Re: Bows-n-Arrows (Re: Enchanted Items)

[Petri Heinila <>]

On Fri, 28 Apr 1995, Ken Woodruff wrote:

> > > Really I guess there should be more of a spectrum of power in the
> > > bow-artifact genre.  Ordinary bows become useless at medium levels,
> > > while even the Bow of Auriga is useless at high levels.
> > 
> > I agree that bows tend to be too "wimpy" against higher level
> > monsters. 
> 
> I think weapon damages are clearly flawed here.  Far more people
> have been slain by archers than by knights wielding large morning stars,
> in fact even a cursory review of historical battles would show that missile
> weapons are the definitive technological advantage, regularly defeating
> even apparently overwhelming numbers of foot soldiers.  The solution--
> up the damage done by arrows (a lot).  To keep game balance the bows'
> weapon speed could be modified (or a bow weapon skill could be added, but
> that's another discussion entirely).

Problem in crossfire in that case is that crossfire is very
fast game, one tick is very short. The fire speed with bow
is somewhat 200 arrows/min (later technologies called these
assault rifles :). To get analogy to medieval use of weaponry
the game should be slower, e.g. one tick is about 10 sec.
 
> Remember "The Hobbit"?   An army of axe-wielding dwarves couldn't bruise
> that dragon, but one arrow killed him.

Well, but Smaug was a bit in different scale :)

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