Examples and Breakdowns~
In this section I'll show various screenies of battle reports and break them down to explain how they work, why they work or what went wrong.
How Ranged Units Work~
Attackin' w/ archers always seems like a good idea, down to how much reverance people talk about it, but you have to understand one of the most important things about any ranged unit: they will always attack enemy ranged units first.
This means that if you attack archers with archers+layer, your archers will be under seige from the enemy archers as soon as they're in range, makin' your layer essentially useless, but it will give your layers the chance to run forward and hit the enemy. This makes ponies and archers dangerous partners.
Have a looky at this report:
Ranged Die First
The battle started at AT range becasue there was no traps/abati; this meant that everythin' was in range of the AT at first. So what did it do? It started to pick off the ranged units first. First the cata's died, then the b'listers, then the archers...by which point the ponies had done enough damage to finish off the last of the ATs.
What would have saved the ATs?
Traps/abati. This would have put the layers in range of the ATs before the ranged units, givin' the ATs the chance to kill them off more before it started to attack the ranged units.
Combine this with range deductibles and you have a serious problem.
This means that while your archers are busy shootin' enemy archers at the other end of the field, they're not even hittin' for maximum damage, but it also means that when those ponies arrive in front of them, they hit them for even less damage and give them all the time they need to kill your archers!
This all isn't to say that archers can't ever attack, jus' don't expect them to be your main spearhead force against any defence with real numbers in it. Archers are still excellent waves to send to clean up heavy layers before you clean the traps/abati. At 5k range your archers can mow down enemy layers safely and quickly, even in small numbers, becasue their defending counterparts are not yet in their range to attack.
Ofc, that's not to say that archers can't succesfully attack either, under the correct circumstances. Takin' advantage of shortrange battles and few layers can bring offensive archers up to a great advantage.
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/a...Archer Assault
Importance of Rainbows~
Let's discuss the importance of gettin' rainbow mechanics correct. We'll start w/ a full, head on attack of non-rainbowed ponies versus archers.
100k Ponies.
100k ponies sounds like a pretty worryin' prospect from the offset, but as you can see, it didnae go very well. What went wrong?
The first few ponies were killed off by traps/abati while gettin' shot at by the 200k archers. They charged forward (while gettin' shot at) and killed the defendin' pony/'phract and continued on more (while gettin' shot at) to start work on the rainbow (while gettin' shot at). As you can see, gettin' constantly shot at by archers for those rounds didnae help their life expectancy as they failed to even finish workin' through the rainbow. Let's counter that problem w/ a rainbow of our own.
99k Ponies w/ a rainbow of scouts
Suddenly the ponies do much, much better. Despite the fact that they were against more than double the number of archers, they ripped everythin' apart. This is because the 10 scouts lunged forward and drew the attention of everythin' for long enough that the ponies go far enough ahead to have sufficient numbers left alive by the time they reached the archers. The issue w/ ponies isnae killin' the archers; they do that unbelievably quickly. The issue is gettin' to them alive. A small rainbow like this protected them for jus' long enough to reach their target and lay waste to them.
However, it's not as simple as jus' puttin' on a wee rainbow and thinkin' the day is yours...
99k Ponies w/ a rainbow of scouts gone awry
The lowest number of archers yet, but the ponies were crushed and never even reached the pointy-eared bowmen. Why, you ask? Because this time, the defender had the better rainbow and was more solidly protected. Now; the first things to happen were that the scouts were utterly demolished by those catas and archers. They only drew the attention away for so long; not long enough, sadly. The ponies were still well in firin' range by the time attention turned on them. And what happened then? 18k pikemen decided to stick long sticks w/ metal into the riders. Although they wildly outnumbered the pikes and killed them all, there wasnae enough ponies left to talk about it by the end of that round, wherein they got shot up a few more times and were dead before they even reached the swordsmen.
So..rainbows? No rainbows or weak rainbows lead only to false hope or potential defeat. You cannae jus' toss some random troops in and cross your fingers. Puttin' in the correct number and the right unit (for example; layerin' up on pikes when ponies are attackin') is absolutely essential in winnin' battles.
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