Ranged Bombard Rework Project

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I am not talking about hill plots. Archers can hit people behind the wall by shooting arrows up so that come down on the heads of the defender whereas rifles can't even when there is only the wall between the two sides of the combat.

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They're no better at hitting defenders with roofs over their heads though. Should we thus be making a tag to differentiate city bombard defenses to having potentially more defense against a direct shot rather than an arched shot?

Or can the difference be considered fairly negligible considering that a rifle will also often puncture THROUGH the barrier you've put between you and your foes unless said barrier is very strong. Can we presume that the cover that is found can be equally sufficient/insufficient for differing reasons?

As people run for cover they can be struck by direct fire. Anyone manning a wall can still be hit when they turn to fire back. If the bullets are coming from a distance you might not realize the shot is coming or that there's really as much threat as there is and may not be taking cover in an effective manner. And bullets don't give a lot of time to react so are you to spend the whole day huddled behind the battlements?

My point being that if you know arrows are coming in, you'll seek cover under something whereas if you know a round of bullets are being fired at you you'll dive to put something solid in front of you. I consider both scenarios pretty equivalent. Arrows give you time to react BECAUSE of the arching - you can see them coming before they arrive. And nobody in the arching unit is really taking any effort to aim either so it's got to rely entirely on covering a particular area targeted (hopefully WELL targeted) by the captain.

There's strengths and weaknesses to both approaches but one does not preclude the capability of the other to take place.

How do you get the Rain of Arrows/Rain of Bolts promotions? Are there other promos that improve RA accuracy (for Archers combat class)?

With Ranged Assault on, Rain of Arrows should be available immediately to any Bow Wielding UnitCombat and Rain of Bolts should be available to any Crossbow Wielding UnitCombat.

Thunderbrd said:

With Ranged Assault on, Rain of Arrows should be available immediately to any Bow Wielding UnitCombat and Rain of Bolts should be available to any Crossbow Wielding UnitCombat.

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"Ranged Bombardment" is on in the BUG options (I suppose that's what you mean). Lots of units have the ranged assault button. But my bellybows can't get Rain of Bolts.

Could it be because they pre-existed the introduction of the promo (ie. they're not new units)?

Don't know if these are significant, but I can't find it in the pedia promo tree, and the promo in the pedia doesn't show any combat classes that it's available to.

Yudishtira said:

"Ranged Bombardment" is on in the BUG options (I suppose that's what you mean). Lots of units have the ranged assault button. But my bellybows can't get Rain of Bolts.

Could it be because they pre-existed the introduction of the promo (ie. they're not new units)?

Don't know if these are significant, but I can't find it in the pedia promo tree, and the promo in the pedia doesn't show any combat classes that it's available to.

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I think you called it correctly. I just ran a test and a new introduced bellybowman from world builder with plenty of xp has immediate access to rain of bolts. I checked every detail in the xml. It all looks straight BUT it also reveals:

The promotion has a prerequisite that the unit not only have a qualifying unitcombat but it also requires the unit have a basic accuracy value in total as well.

A bellybowmen introduced into the game before the system went in place would not have gotten any accuracy from its base unitcombat as it's only when the unit picks up the unitcombat (usually at the time its trained from the city) will it pick up the unitcombat's values - there's no recalc method in place (yet) to get them to refigure changes that have been made since.

It's BASE values will update as the final calculation draws directly on those unit definitions (it doesn't for Unitcombats and promos so as to greatly speed up getting the final calculations on units - when added to the unit the value is stored as an 'extra' value for the unit.)

However, the Bellybowman is by far the earliest type of heavy crossbow unit. Therefore it does not supplement it's unitcombat with any further accuracy of its own - so the unit itself doesn't have any base value as it's intended to derive it all from the unitcombat (that which is common between all heavy crossbowmen.)

Therefore, a Bellybowman that was in the game before the changes were added to the assets would forever be bound to no accuracy value and would thus not be able to take the rain of bolts promos as they require the unit to have some.

IF you are playing on Size Matters, we do now have a proxy recalc method. Split the unit and re-merge it and you'll reset everything as it will be a new unit that's reformed and that will pick up all new unitcombat values and shed removed unitcombat values.

I've been meaning to eventually generate a unit recalculation process (the size matters proxy method could have it's issues at a clean sweep level so I shouldn't use this method of destroying and rebuilding the unit to achieve it.) It's just one of those things that's a major MAJOR pain in the butt to generate, would take a very long time to run the process, and has a low 'wow' factor in achieving it.



I WAS able to find rain of bolts in the pedia but promos don't display their prereqs there in text and the 'available to' section has yet to be fully updated to adapt to accesses and denials based on those established by promotionlines.

Just got back to looking at C2C from a while ago and range bombardment for small arms makes no sense to me. Keep in mind that the game has to straddle all ages of humanity but if you look at gunpowder weapons, from musket to modern assault rifle, at no time when facing similar small arms was there ever a free attack where the participants were not in mortal danger of getting shot themselves; that role has always been the domain of artillery.

I can understand bows getting this skill in the smaller scale conflicts of their eras, but once the powder and shot genie was let out of the bottle, no footmen were safe.


Cheers!
-Liquidated