First Post: Introduction and Request For Help Getting Up To Speed

[MaxWilson]

Partly, it's about scale. Arrows scatter, even if your precision is pretty good, and so 80 barbarians would have taken more damage than 20 barbarians did. (As an experiment, try adding various amounts of Barbarians, or Longbowmen, to your battle replays w/ Shift+'U'.) Still, it's not surprising that melee troops did more damage.

On the other hand, melee troops take fatigue from encumbrance, as well as HP damage from enemy melee units. As fatigue goes up, effective attack and defense skill go down and you also become more vulnerable to missile fire. Sometimes PD + archers can be much stronger than just PD by itself.

-Max

[rdonj]

One benefit to the crone pretender is that she's very cheap. She's also the only mobile 0 point pretender chassis. This makes her a choice for an imprisoned bless pretender, an economy awake rainbow pretender for site searching, something like that.

I've never really been that fond of archers in dominions, personally. You do tend to get much better results using infantry, but archers are useful in large battles for the reasons maxwilson stated, and they are useful on low armor units. I do tend to find them absolutely useless on heavily armored, shielded troops though (heavy infantry). You can try using crossbowmen, but I dislike them even more than archers. The reason being, I tend to use a lot of heavy infantry myself, and I usually end up taking as much damage from my crossbows as the enemy does. All that said, what this means is I usually only use archers if my enemy is fielding lots of low armor units and I'm using lots of heavily armored units, and I try to shoot whatever looks easiest to damage. Casting wind guide can help a lot with archer effectiveness, if you want to get the most out of them.