I’m currently making a mod that overhauls the game to something more realistic. Trebuchets for example have 60 range and realistic accuracy (0%). There is a problem though, which is that they have a hardcoded 80% accuracy against 1x1 buildings, which really hurts gameplay. There are 2 options to solve this:
1: Hardcode trebs to multiply accuracy by 4 or 5 instead of setting it. Since in my mod they have 0% accuracy, that obviously solves the problem.
Or 2, the better option: Remove the hardcoded accuracy entirely. This doesn’t only hurt modding, but the base game aswell, as a) it makes 1x1 buildings easier to hit than 2x2 buildings, which just makes no sense and b) it makes towers even worse than they already are.
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Why should the base game change to cater a mod?
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What range do longbows have? According to what I can find, the type of trebuchet depicted in AOE 2 can expect to get a similar distance.
Lots of things have been implemented to make the game easier to mod and removing hard coded things. Seems a fairly reasonable suggestion to ask for something to be moddable that currently isn’t.
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This would make trebuchets useless.
Making the units realistic, would tear up the balance.
I remember there being a hardcoded limit in the game that restricts LoS and range to 21 tiles.
Currently Elite Longbows have 28 base range to not have as much as Ballistas. What’s important isn’t the range, but the effective range, which, if one tile ingame is 5 meters, for Trebuchets is around 60 (300 metres)
LOS is retricted to 20, yes. And? They can still attack stuff that is farther away, even if not in LOS (except for 1x1 buildings, a bug that I reported already)
I even said that it affects the base game aswell, do you even listen? It wouldn’t make Trebs useless. In the late game it would even make them better if you have a lot, since it reduces overkill. It would also make towers a bit more viable, which they aren’t in the late game except for some special cases like Britons, Koreans and especially Japanese. At least in 1v1 games, where stone runs out pretty past and is better spent for castles, towers are pretty useless.
Edit: wrong reply lol, I meant to reply to Byzantium888
so tell me - in your mod, how does anything stand a chance against archers who have insane range?
Their high inaccuracy makes them only good against large amounts of units packed together. The Knight line’s high pierce armor and speed (1.5 instead of 1.35), and the archers’ low hp (reduced by 5 or 10 each) makes Knights pretty viable, even against a large group of archers, since they need to reload pretty long (8 seconds without upgrades, might increase this later).
Edit: oh and also almost all cavalry has an attack bonus against archers
so uh, same as always.
i’m pretty sure that increasing their speed that much isn’t going to make up for the fact that you literally just over doubled the range of the elite longbow. nor is lowering hp by 5 to 10.
okay, so what’s the range on skirmishers? what about infantry? if the point of your mod is to make the game more realistic, then infantry should be much much better.
No? In the vanilla game, using archers like they should be used makes no sense, they get 100 accuracy after Thumb Ring. And even their accuracy before Thumb Ring is a joke.
Have you seen it ingame? No, but I did. It makes them incredibly strong against archers, which can’t outrun cav. Most archers die in 2 hits by anything above Cavalier, so it definitely does make up for their range. Archers weren’t used as one-unit-type army. They were used in field battles and sieges defended by either walls or other units.
Good luck getting to them though, they have 28 bloody range
yeah well that might have something to do with this being a game, which obviously means stuff is going to be different. the fact that you have health at all is testament to that.
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Skirms have the same ranged as before, though I might maybe add one (I haven’t checked out the range of throwing spears yet). About infantry, some are somewhat good against archers, most are better for raiding and fighting other melee units. The thing is that I divided archer type units into 3 groups: 1. high damage, low firerate, medium damage, 2. mediumdamage, medium firerate, and 3., you guessed it, low damage and high firerate.
The Chu Ko Nu for example has an extremely high fire rate (can’t give them secondary projectiles because that would remove the inaccuracy effect) but relatively low damage, which only makes them good against units with low pierce armor.
Then you have the second group, which is stuff like Longbows, Rattan Archers etc. They’re also best used against low armored targets, but hold up pretty well against highly armored targets too when massed.
Now to the first group, which is the Crossbow line and gunpowder units. They have a high reload time, but therefore do high damage, which makes them the only archers that are truly good against highly armored targets.
I reduced the cost of the Militia line by 5 for now, but else I didn’t make any big changes to them. I will probably buff them in the future, but right now I wanna do other stuff first.
The Spear line is currently just a straight up improvement to the Militia line, costing more, being good against all kinds of melee units and having a bonus against cav of course. (they have 1 range btw)
You can always just use siege instead. Scorpions (now “Ballistas”) are perfect against all kinds of units. And still, cav isn’t as bad against archers as you make it sound. Their speed makes is extremely easy to get to them if they aren’t protected, and even if, their high pierce armor makes them almost immune to their fire. You just have to outmass your enemy’s army. It will maybe be a bigger investment, but if you have enough you can just crush their archers so he has nothing left.
I know that this is a game, and I’m trying to stay away from unnecessary realism. I’m just making a mod that makes it a bit more fun and unique, for me at least, nothing more.
and you don’t see the issue as it stands? the fact that you have to resort to siege against archers should indicate the problem.
really? it takes 17 seconds for your currently listed knights, with husbandry, to get to elite longbows, assuming those elite longbows perform zero micro. compare that to the current 8 seconds.
whats the PA of a Paladin and whats the damage of a fully upgraded Elite Longbow?
meanwhile he’s making more archers at home which means you just took an unfavorable trade.
I think what you might be missing is that the hardcoded max LOS is 20. Even if my Knights are in my enemy Longbows’ range, they can’t shoot them until they’re in LOS.
To fight archer micro, I reduced their speed, I’ll probably reduce it even further in the future.
I don’t know about the current PA and Longbow attack, my own laptop where I have the mod is currently under repair. You can look it up yourself (just look for “-Overhaul-”), but I don’t think I updated the mod before my laptop broke, so it might have old values.
I increased the cost of archers a bit, but that doesn’t matter. Once you lose your big army defending your base in a 1v1, the game is typically over. I remember that I increased the cost of Longbows to 40 wood and gold, so roughly half a Paladin. Even if you scale that up to a realistic army size, Paladins will ALWAYS win if the Longbows are completely unprotected. If they’re protected by Pikes, mix some Pikes in your own, and maybe even add 2 Ballistas or so. Ballistas are very expensive, but can pay off pretty fast if you use them in the right moments.