Bows and guns?

[Cynric Aldrich]

Hello, extremely new here and I was wondering if the concept of bows were completely replaced with guns or will there be both? If there are both maybe we could have a converstation between an establish archer and a gun wielder as an NPC converstation or something of the like. I would love to see how bows could stand up to guns. Also would guns still use dexterity or would it be more based on percision? I'm assuming you would need less strength because of recoil instead of drawing the bow. Sorry if this has been answered long ago, I'm just a huge fan of bows and would love to be pointed in the direction of where the explaination of bows would be. Thanks for taking the time to read this and helping in some way.

[Osvir]

This is Sagani, a Dwarf Ranger, P:E V.I.P (Very Important Person):

 

This is Cadegund, Human Priest, P:E V.I.P (Very Important Person):

 

I hope it answers some of your questions

 

EDIT: We don't know if these are going to be companions or simply "important-to-the-story" characters yet.

 

Guns

Someone else will probably link to the right "quotes" and such by Obsidian but they are going to be close range, 1 shot weapons with long reload. One of the purposes has been said to be able to "pierce" the magical wield surrounding Wizards.

 

Bows

Are still dominant in long range combat, looking at Sagani looks more like a "Forest Hunter" with good tracking skills and such.

Edited November 4, 2012 by Osvir

[Cynric Aldrich]

Quite so, thank you for your comment. What I wonder about now is the dialouge between them.

[Jarmo]

Disputable information, but my take is that bows, crossbows and firearms (of proper wheellock variety) were all in the same ballpark as far as accuracy goes.

Bow has the fastest firing speed, normal crossbow comes second, then wheellock, while real heavy crossbows (drawn with cranquin or otherwise) are the slowest.

Damagewise a firearm should be most effective, heavy crossbow the close second and the bow coming up last. Though long- and composite bows would beat light crossbows.

 

Historically, it took somewhat around 100 years for firearms to take over in the major western armies,

couple a hundred years more and bows were still in use in armies around the world, though top tier troops would have converted to guns.

Non military use of bows, well they're still used today, professionally too, in the few remaining isolated tribes.

[Elerond]

Let Rambo tell you which is better, bow or guns

 

http://vimeo.com/40709487

[FlintlockJazz]

Historically, the reason why guns were used to begin with was because the training required was quite minimal when compared to archers. Archers needed to spend years training up their muscles (English and Welsh longbowman for instance were described as having quite distorted bodies due to the training regime) to become useful, and while it would be centuries before guns would do more damage and greater range this lack of entry requirements made them become widespread across Europe in no time.

 

What does this mean about how it will work in the game? No idea, the devs may have a completely different idea to how gunpowder weapons will be implemented in their game. They may just have it one does more damage and the other fires quicker or something. Cadegund has been mentioned as to using a hammer or somesuch weapon as well, so musket may not be her primary weapon like the bow could be with Sagani.

Edited November 4, 2012 by FlintlockJazz

[Tsuga C]

Disputable information, but my take is that bows, crossbows and firearms (of proper wheellock variety) were all in the same ballpark as far as accuracy goes.

 

Consider your information disputed. Properly trained archers were more accurate until the advent of rifled barrels, a platoon of arquebusiers being essentially a multi-soldier shotgun. Archers took far longer to train to their optimal level of efficiency, though, so there was a strong impetus to switch over to firearms.

[Tamerlane]

Also worth noting: an army of guys with smoke-and-thunder sticks are pretty ****ing scary.

[Director]

I imagine that there will be an update from Josh / Tim at some point that provides more details on firearms. We'll have to wait until then to know more, all we know atm is that firearms will be slow firing wheelock weapons, (which makes sense - anything prior to a wheelock wouldn't be useful to an adventurer).

 

So - lower rate of fire than a bow, but higher damage, higher penetration of armour and magical defenses.