Finally- after 6 years

[PBI]

That goes for the AI firing at you too. Players don't need more advantages over the AI. Maybe it is just part of the gameplay, intended or not. After all moving units should be more difficult to hit and it is not like missile weapons were useless in earlier titles.

It also means more micromanagement which is less fun and players are already busy controlling lots of other stuff.


CBR

Handicapping the player with a needlessly rigid and unresponsive interface is not IMHO an acceptable way of increasing the challenge. If I lose battles because I underestimated enemy strength or made some tactical blunder, then fine, but if I lose battles because my artillery kept turning to track the enemy cavalry as they bore down on my lines and dumbly fired a volley of grapeshot into the back of my own line infantry I feel like the game has cheated. Similarly, I will be very annoyed if I want my artillery to simply keep up a constant harassing barrage on the enemy line, but in fact they never get around to firing because they are too busy constantly turning to track the specific enemy unit that was at the center of the line when I targeted it but has now moved to the end. I found the latter problem particularly prevalent in RTW, where my artillery would never actually get to the end of their loading animations and fire due the AI's unfortunate habit of completely reshuffling its entire infantry line every few seconds, a behaviour I have observed in the ETW demo.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

For that matter, it would be nice if you could give your line the command "advance in formation and engage the enemy unit opposite you" rather than having to carefully micromanage who is charging whom to prevent the AI being able to mess up my line every time it reshuffles.

Attack area is actually a pretty simple improvement which I suspect will greatly reduce the micromanagement needed to use artillery, not increase it; I can just set them to fire at the area in which the most enemy troops are concentrated, and forget about them; no need to worry about them tracking the specific enemy soldier they've been ordered to destroy all the way to my lines. Bridge battles are a good example; I don't see what would be so unrealistic about being able to tell your artillery crews, "just keeping firing grapeshot at the midpoint of the bridge until I tell you to stop", rather than having them never fire or fire into your own men because they have to be ordered to target a specific unit as it charges across. If anything this increases realism since it is no longer necessary for artillery to be balanced by dealing ludicrous amounts of damage when it occasionally does hit (flaming catapults?), instead taking out only a few men in the direct path of the cannonball on each hit. Neither do I see why this would be unfair to the AI; AFAIK it never loses track of what its guns are doing and will give them new orders if they are in danger of hitting their own men.

For the more exotic suggested uses of artillery like creeping barrages, these seem to me to be ruled out at least according to my experience from the demo. The idea of the creeping barrage was to amass so much artillery of such destructive power as to create a zone where nothing could survive above ground; from what I've seen Empire artillery will have nothing like either the numbers or firepower to do this, no matter how accurate the artillery. It will not be possible to wipe out whole units in seconds with artillery, enabling your infantry to advance into the space created unopposed. I strongly suspect artillery will be best used in the role occupied by archers in earlier games, a means of demoralizing and disrupting enemy formations at range and gradually wearing down an overly defensive enemy, but not as a rule capable of breaking whole units by itself.