full archer squad - underwhelming

[Stu -1]

so i kind of had visions of making a designated archer squad that could rain fire from distance and id keep them behind other units or safely behind terrain features etc. usual fire emblem archer/priest rules.

but i can't help but find the archers kind of underwhelming. the single attack when attacking a non adjacent unit means that, compared to other squads, archers only attack half as much per turn. and then on the enemy turn they get doubled if someone manages to engage them and can only retaliate once.

seems as if archers are best implemented in hybrid squads and only attacking from extra range if they physically can't close with an attacker. kind of feel like archers should get a double ranged attack. or do they eventually get this ability as warbows? im at chapter 9-10 for reference. thoughts?

[ajom1987]

Underwhelming? I also have a full archer squad (Jules) and is pretty good. Maybe you are attacking people on forests or castles. Those places give protection against arrows, forests give evasion and castles protection. Or attacking heavy armor infantry or cavalry, they take half damage from arrows or so the tutorial says.

[Stu -1]

Originally posted by ajom1987:

Underwhelming? I also have a full archer squad (Jules) and is pretty good. Maybe you are attacking people on forests or castles. Those places give protection against arrows, forests give evasion and castles protection. Or attacking heavy armor infantry or cavalry, they take half damage from arrows or so the tutorial says.

no its not the damage or terrain. been playing fire emblem for 20 years i get the tactics don't worry XD. like ive said in my post. its the always single attacking at range. they can't clear a unit on their own. so the mop up squad gets the most damage/kills and xp. or if i try and solo a unit, the archers get engaged on the enemy turn and take casualties, reducing their future damage potential.

[Plerr]

To be fair, most archers in FE can't clear a unit on their own either unless it's a pre-promote or highly overleveled. They're meant to weaken a tough foe so another unit can safely go in and sweep up.

EDIT: If I recall correctly I think there are some techs that help boost the firepower of archers so you might see if you grabbed those upgrades already.

[Icy K]

Well my jules is at warbow class and has full party warbows with him and i clear most people or leave them on dead's door but i do agree with u that they are underwelming but i think that is because the ai would abuse this so bad that we would be screwd at least i have seen tons of archer units

[Stu -1]

Originally posted by Plerr:

To be fair, most archers in FE can't clear a unit on their own either unless it's a pre-promote or highly overleveled. They're meant to weaken a tough foe so another unit can safely go in and sweep up.

EDIT: If I recall correctly I think there are some techs that help boost the firepower of archers so you might see if you grabbed those upgrades already.

fire emblem worked differently though. you could get xp purely from the kill. and there were no squads just individual entities. so you could feed archers by mopping up low health mobs and get them full xp. harder to do in this game. also some of the archers in fire emblem games were nuke launchers. think most people just don't invest the effort into them.

its not the tactical issue im failing to understand. i lucked out and found an item that doubles xp and gave it to my jules archer squad which has helped a bit. but softening up squads gives next to no xp and class points. this is my point. not how to use archers or their function.

if the enemy squad has a single (or heavens forbid two) healer then i find it cancels out a lot of the damage an archer volley does. specially if they hit a single target that gets healed. so you either soften up the squad for the archer unit to further soften it up... seems silly. which sometimes means the other squad gets the majority of the fighting and xp because they can double the oppoennt. or risk your archer squad at point blank range and hope they kill enough enemies in the first volley that the retaliation doesn't get any fatalities.

there's a reason the brave weapons in fire emblem were over powered. attacking twice massively boosts damage and therefore xp income.

i have those upgrades and it didn't boost damage by much tbh imo. the tech should add a second volley to ones shot at a distance.

been playing for about 6 hours this morning. read the replies here. and kept using the archers as their own squad to see if they would get good. but still find them underwhelming compared to melee. I appreciate that you and the other poster disagree as i was looking for others opinions. maybe my standards for archers are just higher lol

[Morteon Eternity's Knight]

So I can respectfully disagree on Jules. I have him and his 6 warbow buddies raining death upon all my foes.

So a couple things here - unit elements matter, if you have water archers... theyre going to hit like a wet noodle, make sure your dudes are statted properly.

Secondly - Those leadership boost cookies? I regularly fed them to Jules until I got him to the point where he could field Him + 6 others, More arrows = More Pew Pew

Thirdly - Warbow is the way to go for promotion route, +1 range is huge, and put him on a hill or in a fort... and he can snipe from a mile away

Fourthly - Artifacts - Read what each one does, Trueshot bow is an early common green one thats really good on him. Theres multiple artifacts which dramatically alter the effect of enemy's cover and defenses, with the right combination the damage values of attacks can scale exponentially.

Hope that helps.

[Stu -1]

Originally posted by Morteon Eternity's Knight:

So I can respectfully disagree on Jules. I have him and his 6 warbow buddies raining death upon all my foes.

So a couple things here - unit elements matter, if you have water archers... theyre going to hit like a wet noodle, make sure your dudes are statted properly.

Secondly - Those leadership boost cookies? I regularly fed them to Jules until I got him to the point where he could field Him + 6 others, More arrows = More Pew Pew

Thirdly - Warbow is the way to go for promotion route, +1 range is huge, and put him on a hill or in a fort... and he can snipe from a mile away

Fourthly - Artifacts - Read what each one does, Trueshot bow is an early common green one thats really good on him. Theres multiple artifacts which dramatically alter the effect of enemy's cover and defenses, with the right combination the damage values of attacks can scale exponentially.

Hope that helps.

it's not their stats/levels/affinities. was all over that from chapter 1. seems like the warbow upgrade and maybe because my sybil and jules got screwed hard levelling leadership is why im having issues. ive not encountered any leadership boosting cookies for them yet (start of chapter 11). artefacts also cost capacity but i have been using the trueshot on jules (or the tier below if i only had 1 spare capacity to spare).

maybe archer squads pick up in the mid/late game then and can do as much damage as melee squads. but i definitely think they are super underwhelming as a solo unit squad up until the part i am at in the story. nothing is hitting as hard as diana or my main character currently. and even the other melee squads can hold their own in combat and finish a fight. i feel like its a waste of time having jules running around stealing seize point and feeding him the occasional nearly wiped squad because he does light damage. he's in a squad of himself and another 4 tier 2 archers. damage is unimpressive.

[billytringuyen]

use seige cannon squad one shot every one or some

[Drakilian]

Archers don't seem awful, but they do seem like the worst of the ranged types, with guns being blatantly better with how much tech tree investment they need.

Pretty sure you're supposed to use them basically exclusively against mages/magic heavy squads and other ranged squads (I think they should win against other, higher quality ranged troops in fights). Other than that you just slightly soften stuff up, but you can't soften much because of this:

https://prnt.sc/XQP0BghMkrgr

Bows have a 50% damage penalty (on top of armor) against heavy cavalry and heavy infantry, the most common unit types in the game. Should still do fine against light infantry from range but obviously don't ever want to get into melee with them

Basically just have to choose your targets very carefully because they'll be ineffective against most of the common stuff

[Stu -1]

Originally posted by Drakilian:

Archers don't seem awful, but they do seem like the worst of the ranged types, with guns being blatantly better with how much tech tree investment they need.

Pretty sure you're supposed to use them basically exclusively against mages/magic heavy squads and other ranged squads (I think they should win against other, higher quality ranged troops in fights). Other than that you just slightly soften stuff up, but you can't soften much because of this:

https://prnt.sc/XQP0BghMkrgr

Bows have a 50% damage penalty (on top of armor) against heavy cavalry and heavy infantry, the most common unit types in the game. Should still do fine against light infantry from range but obviously don't ever want to get into melee with them

Basically just have to choose your targets very carefully because they'll be ineffective against most of the common stuff

i feel like i need to close this or update it to say early game now. most of the input seems based around having a full squad of warbows or guns. or using stat boosters on jules. you won't have these by chapter 10 i don't believe?

i did some arenas using jules to try horde kills with his squad and have come to the conclusion part of the issue is that only attacking once (as per my initial comment) he was severely underlevelled relative to the melee squads. his weakness has been improved (but still very noticeable) by forcefully using him in bronze arenas. attacking once per turn compared to twice is, as i suspected, hindering his levelling. i think i'll shelf the game till the mission replays are implemented. i love fire emblem games, but i hated feeding priests and archers kills in the early game. completely derailed the flow of the game for me.

thank you for all the input. the answer appears to be that end game bow squads. with items used to boost jules stats. and at appropriate levels. and using artefacts. seem to do fine. i still think they would be limited by only doing half the attacks of melee squads... but im sure you all aren't wrong.

[Drakilian]

I mean, I'm agreeing with you, they are pretty underwhelming for the exact reasons you state. I think that's also on purpose because the entire firearm tree is locked behind tech upgrades that clearly denote it as being the best option, and the archery line has the lowest stat requirements of any class I've seen showing that it's meant to be the weakest possible option for ranged unit advancement. They have a niche but they also kinda suck by design and have problems getting exp

[Rock]

Seems to me that Water archers would make good gunners. Assuming you have researched the ability to use guns in the rain.

[Shiber Kivan]

I switched Jules into nomad (horse archer) as well as his units so now he is much more useful due to canto. I use him for hit and run tactics

[My Own Treacherous Hand]

The only thing I found dedicated archer squads to be good for was softening up intimidating enemies, usually the guardians of the last objective who you can otherwise only attack with one unit. Once I got cannons, though, Jules started wiping out teams I expected to just be softening up. The lack of a defense option isn't even a drawback since archer squads are so bad on the defense anyway.

[Mechalibur]

I'm not sure if artifacts are random or not, but Jules ended up with really high damage potential when I found the Heartseeker a few missions in, which gives a bonus to damage and removes the defensive bonuses for forests/walls.