Building the Best Army in Mount and Blade Warband: Archers and Conclusion

The previous article compared the infantry and cavalry of the six factions of Calradia. There will be a review of the results at the end, but the previous article can be found here.

Archery is a more complicated puzzle. Archers, by their very function, are used to kill enemy units at a distance.  Two techniques were used to evaluate the skill of each faction's archers.

The first chart records the results when allied archers formed a line and fired at the enemy archers as they approached.  The computer's archers marched closer than was necessary before they would begin to return fire. Meanwhile, my archers would be a number of volleys ahead. By the time the enemy started firing back they were already at a numerical disadvantage.  Sometimes, instead of returning fire, half of their remaining archers charged straight into melee. Obviously, this is not the optimal strategy. Let's look at the chart.

Note (Reading the Chart):

In the charts that follow, the colors are used to say whether my army won or not: green is victory for me and red is victory for the computer. The numbers divided by a slash are the soldiers killed. The left side is the number my army killed and the right side is the number the computer killed.

Archers 200 v 200 Battle Line	Against:
Clayton leading:		Vaegirs	Khergit	Nords	Rhodoks	Sarranid	Swadia
	Vaegirs	X	24/200	132/200	200/90	200/39	200/118
	Khergit	200/47	X	200/195	200/112	200/10	200/70
	Nords	200/11	190/200	X	200/10	200/3	200/23
	Rhodoks	200/5	110/200	200/12	X	200/35	200/16
	Sarranid	200/15	59/200	183/200	200/99	X	200/195
	Swadia	200/14	41/200	200/38	200/28	200/3	X

Khergit Khanate won every match, both with and against me.   This is because their archers are not archers. As I pointed out previously in the cavalry section, the Nords and Rhodoks don't have any mounted soldiers, so the custom game mode supplied them with scout cavalry. The scout cavalry were terrible compared to the other factions. Here the result is the opposite. Khergit doesn't have three types of units (archer, cavalry, and infantry). They only have two types of cavalry. Instead of creating a weak archer unit, the custom game supplied the Khergit with their elite mounted archers. While these soldiers were technically carrying bows, they preferred to use their horse to overwhelm the opposing team and engage with sword, rather than at range. These Veteran Horse Archers were also superbly armored.  Most archers have only padded or leather armor, but the Khergit mounted archers wore chain mail. While they are the best soldiers in this testing sample, they are so different from the other archers, it seems unfair to award them the title of best ranged unit.

Of the remaining five factions, the Rhodok and Nord preformed similarly, winning four of five matches.  Watching them battle, it seemed that the Nords performed slightly better. Their archers inflicted heavy damage, like most archers, but what set them apart was their substantial armor. They wore mail shirts while all other archers, aside from the Khergit mounted archers, wore padded or leather armor.

The Rhodoks high damage crossbows and massive shields proved devastating, and nearly as effective as the Nords. The Swadian's archers were nearly as good, but their crossbows and average armor did not distinguish them in battle, even though their scores in each match were almost the same as the Nords and Rhodoks.

The other two factions, Vaegir and Sarranid, wore only limited armor and seemed to have real difficulty harming their foes. I noticed that these two often ran out of arrows in the fight, forcing them to engage in melee. They failed in that regard too, with their lack of armor a critical factor. 

For the second chart both sides charged at each other, and I did not command my forces. The results were similar to the first chart, but not exactly the same. One of the tactical differences observed was that both armies would send half of their archers into melee, while the remaining half fired into the scrum. This strategy aided factions whose archers were skilled at sword fighting.

For this chart I tried to mitigate the advantage of the Khergit Khanate. Before the battle began I ordered the cavalry archers to dismount from their horses. Then they charged into battle on foot, just like everyone else. They still seemed to prefer the sword to the bow. You'll notice that they won every match. Incredibly, they seemed to do better on foot than when mounted.

Archers 25 v 25 Charge	Against:
Clayton leading:		Vaegirs	Khergit (m)	Nords	Rhodoks	Sarranid	Swadia
	Vaegirs	X	9/25	9/25	14/25	17/25	24/25
	Khergit (dis)	25/14	X	25/18	25/11	25/14	25/10
	Nords	25/13	21/25	X	25/23	25/12	25/12
	Rhodoks	25/20	18/25	25/16	X	25/4	25/9
	Sarranid	25/21	4/25	9/25	21/25	X	25/21
	Swadia	25/4	12/25	25/15	25/10	25/10	X

In review, Khergit preformed the best again. Second place seemed to be a three way tie, but if the casualties are added up Swadia did the best, with Rhodok second, and the Nords third. The Sarranids came in fourth with two wins and three losses, but even their two wins were narrow affairs. They were comical in their padded armor, as were the Vaegirs who lost every match. It is important to stress that the Sarranids and Vaegirs were significantly worse than everyone else.  

If you look closely you'll notice some strange results. For instance, Vaegirs under my command narrowly lost to Swadia, but when I controlled Swadia, I destroyed the Vaegirs. I even replayed those two matches again to see if the results were consistent, and they were. Another oddity was the Nords and Rhodoks. Like in the infantry comparison, the Nords beat the Rhodoks and then Rhodoks beat the Nords.

In conclusion:

If one had to rank the teams it would be difficult to decide between the top four. The Swadians have the best knights and good archers, but their infantry are inferior. The Rhodoks and Nords have exceptional infantry and archers, but they have no cavalry. And the Khergit have only mounted archers and cavalry, which means their armies are more expensive than the other factions.  Yet, their mounted archers outperform all the other ranged units and unlike regular archers, are excellent against infantry and cavalry. They may be the best unit in the game: they are certainly the most versatile.

While the top four seem balanced, the other two teams are terrible; the Vaegirs and Sarranids. They were the bottom two for archers, and bottom three for infantry and cavalry. If one had to make an army with either, the Vageris could survive with an army of cavalry. The Sarranids would do ok with all infantry.  Still, these single soldier type armies would compete terribly against the combined arms of any of the other four factions.

In trying to build the best mixed army it would be easy to pick one of each type of unit. The best army would look like this: a combination of Swadian and Khergit knights, Rhodok and Nord archers and infantry, along with Khergit mounted bowmen. However, traveling the whole of Calradia would be time consuming and inefficient. If one was trying to build the best army withing a reasonable time, the player would chose Swadia as their home region and venture north to hire Nords and south to acquire Rhodoks. With just these three factions any player could create an army to reunite the sundered kingdom.

Mount and Blade Best Army Series

Building the Best Army in Mount and Blade Warband: Infantry and Cavalry

Building the Best Army in Mount and Blade Warband: Archers and Conclusion