such games.

---> My goal is to eventually alter the code so that the OOS does not occur even if city razing is still allowed. That may be awhile though .. in the meantime, I hope to make real changes I can start working on right away, such as Blind, Entangle, and *Training Yards.


*The Kietch proposal.

Kiech said:

Edit: to avoid confusion to others, I was assuming warriors were T0 units, Tasunke has labeled them as T1.

Click to expand...

I just count backwards from t4.

t4 = Knights, t3 = horsearchers, t2= horseman, t1 = scout.

t4 = phalanx, t3 = champion, t2= axeman, t1 = warrior

t4 = high priest, t3 = priest, t2 = missionary, t1 = n/a

t4 = archmage, t3 = mage, t2 = adept, t1 = n/a

Kiech said:

I would also suggest that the Barracks supply +2 exp to all ground units instead of just melee.

Click to expand...

The idea here is that whether you go Stables/ Archery Yard/ or Barracks, it is an investment into a particular line.



The real question is whether or not the specialty buildings should require a Training Yard or not. Common Progression would dictate yes .. but for something like +1 Trade routes, one is inclined to lean towards no. Since a unit can't have more than one prerequisite building (well, technically I think its possible, but rather ugly from an implementation standpoint), I would be once again inclined to think that yes, specialty buildings should require a training yard.

In some ways I suppose you could look at this as a nerf to the martial lines actually. T3 would then require the construction of two buildings rather than 1, at least considering relatively new cities in the era of the tech becoming unlocked.

Such a theoretical nerf once again puts me in the position of not placing the requirement. AKA: If someone wishes to jump straight to Horse Archers via stables, then by all means let them. The only forseeable problem with this is that players new to the mod may get trapped into building a stable and thinking they can build horsemen while not realizing that Training Yards are attached to horsemen.

If we go the route of independent buildings rather than progression, then additional documentation should be added, such as in-game help text and civilopedia entries.

I am open to suggestions for either route (TY -> the three vs TY : the three)

Yeah EitB=/= tasunkes mod.
I don't have time for more (yah werewolf!) but personally I dislike most your building changes.

I'll start my comments here :

Jennvare said:

It has been a while since I've played FfH2 or any of it mods, but this is my experience from the base FfH2 game.

Archers were always meant to be the "city" defenders. Melee units technically could work better, but those who go on the attack tend to have the bonus vs melee units more often than the "Cover" promotions.

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that is completly true. However completly ineffective. you don't choose archers as defender due to this. rangers would be better due to no counter promotion ever. so you need to make account of other boni of archers

Now, all things being equal, if you rule out all possible promotions and weapons upgrades, archers were competitive with melee and horse units (of the same tier) on their basic bonus of city and hill defense. But they were never meant to be base attack units.

When you start working in promotions, you can making an "attacking" archer, but they will always be situational; Foresty promotions for greater attack/defense on forests, guerilla promotions, etc. They will never be the best to attack cities, but they are good for an offensive defense.

Click to expand...

the problem is that in FFH you cannot rule out promotions and weapons upgrades. warriors are insane DUE to bronze and especially in vanilla FFH due to IRON weapons.
Promotions are huge. and the issue is that archers don't get much promotions as they fight few fight unless you are in dire need, they fight mainly defensive fights (less xp) with always the best odds possible (less xp)(as defender is chosen as the one with the best odds to defend.) as archers don't much less xp than melee or recon or mounted they generally can't get the promotions to attack melee; or it is by not taking promotion essential for city defense and defense in general.
further a 3str archer will never be able to scratch (in attack) a bronze axe (5str)
further a 3str archer in attack is not better than a 3str warrior... which costs much less. so to counter pillaging, you are better with warriors than with archers, so archers are not enough.

Thus while archers are "pretty good" in STATIC defense, defending your empire is not limited static defense. you need at least to counter pillaging units. If you had zone of control on archers or even only on forts, then current archers COULD be "equal" for defending as raiders WOULD have to attack them. At them moment raiders just ignore archers that can't do anything to them, then horse archers or collaterals (or basic horseman) wipe the archers into oblivion.
On paper they Might be as good as designed for their purpose … however, as an opportunity cost, they are a total loser.

I do agree with giving them a few of the flanking promotions to make them "skirmishers". But again, this should be by experience gained, item promotions (MoM has these), or even by building if necessary. It should never be a base bonus for the unit-class, but they should have access to these promotions if you want a skirmisher.

Click to expand...

I disagree. The archers needs some bonus even when un-promoted. Otherwise they don't get means to get promoted.

I also have my archer carry the medic promotion to help heal a stack. This way, my attackers focus on promotions to defeat other units. My archers take defensive promotions and the medic promotions to help them recover, and cover them from counter attacks. It also makes me wonder why they naver get access to the guardsman promotion (great chance to defend the stack).

Click to expand...

In FFH your archers can't get medic. The only medic promotion in FFH are limited to (some) disciples units and grigori medics

If archers are all you have to make due to lack of resources, yes you are at a disadvantage, but you are far from helpless.

As far as the bronze, iron, and mithril weapons are concerned; in the base game I thought tier 1 units could only have bronze weapons, tier could get iron, and tier 3 were the only ones with mithril. I could be wrong here as I am only remembering from the original FfH2 game. To me, this was balanced. So if you had 3 archers defending a city, no three other units of the same tier were going to force them out in 1 turn. In the open field, where an archer is exposed, those three other units of the same tier could destroy them, but its not a given. To me, thats a balanced function. Now, if you have 20 attackers against three archers in city, that's an imbalance of production, not unit strengths.

Click to expand...

Jennevare : you are remembering wrong:
in base FFH all melee units had access to bronze, iron and all units save warrior can get mithril weapons.
which makes str 5 !! warriors ... which is huge... especially compared to the cost in hammers.
only some modmod limited warriors to bronze and axe to iron. but those are rare bronze warriors are still pretty OP.

Further, while having only archers (no bronze nor iron) means that you are not totally helpless… (you can build warriors to counter attack and archers to defend cities) it is not enough : non-bronze warrior suck. And non-city archer suck vs horsemen.
So you wouldn't be totally hopeless as the other guy would need catapults or other collaterals to TAKE your cities, however you'll be helpless as you won't be able to do much to counter a chock or raiding parties.

The only proposition I could see for more offensive archery is for archery units to have access to the flanking promotion without a pre-req. This way, they can skirmish for their experience as needed.

I'll have to play some of these newer mods just to see how they play out.

Click to expand...

akatosh said:

I think the advantage archers have is from the strong scaling of the city guard promotion line. I started a different thread on this forum focusing on crossbows, and how I was having real difficulty even hurting highly promoted ones. The reason I had problems with those crossbows was because through wars with other civs, they had gotten to CG3 and possibly some drill and defensive strike promotions on top of that. I would say that for their purpose, which is city or stack defense, crossbows are great units. Situational, but good at what they do.

The problem is that for archers, bronze warriors do almost as good of a job at a significantly lower cost. Maybe the answer is to give the base archer some stronger bonuses to make them better than warriors at city defense on a cost basis. Perhaps increase the strength to 3/6, or increase the promotionless city defense bonus to 40% or something, or give them an inherent defensive strike so they are effective against big stacks as well.

Click to expand...

I do agree with Tas on this.
crossbows are strong. but that's because they are tierIV... thus, while having less attack than other tier IV with metal, they still have a better attack than most tier III units. so they can gain XP by attacking.
but archers and longbow cannot do that.
I disagree with increasing defense.
the issue with archers is not "city defense", they are good with it.
the issue is that they CANNOT do anything else, neither proactive defense nor zone control, nor anti-pillaging AND they don't get much xp.

Hmm, good points Calavente. So the basic issue is that archers are good at city defense but nothing else.

So then, what if we make 2 other changes:

1) give archers an attack bonus within your own cultural borders, so they are better at zone defense but warriors/axes are still needed for offensive warfare

2) give archers defensive strikes+guardsman to give them another niche as stack defenders in offensive wars?