Still not happy with artillery

[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.

[Didz]

Its definately underpowered compared to its historical counter-part, but that has less to do with the damage inflicted by a single round and more to do with the way it functions tactically within the game and the ground scale/range scales used. Its also far less accurate than its real life counterpart.

Historically artillery was the major killer on the battlefield not just a novelty weapon.

[Forward Observer]

I also do not think that the Artillery is underpowered at all, and if one can manage to use it without having it self destruct or kill massive amounts of one's own troops it can be the deciding factor in many battles. If they can fix the dodgy controls for the big guns, I will be a happy camper.

I'm only talking single player battles here since I don't play on-line, but I'm not surprised to hear that on-line players want limits on the howitzers because of the damage they can do when massed. They can routinely devastate units at a distance to the extent that the unit either routes immediately without ever reaching your lines, or if the unit does continue on it is so depleted or demoralized that it folds like a cheap suit at the first exchange of musket fire.

When I have teched up to the right level, I routinely never field a full army stack without having at least:

3 units of 24 pounder howitzers--sometimes 4 units
1 unit of mortar
2 units of 6 pounder light horse

Of course I will have 3 or 4 units of cavalry to protect my flanks, but that only leaves maybe 10 or 11 slots for the various forms of line infantry. I have yet to lose a single player battle with this mix even when out numbered two to one. I routinely get from 5 to 1 to 10 to 1 kill ratios
with this mix, but I attribute it to the use of massed artillery barrages and do not lay claim to any great abilities on my part as a field commander. In the early game when only direct fire arty is available, I will only have 2 or 3 arty units in the mix. You still need them for counter battery fire, to force units out of structures, and of course to batter down fort walls.

Artillery units in real life were designed to complement the rest of the army and not be at the expense of it, but unfortunately with 20 unit cap in the total war game world, the latter is the case--- and I think this is why so many players are afraid to add more artillery because it is at the expense of larger numbers of line troops.

I'll admit that it seems counter-intuitive to replace 120 men carrying muskets with pnly 18 men wielding big pop guns, but I've tried some experiments in the single player/play battle/land battle section of the game just to see if more artillery at the expense of infantry could be justified.

I chose the 1 vs. 1 Alpine Pass battle with me as the British defending against the French. The first time I played it, I used the default unit choices which had two 12lb foot and two 6 lb light horse. Both armies had 1236 men total. I won but it was pretty much a fight to the finish ending in hand to hand. The kill ratio was 1161 for me and 776 for the French

I then played the same battle again, but for my army I substituted 5 units of 24 lb howitzer, 1 unit of mortar, and 2 units of light horse. I only had 3 units of cavalry including my General, so that left only space for only 6 regular and 1 light infantry because my funds were used up. This time I only had 936 men while the enemy had the same 1236 as before. The howitzers were set to fire a mix of explosive shell and quicklime, the mortars to explosive, and the light horse to shrapnell then switching to canister as the enemy closed.

I won the battle again, and my kill count was almost the same at 1017 kills. However this time i only suffered 241 men lost. In other words, I killed almost the same amount of enemy, but did it with 300 less men and also reduced my losses by over 500 men. The big difference was that my massed artillery obliterated over a third of enemy before they got within musket range. Several units that got hit hard routed off the field without exchanging a shot. Those that made it into musket range could only exchange a few rounds of fire since they were too under strength to try charge my lines.

All of this time my mortars and at the end the howitzers were performing counter battery work and wrecking havoc on any reserves the enemy was holding out behind the main push. Even I was surprised at the results so I tried it again. I didn'd score as well as the first time losing about 100 more men, but still the results were impressive when compared to the stock armies in the first trial.


I would love to see the cap changed where a single line infantry unit could be replaced by 2 artillery units, but that is just a pipe dream of mine to still have a decent melee/missile force and at the same time replicate the massing of artillery that Napoleon so favored. It would also make the player who favors artillery so powerful that most infantry or cavalry lovers would surely cry foul--lol.

Cheers