Quoting Lyander,
reply 46
2. Yes the long bow is more effectice but not even close to being twice as effective as the short bow.
Before the patch the longbow does 6 damage compared to 3 for the shortbow. After the patch I see they change the longbow's damage to 5. That's pretty close to twice the damage, but when you have groups of twelve guys in a unit, that bonus is going to be greatly magnified. I bet a group of longbowmen could take out 3 such groups of shortbowmen. Of course alot of this depends on who gets to go first... but my point is there is no choice here. Are you telling me that you would choose to build shortbowmen for some reason? If you're playing a kingdom then maybe you build one squad while you're teching up.
since on the kingdom side it takes an aditional tech to be able to produce longbows yes I do pump out some short bows in the mean time. I didn't realize they gave evil players an extra tech for free but I guess it balances out since kindom squads are 4 people and evil squads are 3 people the multiplier works out the same for giving evil people the better weapon earlier since your squads are running less HP. maybe resolve it by just giving the evil people just one bow