Max LOS only decides what the unit can see. It can still attack another unit that’s within sight of you beyond it’s own max sight range.
There’s absolutely no reason you’d clump up archers to allow cavalry to clean it up all at once, when it’s got 28 range. You’d spread it out, practically as much as you can, to increase the amount of both map coverage and the enemy damage lost to repositioning. You could easily have each of your chunks of archers 8+ tiles apart and have them in chunks of ~7 and still have the firing power of 60 units.
The AI would be unkillable, simply because it doesn’t use formations at all. It’d properly spread out every single archer individually, making siege pointless, and making assaulting “the archers” an impossibility given its preference for target micro.
What you’re saying might make sense in theory, but in practice it doesn’t. Trust me, I tested the mod, I know what the ai is good and bad at with my mod, and one particular thing it’s bad at is archers because it never seems to use attack move and just walks its archers right into your units. Even when it does spread out its units, Knights have high enough PA so it doesn’t matter. Longbows do like 15 damage per shot (not an accurate number, just what I’m imagining in my head right now from past tests), which at first might sound much, but you also have to see that 1. their reload time is high and 2. they are highly inaccurate, which means the damage is spread across multiple units, resulting in those units still being able to deal damage.
You’re right, it micros every unit individually, and you never reprogrammed the AI to recognize all the changes. It’s trying to play AOE 2, not whatever mod you created. It doesn’t realize it’s archers has 28 range. If it did, it wouldn’t run it’s units in to die expecting something different.
It’s the exact same to asserting that Supremacy spam in 256 tech mod isn’t very good because you let the AI play Spanish and they didn’t beat you with it. Literally the exact same. You beat a chess neural net AI playing Reversi. Congrats. Means absolutely nothing.
I can think of one idea to get around this fixed accuracy for trebuchets. Make another unit that has the same graphics etc. as the trebuchet and give it the relevant stats. One may run into problems with packing/unpacking behaviour. I don’t know how that is implemented in-game and have no idea how to replicate this for another unit.
I would like to try your mod
If Longbows have 28 range in your mod, wouldn’t Mangudais have an insane 40+ range then, for the sake of historical accuracy?
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No it’s not the exact same. Also, the AI doesn’t run its units into the enemy so far because it thinks the archers on;t have like 5 base range, but because it has a problem. It doesn’t walk its archers up to the enemy until they’re in range in vanilla, but instead it walks them into the enemy. RIGHT INTO them.
Why? What kind of bows do they have?
Just search for “-Overhaul-”. Also download the graphics mod for string changes. It’s not fully updated yet though, I’m currently working on a rather big rework.
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I would have to give them another class, which would, as you said, give me problems with packing and unpacking. My Stationary Trebuchet unit which I gave class 13 doesn’t have this hardcoded accuracy.
Longbows are called long not because they have a long range, but because the bow itself is long. Seemed like the composite bows the Mongols used were able to reach more than 500 meters.
Seemed like the English Longbows were able to only reach below 350 meters.
That’s really impressive. Problems is though that I also have to think about what you expect from the game. With Longbowmen for example you obviously expect them to have high range, while that doesn’t really make sense for a cavalry archer. I mean I could theoretically give them even more range than Longbowmen, but that would change the way they’re played and how they were used in real history. Obviously the bow was used as a long range weapon, but it’s not only the weapon that’s important, but also the unit that uses it. Mangudai are cav archers, and giving them that high range doesn’t make sense for how they’re supposed to be played. Though I could definitely add some kind of asian Longbowman variant that has even more range than the English one. Thanks for the idea!
but if the goal is realism, “how they are supposed to be played” is what is based on what they really did.
Yeah, and I highly doubt they would use it the same way British Longbowmen did. For that they would probably get off their horse and shoot from there. And as I already said, I’m trying to avoid unnecessary realism. It’s still a game. I don’t want the game to be fully realistic. I know my goals, you don’t.
true, but the point is, if they had range, they should have that range, it makes them even more lethal.
Like I said, it would change both how they’re supposed to be played and how they were used in real life. Sure, sometimes they probably did use their bows as longbows on horseback, but most of the time they would probably get off their horse.
Sadly I can’t even increase their projectile’s speed because I use the same projectile for almost every arrow-shooting unit and building.
Well it’s kind of confusing, you want trebs that miss small buildings all the time, despite them being intended to hit those, in the name of realism but then don’t want longbow mangudai in the name of gameplay.
Then give them tons of range but give them a looooong frame delay to represent the dismounting 11