Request: A mod to improve bows/xbows

Try the "Archers" faction trait (Tarth has it, or you can try a custom faction) - it won't really help the champions, but it will do quite a bit for the trained units once you get the Ram's Horn Longbow. Before that, the bows will be slightly superior to the normal versions.

As for archer champions? Just hope to find one of the handful of good bows, such as the Lightning Bow which gives you an extra 2 damage per level, if I recall correctly.

The assassination line makes bows decent. But yes they need some upgrades. I am thinking about tackling this one. I've been wanting to start modding. I've done some simple stuff. I think the game needs more bows and a few with interesting but not overpowered special abilities.

A pretty simple method for improving them would be to reduce the initiative penalty across the board.  They just seem so slow compared to everything else it's not worth giving to heroes, and as mentioned their damage gets poor quickly when enemies start fielding better armor.

Adding armor piercing to all of the bows or perhaps just the crossbows would work too.  The crossbow ability as it stands is just rubbish.  It's too situational and doesn't even make sense.  Armor piercing is exactly what crossbows and the better longbows were all about though, historically.

A 50%/100% AP for crossbows and a 0%/25%/50% for bows (upgraded to 0%/33%/66% for the Archer trait versions) seems a good place to start, to see how it works out balance wise.

Those should all be very simple XML changes.  Balancing out the existing unique champion's bows would be slightly more challenging, but still not too bad.

It's important to be careful to not make them TOO powerful though, as the whole point is you can deal damage without fear of retaliation.  I know I find archer monsters and bandits to be most annoying in the early/mid game, before my spellcasting really comes into its own.  That tells me they're not too far out of whack.

Instead of reducing initiative I was thinking of increasing the damage, creating a piercing attack (hit 1 or more units in a line) with xbows. and a Multishot attack with bows. If I reduce the initiative penalty I think the the abilities I planned would be too powerful.

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Such mod already exists. This is Patchwork mod https://forums.elementalgame.com/450250/page/1/

Note, that common bows are not much powerful and armor piercing. Their power is in distance and Rain of arrows - all bows now have this special attack.

Crossbows are preloaded before battle and can first shoot very quickly. But later they require much time to reload. Crossbows are powerful and armorpiersing, and have no initiative penalty on the first turn.

I've seen you hyping your patchwork mod in a lot of threads.  While I like many of your changes, more of them rub me the wrong way.  I'd love to see a more modular approach, such as this thread's proposed tweaking and balancing of just the bows, without all the more substantive changes of your mod.  Personally I don't think adding special abilities to the different weapons is the way to go, compared to a more careful analysis of the different weapons' base stats and traits (i.e. armor piercing).

So what do you need for bows and xbows? Common bows were rather weak against armored troops, especially with shields, so is in the game. Xbows were good armor piercing but slow weapons, so it is in the game. All ranged weapons were less effective than melee weapons, so armies mostly consisted of melee troops, so it is in the game.

What things you don't like in the mod? If your reasons are serious, I may reconsider and edit it. Will it be better if the mod was split into several sub-mods which add one specific addition so that you may choose what to take and what not?