Slitherine

Hello,

I am curious what the current conventional wisdom is regarding MF archers vs. LF archers. I'm building a later Seleucid army and the list has lots of different ways to deploy archers. A few questions:

Is there a 'clearly superior' way to field your archers? Like, "no one who has a clue would bother with MF archers" etc...
Is there any reason to include both MF and LF archers in the same army? I plan on using poor slingers as skirmish troops because they're nice and cheap.
Are the optional / mercenary archers better than the core archers?
What are commonly seen battlegroup sizes / configurations for foot archers?

Assume I'm putting together a fairly conventional Later Seleucid army, built around pike blocks and cataphracts.

no one bothers with av undrilled unarmored MF archers who dont have a gimic like stakes or lt spear.

The popular trend is taking poor LF archers who are quite good for the points and can run away from trouble

Interesting. I had noticed that in dozens of sample Later Seleucid armies posted on the madaxeman website, not a single one had MF archers. So the old "tempt the enemy with archers then keep cav close-by to intercept whoever charges them" tactic doesn't work, I suppose?

I can often be found on here arguing that troops that everyone else says are pants, are actually not pants at all, if you think carefull yabout how you are going to use them.

So here goes...

Unprotected MF archers are basically pants. Having said that, I do use them reasonably often - but really only as a cheap way of providing rear support for decent infantry (and whether this is cost-effective or not depends very much on the specific army list. Can you field them in BGs of 4, being the main issue here).

Occasionally they get pressed into action as an emergency reserve to react to something happening on the flanks, but I wouldn't want to stake money on them actually achieving anything useful in that situation

>So the old "tempt the enemy with archers then keep cav close-by to intercept whoever charges them" tactic doesn't work, I suppose?

That can work. As can - tempt the enemy with <something fragile> and then take them in the flank/rear. Or even if the enemy breaks the bait, try to take them in the flank/rear before they can reform. Or win the battle elsewhere before the enemy can get back into useful action. But that sort of thing is risky and requires you to get your timing right, whilst the enemy is trying to exploit it, so not the sort of thing most people want to get into. Or they'd rather use skirmishers in place of the immobile bait. The big problem is that even if you, the player, are quite happy to regard a particular BG as expendable, the VP calculations don't reflect that.

MF archers are normally a nice target for most other troops. They normally shoot two or three times (often just against enemy skirmishers) then die. If they are unprotected they will often get shot up by enemy LF. LF archers get to shoot a lot more, and can run away from trouble.

Consider the rest of your army, Seleucid armies are not shooting oriented, what purpose will the bow BG serve?

MF will be able to give rear support and maybe scare some enemy LF, which is handy if your LF is poor.

LF can skirmish (much more cost effective delay method than sacrificing a BG) and screen your pikes against shooting (the main reason I use LF in any Pk based army).

To clarify: I would take the LF.

I don't know....I always considered a unit of 50 Irg D levy archers, at 1 point each, very effective

The problem with taking the archers as MF with this army in particular is manouver. It would be the only clumsy unit in what is otherwise an army that can bob and weave a little (albeit ahistorically).

Undrilled unprotected archers are a little better if used in mass - say as classical Indian but still far from good. In CI, the drilled status is less useful (you have so many archers usually that the enemy will catch them so drilled status is less useful. But the CI archers are cheap and come in 8s so if you going to attack them you need to put a decent effort in, which means the rest of your army could do stuff. Having elephants handy is a decent counter to some of the things the archers don't like.