Slitherine

So with the tournament I've been doing a fair amount of playing both with and against Indian armies. I don't think they are necessarily unbalanced - you can beat them - but they are certainly top-tier. This is fine in the game but I'm not sure how historical it is. I can't think of many examples of other armies based on unarmored massed bowmen from other periods who performed well.

So a suggestion - maybe have it so that massed bowmen do not cause an automatic cohesion drop when they flank a heavier infantry unit, unless the bowmen have some sort of melee capability (ie, swordsmen)? This would mean that troops like English medieval archers are still pretty tough in melee, but prevents an army of 70-80% massed bowmen from being such a beast to defeat and give an incentive to Indian armies to field more javelinmen and other shock troops.

Obviously you'd need to dock a few points from the bowmen's price. This means that Indian armies would be larger in number, which I don't think is unrealistic.

Also, can anyone recommend any good discussions (say, old Slingshot articles) on the effectiveness and composition of Indian armies?

We discussed this issue during the recent beta, and we are going into the next beta with some nerfs for cheap bowmen. The one you suggest is one of the ones I suggested myself, but it was thought that yet another exception to the normal flanking rules might be undesirable from a learning-curve point of view.

I still think it was a good idea, but we have other things to try. If they don't prove sufficient we can revisit the flanking thing.

Good to hear!

I think it might also be nice to break up the homogeneity of Indian infantry - ie, maybe give some bowmen the swordsmen capacity with accompanying flank-shock power to represent more aggressive troops (ie, the kshatriya retinue of the king) versus less aggressive bowmen provided by tributary states.

- Massed bowmen do not cause an automatic cohesion drop when they flank a heavier infantry unit.
- Elephants 70 points each.

Indian Army problems sorted.

ianiow wrote:- Massed bowmen do not cause an automatic cohesion drop when they flank a heavier infantry unit.
- Elephants 70 points each.

Indian Army problems sorted.

That would potentially cripple the Indian armies badly.

I would rather see some potential tweaks to the army list comp instead. Perhaps trimming the number of elephants in a 1200 FP game to max 5 and forcing more (maybe a lot more) compulsory javelinmen so they have fewer points to dump into archers and elephants.

rbodleyscott wrote:We discussed this issue during the recent beta, and we are going into the next beta with some nerfs for cheap bowmen. The one you suggest is one of the ones I suggested myself, but it was thought that yet another exception to the normal flanking rules might be undesirable from a learning-curve point of view.

I still think it was a good idea, but we have other things to try. If they don't prove sufficient we can revisit the flanking thing.

I like the idea with having no new exceptions. My first thought was, what is happing if you consider massed bowmen as light infantry. Then you have to add some disadvantages, otherwise the points of the units has to be raised a lot. So you can reduce the movement points to 10 and give it unflexible to drop the free turn. Maybe you can drop the evade ability as well, like it is for lancer. Ok this is an exception as well, but it is already present in the game. May be you can find name for the evade ability and add it to unit to make it obvious if a unit has the ability to evade or not.

May be you can add an negative modification for haveing no close combat weapon. So at the moment a light spear has no combat bonus, just on impact. But it is still better to wear a light spear in close combat than a bow. But this will affect all bowmen and slingers.

Best regards
Gwaylare

Anyone who wants to test the new massed defenceless archer rules and/or suggest alternatives will be welcome to join the next DLC beta which should be announced next week.

This time the beta will have both Slitherine and STEAM versions.

That is great news re STEAM version being added to the Beta testing Richard!