They are a "decent" alternative to skeleton archers, whom I cannot resurrect with paladins.

It is all situational. My most "effective" unit being the hunter, but with raw damage, who wins? Assuming no range penalty (e.g. they are close enough), assuming I will max out the attack / defense gap (helplessness against the tough defenders, plenty of attack buffs), we have

Archer Leadership / Avg Dmg = 3.5/50 dmg = 7% damage per leadership.
Hunter Leadership / Avg Dmg = 9.5/150 dmg = 6.33% damage per leadership.

Throw in astral bow and whip of fire, +2 damage

Archer = 5.5/50 = 11% dmg per leadership
Hunter = 11.5/150 = 7.67% dmg per leadership

Both range units always do critical hits (barring double negative effects) with my setup too.

Also, even if you do more damage (the skeleton archers actually do the most damage per leadership, but I can't do mass resurrect with paladins with them), the hunters are probably better.

But you can't quite say the archers do the worst damage. The lowest damage units benefit the most from the +X damage items. The setup matters the most. The no-retaliation girl power team probably does a ton of damage too with the right items too. :)

Of course there are so many other factors to consider as well. That's also why I said "with my style of game play" in my previous post to hopefully preemptively dissuade claims of what is normally a piss-poor damage/leadership unit.

Yes, you can also resurrect level 5 units with demonologists too. I think we have proven quite thoroughly that you really can't put a universal weight on the units since one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

If you establish universal unit weights, they woudlnt need to be perfect.

You have to start somewhere, playtest and revise.

This is the way to create a new artificial limitation forcing you to adapt in a new way.

You suggested that artificial limitations arent helpful but "no loss" and the various difficulty levels of the game are in themselves artificial limitations.

I was talking about archer style units, not "Bowmen" specifically. Ranged units simply don't do the damage that melee units do. Low level units tend to do more damage per leadership, but also die a whole lot faster per leadership.

I'm currently playing a 'level 3 or lower, no droids' game on Hard, to try it out, my lineup is:

Fire Spiders
Royal Snakes
Lake Fairies
Dryads
Gorguanas
Scoffer Imps (reserves)
Bowmen (reserves)

This game had Two snake boots (+1 move, +1 init for snakes) and the Skraash (+9 atk and Def for spiders, +1 morale and speed for spiders, spiders always crit). Even with the Fire Spiders always critting, the lake fairies (with demonesses whip) still out damage them.

Even thougt Zech meant ranged units and not particulary Bowmen, you should still consider the attack and defence bonuses when estimating dmg output

The hunters have 11 more attack than the archers. That means if both units attack a unit with 16 i defence, the dmg output will be 11% pr leadership for the archer and 10.47% per leadership for the Hunter. And that is with both the bow and the whip. Close call I'd say and without the items the Hunter would win with 8,65% vs 7%.

However if you didn't focus so much on crits the two skills on the archer unit can come in handy lots of times. I bet the you've used both the cold and flame arrow alot even though skills can't make critical strikes.

EDIT: Comparing the Hunter with the Black unicorn proves Zechnophobes' point. They are both elves and both have 27 in attack. But the hunter only does 9.5 dmg on average where as the black Unicorn does 16,5 on Average. Adding to this that melee units are better defensive, you only need 5.13 Black Unicorns to kill a single Hunter with one average strike. Vice Versa you'll need 13,40 Hunters to kill a single Black Unicorn with one single average arrow. I didn't consider crit chances though...

"Ranged" is such a strong ability that both offence and defence has been nerfed to balance the units.

As for the topic of the thread: How about using only creatures of one race, at a time? This sounds like it could be both interesting and challenging, but it's off the top of my head.

I did that with both Elves and Demons in KB TL. Elves actually have a decently balanced team although it can get quite tedious, ressurecting late battle, because your fairies fall like flies.
I did no-loss endgame in my warrior impossible game. Paladins and physically resistant allies makes this quite easy as well...

I'm not sure if I'll ever do a 3rd run through on AP, but if I do, I think I'll join Loreangelous' "only lvl 1-3"... Or maybe a "no-spells - no pet - no unit abilty" game.

Hmm, I like this one. Most of my army designs seem to be defined by a few "key" high-level units, so this should shake up that pattern. It'll also make it possible to play around with some of that specialized unit-specific gear. And cheap/ubiquitous units should make re-stocking a bit less of a pain ...

I can see the theory behind this, and it makes sense, but I think I want to go in a different direction. Impossible+no-reload calls for careful, technical play, which is what I'm trying to get away from (though it's my natural style!).

I do think I'll adopt a ban on "scouting combats", though - in other words, no entering a fight just to see how tough it is or to test out a strategy, planning in advance to reload. I won't start a fight unless I plan to finish it. ;)

As for the ranged-combat army, that's what I was playing with recently, and I agree that it's fun and can be reasonably strong with enough +crit gear. (I went with hunters, archers, inquisitors, paladins, and either catapults or cannoneers depending on the situation.) One of the advantages of the ranged approach is that it gives you a surprising amount of freedom in how you use your spells. In some fights you can focus on direct-damage spells or buffing your attackers, and in others you focus more on disrupting the attackers' movement or distracting them with summons. So even though your own units are mostly just standing there and shooting, the fights have more variety than I had expected.

But then I found all the pieces of the Ogre set and decided to play with that, so now I'm stomping around with ogres, giants, shamans and assorted puny little human assistants. After all the cowardly ranged plinking, smashing things around with clubs has been quite satisfying!

I just wish the elves were available earlier; all-elven armies have some interesting possibilities, but by the time you have access to enough different types of elven troops, there's almost always something better available.

One of the biggest disappointments in KB:AP was when I realized that the order of unit availability was going to be almost identical to KB:TL (humans and animals and low-level undead, then dwarves, then elves and high-level undead, then demons), and that the new Pangolin units would be unavailable for almost the entire game. I'd really love to experiment with demons or elves as a starting army, but apparently the laws of nature forbid it. :evil: