Certainly, reducing ranges, even if movement distances are compromised, will not overload a flash map and other mechanics. I kind of relate to the player who has all his archer armies to the rear of another friendly army line, lending direct support to his frontline buddies as enemy approaches or engages. It is not an impossible circumstance in any event. I believe that if you change the range of missle fire in general, based on the range of archer armies, you will force archers, in particular, into more a direct role, in which the archer is a traditional military body.

fatigue is added
That what you are writing about

- player who has all his archer armies to the rear of another friendly army line

in game terms its a gangbanging,
and proper use of archers.

Trained archers or arqbalester units was specialized in completly other thing that fighting, they even dont have armours
They are for firing from distance not to direct role

Last Edited : Sunday, 2 January 2005 - 18:37

I don't have a problem with the range but mountains and forest are another thing. Ranged units should not be able to fire over these obstacles without some form of penalty. Either a 5 to 10% damage reduction for each hex that has a large fixed object in the path blocking line of sight, or have the ranged loose one hex for each hex of terrain obstacles they are firing over.

But how does the game know if you're firing over something like that? All it knows, is that the target is x squares away, and is a ranged attack. It certainly doesn't spend any CPU time working out complex LOS algorithms, trying to determine which hexes are involved in a move from point A to point B.

You have eyes and a brain to spot that easily....it doesn't

Fatigue is in the minor form of reduced BP for movement. The 'extreme' version I suggested jokingly was the idea of not being able ot fire if you fired the previous turn. After all...they need time to reload...speaking of which, maybe we should add a quiver too, an ammunition count, a building which produces ammo....a cost for the ammo, a supply train unit...
The point being, you could keep going on and on with the realism. But it would just make it more annoying, as you'd be working on just getting the logistics to even WORK, much less fight efficiently, or run your economy well.

About how archers are used 'properly'....what is considered proper use of archers depends entirely on culture and tradition. Romans barely had any archers at all, preferring their heavy legionnaires. Egyptians had chariots with archers in them, in the steppes horse archers were vital in ANY army, given that the horse was vital to their way of life.

Do we need ALL of this and more for WarOnline? HECK NO

Rather, we need ranged to meet the following:

- NOT dominate so much that melee troops are un-necessary.
- Provide a combat wing that is invaluable to medieval armies...to the extent that a army consisting of all melee is less pwerful than the same value army, with a mix of units.

These, it currently achieves. That it is probably not historically accurate, is not as important. How many 13th century demon armies do YOU know about?

Yes, I'm fully aware arbs have the shortest range here, yet - in 'Total War' at least - they have one of the longest, and so probably do historically. But to go rearranging troop types for historical accuracy, maybe even measure up an exact distance for their range and start scaling map hexes accordingly...will only confuse most players even more, and give them little in return. Odds are, the average player here knows very little about medieval history...they just wanna beat someone up

And finally, my remark about overloading the flash map was NOT about changing a range/movement value or two. It WAS about creating specialist FOO units, tying them to other units, and having an individual LOS for every single unit. And then finding EVEN MORE to throw on top later