Archers question

[Sunshine Moon]

Just wondering, normally it's a real bad idea to have 60% or more archers in a flank or the enemy can use Charge on Undefended to close into melee and shred them, but is it possible to deny this happening with the world's most souped-up longbow flank?

Like, a Welsh army that can use Massive Longbow Volley, with both the cultural retinue and cultural building bonuses, with a good applicable leader on a pure archer flank, that's gonna be a lot of skirmish damage, right? Has it got a shot of turning the enemy into pincushions before they get time to close the gap? I don't know all that much about combat outcomes to be honest.

 

[mrstevehazzard]

I know that flanks of pure longbow used to be able to massacre a whole enemy army before they could get close enough to touch them, but that was a few years ago and I don't believe it's still the case.

 

[Sunshine Moon]

Yeah, I've read that they got a nerf at some point. Was just curious if they could still work if optimised for it.

Well, in my current Wales game I'm still at the size where my retinue is basically just supplementing my levy a bit, so I might wait until I spy an opportune battle of a size where I can throw them all on a flank and see what happens.

(To say nothing of my recent Britannia campaign where I managed to conquer most of Europe before even learning about Charge on Undefended and realising I'd been using armies of exactly 60% archers the whole time...which just proves the old adage that you don't really have to optimise in this game if you have bigger numbers. Guess all the 30-martial commanders from my Perfect Knight bloodline were brute-forcing all those battles...)

 

[redtide]

Even though a flank is eligible for Charge on Undefended after three days, there isn't an initial skirmish tactic that lasts only three days. They all last either 12 or 18 days, after which time a flank of 100% Longbows could have already done a lot of damage.

EDIT: but there's a bug that allows Charge on Undefended to fire as soon as it's available
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...st-pure-archer-retinue.1394175/#post-26784477