So, you might be playing this game and starting to think about your military. If you've seen some threads/guides online they probably mentioned that archers are op, hell, you might have even noticed it by yourself. And you also probably heard that the specific race - githyanki(obviously mistakenly called Tilapi in game) - is better than others in archery. And that dondorians aren't exactly good archers.

But yeah, you have human settlement and you hate other races, you will purify the world from other vermin like a good little crusader.

I had this, but wondered, am I missing something? Is it really relevant later in the game? Probably not, I mean, you will have 100% expert archers with top gear anyway, why bother? Well I checked and now I want to convince you to build a githyanki archer ghetto in your settlement.

First things first, what stats affect archery and how much? Well, that's simple, there are two: equipment(bows) and soldier skill.

Let's start with bows. Since the game is realistic, it requires every soldier to have 8 parts of equipment to function properly, so a proper archer must have 8 bows at his disposal. All makes sense so far.

The second one is skill, it's a value based on training, which is between 0% and 100%. In short, 100% gives 1.00 archery skill. And now the important bit: skill is directly multiplied by a racial skill modifier. The modifier is:



Okay, that looks like a big difference, but what does it affect? Does it equalize on higher skill levels? Lets first see what combat stats there are and how much are they affected. Note, that since this is a multiplier, cantors and argonauts shoot exactly the same at 0% and 100% archery training.

There are a few combat stats, let's take a human archer, 50% skill, 4/8 bows:

Well, that doesn't look bad, and how would his stats be with 100% skill and 8 bows per person?

Oh wow? Did the range just double? Even more, they also shoot over twice as fast now. Well that certainly made a difference.

Now I don't have exact formulas for you unfortunately, but what you can pretty much say about equipment is, it gives a BIG boost - larger than skill - and the boost is magnified a lot by the skill. So the bow amount will matter much more at both low and high skill, but the higher the skill, the more amplified the effect. Your archers may be skilled - but remember, they can't function properly without 8 bows! But let's skip to the race part, isn't this what this guide is about?

This time I'll just throw you a table, I think numbers speak more than words here. Let's jump right into the top tier, 100% skill, 8/8 bows. I'm replacing shoots per second with shoots per minute so it looks more appealing.


Not only they have over 30% better range, a bit better accuracy, and damage, but above all, they shot freaking THREE TIMES as fast. I didn't expect this result when I wanted to figure out the truth. I though, eh, githyanki are better archers? So I guess 120 humans === 100 githyanki or something. But no, it turns out the ratio is least 3:1, considering ONLY fire rate, even better if you consider other factors. Did I mention they run 50% faster too? Yep, and they can wear 4/8 heavy armor and still be as fast as naked humans.

In case you are wondering how I got these numbers, but not the formula - everything is in the game. You need to navigate to editing a division:


You just need to hover over the highlighted section which represents archery. It shows the attributes your army would have if they were trained and equipped fully as you ordered here. You can check any combination of race, skill %, equipment etc this way without training anyone. This might be helpful if you're curious about particular scenario or if you are playing on newer version of the game(guide was made on 0.67).

So this guide compares mostly units at the top tier, with max skill and equipment. There is something exponential going on with some combat stats. Dropping one bow or 10% of training off githyanki archers take away a whopping 1/3 of their fire rate! It's not that drastic but still significant for other races too. It's then crucial to provide adequate amount of bows, even at the cost of archer division size.

Key takeaways:
- the higher the skill the more race matters
- equipment provides larger bonuses than skill levels(10% archer with 6/8 bows is better than 100% archer with 2/8 bows)
- very high skill together with top equipment is exponentially better


Sun Tzu says: Give a man a bow and he will be a crappy archer. Give a man 8 bows, and he will be better than 8 other men who only have one bow each. But better give those 8 bows to githyanki.