Right. Good question tick

(BTW, draggy at GGC here)

It's really complicated and it was complicated in AOK too, but in a different way. These models were both implemented just because they look cooler when arrows sometimes miss.

In AOM, the first shot usually has bad accuracy (say 50%). The accuracy is also worse at range. This was not done to encourage you to move your units closer, but because it looks dumb when units miss each other at point blank. Each shot after the first shot on the same target also gets a huge bonus, so that by the second or third shot you have a 100% chance to hit. This means you are often better off letting your archers pick their targets than trying to pick targets for them, because you may force them to waste their more accurate shots. Also, because the bonus is so high for secondary and subsequent shots, you are better off fighting at range and not wasting time to move your units up close.

Missed shots have a chance to strike another target, but they do less damage to unintentional targets. (This was not the case in AOK, which let Trebs be much better against massed archers than we intended.)

There is also a concept of what we call tracking, or whether or not you can anticipate a moving target and fire a little ahead of him in order to hit. Generally cavalry and some fast infantry are too fast to be hit by most ranged units. Siege weapons will miss almost any moving target. Heroes tend to have very good tracking. There is also an improvement to make your buildings track better, which is key to stopping raiding cav (who are already pretty pierce resistant).

Finally, the determination of whether a shot will hit or miss is made when the shot is fired. This means that you can't just dance a unit out of the way of an incoming missile. Micromanagement has its place in our games, but it should be secondary to strategy.

BTW, there is no friendly fire for any unit in AOM (even siege), though some GPs will damage friendly units, but cause less damage than they do to enemies.

No friendly fire!!!!!!!! YES!! Thank you DS and ES, less micro the better.

When you say that you can't move out of the way of shot do you mean just achers or all ranged units because I think that 1 it would make siege units to powerful and 2 it would look wierd if a unit hit a target that just moved out of the way.

You mean the days of running scout cavalry through an enemy town packed with mangonels to try to get them to damage themselves is over???

Aw...

EQS

Wow, thanks for the response. That's a lot of detail, and it'll be good to know. It'll make predicting outcomes of 1v1 fights more difficult, but that's okay - I'd rather know how it works on the battlefield than on paper.

ya great response

thanks,

DJXput

Yeah black mongoose brought up a good question about after the shot is fired can a unit get out of the way still? Or is it similar now to the way that melee units work - when a calvary unit is chasing a slower unit it will run up and stop when it attacks and usually by the time the animation is complete the other unit is already out of range but since the attack was already able to do it still counts even though the animation doesn't match up. Is this how the ranged weapons work now?

No friendly fire. Thats interesting.

Wow! Sidewinder arrows!

Once the missile has left a ranged unit, it already knows whether it will hit or not. I suppose if you had a Catapult firing at a very fast unit like a certain bear, then you would see it miraculously change in flight to follow him.

We did this because it was annoying in AOK to play the micromanagement game when fighting Mangonels or Cannon Galleons. A little micromanagement in combat is fine, but you could go from 100% to 0% losses by moving your units around after they were fired upon, and we just don't feel our games offer the kind of information and control to really encourage that kind of tactical movement.

If you want to avoid a missile, get out of range, don't stop moving (because of tracking, which is different from constantly starting and stopping moving), or kill the shooter.

you mean that if the toxote (for x-ample) is killed while it's shot is still in the air, the arrow won't hit?

kewl!

Does it also mean that when playing the AI the computer doesn't just move its men after you target them with ranged weapons or siege?! Those Elbows on the Frank campaign on AoK used to drive me mad! You just couldn't use onagers against them cos they walked out of harms way every time!

Daz

Oh... a "Certain Bear" you say.lol

Laser Bear!

DS. Why is ES encouraging people to let their archers do their thing, and not manually aim? Often archers fire at their own targets, and it's much more effective for me to make them all kill one thing, then another, etc, etc. Not anymore. Why has this been implemented? People who take the time to manage their archers should be rewarded. As it stands now, all you do is waypoint units to battle.

cool

heh Cease, you post that for us to see that old thread or what? XD

cool topic indeed, rises questions about archer micro

[This message has been edited by RTSR (edited 07-23-2015 @ 10:51 AM).]

Yea a friend shared it with me

If I ever stumble upon cool threads like this I usually bring them back