Bannerlord Archer Tips

After about 600 hours in Bannerlord, here are some tips and strategies I've picked up for archers - playing an archer, archer tactics, and strategy considerations. Hope these help someone!

Playing an Archer

Here are some notes to help you pincushion enemies on the battle map:

1. Are you a horse archer, foot archer, or crossbowman? Each has strengths and weaknesses. Horse archers are highly mobile, but vulnerable because you're a big target, and you generally won't be as accurate because you're shooting from a moving platform. Foot archers are footmen and therefore slower and less mobile, but you can take the longbow for range and you'll fire quickly. Crossbowmen can't reload from horseback until you're high level, and you don't get as much reload time reduction as you level, but you're going to do a lot of damage with every shot and you can hold aim indefinitely.

2. Horse archers should stay moving at all times. Speed is your friend and your main defense. If you stop, you will start to take damage as enemy archers find the range or enemy cav charges you. You should at no point charge into the enemy; you want them over there where you can shoot them, not in your face. And don't bother aiming at individual units, you're better off aiming at clumps (unless you're trying to snipe an enemy lord). Your job is to harass enemy units, draw off heavy cavalry, counter enemy horse archers, and snipe lords. For loadout, take the best bow you can find, two stacks of arrows, and a slashing pole arm or lance. Your horse should be a desert horse or Asrai war horse; they are fast, and fast is what you're going for. Take heavy armor, your horse won't notice.

3. Foot archers need to stay near friends, preferably friends with shields, spears, and swords. If you leave the company of your friends, you're going to die; cav will get you, enemy infantry will charge you, or enemy archers will focus on you. Your job is to snipe enemy units as they charge the infantry, harass entrenched units, and pick off retreating units before they can re-form a line. Following an infantry line as close support works well, as does flanking an enemy line. If at all possible, try to occupy a position higher than your infantry, so you can shoot over their shoulders. Your loadout is a longbow or noble bow, two stacks of arrows, and a two-handed weapon like a greatsword or battleaxe. Don't bother with spears. The point of your melee weapon is to deal with infantry that charge you, not to try to engage cavalry. Use your bow for cav, and shoot the horses. Take the heaviest armor you can that doesn't slow you down too much, and get a good helmet. You're going to need mobility, but you won't be taking a shield, so your armor is your life. If you can't keep up with the infantry, you're too slow.

4. Crossbowmen work just like foot archers, except you should be taking headshots from the word go. You're not going to manage the same volume of fire as a bow, but you don't have to; use your ability to aim for as long as you like to line up your shot, and only shoot when you're sure of a hit. You have to be more careful of your ammunition as a crossbowman, because most of your opponents will not be shooting crossbow bolts at you. This limits your opportunity to reload, since you won't have as much opportunity to scavenge from the field. Like a foot archer, take the heaviest armor you can that still allows you to keep up with the infantry.

5. Your priority target is ALWAYS the enemy lord, if one wanders into your sight picture. Killing all the enemy lords will remove the AI's ability to "control" their units, and they will then all just charge or revert to their default behaviors. That usually means you win, as they will break on your infantry line.

6. Your secondary targets are enemy heavy two-handed melee troops. Sturgian line breakers, Asrai mamluk guards, falxmen, units like that. Those guys will butcher line infantry, but they've got nothing to block arrows.

7. Your tertiary targets are enemy light infantry - chaff mobs of recruits and peasants. Those guys are dangerous in groups, and can serve to choke your line while enemy cav or heavy infantry do damage, but their morale is poor and you can make it worse by shooting them. They're also wearing almost no armor and have no shields, so they drop quickly.

8. When in doubt, avoid shooting at shields. All shields will block arrows in a small radius around them, and it's not worth your ammo to try to snipe an opponent over their shield. It doesn't work. If you must shoot at shielded enemies, shoot them in the back.

Archer Unit Tactics Or, how to get the most out of your arrow lads:

1. Keep your archers protected. They should almost never be in front of your infantry line at the start of combat, and you should direct your heavy cav with an eye to chasing off enemy cavalry that might harass your archers. Archers can deal tons of damage, but only if they're allowed to shoot.

2. Keep your archers on high ground and your infantry on low ground. This allows your archers to shoot opponents much closer to your infantry, which is usually when they're most vulnerable.

3. Once the infantry lines engage, move your archers to a flanking position on the side of the engagement. This lets them shoot along the enemy line and pick off fleeing units.

4. In large battles, keep your archers in motion... and don't be afraid to have them charge into the melee. You may need to move them back and forth from their high ground behind the infantry to a flanking position and back again several times. Note that they will eventually run out of ammo - crossbowmen especially have this problem. At that point, treat them as light infantry and charge them into melee to help out as needed. Eventually they'll die and their reinforcements will arrive with more arrows. Then revert to the support fire role.

5. Control your archers' fire. Don't let them waste ammo shooting at one horse archer kiting around in front of them; take them off of "fire at will" mode, and don't re-enable it until they have a nice juicy block of units to shoot at.

6. Don't let your archers shoot at shield walls, it's a waste of ammo. Either charge your infantry and move the archers to a flanking position or let the enemy come to you and move your archers to a flanking position. Either way, they won't do any damage until the infantry engage.

7. Once you have more than a couple dozen archers, always set them to dispersed formation. If you leave them in the standard line, they won't have enough room for everyone to shoot. It also makes them less vulnerable to counter-fire from enemy archers, especially horse archers.

Archer Strategy Good generals know tactics. Great generals understand logistics. Here are some tips for archers from the strategic view:

1. The best foot archers in the game are Battanian Fian Champions. They are easily promoted from archers recruited in the Battanian home territories. If you want to field good archers, get these guys.

2. The second best foot archers in the game are either Imperial archers or Asrai archers, depending on who you ask. They're both well-armored and survivable.

3. The best crossbowmen in the game are Vlandians. They have huge shields on their backs, and they turn away from the enemy while reloading so that counter-fire will hit the shield.

4. Try to only have either crossbowmen or archers in your army. If you mix and match, they'll run out of ammo at different times in engagements, and that makes it harder to judge when to let them charge. Bannerlord has enough things to juggle in battle, you don't need that one on the list.

5. Foot archers promote quickly and are usually the second most survivable units in your army (the first being horse archers). You'll want to field at least twenty or thirty to make them effective in the mid-game, upwards of fifty in the late game. That being said, never let them outnumber your infantry in the early-mid game or you'll find your battle line getting overwhelmed and your archers getting slaughtered in melee. No matter how much armor they have, no archer is as survivable as a heavy infantryman with a shield in close combat.

6. The best horse archers in the game come from Kuzait (shocker) with the Asrai as a close second. The Imperials trot into last place. Kuzait horse archers are absolutely lethal both at range and at close quarters (Khan Guards are just scary) and very well-armored, while also being fast. Asrai horse archers are almost as well-armored and just as fast, but less lethal at close quarters. Imperial Bucellarii are well-armored but too slow and not terribly dangerous up close. You can resolve some of these problems by curating the horses you use to equip your horse archers, but you can't do anything about their loadouts.

7. You will have your horse archers until you suffer an army wipe, so make sure you choose units you like. They will be the most survivable units in your army in most cases.

8. In the early game you probably want to focus on either foot archers or horse archers, but not both. Your party just won't be big enough to get the most out of these units if you try to take all unit types with you when you've only got 80 guys total. Both archers and horse archers are only useful when they hit critical mass.

9. In the mid game, you can start to diversify. When your party size is 150ish you probably don't want more than, say, 20 or 30 horse archers or more than 40 or so foot archers. The key point is to maintain enough punch in your infantry line and heavy cav to allow them to do their jobs. That equates to about a third to half of your army being infantry in most cases, with 10-20 heavy cav. Alternately, if you want to just constantly run around in an army with one or more of your companion parties, you can tailor each party to play to different strengths. This can be dangerous, though, as you'll lose the speed advantage.

10. You can get away with an unbalanced party in the late game. Once your party has 200+ units, keeping an infantry line of 50 or 60 guys, with 20ish supporting heavy cav, is often enough. The rest of your army can be archers and horse archers, and that's a pretty lethal build.

11. Castles and cities are a GREAT source of foot archers in the late game. They will generate automatically with the right perks, and all you have to do is swing by and pick them up. At this point it's not worth it to recruit them at all; just pull them out of your fiefs as needed.

12. Remember that the auto-resolve favors horse archers. If you're tired of your companions losing all the time, curate their parties and give them a bunch of horse archers.

And that's all I've got to say about archers! Hope this helps someone!

Submitted October 30, 2021 at 11:02PM by thecastellan1115 https://ift.tt/3CvWC7b