NOTE: I do not own the rights of most of the pictures in this article. They're just the result of a quick Google research when I needed something, so I'll remove them if someone complains. Now, back on topic.When playing a battle in Europa Barbarorum, I imagine very few of you are thinking "I can't wait to start this battle with a good skirmish phase". The skirmish phase is probably the single most underestimated phase in the battle: an excessively small amount of players really pays attention to what happens during the early game. I am one of these players.
Why is the early game so overlooked? With the exception of steppe battles (not a common sight in the current MP environment) the initial skirmish usually leads to no significant conclusions, apart from the depletion of both ammunition and manpower of missile units. However, it often happens that a missile duel takes a significant part of the total length of the battle itself. Furthermore, some battles can be won or lost depending on your decisions during this phase.
From the moment when you click the button for ending the deployment to the start of the melee, the skirmish should be, for a good reason, your first pressing thought: this is what this guide is about.
I decided to divide the guide in two parts. In the first part I introduce technical concepts and discuss the results of some related experiments; the second part is dedicated to tactical considerations.
Introduction
First things first, we need to recall some technicalities that everyone should be confident with.
Hotkeys
- R → Run/Walk
- A → Fire at will
- S → Skirmish mode
- C → Close/Loose formation
Since this guide is all about efficiency, I start right now with some basic considerations.
Using R is generally more efficient than double clicking for commanding a unit to run. Also keeping fire at will off is generally the preferred option, so that you can target the units you dislike the most without wasting ammunitions. Skirmish mode is useful for micro-heavy moments of the battle, but its malfunctioning often causes the skirmishing unit to be trapped: use it with care, and not for too long if your men are chased.
All of the above are somehow trivial things, stuff that each decent player already knows. But the importance of a correct deployment and formation cannot be stressed enough. I repeat it: nothing can be more important than knowing how to correctly deploy and form up when using ranged units. And now we get to more exotic and interesting considerations.
In order to get to the juicy stuff, however, it is necessary to introduce the concept of cone of fire and beaten zone.
Cone of fire and beaten zone
When a large number of ranged weapons, such as bows, shoot their missiles from approximately the same position, the projectiles will be dispersed during the trajectory towards the target. The geometrical shape the arrows form when moving is called cone of fire.
Since the shots follow different lines inside the cone of fire, they will land not in the same spot, but within a certain area. The (approximately) elliptical area where all the trajectories converge on the ground is called beaten zone.
Now, a quick reminder on how projectiles work in EB. Each projectile defined in descr_projectiles.txt comes with an accuracy parameter that describes the spread of the projectiles, i.e. the maximum angle at which the projectiles are shot with respect to the "ideal" angle to reach the target. The lower the number, the greater the accuracy of the projectiles, since more projectiles are closer to the ideal angle.
There is a direct relation between the accuracy as defined for the projectiles and the beaten zone: the higher the accuracy, the smaller the beaten zone. Since the same number of projectiles hits a smaller area, there is a higher probability of hitting a man within that same area: here it is, higher accuracy means in general more effective volleys.
Oh, by the way: the above pictures tell us something very important: proximity increases accuracy. Projectiles spread less if they reach the target sooner, so the beaten zone is smaller whenever the shooting distance is shorter.
Efficiency
Once it has been said that EB online battles are all about conserving your resources for the appropriate time. This is correct. Furthermore, this concept assumes crucial importance when applied to missile units. This is another key point you need to take away from this article: you need to conserve your resources to dish out the maximum damage, at the right moment, in the shortest amount of time. You want to be as efficient as possible with each of your volleys: nothing worse than depleting all the ammunitions of your Toxotai Kretikoi on worthless Sphendonetai and then hopelessly watching heavy infantry units turn their backs to you without the possibility of punishing them.
How to play efficiently with ranged units? You want to place your beaten zone on top of as many enemy units as possible.
As you can see, there are different conditions you need to adapt to. Frontal fire is efficient with units arranged in column but inefficient in the case of a line, and vice versa for flanking fire. In general, flanking fire is superior due to how projectile resistance works in RTW (and consequently in EB): if you bypass the shield you can do a massive amount of damage. This is going to be discussed in the second part.
However it is clear what is the best option all around, which, unsurprisingly, has a precedent in history. The enfilade fire was the favourite of horse archers, who used to flank enemy formations (enfilade) and run as close as possible (proximity increases accuracy) to get the maximum penetration power and efficiency. Even in modern warfare, enfilade fire is considered superior especially for weapons using cyclic rate of fire in the order of magnitude of several hundreds of rounds per minute, but low accuracy, as for example machine guns.
Modern representation of some horse archer action.
For this reason, the use of enfilade fire is advised in any possible occasion, because of the extra kills that stray projectiles can provide on nearby units. This is something every Napoleon Total War player knows by heart, but even in RTW engine it's always good to know where to shoot at.
Experimental study
We have one good starting point for an experimental study of the behaviour of missile units:
proximity increases accuracy.
Two possible ways to inquiry this phenomenon involve a "static" case, where the shooting unit remains untouched, and a "dynamic" case, where the size of the shooting unit varies because of casualties over time.
I'd like to thank Aeneas and his immense patience for having helped me in performing the following tests.
Case study 1: archery effectiveness
First of all we need to choose which archers are going to be included in the test. The important parameters are two: unit size and accuracy. I chose three archers with low, medium and high accuracy to run the tests, respectively Thanvarê Payâdhag (Persian Archers), Thanvarê Pârsig (Heavy Persian Archers) and Shivatîr-î Mardâ (Mardian Archers). The fact that their attack and number of men are different is ininfluent, since one can renormalize all the numbers accordingly (and that's what I did).
The unlucky Guinea pigs of this test were several units of Pantodapoi, deployed six ranks deep and with their backs exposed to the archers to maximise casualties and enhance the statistics. Of course they were kept in close formation.
The archer units were deployed in three different positions: at maximum range, at mid range and at point blank range (about 20 metres away from the back row of the Pantodapoi). To properly mark the mid range I used a "placeholder" unit whose position was adjusted beforehand, and then moved the archers in the same spot.
For each archer unit six volleys are shot; the average number of inflicted casualties is written down, and then the archer unit is moved into the next position while the Pantodapoi are replaced by another full-strength unit.
Case study 2: archery duel
In order to compare the performances of different archers at different distances, one needs to take into account also how casualties influence the outcome in the long run. For this reason, an experiment involving two archer units shooting at each other is prepared.
I decided to test the behaviour of the Thanvarê Pârsig with respect to the Payai Dunai (Saka Foot Archers). The main differences between those units are the accuracy (medium and high, respectively) and the armour (7 and 2, respectively). The unit spacing in loose formation is the same. The tests are run at two different distances: max range and generic "close" range, about one third of the max range. Note that the Thanvarê Pârsig have lower range than the Payai Dunai, so it's their max range that I'm referring to.
This time twelve volleys are shot, and the casualties done by each volley are written down. The two tests are performed separately with different units (no shit Sherlock...).
Results
The table below shows the average casualties inflicted by the aforementioned units to the Pantodapoi at different distances. The number is divided by the attack of the archers and the number of men in the unit, to have a proper comparison between the killing power of one single man with a certain accuracy parameter.
| Casualties per man | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit type | Max range | Mid range | Point blank |
| Thanvarê Payâdhag | 7.11 10-2 | 10.41 10-2 | 11.07 10-2 |
| Thanvarê Pârsig | 10.0 10-2 | 10.00 10-2 | 11.78 10-2 |
| Shivatîr-î Mardâ | 9.51 10-2 | 11.49 10-2 | 12.48 10-2 |
As one could expect, the killing power generally increases with the increase of accuracy. As we expected after the theoretical discussion, though, the killing power increases with the decrease of the distance, too: the beaten zone shrinks, allowing for more hits on the exposed unit.
An interesting comparison concerns the gain in killing power, i.e. what is the percentage increase in inflicted casualties. In the histogram below I plotted the results for the two units with maximum difference in accuracy.
The results show that the Thanvarê Payâdhag gain a significantly higher amount of killing power with respect to the Shivatîr-î Mardâ: 55.8% against 31.3%. I think this is because the high accuracy of the Shivatîr-î Mardâ is not improved by the decrease in distance as much as the low accuracy of the Thanvarê Payâdhag, since arrows are less dispersed anyway.
Regarding the test with two archer units opposing each other, below you can see a histogram illustrating the average number of inflicted casualties for both the Thanvarê Pârsig and the Payai Dunai.
No need to put percentages in evidence, as you can see. What is important here is the difference in the performances at different distances. While in the first case both are dealing with each other pretty evenly, as soon as the distance is reduced the Thanvarê Pârsig completely shred the Payai Dunai.
This is also remarked by the two following graphs, where I plotted the number of remaining men as a function of time (yes, it's the number of volley, which is the same). I also showed the gap in manpower of the two units at the end of the test: there is a clear difference between the two situations. Of course this result needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, since as soon as the number of men in a unit dwindle the survivors start to spend time walking to restore the formation instead of shooting. In the end, the effect is that the superiority of the Thanvarê Pârsig at close range is exponentially enhanced with time.
Disclaimer for graph aesthetes (click to expand/close)
Discussion
From what we saw from the data we can derive some interesting conclusions.
From the first test we learned how the distance is a crucial parameter to consider when shooting with archers. While at long range highly accurate units perform considerably better than the others, at close range accuracy matters less and performances are evened out.
One thing should not be overlooked. Tthe Thanvarê Payâdhag not only gained the most in killing power, but also got the highest number of absolute kills at close range (a whopping 13.4 on average per volley, compared to 10.6 of the Thanvarê Pârsig and 12.6 of the Shivatîr-î Mardâ). Of course the reason for this lies in the high number of bows this unit can rely upon. As we can see also in the comparison between Large and Huge scale, in some cases quantity is more important than quality to deal a lot of damage in a short amount of time.
Furthermore, the archery duel test gave important results as well. At long range the Payai Dunai, the most accurate between the two, were taking on the Thanvarê Pârsig, which cost more than one and a half more and are clearly superior archers. This is due to their higher accuracy, that allowed them to do the same amount of damage they received even when at a disadvantage in armour. But at close range, the importance of protection is much higher because (as we saw in the previous test) accuracy matters less, and in fact the Thanvarê Pârsig dominated decisively the archery duel.
What do we learn today?
- A wise commander should employ low-accuracy archers at close range, where the sheer number of arrows makes up for their inaccurate shots;
- A wise commander should employ high-accuracy archers at long range, to maximise their killing power by peppering vulnerable units at long range;
- A wise commander should employ high-armour, medium-accuracy archers at every distance, because they are just as effective at close range as they are at long range; however, he should keep in mind that they excel at close range, especially in missile duels (and they can also close in melee and rout inferior skirmishers if their martial prowess is sufficiently high).
Note that there is no foot archer in the game which has a high amount of protection and a high accuracy at the same time: now we know why such a unit would be clearly overpowered.
One last consideration. In the tests I did not take into account slingers or horse archers. There are multiple reasons for that.
First of all, archers are the most numerous long-ranged missile units in the game, and generally the most used in MP: it made sense to give them priority. Secondly, horse archers are not used very often in missile duels. In third instance, slingers use different projectiles and have different values of accuracy and range. In my opinion there is also a problem in the balance of slingers: they are too effective in missile duels at the moment, thanks to the AP attribute and their low cost. To sum up, different experiments need to be conceived for these two kind of units, and I might do it in the future.
Well, this is the end of the first part of my study on missile units in EB. The second part is being worked on at the moment: I'll try to be as swift as possible!
I hope you enjoyed the reading of this article. As usual, if you have any suggestion or question please feel free to share.
Cheers!
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