Archers or bowmen are subjects who will hunt animals to collect coins during the day and defend the base from enemies at night. They are the most basic combat units in the Kingdom and are critical to any base's defense throughout the game.
Types
Hunters
All archers are initially hired as hunters. Hunting during the day and defending the walls during the night are their primary activities.
Soldiers
Whenever a knight or a squire is hired, they will enlist up to 4 nearby idle archers under their command. Soldier archers always stick with their liege and will attack the portals with them, but do not hunt anymore, nor mount towers. In Two Crowns, they also escort the bomb towards the Cave.
On Towers
Unless they are made soldiers, archers will prioritize filling all available spots on archer towers, starting from the farthest spots, regardless of the time of day. They won't leave a tower on their own, meaning they'll stay on guard, unless they get captured by floaters or hit by a breeder's smash or boulder toss. When an archer is captured by a floater, the nearest archer will run to re-man the tower, even if it means running towards an army of the Greed.
While occupying any defensive position, archers won't actively hunt wild animals, but in New Lands and Two Crowns they will shoot the deer that wander near them.
Routine
Hunting
When all knights and towers have hired all the archers they can, idle archers will remain. At the beginning of the day, archers will be found at the outer walls. They will split up unevenly so that some of them stand by the wall, while some of them wander to the left and right, both within the kingdom and far beyond the walls, until they reach the edge of a forest. These wandering archers will hunt the rabbits and deer they encounter.
Archers usually avoid going into a forest unless they are chasing deer and usually they don't chase very far. However, archers going into the forest will pay no attention to portals of The Greed, whether they are active or not. These archers may accidentally hit the portals when aiming at other targets (usually deer) and the portals will activate for defense. For this reason it is advised not to build the outer walls too close to portals.
Defending
As the night begins, all idle archers will run to the nearest outer wall, to hide behind it. If one side of the kingdom has more archers than the other side, then some archers might walk to the other side to even out the numbers. They will not hunt any animals unless they wander nearby.
- When the Outer Walls Change
When the outer wall being defended by archers is destroyed by attackers, the archers slowly retreat towards the next outer wall, although they often stop to shoot. This results in archers stopping smaller enemy breaches while they get overrun by the larger ones.
When the construction of a new outer wall is ordered, the archers will start migrating towards the new wall, but will station there during the night, only if its construction is complete. If the new outer wall gets destroyed before they get there, they will not stop migrating, making them run straight into the Greed. This behavior makes new wall constructions late in the day and/or very far from the established wall, very risky.
Patrolling
During the day, some hunter archers will run across the kingdom, moving from one outer wall to another.
This behaviour is useful during the making money seasons to bring all the surplus from hunting at the borders to the bank. If the Monarch stay by the Town Center during the day, these archers will drop the coins around him/her, who can quickly gather and give them to the banker. With this process one can easily increase the coins reserve by 40 or 50 coins each day for several consecutive days. It's frequently (if not always) the archers that can't collect anymore coins, that perform these diurnal patrols; which prevents them from hunting and leaving coins on the field for the greed, and allows other archers with less or no coins at all to go hunting.
This is also useful during the winter in the medieval biome if there are pikemen fishing and dropping coins all over the ground. Patrolling hunters will gather the coins before they vanish.
If the kingdom has incorporated sections of wood, the patrollers will help the hunters in the wood by stopping to shoot everytime they see a deer.
The Monarch should balance the kingdom expansion and the number of archers recruited, so that the lack of hunting at the borders during the day and/or a possible delay for defending the walls at night can not be felt.
Upgrading
All archers (hunters, tower guards and soldiers) will hit far more precise, if the archers buff is unlocked, by donating to the Statue of Archery. This gives the archers a temporary buff in Classic and New Lands, and a permanent buff in Two Crowns.
Trivia
- On the steam description for Kingdom: New Lands there is a picture of an archer shooting an arrow at a target.
- When archers are abducted their fate is unknown but they are most likely killed (see Theories for more information.)
- Two Crowns GLITCH: Archers might walk in the air back to their towers.
Gallery
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