Archery units slaughtering firearms units

[Callonia]

Yea i know its from napoleon war game, it was simply a point I wanted to make, riflemen still had to get fairly close to their targets to even shoot. And from what you can see in the pictures, those armies is pretty close xD

 

[nokmirt]

God, just stop with the excuses people. An archery unit is not going to survive combat with a regimented rifle unit. That's ludicrous and you're making yourselves sound like apologists.

They need to fix some aspects of combat. Can they take care of this in a patch?

 

[hewhoknowsall]

18th century musketmen: 50 yards effective range, <3 shots a minute
English longbowmen: 200 yards effective range, 12 shots a minute

However, musketmen did have some important advantages over archers:

Faster training time
Muskets faster to mass produce
Muskets easier to maintain
Muskets can be fired even when sick, but a longbowmen would have to be in good condition to fire a longbow
Muskets can be fired from cover
Muskets had a phycological effect
Muskets had greater penetrating power
Muskets could have a bayonet
Muskets did not consume as much energy to fire in a battle




I'm ok with 18th century line infantry having less range than longbowmen. But modern infantry and tanks? That's beyond suspension of disbelief. The entire point of his new combat system was to provide a more tactical combat system, but once they reach modern warfare they suddenly change it into a tactical combat system and scrap ranged ability for guns?

WTF?

 

[nokmirt]

Yes in the live preview, remember the trebuchet giving holy hell to the french cannon.

Again effective range of a treb is around three hundred yards. Napoleon's cannon had an effective range of up to 1440 yards. Those trebs would never have made it into firing range. Treb with a good crew could possibly throw a rock, greek fire, cow, or head every 1 minute 38 seconds, where a cannon could get 4 shots per minute. So yeah some things need addressing. I wonder if a wooden frigate has a chance against a battleship in this game. These simple things should have been addressed from the outset of developing civ 5.

 

[AgaresOaks]

It's abstraction, people. Those things are "melee" because compared to their contemporaries, they had significantly shorter range. If things were to scale up properly, you'd basically see only artillery late game because it'd outrange everything by SOOOOOOO much there'd be no reason to get anything else. (WW2 era artillery shoots at, what? 10, 20 tiles if archers get a 1 tile space? Modern artillery would be like 100 tiles?)

 

[nokmirt]

Nah, that's BS. In history, whenever well-formed, well-led firearms meet archers, archers die.

As far as the Zulu War, 15,000 British crushed 35,000 Zulus, losing about 2,000 casualties to about....wait for it...over 10,000 Zulus casualties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zulu_War

You are remebering the battle of Isandhlwana, where a column of something like 1200 British and African auxiliaries were caught with their pants down and slaughtered by 20,000 or so Zulus. But even in this battle, more than twice their number of Zulus fell.

At Rorke's Drift, less than 200 determined, fortified British troops held off thousands of Zulus, causing about a thousand casualties until the Zulus gave up and left.

There is something to your point, it's just your example that's bad...for much of the transition period between muskets and bows, bows were the tactical superior, but it takes a hell of a lot longer to train an archer to hit a target at 200m than to train a bunch of peasants to line up and pull the trigger. Plus you have the emotional factors of noise, gaping wounds, etc that count for more than you might think.

Tough to model this in game, I agree. Best way might be to minimize crossbows impact on at least riflemen and up. (Musketeers can suck it up.)

I wish I had access to the unitxml file, i would change some unit stats in this regard.

 

[Lawrie]

Yeah I think so! For me anything relating to 'range and damage' descreptancies stand out more than say crossbow men beating musketeers!

To be honest i just kind of belive that the combat values that differentiate the units do enough to reflect there differences. The exceptions are relatively rare, and history too is full of them, so I definately don't believe there should be an automatic - this is more modern it should win addition to the combat rules. Certainly fixing ranges though should be applied, though i understand that they are trying to make the units distinct in each epoch.

That is they want to simulate the effect archers as ranged units had in an arena of melee units, where as in the industrial age well... the ranged element was a 'given' rather than a distinct seperate element of warfare from mass melee.

So you gotta have the right balance to make the units of each era stand out against there normal foes rather than balance everything in proportion to every unit of every era.

 

[hewhoknowsall]

It's abstraction, people. Those things are "melee" because compared to their contemporaries, they had significantly shorter range. If things were to scale up properly, you'd basically see only artillery late game because it'd outrange everything by SOOOOOOO much there'd be no reason to get anything else. (WW2 era artillery shoots at, what? 10, 20 tiles if archers get a 1 tile space? Modern artillery would be like 100 tiles?)

Problem:

1. What if infantry and archers coexist in a civ game? Your idea is that the combat ranges scale up abstractly, but what if units from 2 eras coexist?

2. Why do 18th century cannon units outrange tanks that have longer barrels, more advanced ballistics design and better targeting systems? Neither can indirect fire that well?

3. Why do longbowmen outrange modern artillery?

4. Gameplay wise an archer could outrange and fire a at a tank from across a mountain and eventually destroy it.

5. How do longbowmen fire at jet fighters?

 

[the343danny]

A decent solution is to give gunpowder units the ability to fire from the same range as an archer, but have it not be able to shoot over trees, units, hills, or mountains, no matter their promotion. Also maybe it will be good to make them need to be right next to cities like at the moment to attack them.

 

[gonzo562]

are ya firearm units getting destroyed inside the enemy territories.

Their couple policies that buff units when fighting within your territory.

 

[Peng Qi]

They gotta release a ranged gunpowder unit in a patch.

Or make archery units upgrade to cannons or something. Or just make a "fast cannon" style unit that archers upgrade into. Some kind of light mortar with no setup time.

 

[which dereri]

I don't care if it's realistic as long as it plays well. Musketmen feel strong and cheap to me and you can get them really early. Why would they make them dominate any civ that is a little behind?

 

[hewhoknowsall]

I don't care if it's realistic as long as it plays well. Musketmen feel strong and cheap to me and you can get them really early. Why would they make them dominate any civ that is a little behind?

Strawman? Musketmen historically were weaker one vs one against longbowmen, but mech infantry should be able to shrug off 1000 longbow arrows without penetrating it's armor.

 

[westward]

History is the inspiration for this game, not the shackles that bind it.

Mounted units should be using their superior movement to flank and kill crossbowmen.

Superior tech should give you an edge, but it shouldn't make you invincible. If you're running your technologically superior units blindly into ranged fire without first scouting or clearing the way, maybe you deserve to lose?

 

[Nague]

ok, i had to register for this...stop trying to justify this.

The reason archers have range over the riflemen and following units is simply that you cant make them ranged because then ALL units in the later game would be ranged.
Its simply a change of scope, the archery ranges are now melee and the new extreme range artilleries take the ranged spot.

The devs clearly overlooked the consequences during the direct transition and have to modify the archers versus units of eras where the combat ranges changed.

 

[Cu Chulainn]

How's this for an idea?

Give gunpowder infantry units Return Fire ability. They would still have no ranged ability of their own, but when fired upon by a ranged unit would return fire. Give muskets range 1 for this ability and range 2 for rifles. Give modern artillery (cannon and better) immunity from these counter attacks.

 

[hewhoknowsall]

How's this for an idea?

Give gunpowder infantry units Return Fire ability. They would still have no ranged ability of their own, but when fired upon by a ranged unit would return fire. Give muskets range 1 for this ability and range 2 for rifles. Give modern artillery (cannon and better) immunity from counter attacks.

Still problematic;

Tanks and infanty still outrange cannons. Longowmen have a range of 3, yet tanks and infanty outrange them by even more. Therefore, you'd have tank and I gantry having a counter range of 3 hexes, which would make them able to counter long ranged modern artillery, which is NOT realistic.

 

[Cu Chulainn]

Still problematic;

Tanks and infanty still outrange cannons. Longowmen have a range of 3, yet tanks and infanty outrange them by even more. Therefore, you'd have tank and I gantry having a counter range of 3 hexes, which would make them able to counter long ranged modern artillery, which is NOT realistic.

Well, the Longbow range of 3 really needs to go in favor of some other bonus, but separate issue, I guess. Under this idea, artillery would be immune to counter by units of the same or previous era.

 

[Revoran]

I'm ok with 18th century line infantry having less range than longbowmen. But modern infantry and tanks? That's beyond suspension of disbelief.
WTF?

Agreed, for musketmen, (a little less for minutemen and musketeers because they are UU's) it's a little bit believable (as long as the archer gets in first). Riflemen is pushing it - and for WWI Infantry and Paratroopers/Mech Infantry it is no longer believable.

 

[AgaresOaks]

Problem:

1. What if infantry and archers coexist in a civ game? Your idea is that the combat ranges scale up abstractly, but what if units from 2 eras coexist?

2. Why do 18th century cannon units outrange tanks that have longer barrels, more advanced ballistics design and better targeting systems? Neither can indirect fire that well?

3. Why do longbowmen outrange modern artillery?

4. Gameplay wise an archer could outrange and fire a at a tank from across a mountain and eventually destroy it.

5. How do longbowmen fire at jet fighters?

Great. Let's just have 100 range artillery and 50 move tanks so things scale properly, then. Oh wait.

2-5 are basically completely irrelevant because your industrial/modern era units will utterly crush bowmen of any type. Is it unrealistic? Sure. Does it have any impact on gameplay? *crickets* Hell, in context you're probably taking several YEARS worth of arrows on your giant death robot while doing absolutely squat before it gets some scratches on it.

1's basically only relevant for rifling. Could that use some rebalancing? Probably, riflemen should be markedly more competitive than archers. For basically everyone else, you're lucky to make a dent with any reasonable number of forces. And hell, you need to be like 3:1 bows to be competitive against rifles, and that's starting to look kinda competitive in real life too.