Underwaterghostbear wrote:1. Plate was the counter to the bow. Not the disadvantage against it. This is exactly what urged on the gunpowder age. Bows dominated the field until the invention of plate armour, and the development of plate lead to men being able to pass through hails of arrows by MANY accounts. In a balanced game you don't say "It's not a balance issue that archers can take down slow, heavy plated warriors, those people should be wearing less armour and be more vulnerable to each arrow." I mean let's be honest plate armour was the reason bows became obsolete. By the end of the development of plate armour, especially as people started to use better metal than low quality mild iron, the bow was nearly useless against such armours. The only effective shots were ones that managed to pass through a gap. Like I say, it's the reason for the demise of the bow and why the world then developed so quickly in terms of ranged warfare.
In medeival ages, people in a army had to pay for their own armor. Plate Armor was pretty rare. Most people waer cloth or leather, if lucky chainmail.
Plate Mail was a counter to everything, no blade could pierce through it. blund weapons werent that effectiv as it was displayed today. If you want platemail to be a realistic counter to bow and crosbow, only 1 out of 100 should be able to afford plate mail. That would be realistic.
Underwaterghostbear wrote:Bows were developed to mow down unarmoured enemies in droves, not to somehow nail people through plate. The counter to plate was others in plate using half sword techniques, slim piercing weapons designed to exploit gaps in the plate or heavy impact crushing weapons made to smack the man inside senseless and fracture his skull. In a balanced game an archer shouldn't be good against EVERYTHING.
Bows were developed to hunt, not to fight in a army. Big groups of bowmen were there to scar the enemy. They were used on long range only, on this range an arrow was non leathal.
Underwaterghostbear wrote:2. You can say "Ahhh but you can't really effectively hit at long range" but this just isn't true, it's just a matter of being realistic and firing in groups, like in real life, it's very difficult to miss a group of targets with ten arrows showering their area. An individual archer may have a small chance of hitting an individual enemy over a distance but a group is almost definitely going to hit another group or even a single target, if the damage is unrealistic then you have the balance issue. there's a reason archers were trained to fire as a unit focused at targets so while that argument could maybe fly in YO, in a game of 10,000 in a server it has no weight, because there will now be regiments of archers mowing down people regardless of how armoured they are.
Even in MMO you will rarely see battles of 100 vs 100 (at this moment this is not even possible). Bowmen groups are not that big and there are a lot of things to cover. Going against a group of bowmen on open field is bad tactic and plain stupid. Nothing to fix here, if you want to move like a moron.
Underwaterghostbear wrote:3. to say "evading an arrow at mid range isn't that hard" is neither here or there, it means literally nothing. Evading an arrow from a newbie at mid range is easy because he's probably firing at where you are, not where you're going, but to say the same about an experienced archer who's got his eye and knows his distances, that's complete horse plop and still disregards the fact that you won't be dodging single arrows. You really can't argue that hoping your opponent isn't a good marksmen is substitute for actual balance, can you?
You can see an arrow mid air. It doenst matter how skilled the archer is, you are always able to dodge.
Underwaterghostbear wrote:4. What's this 200 arrow nonesense? as though they're not going to be even as smart as medieval man? They're gonna be nicely cushy in their spot with supplies. In a siege situation they can easily have thousands of arrows in reserve. Thousands.
People who complain that they cant move across an open field in their plate mail to slauter bowmen, are not that smart realy.
If someone moves his tradingcard across the map for hours, resupply is perfectly fine. The problem are archers, running like rabbits with 200 arrows in their backpack. A siege situation anyway is different from an open field fight. You can have as much arrows as you want in siege fight, the people behind the wall have the edge.
Underwaterghostbear wrote:Be unarmoured and rush the archers, knowing that the hail of arrows will kill you near instantly (because you're the exact type of troop the bow is made to slaughter in droves and you'll take massive damage) and that the archer you're approaching is probably better armoured than you are anyway because he didn't half the half brained idea to rush the enemy wearing no real armour....
When you only can imagine some crybaby tactics like rushing archers in a straight line fully visible, then you are right there is no counter. As long as everyone in LiF has a horse, it is simple to attack a group of archers from every direction.
As you speak here, was you ever part of a hugh battle in LiF? Hugh battles are more chaotic than organised. Your and enemy cav roam the whole battlefield freely. Archers fire at free will and not at the same target at the same time. You will not see a close formation, like a shieldwall or anything else. Its not even a loose formation, its chaotic. There is no group to target, only single men on a field.
An archer focused on hitting a target, is more likely to be trampled down by a horsemen than hitting someone.