it’s a problem that’s made worse by an archer’s qualities. Being locked to mostly player phase combat will overall reduce exp gain even if the archer has good bases. It’s also just easier to giftwrap kills with archers than with other units since they won’t be eating a counter so archers can often be used to set up kills for other units instead of the other way around since units with 1 range will have to take the potential for a counter, although this problem could be somewhat mitigated with a Jagen but depending on map size and the quality of enemies it could still be a problem.
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Inequalities between classes in terms of opportunities for exp will always be unequal because some classes are an answer to more solutions than others but I think it’s fine if no one unit receives too much exp. If enemies are dangerous enough then Archers will still find a comparable amount of opportunities to gain exp.
Adding on to this, I wanna comment what I’m doing for my hack.
In my hack I’m using skills. Each class, both promoted and unpromoted, learns 1 skill. To imrove bow users, Snipers have Bow Range+, and Rangers have Point Blank. It both fits thematically, and makes the “primary” bow users more useful. There are still other classes that use bows, but they’re just complementary tools for those classes.
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Change the Range:
Making the Short Bow 1-2 Range.
Making the normal Bow 2-3 Range.
Making the long Bow 3-5 Range.
This emphasizes the strengths of the archer (attacking from long distance, after all it makes no sense for a bow to have the same range as a javelin) and maintains the weaknesses (being weak at close range and being careful with positioning).
Putting the shortbow into the 1-2 range helps the archer have an alternative to being able to counterattack in exchange for losing the extra range that other bows offer.
As a bonus, this also nerfs flying units that are overly powerful and makes you be more careful in positioning them, because the enemy archers will also have a greater range.
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A thought occurs. In games where a few strong characters, most characters, or even all characters on your side have access to the Subdue combat art that always leaves the foe at 1HP minimum, is the “Niche” of Bow users as “The guy who damages my foes without killing them so I can feed those kills to better units” still valuable enough to justify spending one of your very limited character slots on it?
That’s not really a niche to begin with lol it’s just called being a bad unit.
Mages pretty much completely outclass them in that regard too.
Anyway if everyone has subdue then nothing really changes for archers bc they’re not doing much anyway if they’re worse than everyone and they’re doing good anyway if they are comparable to other units.
@TLD the issue with changing standard bows to 2-3 range and longbows to 3-5 range is that it increases the enemy threat range. This encourages the player to slowly turtle around the enemy lines as to not be put in range rather than push forward. This is especially severe if the game features nomads.
There are ways around this, putting pressure on the player with anti-turtle incentives such as reinforcements, chests that can be stolen, and villages that can be destroyed. Doing this pretty much forces the player to engage(heh) with the enemy and rush down the archers with your own archers or high movement units.
Yes, but I think there should be some balance between player phase and enemy phase. Long range bows put too much of a focus on player phase in my opinion as you are only able to counter them with bow users of your own. A good balance is around 70/30 player phase to enemy phase I’d say. It can become frustrating when you are not able to counter enemies. The ability to counter is what makes fe stand out from other strategy games after all.
Also, situations where you are able to rush down these archers are very few and far between. Usually, they will be accompanied by other enemies, so overextending is usually not an option as your cavaliers alone likely won’t have enough firepower/durability to clear up enough enemies that would enable them to survive the next turn. This only really works if an archer is relatively isolated, which is not usually the case.
The mekkah video today is actually quite interesting on this topic.
One of the best natural way to counter player deathballs is reducing the amount of attacks the player can get off on a single enemy. If an enemy is on a choke surrounded by terrain, you only get two or three hits max on the enemy. But higher range archers can drastically increase this number.
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i think bows should hit hard
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Say, wouldn’t False Swipe from Pokemon as a Combat Art make “the guy who weakens enemies safely to feed kills to my other units” a redundant niche?
Also, it would be sick if Archers did Super Effective damage to Mounted Units and Not Very Effective damage to Armoured foes. Some horses aren’t armoured, so that would be sick.
Maybe archers could get bonus damage on unarmoured enemies, as a bonus skill inherently gained upon equipping a bow and lost when unequipping it?
Echoes already has something like this. Armored classes take half damage from bows.
And having armor-effective bows could be really cool.
I think Horse-effective bows already exist. But I don’t think making ALL bows horse effective makes sense. What makes a horse more weak to arrows than a human?
Come to think of it, an arrow could do a lot of damage to a horse. Maybe horses should be weak to arrows unless the horse unit is also armoured?
Try it out.
Just make a game with that. Get people to playtest that and see if it works. Do people like using their archers in that game?
I apologize for being so terse, at this point there’s just too little reason in saying anything else.
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