Here's a question I've never seen discussed...

[Aaron]

What do you do with your archers after the melee starts? They don't shoot over your own units heads very well at all. Their unit ai seems to evenly divide focus between all the enemy units men. This means if 80% of the enemy unit is hidden by line of sight, only 20% of your archers unit will fire, while the other 80% just sit there and wait.

If these unit ai where slighly more competently designed, they'd take turns firing at that 20% that is visible instead of doing nothing.

From my experience, you can either shoot at the enemy archers or the enemy general. Trading with enemy archers is bad on higher difficulties. Countering them with cav is better and you don't want to shoot your own cav if that's what your doing.

I've considered adjusting their position, I've noticed they fire better from sharp angles to their side instead of units directly in front of them. Though that takes a lot of micro and not gaurenteed to give results.

Archers aren't that great at hitting cav. Not just that, they seem to not do that much damage even if the cav unit is standing still unless its light cav which has 1 armor.

Seems like you don't really have good options. Archers are just so easily counterable by a melee rush. There are a lot of open field battles in the campaign where my archers get 20-30 kills while my melee units get 100+, mostly because archers need to fire a lot of arrows to get 100+ kills, and they can't do it unless the enemy lets you...

No wonder competitive multiplayer games will bring a monk unit which expends it's ammo quickly, or nothing at all.

[BastardSword]

I've discussed it a lot in the last few years here but not recently.

For me the main role of bows is to whittle down the enemy bows, and to soften up enemy melee troops. If you can destroy all or most of a stationary army's bows, they will charge in their melee troops. Retreat your bows behind your yari ashigaru, turn on spear wall and win.

After you pull the bows back behind your now busy melee units, if you do nothing and leave them to their own devices, they will usually claim to have their sight blocked, and won't fire very much. This is when you need to give them direct orders. Click on enemy bows and the enemy general to kill them off. Yes cavalry and especially generals seem to have insane immunity to bows, however have all your bows fire at the general and turn on fire arrows if you can, and often the general will get killed off pretty quickly.

My preference in a full stack army is to always have 6 bows, which seems best to me. 6 is enough to defend a castle (usually) and will do well at countering enemy bows in an open field battle. Bow ashigaru are fine in the early game, and any bow accuracy upgrades are good to have. I prefer to replace them with bow samurai because they are decent archers and have way better armor than monk archers. Monk archers are better archers, but can die off really easily if you aren't careful.

[Young Erusean Officer]

Having archers sort of dictates where the battle will be fought. Sure the defender can sit on that nice little hill waiting on the timer but if he has no archers or less than you he'll need to react or he'll lose a lot of infantry before the fight even begins.

Archers shine the most in sieges though either defending or attacking. Even Bow Ashigaru become extremely useful. Bow Ashigaru start fires more easily due to their higher numbers and accuracy matters little when targetting walls, towers and gates. When defending, their lethality doubles.

The AI also is very dumb and easy to cheese on sieges with archers. I never got why people auto resolve meaty sieges when all you lose are a few archers or no troops at all to win.

Bow Monks are also insanely overpowered. Insanely overpowered.

[Imhotep]

Archers are in a line at the front and soften the enemy and screen the melee troops. If the enemy charge at them, if they are in Skirmish mode, they will run behind the melee troops and turn around again to face the enemy. If it is one's own army that is advancing, then the archers will stop and shoot the enemy, while the melee troops advance through them.

Either way, the missile troops end up behind the melee troops. Bow missile troops can shoot over friendly troops, and I've rarely experienced blocked Line of Sight issues in these circumstances. So for the rest of the battle, they are at the back, just shooting over the heads of friendly troops.

I usually have around five bowmen in a stack, although only my Daimyo's stack has all Samurai, so I use a lot of Bow Ashigaru throughout the game.

[Aaron]

Originally posted by Imhotep:

Bow missile troops can shoot over friendly troops, and I've rarely experienced blocked Line of Sight issues in these circumstances.

If you zoom in you'll see a lot of them aren't firing anymore. Not that it really matters. Even if they're only doing partial damage, we've basically established there really isn't much else you can do with them.

They're kind of a lack luster unit if they don't have time to shoot at the enemy unobstructed by their allies. It might be possible to maximize their damage by placing them at the perfect angle/elevation on the map, but they way they work and their arc aren't clear at all. Matchlocks shoot straight and focus fire on them enemy men they can see, while archers try to spread their shot why firing at an arc. Getting a good angle is totally lost on me.

Archers fall somewhere in line with yari samurai in being situational and kind of overpriced, at least in open field battles. They're excellent in siege battles though, both on the attack and defense so maybe it balances out.

[Smoothhoof]

I sometimes switch my archers to melee and send them into the fight once all the swords and spears have been swinging for a bit. The extra weight of men can rout the enemy line and the losses the archers take are offset by the experience they gain.

[Telvido_cat]

They increase kills in post battle auto resolve. Bow monks can get 500 kills.

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by Imhotep:

Bow missile troops can shoot over friendly troops, and I've rarely experienced blocked Line of Sight issues in these circumstances.

Originally posted by Aaron:

If you zoom in you'll see a lot of them aren't firing anymore. Not that it really matters. Even if they're only doing partial damage, we've basically established there really isn't much else you can do with them.

As others have said, they're most useful before melee begins in earnest. If you have similar numbers of bows to enemy, they're used to soften enemy up; while if you have significantly more bows than enemy, it will usually get the AI to attack you, even if the AI is on strategic defense, because the AI scripts will prioritize getting into melee if you overmatch in missiles. This can be very useful.

As the battle develops, they can be very useful for chasing down routers, to keep such from rallying and/or escaping the map. They are well suited to this mission because they can harass with shot as they chase.

Another nice thing about archers is that they can setup screens/pavises in defensive battles (if the stack has been stationary for a turn). These create very useful obstructions that can be used to funnel enemy melee troops.

Originally posted by Aaron:

They're kind of a lack luster unit if they don't have time to shoot at the enemy unobstructed by their allies. It might be possible to maximize their damage by placing them at the perfect angle/elevation on the map, but they way they work and their arc aren't clear at all.

You'll get more of a feel for them with time.

Originally posted by Aaron:

Matchlocks shoot straight and focus fire on them enemy men they can see, while archers try to spread their shot why firing at an arc. Getting a good angle is totally lost on me.

Archers fall somewhere in line with yari samurai in being situational and kind of overpriced, at least in open field battles. They're excellent in siege battles though, both on the attack and defense so maybe it balances out.

I like matchlocks a lot, but the archers do have some nice advantages over the guns.

One of them is their longer range. This is very useful in river crossing battles, as well as dealing with enemies that are camping hills.

Strategically, a big advantage with bows is that they are available much more readily than matchlocks. Even if you're playing as Otomo, the provinces that you'll be expanding into across Japan are not going to work well with maximizing gun unit replenishment, like Matchlock Samurai, until you invest accordingly. With bow ash though, you'll always have good replenishment, cheap recruitment, and often times improved morale and such. Matchlock Ash are readily recruitable as Otomo, but that's Otomo: with all the other clans, you're looking at quite a long road to get Matchlock Ash setup.

[markeason]

Archers are also very effective at river crossing defence, deployed a little behind the yari ashigaru and able to target the bridge but not the far bank (forcing the enemy archers to cross.

In terms of the fire arc, I think of it like this.

At very close range, the trajectory of the arrow is almost flat (like a gun). So, if your archers are behind your melee line, they will not be able to shoot the enemy units in melee without inflicting significant friendly fire. They need to target more distant units, arcing their fire over the melee line, And this, as Bastard Sword states, requires manual targeting. I find it best to focus fire several units of archers on one unit (the AI tends not to do this) as a quick and effective way of eliminating enemy ranged units.

When you see the blocked line of sight symbol move your archers back a little from the obstacle and they will be better placed to arc their fire over it - try to picture a parabola and you will get an idea of how far back they need to be.

A typical case is defending in a fort, when the archers have been withdrawn from the walls behind your melee units - because the terrain is flat, they need to be quite a way behind the melee units to be able to fire unimpeded at enemy within the fort.

Ideally, in the open field, you will be positioned such that your archers withdraw to higher ground behind your melee line, reducing the impact of blocked line of sight and providing a gradient for your melee units to charge into the enemy.