One for the devs, reference Trad Recurve.

[Babaski]

Thanks to the Devs for continuing to produce content. I thoroughly enjoy the game and the associated DLC. I'm pleased to see the team interact with the community and to take on board feedback.

I'm an experienced instinctive trad archer. I regularly shoot recurved hunting bows and war-weight self bows, both for sport and recreation without referencing the bow/arrow, or sight marks.

To the point then. The bow is inconsistant, inaccurate and apparently poorly tuned, no doubt a deliberate gameplay mechanic to encourage ethical bow kills at close range and something I can ignore, but for what follows.

I'll begin by making a wild assertion that the bow as modelled is likely around 50-80lb in draw weight, which would be typical of the type. The arrow provided, at 540 grains is not sufficiently heavy at the upper end of that draw weight scale to be safe to shoot from a traditional bow, or even desirable as a hunting weight arrow. More importantly from a gameplay and "realism" perspective, with the arrow as given and regardless of the draw weight, the point of impact is simply too high. Shooting so far over-hand (and stiff) at 55 yards, even with a suitable draw weight/arrow weight combination and any possible "eccentric" anchor, is unintuitive. It follows that I would welcome some small adjustment to the fall of shot in the interests of intuition.

[god_zeke_satan]

Hi there. Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you're enjoying the game. We will definitely take a look into this and certainly consider making adjustments.

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly. Your main points are as follows:

1) The 540gr arrow is too light for the bow -- it should be much heavier
2) The arrow scatter is inaccurate but that's okay because it encourages ethical hunting
3) The arrow's trajectory is not realistic and it should have more drop
4) The player's form when aiming the bow is not realistic for this kind of bow and is in fact, unintuitive and impossible considering the power of the shots

Is that correct?

[El Turista]

Originally posted by Babaski:

Thanks to the Devs for continuing to produce content. I thoroughly enjoy the game and the associated DLC. I'm pleased to see the team interact with the community and to take on board feedback.

I'm an experienced instinctive trad archer. I regularly shoot recurved hunting bows and war-weight self bows, both for sport and recreation without referencing the bow/arrow, or sight marks.

To the point then. The bow is inconsistant, inaccurate and apparently poorly tuned, no doubt a deliberate gameplay mechanic to encourage ethical bow kills at close range and something I can ignore, but for what follows.

I'll begin by making a wild assertion that the bow as modelled is likely around 50-80lb in draw weight, which would be typical of the type. The arrow provided, at 540 grains is not sufficiently heavy at the upper end of that draw weight scale to be safe to shoot from a traditional bow, or even desirable as a hunting weight arrow. More importantly from a gameplay and "realism" perspective, with the arrow as given and regardless of the draw weight, the point of impact is simply too high. Shooting so far over-hand (and stiff) at 55 yards, even with a suitable draw weight/arrow weight combination and any possible "eccentric" anchor, is unintuitive. It follows that I would welcome some small adjustment to the fall of shot in the interests of intuition.

Very interesting. Congrats.

I'm starting myself in trad. archery world thanx to a friend of mine. Very didactic post.

[Babaski]

Originally posted by zeke_difficulty_5-medium:

Hi there. Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you're enjoying the game. We will definitely take a look into this and certainly consider making adjustments.

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly. Your main points are as follows:

1) The 540gr arrow is too light for the bow -- it should be much heavier
2) The arrow scatter is inaccurate but that's okay because it encourages ethical hunting
3) The arrow's trajectory is not realistic and it should have more drop
4) The player's form when aiming the bow is not realistic for this kind of bow and is in fact, unintuitive and impossible considering the power of the shots

Is that correct?

Thank you for replying so promptly.

1) Yes.

For a modern trad bow 8 grains per pound would be the absolute minimum, any less you may as well be dry-firing and I certainly wouldn't be hunting with 8gpp. 10gpp is a good start. 16gpp is better.

2) Yes.

The arrow scatter is unrealistic for an experienced archer. Consistancy is the name of the game. A well tuned arrow, spined correctly and shot by a consistant archer off the fingers will not deviate left (stiff) or right (weak), except for windage and not nearly as much as you would think. A heavier arrow with high front of centre will iron out flaws in form and reduce the effect of wind, while aiding penetration. If the current scatter is a design feature to encourage close in shooting, then yes, that is ok.

3)Yes. See 4.

4)Yes.

If we take a "sight picture" shooting both eyes open, focused on the target and with an anchor point low on the side of the face, with a bow/arrow around 10 grains per pound and a middling front of centre at 15%, I would expect the arrow would be pointed in the top half of the target at 55 yards. The current sight picture as modelled, with the arrow pointed a full target and a half below the point of impact at 55yards, would instead be correct at 10 yards.

Please allow for some fudging of numbers, as I do shoot instinctively and am not accustomed to referencing sight pictures, but I hope my point is clear.

[Babaski]

Originally posted by El Turista:

Very interesting. Congrats.

I'm starting myself in trad. archery world thanx to a friend of mine. Very didactic post.

Thank you.

If you've not already done so, you will absolutely fall in love with the stick and string. Easy to learn, hard to master and utterly rewarding.

[Cederic]

Re: 1, the game states it's a 70lb draw bow. I wouldn't calculate arrow weight by draw weight though, I'd use draw weight to determine spine then weight of the wood for that spine arrow per inch of arrow. Since the game says they're birch arrows, you'd look for something around a 3/8 spine so a fairly standard 27-28" shaft would weigh somewhere between 400 and 600 grains. Add 100 to 125 grains for the broadhead and the in-game weight of 540 grains doesn't feel inappropriate at all. However: The Qing bows on which the in-game recurve is modelled were all about shooting heavy arrows without losing too much arrow speed or accuracy. So there would be a lot of sense in giving the bow a fat heavy damaging arrow - maybe a rank 4 alternative to the current one? Same range..

Re: 4, I shoot a modern 42lb take-down recurve without a sight. My point of aim (distance at which the arrow will strike where the pile tip points at full draw) is around 55y, but I anchor quite low so I'd agree with you that the in-game bow should be hitting around 50-70y with a 70lb draw if it's as efficient as a modern Olympic class recurve. Except that it's designed on 18th century technology so I'm guessing it's not.

With a sight on my recurve is less accurate than my compound, but you're talking about an inch at 70y. The real difference between the two is trajectory, with the compound being much more amenable to cocking up your distance judgement. So re: 2 I don't buy a recurve throwing the arrow randomly all over the place. But.. the game actually gives the recurve very good accuracy. 10 shots at 100m (so way above the distance you should be using it anyway): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1359648866

Allowing that's a rifle target not an archery one, this is literally an olympic medal winning level of accuracy.

Adding a 5) You've got a tiny little recurve that weighs as much as the big clumsy crossbow and weighs more than a wood+metal rifle. I've shot bows of this design and they weigh sod all. Drop the weight to 1lb please!

[Babaski]

The Qing bow is a hyper recurve and as such, the bow geometry is more efficient than a typical Olympic recurve pound for pound. The big hooks increase the area under the draw force curve and have more usable geometry before stacking. It is why they are able to push heavier arrows for comparable arrow speeds. As a parabolic equation, the optimum bow weight/arrow weight combination gets moved to the right.

Yes, the bow should be point on at 50 odd yards.

540 grains@70lbs is 7.7 gpp and dangerously low even for a modern single string bow. Having a bow fail on you at full draw is no fun. Let alone low arrow weight robbing the bow of efficiency and the arrow of terminal effect. Speed is not the deciding factor in arrow lethality.

3/8 Ash, long shafts for hunting with 250 grains up front at least! Get that weight and FOC up.

[Baltor]

I would like to add 2 more points about the bow.

1 - I have zeroing enabled. This skill is for scopes. In an traditional bow this ability should not exist because you only have your eyes to aim. Currently you can regulate to 20, 40 and 60 meters.

2 - You can spend too much time aiming without vibrations. In a compound bow, the pulleys reduce the strength but in a traditional bow all the strength is supported by your arm. Currently I can aim for 10 seconds without any vibration.

I do not have experience in bows but I think that this type of bow should shoot in a single smooth movement with very little aiming time. If you aim more than 2 or 3 seconds, your arm should vibrate.

P.S. Sorry if I made mistakes in the language. English is not my native language and it is a bit difficult to explain it to me.

[Tommy]

Originally posted by baltor74:

1 - I have zeroing enabled. This skill is for scopes. In an traditional bow this ability should not exist because you only have your eyes to aim. Currently you can regulate to 20, 40 and 60 meters.

I'd love to see zeroing removed from all bows. Its distracting and removes an important part of bow hunting.

DEVs please listen to this, I know it been mentioned many times on these boards.

[afwsi]

Originally posted by Tommy:

Originally posted by baltor74:

1 - I have zeroing enabled. This skill is for scopes. In an traditional bow this ability should not exist because you only have your eyes to aim. Currently you can regulate to 20, 40 and 60 meters.

I'd love to see zeroing removed from all bows. Its distracting and removes an important part of bow hunting.

DEVs please listen to this, I know it been mentioned many times on these boards.

yeah, I kinda agree with removing zeroing. I mentioned once or twice about having the ability to adjust the pins for the bow sights and save there positions for next time the game is played. You couldn’t get anymore realistic than that.

[afwsi]

Originally posted by zeke_difficulty_5-medium:

Hi there. Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you're enjoying the game. We will definitely take a look into this and certainly consider making adjustments.

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly. Your main points are as follows:

1) The 540gr arrow is too light for the bow -- it should be much heavier
2) The arrow scatter is inaccurate but that's okay because it encourages ethical hunting
3) The arrow's trajectory is not realistic and it should have more drop
4) The player's form when aiming the bow is not realistic for this kind of bow and is in fact, unintuitive and impossible considering the power of the shots

Is that correct?

I haven’t had the chance to play yet ,but there’s something off with recurves. From watching the streams, it looks like you have to aim at the animal’s feet to even hit em. It could be the player’s form when aiming that needs tweaked.

[Babaski]

Originally posted by baltor74:

2 - You can spend too much time aiming without vibrations. In a compound bow, the pulleys reduce the strength but in a traditional bow all the strength is supported by your arm. Currently I can aim for 10 seconds without any vibration.

I do not have experience in bows but I think that this type of bow should shoot in a single smooth movement with very little aiming time. If you aim more than 2 or 3 seconds, your arm should vibrate.

Breaking the laws of physics aside, that is not how a compound bow works despite this oft quoted perception. The cams (pulleys, as you put it) allow for the bulk of the potential energy to be loaded in the first inches of the draw cycle. The bow "lets off" as the cams turn in the last part of the draw cycle (the "valley") reducing the draw weight per inch of draw and providing inches of consistant thrust and stable acceleration. The cams are maximising the area under the draw force curve and raising bow efficiency, but you are still holding the full draw weight on your shoulders.

Compare this to the Qing bow, which is functionally identical. The bow is simply a cantilevered spring. The big hooks (siyahs) are in fact cams and allow for the loading of most of the potential energy in the first part of the draw, before they themselves turn over and "let off". The difference is in by how many pounds per inch of draw.

If you are shaking at full draw, then you are overbowed and the bow is too powerful for you to shoot effectively. Materials selection in the construction of the bow aside, the average archer should be be able to support the full draw weight of a hunting or target weight bow indefinitely.

When you see those archers coming to full draw and shooting quickly, it is often simply a matter of the style and technique of shooting the archer has adopted, and/or the materials the bow is made out of (no glass, carbon, modern adhesives etc) and cannot support being held at full draw for very long. English Warbows with draw weights up to 180lb are a good example of a bow and shooting style not meant to be held at full draw, primarily because it will dramatically shorten the life of the bow, with bio-mechanics and fatigue being the other considerations.

[Cederic]

Hmm. A modern carbon fibre recurve is going to out perform a wooden bow purely because of the superior materials involved. I've also shot both styles of bow and my 42lb carbon fibre recurve has faster arrow speed than a 55lb Qing style wooden bow.

Not tried a 70lb one, would struggle to draw it. Would need to practice.

Regarding releasing the arrow on the draw, Babaski's spot on that this is how you shoot a yew selfbow at warbow weights. Makes roving shoots excellent fun. A recurve though you do bring to full draw, steady yourself and only then release.

The game does boost your heart rate if you hold it at full draw, and that does make your aim point start to wobble - a lot. So it seems fine as it is.

Regarding the zeroing, that's something you do to sights - and yes, you do zero bow sights too. The recurve doesn't have sights though so I've found that it's much easier to keep it set to 40m and just shoot purely instinctive.

[Babaski]

Originally posted by Cederic:

Hmm. A modern carbon fibre recurve is going to out perform a wooden bow purely because of the superior materials involved. I've also shot both styles of bow and my 42lb carbon fibre recurve has faster arrow speed than a 55lb Qing style wooden bow.

Kinetic energy is not the unit of measure relevant to bow efficiency, mass is. Imagine speed is the constant and mass is the variable.

What carbon fibre does allow is the reduction of limb mass and greater torsional stability over a greater length of limb. You now have long limbs without the mass penalty meaning you can shoot a heavier arrow for the same draw weight at the same velocity, provide more usuable geometry (stacks later in the draw) that will not twist under load or at the release thus affording greater stability. What you have with the Qing bow is relatively higher efficiency because of the limb profile, but low stability because of the limitations of the materials and bow length, so by adopting a similar limb profile with consistant thrust throughout most of the powerstroke, you will absolutely see greater efficiencies from a carbon limb. However, outside of some very expensive examples, few ILF or boltdown bows have dared to tread here and it is not typical of average target, or hunting setups.

Not all limb profiles are made equal, but slowly the industry comes around. Commercially there has been no pressure to change limb profiles until recently, with the big firms making carbon bows in the same old profiles purely to charge more, with negligiable performance increases.

Use a high mass arrow as physics and design intended, and you will see even greater efficiency with little hysteresis (conversion of energy to sound,vibration etc) partly as a result of the arrow being in contact with the string for longer.

Once released, the high mass arrow has higher momentum (direction, without which KE is meaningless) as a product of mass and greater impulse (time for the force to act). As drag is the square of velocity, with high momentum the arrow is subject to a lower resultant force acting against it during flight and at the target. It carries KE further and for longer at a stable velocity and with high impulse will penetrate further.

[Lightshifty]

Originally posted by Babaski:

The bow is inconsistant, inaccurate and apparently poorly tuned

There is nothing wrong with the bows, you just have to learn how to aim them by using reference points. Once you have learned and practiced this, it should become instinctive.

For 50m aim about here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1360793846

Notice the nice grouping I had with 10 shots, hold your breath with the left shift button and aim and release as soon as possible so that the bow does not wobble. You can repeat this in succession a few times, but your heart rate indicator will go up and will cause you to run out of breath sooner.

By the looks of things, it appears that you are supposed to count the 'stripes' on the handle and draw a straight line from the arrow. For 50m, it seems something like a line from the 4th black stripe and where a line from the arrow cross over.

50m is quite a long distance for the bows in the game, so a grouping like that is pretty accurate! For closer targets I would imagine that you need to aim lower by aiming using a stripe from higher up the handle, now that I have mastered the bow at 50m I'm going to nail it at 100m especially as a guy above has shown that it is fairly accurate and repeatable, (assuming his shots were actually with the bow and he didn't just switch weapons and take a screenshot for a hoax). It would be nice if they added 10m and 25m targets, or even a seperate bow shooting range for more usable hunting range practice.

As for all the bow physics discussion going on, pretending to be bow shooting geniuses it is pointless. 2 bows with the same draw weights and draw length shooting the same arrows will not shoot the same simply because of differences of the speed of the bow and it's tillering, and level of paradox. The faster the wood of the bow can return to it's resting state after the arrow is released, the faster the arrow will travel, and that difference all comes after the unique properties of the stave itself on a cellular level. No 2 bows shoot the same, but modern factory made compound bows with all their modern materials and quality control can come very close to each other.

And all that nonsense about not being a safe weight for hunting? Native American archers would take down Buffalo with 40-50lbs bows with whatever stone point size they chose to make, but whatever, for the sake of the argument lets assume for a second that the laws and regulations on 'ethical' poundages and arrow grain size is based in reality. Using the same laws and regulations on safe and ethical hunting, a 540 grain arrow is fine for a 70lbs bow.

[Babaski]

Originally posted by Lightshifty:

As for all the bow physics discussion going on, pretending to be bow shooting geniuses it is pointless. 2 bows with the same draw weights and draw length shooting the same arrows will not shoot the same simply because of differences of the speed of the bow and it's tillering, and level of paradox. The faster the wood of the bow can return to it's resting state after the arrow is released, the faster the arrow will travel, and that difference all comes after the unique properties of the stave itself on a cellular level. No 2 bows shoot the same, but modern factory made compound bows with all their modern materials and quality control can come very close to each other.

And all that nonsense about not being a safe weight for hunting? Native American archers would take down Buffalo with 40-50lbs bows with whatever stone point size they chose to make, but whatever, for the sake of the argument lets assume for a second that the laws and regulations on 'ethical' poundages and arrow grain size is based in reality. Using the same laws and regulations on safe and ethical hunting, a 540 grain arrow is fine for a 70lbs bow.

Thank you for your input.

I'm well aware of the limitations of natural materials and what feats Native American archers were capable of with the tools at their disposal. One shot kills they were not.

You are welcome to re-read the thread and contribute further to what has actually been discussed, rather than go off on a tangent about laws and regulations. I can only imagine that you don't care about the longevity of the traditional bows you yourself shoot.