Archers bonus vs mounted units

[Nameless One]

Does anyone see the reason why Archers in the original battle system have +1 to their missile rating against mounted units? I've never seen anything similar in any other system. Is there anything about longbows and crossbows that makes them more efficient against mounted units?

Most importantly, is this something that should be kept or done away with when developing a new battle system for Birthright?

[stew31r]

It's more of a real world thing than a battle system thing. The most effective deterrent to cavalry after a pike line or spear wall is missile troops at range. Horses will start to panic if hit with enough arrows/bolts/javelins. Horses are also a bigger target and thus more likely to be struck by volley fire than the riders. Wounding or panicking horses so that they are combat ineffective as just as good as killing them. The are several historical references to the effectiveness of mass missile fire at disrupting if not out right turning cavalry charges.

[Nameless One]

Ah, thanks, that makes sense. I was wondering about this because the archers seem a bit too strong in BR War Cards system. I've made a tool to test performance of units in one-on-one battles and it seems Anuirean Archers will defeat any other unit except Elite Infantry and Knights with ease. Even with Elite Infantry it's 50:50 odds so only Knights count on defeating the Archers most of the times. Doesn't seem very balanced to me since same-priced Infantry can't even defeat Irregulars 50% of the times.

[Jaleela]

A much used example is the English Longbowmen at the battle of Azincourt when they stopped the French cavalry. There were other factors involved: weather and resulting thick mud, the funneling effect of the field, etc... but it was an effective demonstration of the value of the longbowmen.

The difference between the infantry and the Knights tends to be armour and the speed at which the unit moves. Infantry cannot move as fast as horses at a gallop, so it stands to reason that if the knights can clear the distance to the archers faster, taking less damage and once there, the archers don't have a lot in the way of armour and weaponry with which to defeat the knights at close range. Household archers like those of the Dukes of Burgundy were fully armoured, most other archers were only partially brigandine or jacks, or no armour at all.

[rjurikwinds]

(...) I've made a tool to test performance of units in one-on-one battles (...) Doesn't seem very balanced to me since same-priced Infantry can't even defeat Irregulars 50% of the times.

Yes; I just LOVE Irregulars. Cheap, easy to muster, cheap, good movement, versatile stats, cheap... did I mention CHEAP? Now don't take me for a goblin-rabble type of guy, but when you have a domain to run and you don't have gold bars growing on trees, Irregulars are a Erik-sent blessing!

[AndrewTall]

Yes; I just LOVE Irregulars. Cheap, easy to muster, cheap, good movement, versatile stats, cheap... did I mention CHEAP? Now don't take me for a goblin-rabble type of guy, but when you have a domain to run and you don't have gold bars growing on trees, Irregulars are a Erik-sent blessing!

And yet you never let me put the warcard 'goblin rabble' into play in RW. Sigh, whatever else you could call them they were dirt-cheap fodder and the 1/8 GB maintenance was just too cute for words.

[Green Knight]

The Archer bonus vs. cavalry is very sound.

The fact that their original Missile 4 is way too strong against stuff like heavy infantry is another matter.

[Nameless One]

I think the core of the problem is that units have way too few Hits which are way too easy to loose in the original Birthright battle system. For example, Anuirean Cavalry has no problem charging across the whole battlefield to attack Anuirean Archers, but they will probably get hit by their "last shot", which brings them down to a single hit with stats roughly equal to those of the Archers, while Archers remain unharmed. Elite Infantry might seem in better situation, but their Move of 1 gives archers at least 2 shots, making it probably for Archers to score 2 hits, not to mention chances of R or D result.

Actually, the dominance of Archers in a world with where soldiers don't use shields (if you take a look at warcard illustrations) might be justified. The only problem is that they are very cheap. Increasing the price of Archers might be justified considered that Longbowmen are much more difficult to train that ordinary footmen and that longbows, although relatively easy to produce, depended on a single type of wood which almost grew extinct in Europe because of longbow production.

[splinter]

i wonder why the rjurik archers have not the +1 against cavalry and how come in the book of regency, the rjurik cavalry has a missile rating of 1. the orginal cavalry warcard has no missile rating.

[Nameless One]

They probably forgot the cavalry bonus or didn't agree with authors of the boxed set. About the Book of Regency, it was never really published so they either forgot to synchronize the values with other sourcebooks or the values in the BoR were meant as an errata. We'll probably never know about either of the problems.

[Arentak]

I think Anuirean Archers are meant to represent Longbowmen, and other Archers may represent guys with shortbows. I like to think of irregulars as having a mix of slings, shortbows, and javelins. For units with a missile rating of 1 or 0, I assume some javelins.

[Magian]

That bit about the irregulars sure makes me excited to see what I can do with Mhoried as their musters are irregulars. Now to consider the possibilities of units with composite bows.

[AndrewTall]

They probably forgot the cavalry bonus or didn't agree with authors of the boxed set.

Or it could be a cultural thing - is there a difference between a disciplined anuirean type series of volleys from ranks of trained longbowmen compared to 'shoot whenever you're ready' with shortbows for the rjurik? Not sure myself, I'd defer to the historical types.

I never used the war-cards myself, it seemed very over simplistic and didn't fit in with the more story-based game I was aiming at. Given the BR was partly targetted at the war-gaming crowd I always wondered if the warcards were expected to be used by the designers or just used to round-out the set while things like battlesystem, warhammer, etc were expected to be used in practice.

[Nameless One]

Or it could be a cultural thing - is there a difference between a disciplined anuirean type series of volleys from ranks of trained longbowmen compared to 'shoot whenever you're ready' with shortbows for the rjurik? Not sure myself, I'd defer to the historical types.

Rjurik use longbows. If the bonus should have been left out for any archers then it should have been the Vos Archers, but we all know Vos units simply had their stats copied over from the Anuireans.



I never used the war-cards myself, it seemed very over simplistic and didn't fit in with the more story-based game I was aiming at. Given the BR was partly targetted at the war-gaming crowd I always wondered if the warcards were expected to be used by the designers or just used to round-out the set while things like battlesystem, warhammer, etc were expected to be used in practice.

I think TSR wanted to profit off the card game hype of that time. Did you know that Dragonlance setting had a card-based system?

[AndrewTall]

Hmm, no idea why but I had it in my head that only Anuireans used longbows :confused:

I vaguely recall a TSR card-based game that died a death (spellfire?) but I never looked into it in any detail. What confuses me is that BR was specifically described as a cross between a RPG and a wargame, used D&D but didn't used something similar to battlesystem, although the latter may have died a death by the time BR came out.