Just like how you can say ranged infantry can be moved to the flank, I can make the argument that your cavalry or generals could have circled around the infantry and hit the enemy ranged units already to prevent any prolonged firing at our ranged units to matter. Once you get into how a battle is fought so many factors change. I totally agree with that but I was just testing in this manner to reveals things that are not so obvious to players like firing rate is a huge factor in determining your damage in a given time frame (more so than damage) or armor on enemies are not as effective against high base damage fast firing archers as you think because it slowed them down.ģ. Yes your ranged units will be able to fire a bit at routing and returning enemies or you can even maneuver them to the flank and in all cases the more stats you have, the better off your units will do. But be careful about making blanket conclusions from a single very specific test!Īll good points and in the conclusion I do try to explain how your range, ammo, and actual damage will matter in cases where you have the time to fire your entire ammo.Īnd I thought a lot about your points before designing the test meant to compare how gold ranged infantry perform against charging enemies in an open field fight.ġ.In this case, the frontline does not matter when looking at how effective these units are compared to one another as the front line would provide the same reduction of distance for all of them.Ģ. I do really appreciate that you are running these controlled tests, and I think the effort to do careful controls is worthwhile.

This came across harsher than I intended. But this data does not support the conclusion of medium crossbow being better than heavy. Now I'm not going to argue that Heavy Crossbow are more cost effective, as the general trend of heavier units in 3K is that their costs outstrip their effectiveness, but there's other reasons why having elite corps are valuable (thats a whole other discussion). And in a really close battle, when the crossbows need to finally melee, their superior armor and morale lets them hold the enemy back for longer. This can quickly even out the DPS, not to mention saving on army downtime. Because of point 3, heavy crossbows will take 11.7% less damage from archers than normal crossbows, though only 6.7% less damage from crossbows. 23% more ammo at equal damage is going to be 23% more damage done, give or take. Because of points 1 and 2, when the frontline of enemy infantry closes - the crossbows can just switch target. Heavy Crossbows have slightly lower DPS, but this is a lot less critical than these tests make out. Not accounting for these factors leads to your headline conclusion, which is wrong. The same factor applies to getting hit by a cav charge, though obviously this is a worst case scenario. Armored ranged units take fewer losses and can do more damage. Ranged units get attacked by other ranged units pretty often. DPS is certainly very important, because the enemy can do damage to other portions of your army before getting arrowed, but it is not king.Ĭounter fire.

Realistically, kills done to the enemy are directly proportional to ammo. Reasons for this can be: player maneuvering, returning enemies (running but not shattered), enemy reinforcements, enemy cavalry cycle charging, all of which offer a variety of targets that the archers can switch to if one target is blocked by friendly melee. Target variety: Ranged units run out of ammo in any battle that is not a rout. The time they have to fire is NOT the time it takes the enemy to close. Ranged units hide behind melee units in the opening stages of a battle. There are several factors missing:Ī frontline. On the other, the scenario it is testing should not happen to the player, so the data is skewed rather far from real game application. On the one hand the test is well controlled and very thorough, yielding reliable data.

Total war three kingdoms crossbow