Archer Tower vs Archer Squad

[Zorlock Darksoul]

Does anyone have any approximate damage numbers for Archer Squads? I'm wondering if they can put out more or less damage than the Archer Tower. The squads seem to visually fire more arrows whenever a battle commences, but I don't know if that means they actually put out more damage or not. Any info would be appreciated.

[Bob]

Go for Archer Towers - but don't ... I repeat DON'T send Archer Squads after Wolf packs! They get slaughtered, every time!

[AndBell]

You can send archer squads to wolf packs but they need to be at a safe distance. They can get no damage at all because they shoot from the distance

[thelonewolfling]

I personally ditch archer towers entirely after the early game.

Even if they do less damage - and I don't think they do - you can stack them in the same square as a tower, which means you have to sink a lot less resources / time into defences. And they don't pull from population. And don't take time to get people into position. And they are mobile on top of everything, which means you can move them around if necessary.

Two ten-high towers next to each other, with two ballistae and archers, works _astoundingly_ well.

[Porcinus]

i seem to recall the game says archer squads do use idle population

[phaoray]

I just go for towers, less micro and if they are really high up they can cover plenty of ground to not need many of them at all.

[Exacerangutan]

OK so I was wondering about this, myself, and since I couldn't find clear answers either here or on the wiki, I decided to do a bit of science.

The short answer is that (as far as I was able to test) archery towers are MUCH better in ALMOST every respect besides mobility. Unless you have a mobility-specific strategy in mind, e.g. a point-defense model, they're kind of terrible.

To get into a little more depth, it depends on the enemy and the scenario. The wiki does point out that archers get a bigger elevation boost to their range, maxing out at 13 tiles rather than 10.5 tiles on a 10-block tower. Now, it doesn't take very long for most enemies to cross 2.5 tiles of ground (or water in the case of a ship), so you'd need to have a pretty specific design to capitalize on that advantage very much, but it's there. Archer squads also don't appear to get stronger with experience, but start out at maximum strength, whereas a tower's crew start out doing about 50% their maximum damage, which they reach only after about 7ish years (I think the learning rate is roughly 15% skill/year).

The wiki doesn't appear to say much about relative damage, though, so I made a creative world and spent the day throwing various enemies at various configurations of walls and towers--for the damage testing, the important tests were done in a ring wall with lots of towers around a circle of moat. The testing method was to place enemies in the center of the ring and record how long it took from arrows first impacting them until their HP bar disappeared on the slowest timescale setting. I tested archery towers vs. archer squads against ogres, dragons, strong vikings, and weak vikings. I still don't completely understand how damage to viking boats works or why they sometimes sink and sometimes don't care that their units are dead, but that's another barrel of eels.

What I found is that against ogres and dragons, archer squads were a little less than 1/2 as effective as archery towers, and nearer a quarter as effective against vikings. Specifically, normalizing to the 80 DPS started for a fully trained archery tower in the building data, I found the archer squads did about 30 DPS to ogres and dragons, and around 20 DPS to both strong and weak vikings. Notably, that's actually about 25% weaker than a completely untrained archery tower, so the tower's training time just narrows the tower's advantage in terms of damage output.

Notably, I also found that swordsmen are MUCH better against ogres--they tested at roughly 70 DPS against strong vikings, and a whopping (normalized) 130 DPS against ogres. Multiple swordsmen squads killed weak vikings too fast for me to take reliable data, and they obviously don't do much of anything to dragons. For thoroughness, the setup for swordsmen testing had them start in the tiles surrounding the enemy, and timing started from the squads of swordsmen converging on the enemy.

Another quick note I'd forgotten--when I looked at the wiki it claimed that archer squads use 7 gold per year, but I'm pretty sure they take 9, compared with an archery tower using 6. To put it another way, if you've been using archery towers, to get the same total damage output from archer squads would hike up your annual military budget by about 4 times as much.

There are some blind spots and imperfections in this testing.

The ring wall I used was large enough that enemies at one edge would be slightly out of range of the opposite wall, so that may lend an modest advantage to swordsmen, who keep the enemy stationary.

All testing (at least with data recorded) was single-target, so I don't know if there are rate-of-fire or maximum targets differences that might be important against say 8 squads of vikings. I'm not sure how target selection works, so I'd have to really think about how to set this up in a consistent, reproducible manner for testing.

I was already spending way too much time hyperfocusing on this, so I only did 4 or 5 runs of each experiment. The statistics aren't amazing, but they're good enough to serve as the basis for a rough comparison where the difference is significant.

I should note I actually had to double my number of archers for the dragon test (32 archer squads vs. 16 archery towers) so they'd be able to kill the dragon before it just flew the hell away, which obviously undermines the whole damage-rate-testing thing, but does make a point as well. I corrected here by doubling the average time of dragon kills. These varied more than the others (~7.9±1.4s or about 18% compared with ~15.6±0.4s or about 3%), because dragons are so fast their choice of flight path (straight out one side of the ring vs. turning around halfway) changed their exposure drastically, but I tried to get a similar distribution of trajectories, so I have reasonable confidence in the statistics.

I presume that's much (probably MUCH) more information than you wanted, but I hope it helps.

[Zorlock Darksoul]

Considering I asked the question almost five years ago (during which time the game has gone through multiple updates, rendering any previous answers at least partially inaccurate), I am immensely impressed that anyone took the time to dig into this issue with such fervor. I appreciate the detailed data-gathering (even if you aren't certain of its accuracy), and I look forward to putting it into practice the next time I dive into the game, likely after this new dragon-taming system is out of beta. You have my thanks.