Various ranged weapons in a full party, weapon speed and attacks per round

vladpen

It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to deliberately give your party all different types of range weapons, because their different rates of fire means that the enemies will be hit by the various projectiles at different times, interfering with their movement more than if all the projectiles hit at the same time. According to wikia, these are the weapon speeds:

Dart: 2
Light Crossbow: 5
Sling: 6
Shortbow: 6
[Composite] Longbow: 7
Heavy Crossbow: 10

Based on these numbers, a light crossbow fires 7 bolts for every 5 arrows fired by a composite longbow... just kidding, I actually have no idea what the relationship between APR and weapon speed is. For example, the light crossbow fires at 5, then the longbow fires twice at 7? I don't think so. How does this work?

Attacks per round:

Darts: 3
Bows: 2
Crossbows & Slings: 1

Jarrakul

Weapon speed determines when you start attacking, while APR determines how often you attack. APR attacks aren't all taken at the weapon speed, though. Later attacks occur later, although not that much later. Using your example, I think it's more like the light crossbow attacks at 5 and the longbow attacks at 7 and 9 (roughly). I've also seen some evidence that high APR will effectively lower your weapon speed, so that you can get all your attacks in by 10 (the last phase). I'm not 100% confident of that, however.

In theory, you could use different weapon speeds to stagger the exact times when the damage is dealt, but in practice things aren't going to be simultaneous anyway. Remember, in almost all encounters, most characters are going to have to move forward before they can attack, and they'll all have to move different amounts, which will throw the timing off no matter what you do.

vladpen

Jarrakul said:

most characters are going to have to move forward before they can attack, and they'll all have to move different amounts, which will throw the timing off no matter what you do.

So lets say two people with shortbows attack the enemy at the same time, and one of them has to move forward. That one spends 4 moving and then fires at 6, whereas the other guy stands still and then fires at 6. No?

Jarrakul

I don't believe so. The way weapon speed works is a bit... opaque, and it doesn't really matter for most things, so don't take anything I'm about to say as gospel. That said, I think it works like this:

Alice doesn't have to move, and so fires immediately. Her attack round starts immediately, and she fires at 6. Bob has to move, and so does not fire immediately. He spends 4 time units moving, and his attack round doesn't start until he's done moving. He fires at the 10th time unit, but it's still 6 to Bob (since his attack round didn't begin until he stopped moving).

Of course all of this messes up when people have to move around during combat. I'm honestly not sure how that works, but I can tell you with great certainty that it does not simply reset every time you move to a new target. I suspect that once you start attacking, weapon speed becomes irrelevant until you stop attacking for a little while, and APR takes over entirely. Which means you can often move and then attack immediately if you can properly manage how long you spend moving.

vladpen

Jarrakul said:

Alice doesn't have to move, and so fires immediately. Her attack round starts immediately, and she fires at 6. Bob has to move, and so does not fire immediately. He spends 4 time units moving, and his attack round doesn't start until he's done moving. He fires at the 10th time unit, but it's still 6 to Bob (since his attack round didn't begin until he stopped moving).

I thought everyone starts their round at the same time.

Edit 1: That is definitely not the case; you can set the game to auto-pause at end of round, and when you do this, it becomes clear that each character has its own round.

Edit 2: Actually, the game auto-pauses at "end of round" as soon as the character takes his last action of that round--if I give my Archer a light crossbow (speed 5), he fires once and the game pauses; with a composite bow (APR 5/2); it takes him twice as long to reach his "end of round". So this actually doesn't prove anything, everyone could start rounds at the same time, and the "end of round" setting could be a misnamed "last action of the round".

Edit 3: Actually, "end of combat round" would makes sense for that option.

Jarrakul

One of the few things I can say with certainty about the timing in BG is that rounds are individual for each character. This is most visible when looking at spellcasting. When you cast a spell, you can't cast another spell until your next round, which is always 6 seconds from when you started casting the first spell, regardless of when you started casting that first spell.

gorgonzola

vladpen said:

Edit 2: Actually, the game auto-pauses at "end of round" as soon as the character takes his last action of that round--if I give my Archer a light crossbow (speed 5), he fires once and the game pauses; with a composite bow (APR 5/2); it takes him twice as long to reach his "end of round". So this actually doesn't prove anything, everyone could start rounds at the same time, and the "end of round" setting could be a misnamed "last action of the round".

I suspect, from experimentation on a different thing than ranged weapons using (I was experimenting on singing the bard song and attacking in the same round) that the autopause at end of round does not work properly in EE, while it did in original.
As the whole round duration thing is quite complicated, a round lasts 6 seconds and is split in 10 0.6sec parts, and it never lasts more than that, but the engine can decide to begin the next round before the 6 secs has elapsed on certain conditions, mine is only a suspect and more experimentation is needed.