How about just 3 range, without the 2?
That honestly just makes them really janky to play with very specific placements, while it does not help them too much(Yey, nobody can counter them, great. except that they were mostly only played for not getting countered anyways, so only a few classinteractions really change)
I think the problem are the stats, now with skills i think you should give them more HIT instead of range and stats growths. Any character needs a downfall in a growth. For example here’s my character archer, Robert.
Robert is a pre promoted Oifey, that being said he’s like Seth.
His personal skill is that one that increases critical hits by skill/2 + luck *1.5 i think…
So in order to be playable I want to give him nice start stats and low growths because of the skill being said, and if the class has 2 or 3 (Now in these hacks since 6 or 5 are broken like THWD) like FE 8 PME with only a personal skill and not a lot skills in a character I make him broken, but since archers and snipers suck in vanilla games I don’t want to turn him in a ranger.
ADD in consideration the skills. In Void’s blitzarre adventure I see Grit has a long bow. If you want to give archers long bows, turn bows in ballistas with low Mt. and decent Hit. If you want to use bows at CQC give them 1-2 range. Think in your character too, what his personal skill is, what is going to be:
Non promoted early archer or Non promoted after 10 chapters archer like Knoll (Only Shaman in game not including Ewan) or Pre promoted.
Well that’s what I think.
I agree that the most reasonable solution would be to give Archers 2-3 range accessibility. That would give archers the options to attack any non-bow user without chance of retaliation, which in my opinion makes up the fact that they are usually unable to retaliate in enemy phase. This issue should be balanced out in a way that gives them superior utility in player phase, which I believe is nicely solved by giving them consistent 2-3 range options.
However I do think that brings up other issues: Why use archers if you can use nomads? Or bow armors with equal movement (e.g. project ember hack)? The weapon type is one thing, but archers would need to have significant niche in order to keep up with more conventient-to-use units. Why use a soldier if you have a cav or a 5 move knight, right?
Well, one option is to improve level design in a fashion that promotes using archers over their peers. I think designing maps with convenient placements of ballistas can encourage using archers for an extended period of time (e.g. the nameless heroes hack). This I think should be considered more often as it gives them a slight edge in certain situations.
Another possibility is to give snipers a juicy crit bonus, which you couldn’t get anywhere else as a 2-3 range unit (e.g. Project Ember hack). This however leads to the problem that enemy Snipers will be very difficult and unsafe to deal with due to their range and crit chance, thus kinda promoting a turtling / bait & switch type of gameplay just to deal with them safely.
So instead, I think a nice and clever way to solve this issue is to make class exclusive weapons. Instead of making all bows 2-3 range, there could be iron, steel and silver variations of longbows (similar to the blade variations of swords) which are exclusively usable by archers. Other bow wielding units are locked to 2 range instead. This would make them superior for dealing with pretty much anything with 2 range availability, and it would give level designers the power to limit the 3 range accessibility on enemy units.
Aside from this, I think effectiveness weapons are also an option to consider, since horse and armorslayer weapons are not available for bows and would buff their use across the board, giving nomads as well as bow armors some new tools to deal with their 3 range loss.
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I have two archers. One has below average speed but high strength, allowing him to fare well against slow enemies. The other is extremely fast but also weak. Given the same weaponry both do about the same damage, with some advantages depending on the weaoon. Verde gets to quadruple with the Quick Bow but can’t double some enemies with the Steel Bow, making Ruben better with it.
Snipers get a crit bonus. Nomad Trooper I think will get Desperation as a skill. Aside from that they won’t learn any other skills.
Global 2-3 is a solution as shitty as 1 range bows and only served to make archers extremely annoying to fight.
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I don’t think this solution has been implemented in a hack before, so bear with me.
Making archers good
Remove bows and bow using classes from the game.
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That might be good for a Fate/Stay hack since
you could still have the Archer class but it would just use swords lmao
I tried a combination of weird stuff. First I made iron/steel/silver/poison bows 2-3 range. To tackle the issue of archers being broke, I made the class itself a slow class so the 2-3 range would be chippy from both sides. For promoted classes, I made the bow rank of any class with bow secondary start at E and locked iron bows into D rank so players would have to grind short bow for a while to unlock. Then I lowered the accuracy of all bows to axe-ish accuracy, but made archers (playable and enemy) extremely high skill to compensate so they could hit reliably and also just naturally crit a good amount.
I just didn’t have that many stationary bosses lmao. That feel when you gather your entire army around a throne and just sit around and dunk on some guy is funny once, but then it just gets kinda sad.
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Fates archers are really good for a few reasons:
Bows might and hitrate are actually good. they are comparable to lances.
Weapon Triangle pits bows as a “lance” unit, making only axes and magic good vs them. So swords, ninjas are weak and lances are normal. Meaning a good portion of enemy archers good vs your team and the other way around as well.
Magical Bows, giving them magic enables the go around of Knights and Wyverns (although they are weak against bows in general).
Not to mention the bow users you get: Niles, Mozu, Setsuna are all really really good stat wise. Execeptionally fast, good skill in +4damage while initiating. Niles has great RES and SPD. Mozu is a monster in Str,Skl,Spd. and I forget Setstuna.
So I feel bows can be good without 2-3 range. and In my hack I initially had them at 2-3 with longbows at 3-4. That made enemy knights with bows really oppresive with high str, high skl (knights in my hack have good hp,str,skl,def) So they could almost oneshot your team if they hit.
I think you got the Fates weapon triangle wrong. Bows are green like Axes, Magic and Swords are red, and Lances and Hiddens are blue. So Magic and Swords beat bows, and Bows beat lancemen and hidden weapons.
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This is correct and I hate it because the Fates triangle caused them to take out my favourite class, Warrior.
Javelins and hand axes are also kinda unfair for archers. Maybe making them less durable and more pricy would give the archers more value.
Or increasing their weight and/or slightly lowering their hit rates to roughly FE6 level.
I’ve been playing Project Ember recently and my earlier concerns are proven right. Bows are insanely good thanks to universal 2-3 range (minus short bow, I sell that immediately) and sniper crit boost, so in that hack I personally never use javs and hand axes, except with fliers (snipers can’t keep up with them). Bosses in that game are also extremely easy to kill thanks to OP bows that don’t get retaliated upon, so I’m even more convinced that global 2-3 range is not the best solution.
I’d say nerfing javelins and hand axes is also not the way to go. They are already as fragile as silver, weaker than iron, and less accurate than steel, so if they were nerfed, players might avoid them altogether. I would at least.
High bow might, sniper crit boost and an abundance of playable ballistas might be good contenders. Say, iron bow would get 8-9 Mt, crit boost could be +15 like swordmasters and berserkers, and ballistas could be in 1 out of 3 maps. I also like Hyoen’s idea of making effective bows against armor and cavalry, or a bow that negates enemy defense altogether. Or do like FE7x: Immortal Sword, which gives bows weapon triangle advantage from afar and disadvantage in melee.
I did get the Fates triangle wrong lol, but with Javelins and Handaxes, I feel like they should be more accurate but deal less damage then their iron/steel counterpart. Low hitrates hurts players but it hurts enemies even more to the point why am I using a 60hit handaxe? I prefer the 85-90 handaxe with 3mt. Some tradeoff for using ranged.
Along with effective bows in my previous hack I had elemental bows which along with effective vs fliers including wyverns.
Fire Bow: effective vs armored, wyvern lord units
Ice Bow: effective vs horses
thunder: effective vs mages.
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One thing that should not be overlooked about 3 range archers is that your map should be designed around them if that was the case. You can’t just plug in a 3 range archer into a map thats obviously not built for it because it can lead to many complications and irritating scenarios for the player. This wouldn’t be too big of a deal later on but in the early game it can be pretty scary to be attacked from 1range (normal enemies) and 2 to 3 range. Thus map design should be accounted for when making a change like this one.
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While the player phase focus and threatening enemies are needed to make archers a lot more viable, I think global 2-3 range is the only way to make them truly stand out. The point of an archer is to deal damage without taking a counter on player phase and be vulnerable to taking damage without being able to counter on enemy phase, and 2-3 range solidifies this position by enabling them to outrange mages and 1-2 range physical weapons. Obviously enemy placement has to be adjusted to factor in units with 3 range but Souls of the Forest proves it’s possible to design maps with 2-3 range archers extremely well. It also makes more sense from a logical perspective (why would a bow have the same range as a javelin).
Bad arguments against 2-3 range:
-“it was poorly implemented/unfun in this example,” doesn’t mean it can’t be done well (which I believe SotF did great)
-“it makes archers cheese your stationary bosses” there’s several ways to tinker with bosses to make this less of a problem. You could consider using skills if your hack has those to alleviate the problem (for example tome range plus 1 to give mage bosses 1-3 range or bowbreaker), adding 1-3 range weapons, or you could also just have less stationary bosses, i don’t really see the point of them unless their absolutely necessary (like on a seize map).
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Echoes’ archers have like 5 range, and while it’s a tad broken it’s really not an issue of map design, more an issue of a unit attacking from 5 squares away. The no 1 issue is if you have a 1 tile hallway they become very powerful.
Personally I think stationary bosses are crappy. I know they’re a staple of FE, but they’re not fun to fight and just encourage a war of attrition playstyle. (which I don’t enjoy-weren’t people talking about how turtling is bad?)
So set them to 2-3, ditch 1 tile hallways, reduce stationary bosses, and for any stationary boss you DO have make some kind of enemy reinforcement or time constraint so the player can’t just sit and chip away.
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If it is technically possible, archers could inflict some sort of stat debuf on landing a hit. Like a -1 on defense. If it is not possible a poison bow from the start may also work.
Take examples from enemy archer units in higher difficulty:
-Highly accurate.
-Doubles A LOT.
-Some can take out one of your non-armored unit with killer bows + high SKL in one round.
-Some can dish out a frustrating amount of damage with silver bows or even steel bows.
-Some comes with Close-Counter, making fliers think twice before going for an attack.