Still not happy with artillery

[joe4iz]

I have pretty much quit using arty unless I am defending a fort. The only ones I care to use are howitzers. Prior to that , I produce no arty at all.

[Forward Observer]

I have pretty much quit using arty unless I am defending a fort. The only ones I care to use are howitzers. Prior to that , I produce no arty at all.

Don't get me wrong, I still love my artillery and never field an army without at least 25 to 30 percent artillery units. It's just that I wish I didn't have to micro-manage them so much that it distracts from managing the overall battle, and even then sometimes I still can't prevent them from self destructing, or even worse--destroying more of my own men than the enemy does.

I'm can only continue to have faith that the developers will eventually sort some, if not all, of these problems out in a future patch.

[loony]

artillery are almost always my most valuable units. I always produce those, even when I have only fixed artillery only. Just last night I played a battle where 2 units of demi cannons racked 200 kills each. why? well because I attacked enemy horse with my cavalry and enemy infantry was forced to react to my falnking attempt. my demi cannons kept firing directly on the flank of the enemy infantry.

of course, i spend a lot of time looking at what my cannons are doing; say the enemy tried to attack the cannons twice; i was fast (or lucky) enough to see that in time, change ammo to canister, engage one of the attacking units in melee and devastate another one with 8 cannon canister salvo.

i think the greatest problem with artillery is that at the beginning of the game the cannons are nothing more than big bad muskets. you have to have a lot of them pretty close to the enemy to make any sort of impact..

[Didz]

Just noticed another artillery related silly.

In my current battle I deployed a battery of howitzers in a wheat field. If you look in the map you will spot 'wheat-fields' by the little sheaves of corn stacked at random on them.

Unfortunately, when my howitzers unlimbered the central gun just happened to have one of these little sheaves directly in front of its gun barrel. What I didn't realise until the gun fired was that these sheaves of corn are armour plated and impenetrable.

So, instead of blowing the corn out of the way, or just ignoring it, the explosive shell left the barrel, hit the corn, exploded and took out the gun and the entire gun crew that just fired it.

Totally ridiculous.

[Husar]

My biggest problem with artillery was looking at 6 units of mortars firing both explosive and this fire-from-above-shot at the enemy and killing almost noone for several salvos, even a cannonball that explodes in the middle of a formation often kills just the guy it landed on, they do kill some solidiers now and then but if the enemy advances, they usually reach my lines before any real damage has been done, having 6 units of line infantry would be a lot more useful at this point.

[Didz]

Yep! agreed artillery is badly underpowered compared to its historical counter-part, however, the main benefit comes when the enemy decide to go to ground in buildings, and of course forcing the enemy to come to you rather than stand off and hide behind walls and stuff.

Pre-patch the enemy would literally sit in a building until it collapsed on top of them wiping them out. Now I notice that they abandon the building at about 60-70% damage and make a suicide charge at you instead. Same result just slightly different tactic's required to handle.

Artillery just avoids having to go in after them with the bayonet.

[Marquis of Roland]

Yep! agreed artillery is badly underpowered compared to its historical counter-part, however, the main benefit comes when the enemy decide to go to ground in buildings, and of course forcing the enemy to come to you rather than stand off and hide behind walls and stuff.

Pre-patch the enemy would literally sit in a building until it collapsed on top of them wiping them out. Now I notice that they abandon the building at about 60-70% damage and make a suicide charge at you instead. Same result just slightly different tactic's required to handle.

Artillery just avoids having to go in after them with the bayonet.

Artillery is definitely not underpowered, the problem is shot trajectory. When the shells do hit the way they're supposed to, they do plenty of damage. I had a single roundshot (my own) kill 38 of my men, and if canister shot didn't shoot up when the enemy close I'm pretty sure they'd be doing 40 per shot. You cannot say howitzers are underpowered when people playing MP are putting up restrictions on howitzer use.

About the building thing, post-patch the AI cannot evacuate the building fast enough (they start running out at 50%) before it is destroyed (I limit myself to 3 howitzer units, I don't bother with any other type of artillery and yes I've used them all). So basically, same thing as before, hehehe.