Heavenfall

Its an unfortunate side effect of all the nerfing that ranged damage has been dealt over the course of the beta. Sort of funny too since part of the problem is that the ai has been designing strange unit composition.

I think for one we need less movement speed buffs for tactical combat, and slightly larger tactical combat maps (20-50% larger... yeah thats slightly!)

that for one will make me feel like archers are actually not just useless versions of melee weapons, and the small combat maps help ruin my feel for tactical combat (Entering melee on the first 1 or 2 turns with the proper traits/armies)

That said I dont think a trait is entirely the right direction to go to lower initiative off bows and staffs, I would rather see interesting traits like special abilities for bows (3 turn cooldown, shoot volleys to target location dealing fireball size area of effect damage (3 times 3 squares) and deal 25% of weapon damage to each stack in those squares). Stuff like that instead of all these boring non-descript +1 damage traits.
Even a trait where your bows deal 3 more damage against large creatures (Single stack creatures)
+10 Accuracy against big stacks (3 units, 5 units, 7 units, 9 units) as an opposite to dealing more damage to big creatures.
+5 initiative for 1 turn if shooting at an enemy unit that is between 2-3 squares away.

Stuff like that will help brighten my day.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

While I appreciate the thinking, I am not talking about initiative, I am talking about movement points, and lategame in my own armies I can easily hit 6 ish movement on turn 1 (horse+charge) turning any battlefield into a melee fest.
While the opponent "might" have melee blockers, the melee units that are supposed to block my chargers might even stand behind the archers, and if they are standing 1 square in front of the archers have little chance to block, also giving little point to archereering.
Why I am saying this is, if I have to get a turn to slow down my enemy, it will be very very difficult to use that properly.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

There are a couple great mage staffs out there that I've seen (and I assume I have not seen them all), that add mana and/or spell damage boost.  Should a mage also get a powerful, no-init ranged weapon on top of all they already get?  I'm not so sure they should, and here's why:  Every ability that allows you to do risk-free damage has a high cost, whether that's the magic costs or the init modifier on a bow/staff (which your suggestion for a champ archer build is great, though I'd make it available to both warrior and assassin paths, because the init penalty would go away in stages as you "paid" for it).  For their incredible power, mages pay the cost in mana, talents, resist chance (early on), and time gaining/protecting shards.  There is no equivalent cost other than that init hit on ranged weapons--so removing that even through several talents might make them too powerful (an "I kill for free" weapon).  The more sensible thing to do (and I believe this is the dev's intent) is to use a dagger's high init going into a fight if you intend to cast a lot, and a ranged weapon if you don't intent to cast (or have a melee hero cast haste on the ranged guy as he's running into the fight).

So the question of balance might be this: if you had a buff mage who could also hurl mana-free range damage when he doesn't feel like casting, why would you need/want any other class?  I think having to use gear/spells to overcome that init hit is a really good dynamic that should not be removed through talents (because then you'd get these ridiculous high-init ranged champs who were untouchable).  Thoughts?

Also, you have to be careful making too many bigger tactical maps, or you discourage melee builds--why make an assassin who has to take 3+ turns getting at a ranged unit, when you can simply have your own ranged units?

On a related note, I built great archer units with about 24 init, and like in the old days of WoM, they mopped up the map (with the exception of that huge group of mercs in the dragon eye quest--their damage soak was just too high for the 3 5-stacks of elite archers I brought to the fight; of course, I could have simply come back with 9-unit stacks and gotten revenge had I felt like it).  They seem balanced well and still viable without being overpowered (you have to invest quite a bit into them to get them on par with, say, a group of pikemen, but then you take no losses, risk-free killin').

I definitely agree with you about staves, HF, but I think that a better fix for ranged weapons is to have two classes of bows: Shortbows, and Longbows.  Shortbows would be much faster than current bows, while not quite as powerful.  Longbows would be just as slow as current bows, but do more damage.  Traits, IMO, should be focused more on giving your champion more interesting abilities like what Kong suggested.

I agree Heavenfall.

I really think a larger tactical map is the best solution.  Maybe archers should also have their own "overpower" trait so they become useful endgame when fast, heavy armored multi-unit melee groups start charging down with multiple moves to.

Some months ago, Frogboy started a topic concerning the ability of archers to kite.  Several solutions to the problem that did not involve nerfing archery to uselessness were suggested and apparently all were discarded.  The one I favored was reducing movement points on units equipped with bows.   That way they were still useful as weapons but greatly reduces the ability to kite.  Limiting the range of bows would also help with the kiting.

Larger tactical maps would be nice but I'm wondering if we would be happy with the increase in the amount of time tactical combat would take if maps were increased in size.

I've always thought that initiative penalties and bonuses directly on weapons are badly done, that's why I wrote up a comprehensive suggestion regarding weapon balancing a while back (here), one part of which would essentially move all the initiative bonus/penalties into the weight of the weapon and have it be handled via the encumbrance system. Although I never expected to get the whole thing implemented, I thought that part of it had a decent shot, but no dice so far. Part of that weapon balancing suggestion also buffs up bows (adding some penetration so that it can handle armors), and staves (by turning them into rods and having a focii off hand to boost elemental damage). Though it didn't address hero weapons specifically, I think it could be used as a basis to do the same.

Kalin, I largely agree with your post.  The initiative balance is broken at the moment.  It can be at least partially fixed by reducing initiative penalties and/or increasing map size (which will NOT dramatically increase combat time as a large map will at best increase the combat turns by maybe 1, max 2).

Armor piercing for bows makes a lot of sense, as does giving some sort of buff to staves (which at the moment suck ass compared to casting spells).

Yeah, Wizards using daggers is ridiculous.  Even if a Stave had a +1 initiative bonus, I would still use a dagger, on the basis that magical staves as weapons still...SUCK ASS.