these are all basically the same thread actually, so i’ve merged them
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If anyone doesn’t know about vilkacis’s LP, this seems like a good moment to advertise it.
He made Wolt one of his best units simply by giving him Hector’s stats. Think about that.
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Not quite. He gave Wolt Hector’s growths IF they were better than what Wolt had. Thus, Wolt has 355% growths which is a massive amount.
For reference, Lance’s growths in that run only equal 285…
So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
“Archers are good!!..if you give them a 70% growth point advantage over all your other units.”
Just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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My thread got locked for this one, so uh…
They buffed bows in the new FE 3 Houses by making their range improve as the bow user’s skill goes up. Bows severely suck in every other FE game, both official games and romhacks, unless something was done to buff them in that hack.
Magic tomes hit 1-2 spaces away, bows only hit 2 spaces away.can’t counterattack unless your foe’s dumb enough to stand exactly 2 spaces away. Your mages can get EXP during the enemy phase for killing enemy units, and that’s unlikely to ever happen for your archers. bows are glass cannons like mages but mages are useful in more situations (and most characters have more DEFence against physical attacks than magic RESistance) so spellcasters will usually hit everything harder than bowmen, get more EXP, and hit even harder because they were more useful in more situations and contributed more utility to the party. Plus spellcasters often have more health and defense than bowmen, meaning they can get hit during the enemy’s turn and kill with counterattacks while bowmen are completely worthless during 99% of enemy phases.
Each playable bow character seems designed to suck, but Bows have problems inherent to their design no other weapon category has, and those won’t go away even if you “just let archers kill things” by buffing their stats and growths. Bows have 1 job, hitting fliers for bonus damage, and they usually suck at it. Elemental mages can score the same bonus damage with Wind tomes anyway and usually hit harder due to their higher level. Every time an enemy flier hovers over territory my walking or horse-riding bowmen can’t cross over but my mage on a flying mount can, every time my mages would one-shot an enemy javelin-using pegasus knight my archer can’t one-shot or even attack without dying to the counter, and every time my melee guys do better 2-range damage with thrown javelins or axes than my archer while also having better survivability for the enemy phase and the ability to kill enemy units during it while my bow users are bad player phase units and sitting ducks during the enemy phase 99.9% of the time, I wonder why archers even exist.
Archers need a buff. But how should they be buffed? Should their uselessness during the enemy phase be fixed, or should they be given niches unique to them during the player phase?
Give them 2-3 range or anything better, giving them the niche of being able to hit foes and chip them down without getting killed via counterattack? Make their range scale up with Skill? Add a portion of their Skill to Damage? Guarantee crits on fliers? Give them 1-3 range and let them counterattack Sword, Lance, and Axe users first? Let them deny counterattacks to Sword, Lance, and Axe users when attacking? Bows need some kind of buff, I’m just not sure what.
Your thread was merged, not locked. I also already copied this entire post earlier as it would have gotten lost when the other threads were merged together.
Just scroll up.
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Sorry, I didn’t notice.
What do you think about bows?
I would disagree with this. Bows a pretty good in FE11 and FE12 for 3 main reasons, I’d say.
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Enemies hit pretty hard, so attacking on player phase and avoiding counters when possible is the name of the game. Reliably hitting for good damage at 2 range without taking a counter is quite valuable.
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Most other physical 1-2 range (e.g. Javelins, Hand Axes) are pretty weak/unreliable relative to bows and and only have niche uses.
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Enemy fliers are fairly common and pretty scary, giving bows a good niche for taking care of them. Forging also accentuates this strength.
I think what’s most telling here is that bows aren’t explicitly buffed in any way in FE11/12 to make them more effective; rather, the context in which they exist changes to make them more relevant. If you make their inherent strengths (avoiding counters, knocking off fliers) less commonly distributed and more relevant, they are better without fundamentally changing how they work.
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Do we need to merge similar discussion threads? This one didn’t have a post for 1.5 years and now I am getting notifications because of it.
It also makes the thread a bit jank to read.
I know this is separate, but it’d be nice to change the policy on thread merges and locking threads that get bumps.
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It was either merge it into this one or lock it and say “this has been discussed multiple times already”.
They’re all discussing literally the same thing, I saw no point in having them all exist in their own little bubbles, and this was the one that was the most robust in terms of discussion itself (not the oldest one, that one I left where it was laid to rest 7 years ago).
You can always turn off the notifications if you don’t want to participate in the discussion.
How many times did I say discuss or discussion
Too many
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I feel as though we’re going in circles. Bows specialize in player-phase flier-deletion in a way no other weapon class does. Are they really good enough at flier deletion to justify what they sacrifice by being bow-locked? Where other weapons can damage foes or even kill during the enemy phase via counterattacks, bows are exclusively hyper-specialized glass cannons. A swordsman can carry an Armorslayer and Dragonslayer and an overpowered legendary weapon and some kind of magic sword and end up with far more versatility and power than any Bow-locked Bow user. And yet there are situations where your mages or melee units can do more damage to enemy Pegasus knights than your archer. Or situations where your archer can kill one flier, but it would mean getting killed by the other fliers, where your other units could kill that flier and survive attacks from the other fliers, maybe even kill via counterattacks. How many fliers can fly over terrain obstacles to kill archers on foot or horseback unable to approach the flier without getting killed? How many fliers can fly onto terrain the bow user can’t use like seas and hazards, get close, and attack the bow user with no danger and no risk of counterattack?
Giving the archer more easy targets might make his one job useful more often, but is he really the best around at it? Is being the best at it worth all the tradeoffs in areas some would consider vital for a unit to not get benched?
I recommend you play some hacka where bows are very useful.
Eternal Winter, Souls of the Forest, TMGC, and The Eligor’s Spear (this one’s pretty tough) are hacks that I’ve played where bow units were useful.
It’s all a matter of putting bows in an environment where they can be useful. Swords in FE7 aren’t that useful in FE7 because handaxes and javelins are the best weapons for taking on groups of FE7’s weak enemies for example.
There’s also the option to just not have bows in your project if they’re giving you this much trouble to come up with ideas for.
I can’t figure out how to make interesting weapons
and
I can’t figure out how to make unique and memorable characters
Wow this solved all my problems. Thanks, Contro! 
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What did those hacks do to make bows useful?
Put more of the one (two tops) types of enemies Bows are meant to be good against on maps? Give the Archers better stats and growth rates than anyone else, so they can be your army’s best player phase units to make up for how they’re sitting ducks during the enemy phase in a way no other unit is? Upgrade the bow to be better during the player phase (letting arrows beat mounts, 2-3 range or 1-3 range bows, 2+ range bows) or less awful during the enemy phase(the ability to counterattack, vantage for incoming non-tome non-bow attacks)?
They gave them jobs to do, and gave them the tools and stats to do it.
I really recommend you play some hacks and see how bow units work in practice. Just talking about how hacks have done it on paper won’t get you an idea better than just playing them to find out.
I’ve played a few hacks but I have yet to get to the ones you mentioned, and it may take a long time before I get to them due to how busy I am. To help this discussion move along can you tell me what I need to know about what answers these hacks have to the question of fixing Bows?
I apologize for being snippy, but it was already said:
You make Archers good by making being bowlocked not suck. And in turn, the way that you make bows useful is very simple:
You make having 2 range and flier effectiveness matter, and you make the units not dead weight outside of that niche.
The ways you do that are, as stated earlier?
Making enemies be threatening and making access to 2 range attacks the exception, not the norm.
The only thing not covered rather exhaustively in these last posts is to make mages not invalidate archers, since they both have access to ranged attacks and mages even boast hitting resistance which almost universally is lower than defense.
You can do that by making magic not all be 1-2; or by having enemy fliers be very scary and not having wind be effective on fliers; or by giving the archer actual defensive stats while leaving mages as paper; or by making enemies have actual resistance scores sometimes; etc.
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Bows in general don’t really need to be “fixed”, they need to be put in a situation where they’re useful. There are a few parts to this:
- Archers need to actually have useful stats. More than anything, vanilla archers tend to suck because they have bad stats.
- Player phase combat has to be valuable. This usually means having strong enemies. Obviously, archers have a worse enemy phase than other units since they can’t counterattack up close. In games where enemies are weak, the most efficient way to deal with them is to kill a bunch in one turn on enemy phase. In game where enemies are stronger, killing on enemy phase becomes harder and counterattacks become more threatening, so the focus shifts to player phase, where archers excel by avoiding counterattacks from most enemies without having to use weak 1-2 range weapons.
Obviously, having lots of fliers around can help make bow users good as well, but that’s not really the main problem – and neither is lacking 1-2 range options. Bows’ specialty isn’t just killing fliers, it’s attacking on player phase without getting hit in return. For them to be good, they have to be in a game where that’s valuable, and have stats good enough to do it.
There are other things you can do to make bows better – things like Echoes and 3H’s range boosts, flier spam, the classic and often memed-on 1-2 range shortbow (which is honestly fine to include so long as you don’t keep the 5% crit on it, but it absolutely won’t “fix” archers by itself) – but really, the number one thing that you need to do to make archers good is just design the game in such a way to let them use their strengths.
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Bows are bad if bow users are bad stat wise or bow users are obsolete because other units are broken. Most amateur game designers intuitively feel like ranged units should do lower damage than melee, but that’s not the case in most games. Hell, the sniper rifle one shots players, and it’s the longest range weapon in shooters.
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Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but defence maps are also great for those looking to make archers more viable. They can safely pick off dangerous enemies while hiding behind a wall or a tank and the nature of a defence map ensures that they won’t be held back by their infantry movement.
Alternatively, you could take what makes bows excel in comparison to javelins/handaxes and enhance that trait, being accuracy. Taking an already established premise and building upon it often works better than trying to veer away and create something completely different in my opinion.
I’d say it’s also worth noting that not all weapons/classes are created equal and that this is very healthy for a single-player game like FE. If all characters were of a similar strength, we wouldn’t be able to have the characters we all know and love like rutger or perceval (some also like the prospect of training characters that are generally considered to be worse than their peers for the fun of it, like walt for example).
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To sum up, you can buff archers directly or indirectly.
Indirect buffs:
- Enemies hit hard
- Javelins & Hand Axes are bad
- Enemy fliers are common and strong
- Not all magic is 1-2 range
- Wind isn’t effective vs fliers
- Enemies have more Res
- More defense maps
Direct buffs:
- Archers have great bases and growths
- Archers have defense while mages don’t
- Bows have more range
- Melee counterattack
- Bows have more might
- Archers gain more experience to keep up with classes with an enemy phase
Indirect buffs feel more interesting, but they’re also harder to implement. Buffing bow or archer stats is simple and quick, while indirect buffs require you to change entire enemy placements, enemy equipment, enemy stats, or map design.
Having a couple of comically bad units is okay, but entire classes being doomed just to make other classes look good doesn’t seem right to me.
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