Guess what, get a fucking shield, it's not hard to waste 1 or 2 points in shield skill, arrows don't penetrate shields, bolts do.
Yes they do. Except when the shielder is exactly ( 10° error maximum ) facing the archer, or when he got 8+ shield skill.
And anyway, as soon as there are two archers on the opposite side, the shielder is pretty much dead.
The class that is designed to counter archers is in fact better at killing melee. Just like with every build you can think of, the easiest prey is melee. Melee attack melee because they are closer and willing to engage. Ranged attack melee because they can't defend. Cav attack melee because they are occupied/helpless (killing 1h is the easiest thing to do for a lance cav). Now if we consider the other classes, it appears that ranged are the hardest preys. As melee, they will run in various directions and shoot you in the back. They are able to run away and attack you at the same time. Cav however, can't do that. They are forced to come in melee range to hit, therefore even if they flee they can't attack back, which means that in reality they never flee. Furthermore the majority of footmen have weapons long enough to have better chances than 50% against a lancer. Only 1h require a good loljump to kill the cav, but it's doable. Not to mention that you can still chamber the lance. So in the end, inf will never catch a fleeing cav, but anyway a fleeing cav is like a dead cav as he can't do anything. However, ranged are both able to kill the fleeing cav, and to attack and retreat simultaneously.
In the end, Ranged can hunt everything and protect against everything (either camp a roof and be immune to cav, or run and be immune to inf, in the end it requires both a cav and an inf to kill a runner). Cav can only hunt 1h but that's not very effective. Most of the cavs are just ninja's, killing the unaware. They are only protected against melee. Inf can only hunt other inf and are protected against nothing.
When a melee kills a ranged, the only way it happened is because the ranged made an error : not being aware, or waiting too long before fleeing. When a melee kills a cav, the cav shouldn't have attacked because the melee had a long enough weapon / wasn't really unaware.
Melee have the worst initiative. This should be balanced with damage / survivability etc. Most of their kills are purely defensive : someone else thought they'd kill you, and in the end you killed him. It's even worse for shielders that have to move with additionnal weight.
I'd really like to see some incentive for making more anti-archer and anti-crossbow chars. Shielders fail at this, because even though they are a little bit protected against ranged, they are totally helpless when it comes to actually kill them. Shieldless throwers are better anti-archers than 1h/shield. I say we need a buff to anti-archer throwing weapons (mid-low cut damage, low upkeep and good missile speed), a decrease in shield weight and an increase (more like a balance between round and non-round shields) in shield coverage (together with a slight nerf to the shield skill on shield coverage).
What is amusing is that people usually complain about poor class autobalance "all the archer and cav in one team, all the inf in the other" then say "classes are pretty much balanced". If classes really were balanced, disbalanced class teams wouldn't be a problem. Furthermore, solving this problem for cRPG with a tweak to the autobalance won't solve the issue for strat.
Poll