Bowmen and crossbowmen balance

[Bo_]

Archers are imba now, kam fix this please.

[pawel95]

Archers are imba now, kam fix this please.

That is the best post in that topic here though...

[Bo_]

Yes very constructive feedback.

[pawel95]

However it´s a good pusher to show that this problem still exists

[Shadaoe]

Like anybody forgot

[pawel95]

Just found a new movie from the german player Könich. I don´t want to make here any discussion anymore with the community, but I was still shocked that 3 swords still survived vs that huge group of xbows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcKFyp216hI

It´s a movie about the ?op? Strength of swordmen in the current rc. Knights killed all swordmen with one killed knight, while swordmen vs scouts the result has a big difference.
Same comparision with Xbows/Bowmen(?Why xbows aren´t made?)

[EDMatt]

Will something be done to xbow directly or indirectly ? regardless of if it might include having to add a unit to somehow counter a bowman (rock-paper-scissors style) or not. (rogue's being very good vs bowmen and being able to somehow train them..who knows).

As it is now the game desperately needs more units in the game as it just is a broken game atm when played at the highest level ;S.. xbows being useless doesnt help.

[Lewin]

Previously bowmen were unused and everybody used crossbowmen. Then we made some balance changes to make bowmen better (shorter reload times) and now only bowmen are used. So if we change the reload times back to something closer to the original value then it should make bowmen be used less and crossbowmen be used more. Crossbowmen have not been changed in these balance changes, only bowmen were changed.

I'll make this balance change to bowmen in the nightly build, remind me if I forget.

[Bludmaster]

Thats not correct because you changed bowmen - everything was ok - farm patch - leather change - mass bowmen - problem .. and you took shoot and go back from xbow and its big change aswell (if we are talking about top games as Matt said )

[Lewin]

Shoot and go back on crossbowmen was allowing them to fire faster than they normally could (now we only delay them as long as it takes them to reload if they were standing still, which is slightly longer than the time it takes them to walk one tile so they don't fire as soon as they stop walking like bowmen do). So the previous balance was relying on an exploit giving crossbowmen a faster rate of fire than normal.

So it seems like we might need to make a bigger change to the crossbowmen/bowmen balance, because it was affected by three things:
1. Crossbowmen are now less powerful due to exploit being fixed
2. Bowmen are now easier to train because farms are slightly more efficient
3. Bowmen were given a shorter reload time because there used to be a balance problem where only crossbowmen were used

For a start we can set bowmen's reload time back to what it was before r5503, that's already quite a big change. If that still doesn't make crossbowmen useful we can look at further changes to bowmen or crossbowmen.

[Bludmaster]

Well in my opinion making bows weaker will not help because this problem is not just about balance of these 2 units but about balance of whole fighting in kam. Bows are not too strong as it is now only xbows are too weak in comparison to other iron units.

[The Dark Lord]

I thought we concluded from discussions ages ago that crossbowmen need a little boost (against shielded units? for example make their bolts more 'piercing'?).

[EDMatt]

Shoot and go back on crossbowmen was allowing them to fire faster than they normally could (now we only delay them as long as it takes them to reload if they were standing still, which is slightly longer than the time it takes them to walk one tile so they don't fire as soon as they stop walking like bowmen do). So the previous balance was relying on an exploit giving crossbowmen a faster rate of fire than normal.

So it seems like we might need to make a bigger change to the crossbowmen/bowmen balance, because it was affected by three things:
1. Crossbowmen are now less powerful due to exploit being fixed
2. Bowmen are now easier to train because farms are slightly more efficient
3. Bowmen were given a shorter reload time because there used to be a balance problem where only crossbowmen were used

For a start we can set bowmen's reload time back to what it was before r5503, that's already quite a big change. If that still doesn't make crossbowmen useful we can look at further changes to bowmen or crossbowmen.

May I make a prediction : Swords will become a bigger priority after peacetime .
Let me explain:
Bowmen are spammed alot after peacetime because of the fact that a leather unit (that will also contribute and contributes towards your food/lategame) is a great counter as of now to sword fighters in mass, and it is rather easy to spam(imo leather unit shouldn't be so effective against iron, its wrong!).
If you reduce the speed of shot of a bowman, it will just mean that swords will become even more important than they are now (better tanks, more survive-ability for a period of time, lets not talk about knights that's another story).
Now the dilemma.. what do you recruit after peacetime ? sword or xbow? To be honest I won't ever recruit xbow as it is and even if bowmen's attack speed was reduced alittle bit. I would still prefer to have a unit that can both tank defensively and offensively unless xbows had a pushing power greater than that of a bowman (faster attack speed which would make xbows kind of imbalanced).

If you ever read any of my previous topics you would have already read some of my ideas and opinion about what needs to be done (more units put forward). otherwise I can't really advice on any other things you can do here, options are limited with only 2 types of range , so balancing this is a nightmare.
But what I can give you is my opinion and my experienced guess and suggestions on this topic, and I don't think that just this quite a change(reduction of bowmen alone) will bring a balance of some sort.

That's my take on it!

[EDMatt]

Well in my opinion making bows weaker will not help because this problem is not just about balance of these 2 units but about balance of whole fighting in kam. Bows are not too strong as it is now only xbows are too weak in comparison to other iron units.

If they are not too good, why does bowmen take up 70% of the battlefield after piece time army on avarage give or take?

Typical army after peacetime : 45 bow men
25-30 swords
Depending on the map.

[Romek]

Well in my opinion making bows weaker will not help because this problem is not just about balance of these 2 units but about balance of whole fighting in kam. Bows are not too strong as it is now only xbows are too weak in comparison to other iron units.

If they are not too good, why does bowmen take up 70% of the battlefield after piece time army on avarage give or take?

Typical army after peacetime : 45 bow men
25-30 swords
Depending on the map.

Because they are easy to spam kolego
Bowmans are only good in large groups - on some maps it is realy hard to place that big spam of bowman in logic place especialy when the map is open. According to what we can see now I will say that typical PT army is 25-35 swords(5-10 horses) and 25-40 bowmans - Golden Cliffs standards. Mass bowmans are not working now because people realized that it is so easy to counter them with horses also when you have only swords + bows that means your army is realy slow and sometimes you cant even go with logic formation to help your ally when someone decide to rush him. In most of my games almost everyone is making stable right now and that horses can really rape bows. Everyone knows (maybe not koczis ) how to stop horses - you need pikes/lances not bows.
So I want to say again that MASS BOWMANS SPAM IS NOT WORKING.

For me balance in this game is almost perfect right now. The only thing what you guys need to fix is one unit - xbow(they need a little more accuracy or attack speed).