So I watched this:
Fully garrisoned TC with 15 villagers, shooting 10 arrows, at skirmishers walking two tiles away. The volley does 3 damage, meaning that 3 of the 10 arrows hit the wrong skirmisher, doing half damage, and the other 7 arrows missed, or one hit its target for full damage and a 2nd hit another for half damage.
Are TCs really worse at hitting targets in DE than in AoC? I know that DE added extra locations from which TCs can shoot arrows.
That might be a reason, if these new locations are somehow worse. It’s also possible that arrows from TCs are not spawning at the correct elevation (the bug that caused players on Mountain Pass with super-high elevation to accidentally kill boar with TC), possibly related to TCs having sub-structures, which also causes their repair cost to be 4x the usual amount.
But maybe more importantly: the spawn point for the arrows that miss in this video is very high up. This might not be due to an elevation bug.
Arrows firing down at a steep angle definitely has one effect: they don’t travel as far before hitting the ground. If an arrow at long range misses, it could travel several meters before hitting the ground. But these arrows hit almost at the feet of their target.
I had started writing this thinking that maybe collisions between projectile and targets are only checked ‘sideways’, but this is contradicted by the change to blast damage to have full damage in the width of the projectile, due to the ‘bombard cannons only kill scorpions that are moving towards the shot’ bug. But it’s still deceptive with arrows, because they look thin and long, but the game doesn’t care about their graphic.
So we look at another explanation: the first arrow in the volley at 2:56:00 in the video 10560.21, and going frame-by-frame it appears to hit a skirmisher, doing damage, at 10560.46. The last arrow hits the ground at 10560.79. The next volley spawns at a different location, with the first arrow appearing at 10561.68, and the last arrow appearing to hit the skirmishers at 10562.2, meaning it would have reached the ground a bit later.
Another volley starts at 10552.62, first arrow hits skirmisher at 10553.02, last arrow hits at 10553.25, from ~5 tiles away. Another volley from same spawn location: arrow appears at 10555.58, first hits at 10555.94, last hits at 10556.21.
So, using video times (game times 1.7x larger) arrow at close range took 0.25 sec to hit, arrow at long range took 0.4 sec to hit, or from medium range (4 tiles away) 0.36 sec to hit.
This does not support the hypothesis that the arrows from a TC have a predetermined downward velocity, giving close targets a lot of time to move out of the way, but it does seem that their vertical velocity at a close target is lower than their horizontal velocity at a distant target: the arrows seem much more closely spaced when falling on a nearby target.
So maybe the change TCs need is not to change the spawn points of arrows (maybe slightly decrease their heights); not to change the projectile width or allow projectiles to have a length that differs from their width, for the purpose of collision; but simply to change how the Z-dimension, height, affects the calculated velocity of projectiles, by making Z less important (compressing Z) and so causing vertically-fired projectiles to be faster.
Also, I deleted what I had written on this because it didn’t support a hypothesis, but the shadows from projectiles match their 2D position, without regard to their height, so trebuchet projectiles have a shadow that travels in a straight line towards their target. This makes it possible to dodge them. Very few players realize this.
Did you know that the shadows from trebuchet projectiles travel in straight lines on the ground?
- Yes
- No