are archers still relevant?

Zegner

Guest
historically there have always been discussions about archers but what do you think of them as of right now, in 2019? On worlds with paladins with skills specifically i think that the +30% bonuses to both spears and swords makes them much stronger now than they used to be. Also, the daily bonuses you sometimes get from logging in only apply to spears and swords too, giving them the edge once again.

I havent played tw for a few years and im interested to know the opinion of active players on this topic, and perhaps some new advisable defensive ratios on archer worlds with pally skills
 

IAmAbel

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It´s a tricky question.

Archer still has really good defensive stat against infantry and cavalry, it´s not like the base stat have been worse or so. The problem being cost/strength ratio and the high recruitment time/strength ratio. I´m not gonna spend time giving you the numbers but overall it is the most costly infantry unit based on what total defensive stat it gives, and also the infantry unit that takes most time based on what stat it gives.

That have always been the problem with the archer, but with heavy swords or HC that can counter MA the archers have still been a good addition to every deff.

Adding the booster though, the archer bonus is not like the usual 15/15% defense bonus, you can´t get it on daily bonus so you gotta get it from events. It is usually not expensive but it is not available on every event, making it really hard to come by. The only bonus that you can get from the game, without events or buying from packages, is the tribe bonus 8%.

The sword/spear on the other hand, the game usually gives you some 15/15 defensive boosters from daily bonus, and some 5% sword bonus. Adding some paladins there and you got yourself 58% sword and 53% spear bonus. That gives the sword/spear a better defense/cost, better defense/recruitment time and if the attacker use a lot of MA the sword/spear defense will be a lot stronger overall.

HOWEVER,
I have noticed that it is very few players that use their paladins correctly. Coming to .net I thought the paladin play would be a lot more efficient than it is, that whenever a player get targeted the tribe would provide full out defensive paladins everywhere to stop the attacker from doing dmg. This is not really the case, and since mass targeting and mass nobling behind FL is still a tactic a lot of players do then you will take a lot of hits without paladins if you are not able to pp to relocate the paladin.
If you are not able to have the paladin then the numbers are changed and the archer is once again much stronger.

Me, I love paladins and give them a lot of attention. I play w105 and w106, both worlds have archers but only w106 have paladins. Since I use my paladins quite a lot I have 10 paladins with the 4 4 4 4 defensive stats and 9 with 4 4 1 4 offensive stats. meaning that I take most hits with a paladin there, therefore I have 0 archers on w106. If I didn´t put so much effort in my paladins I would probably have more archers, like w105:
On w105 on the other hand I don´t have paladins so the math is a bit different, there I have instead quite archer heavy deff. Also I stacked up some 25% archer bonuses and after that we made even more archers in our deff since the overall stat will be a lot stronger. Archer is one of the strongest units there is when you have the 25% bonus and there is no paladin.
My strategies is often based on having the strongest deff available, despite what time it takes to build it. (which is why I don´t have any HC at all on w106 as well, but that is another topic)

So it really comes down to settings, play style, what kind of tribe you play in and how well you play with your paladins, do you have decent boosters or not, will you be able to get decent boosters or not. Adapt to the current situation to get the most out of your troops. Archer is not dead, but I wouldn´t use it in every situation anymore, like you would say like 50 worlds ago.
 

Mintyfresh

Skilled Soldier 18 & Master Commander 21 & 22
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It´s a tricky question.

Archer still has really good defensive stat against infantry and cavalry, it´s not like the base stat have been worse or so. The problem being cost/strength ratio and the high recruitment time/strength ratio. I´m not gonna spend time giving you the numbers but overall it is the most costly infantry unit based on what total defensive stat it gives, and also the infantry unit that takes most time based on what stat it gives.

That have always been the problem with the archer, but with heavy swords or HC that can counter MA the archers have still been a good addition to every deff.

Adding the booster though, the archer bonus is not like the usual 15/15% defense bonus, you can´t get it on daily bonus so you gotta get it from events. It is usually not expensive but it is not available on every event, making it really hard to come by. The only bonus that you can get from the game, without events or buying from packages, is the tribe bonus 8%.

The sword/spear on the other hand, the game usually gives you some 15/15 defensive boosters from daily bonus, and some 5% sword bonus. Adding some paladins there and you got yourself 58% sword and 53% spear bonus. That gives the sword/spear a better defense/cost, better defense/recruitment time and if the attacker use a lot of MA the sword/spear defense will be a lot stronger overall.

HOWEVER,
I have noticed that it is very few players that use their paladins correctly. Coming to .net I thought the paladin play would be a lot more efficient than it is, that whenever a player get targeted the tribe would provide full out defensive paladins everywhere to stop the attacker from doing dmg. This is not really the case, and since mass targeting and mass nobling behind FL is still a tactic a lot of players do then you will take a lot of hits without paladins if you are not able to pp to relocate the paladin.
If you are not able to have the paladin then the numbers are changed and the archer is once again much stronger.

Me, I love paladins and give them a lot of attention. I play w105 and w106, both worlds have archers but only w106 have paladins. Since I use my paladins quite a lot I have 10 paladins with the 4 4 4 4 defensive stats and 9 with 4 4 1 4 offensive stats. meaning that I take most hits with a paladin there, therefore I have 0 archers on w106. If I didn´t put so much effort in my paladins I would probably have more archers, like w105:
On w105 on the other hand I don´t have paladins so the math is a bit different, there I have instead quite archer heavy deff. Also I stacked up some 25% archer bonuses and after that we made even more archers in our deff since the overall stat will be a lot stronger. Archer is one of the strongest units there is when you have the 25% bonus and there is no paladin.
My strategies is often based on having the strongest deff available, despite what time it takes to build it. (which is why I don´t have any HC at all on w106 as well, but that is another topic)

So it really comes down to settings, play style, what kind of tribe you play in and how well you play with your paladins, do you have decent boosters or not, will you be able to get decent boosters or not. Adapt to the current situation to get the most out of your troops. Archer is not dead, but I wouldn´t use it in every situation anymore, like you would say like 50 worlds ago.

Why is it every single post you make contains some kind of reference to the swedish server and either implicit or explicit negative comments about .net server and how inferior it is? Getting pretty tiresome gotta say, particularly when i havent seen anything of note from .swe players either in any way.

Archers are hands-down the best defensive unit in the game in the majority of situations. Only beaten by swords when you have a 45%+ bonus to swords in the village. MA are a terrible unit and people "shouldn't" and often dont build them in nukes. Therefore the weak archer defense of archers is negligible. Therefore its 50/40 defensive stats are far superior to swords 50/15 defensive stats. Most nukes are also heavy on cav strength due to the way recruitment times work from the stables/rax so the additional cav defense provided by archers when combined with your spears/HC goes a long way to strengthening your overall power of your stacks. There is no point having swords and HC in a DV because it unbalances the DV and makes it lopsided towards general defence. Therefore if you forego archers then you're left with either having incredibly slow DV with no HC or inefficient DV with just HC/spears

This is in addition to the fact that archers move quicker than swords which is actually quite a big deal a lot of the time in active war fronts. The only time swords trump archers is with heavy bonus boosts for long-term long-rage stacks where you can quickly maneuver the paladins around. The extra build cost is negligible provided you actually use your troops to farm / res balance / whatever. The extra build time is also a fallacy because they're stronger units so die less and need less replenishment, assuming you're using a packet defense system of course.

If people find archers to be an inferior unit then its likely because they're not using them properly, not because of a flaw with archers. Generally i see swords being built by people who dont have a proper grasp of the game beyond beginner/intermediate strategy levels. Not trying to insult anyone here with that just making an observation
 

DeletedUser122494

Guest
Archers are hit and miss in my opinion. Great usually, but a pretty slow unit to build.
Good for times when you are in no rush to finish a deff villa, and resources are abundant. Not really worth it otherwise; with a few exceptions.

Basically a unit for luxury deff builds :)

@Mintyfresh Hey now, plenty of swedes doing good on these servers. Don't agree with .net bashing though, far higher skill cap here than on pretty much any country based server.
 

IAmAbel

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Why is it every single post you make contains some kind of reference to the swedish server and either implicit or explicit negative comments about .net server and how inferior it is? Getting pretty tiresome gotta say, particularly when i havent seen anything of note from .swe players either in any way.

I do often bash .net as a server, mostly due to many .net players attitude towards any strategy that is not exactly the same as they play themselves. Also a lot of players I met so far have been so freaking cocky then quit after 2 weeks of fighting, so I´m kind of returning fire when I can. All in good fun of course, since .se doesn´t exist then we are all .net players now. This particular post about the difference between .se and .net is not really .net bashing from my side, but rather saying that it is a difference. Mainly it is because .se worlds are much smaller, accounts are smaller when a world wins and wars are being fought much more in a smaller scale. On .se it makes sense to put a lot of pp to fix the paladins but on .net when you have much more villages in the war it might make much more sense to use pp in other ways. But it is a shocking difference in paladin use for sure, maybe not because I bash .net but because the paladin don´t inpact AS MUCH here. And no, swedes have not had a full out premade yet so we shall see soon enough if swedes as a team can be good or not, w100, w105, w106 are with a lot of non-swedes after all.

Archers are hands-down the best defensive unit in the game in the majority of situations. Only beaten by swords when you have a 45%+ bonus to swords in the village. MA are a terrible unit and people "shouldn't" and often dont build them in nukes. Therefore the weak archer defense of archers is negligible. Therefore its 50/40 defensive stats are far superior to swords 50/15 defensive stats. Most nukes are also heavy on cav strength due to the way recruitment times work from the stables/rax so the additional cav defense provided by archers when combined with your spears/HC goes a long way to strengthening your overall power of your stacks. There is no point having swords and HC in a DV because it unbalances the DV and makes it lopsided towards general defence. Therefore if you forego archers then you're left with either having incredibly slow DV with no HC or inefficient DV with just HC/spears

Here it seems like we are overall at the same page, but you are only taking 45% sword bonus into account. I would say that you should count 60% sword bonus and calculate after that. And if you say cav heavy nukes then you are not using that 15% axe bonus either. Like it really comes down to what situation you are in as I said. If I were to be attacked on w106 and loose my 8 15% sword bonuses then MAYBE I would consider going for archers, if you don´t sit around with more than 5-6 fully defensive paladins and don´t have any boosters then the archer is the strongest unit, if you don´t calculate cost or time to recruit.
This is in addition to the fact that archers move quicker than swords which is actually quite a big deal a lot of the time in active war fronts. The only time swords trump archers is with heavy bonus boosts for long-term long-rage stacks where you can quickly maneuver the paladins around. The extra build cost is negligible provided you actually use your troops to farm / res balance / whatever. The extra build time is also a fallacy because they're stronger units so die less and need less replenishment, assuming you're using a packet defense system of course.

In paladin worlds I don´t think movement speed is as important. If you stack I am sure most use 250 250 packages, or like 133 133 133 packages or whatever you feel like and not send one support each unit, like most wont go for 250 spears first and then 250 swords. that takes ages.. And if you need to move deff fast then you have 10 paladins that can move deff faster than anything. Adding that archers make terrible scavenging, sword is 50% stronger there and spear is 250% stronger. Cost is a thing because the more cost, the less mints and the less villages you can create. But maybe with todays meta where you can simply buy whatever ress you want from events then maybe cost is out of the equation as well.

If people find archers to be an inferior unit then its likely because they're not using them properly, not because of a flaw with archers. Generally i see swords being built by people who dont have a proper grasp of the game beyond beginner/intermediate strategy levels. Not trying to insult anyone here with that just making an observation

As you, op, can see there is different views on this unit. I would use it on paladin worlds as much as I would on worlds without paladin. Mintyfresh here thinks everyone that doens´t use it is inferior. So it really comes down to how you wish to play the game.
 
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