Artillery Pieces

**Macilrille** · 05-15-2010, 18:14

But in Field Battles many enemies rout at the sight of them...

**Apázlinemjó** · 05-15-2010, 23:15

The cheap arrow throwers are insane general killer machines, beware them!

**paleologos** · 05-15-2010, 23:23

Originally Posted by Apázlinemjó

The cheap arrow throwers are insane general killer machines, beware them!

What do you mean "cheap"?

**Duguntz** · 05-16-2010, 07:00

You know, (personal opinion) artillery isn't worth a damn, their only use in the game is to make you loose your treasure in insane construction cost and upkeep. don't build them. many said : yeah, they're good to inflict fear.. well, hire any naked units and you'll cause fear for... 27 000 mnai less! they breach walls... RAMS ALSO! and they're free, also they're good against packed ennemy : not as good as massed sligners... so all in all, artillery is worthless. that was my 2 cents

**paleologos** · 05-16-2010, 09:54

Originally Posted by Duguntz

You know, (personal opinion) artillery isn't worth a damn, their only use in the game is to make you loose your treasure in insane construction cost and upkeep. don't build them. many said : yeah, they're good to inflict fear.. well, hire any naked units and you'll cause fear for... 27 000 mnai less! they breach walls... RAMS ALSO! and they're free, also they're good against packed ennemy : not as good as massed sligners... so all in all, artillery is worthless. that was my 2 cents

Without ever having used artillery I would assume (as a matter of fact I did assume this, that's why I haven't recruited them so far) that they are way overpriced for the weight any one unit is likely to pull during a battle. The purpose of this thread is to gather opinions and suggestions regarding the modifications that can and should (and also shouldn't) be made in order to make artillery pieces worth both their money and the unit slot they will occupy in any army. Raising and upkeep costs are very easy to tweak. What is potentially tricky is to avoid making doomsday machines out of them and therein lies the need for advice.

Also, another question about artillery: in vanilla RTW art. pieces made armies slow in the campaign map, which as far as I was concerned was enough of a disadvange to not have them. Are things better, the same, or worse with EB in this department? Is there a way to modify the speed of art. pieces in the campaign map?

**Macilrille** · 05-16-2010, 10:35

They are the same or worse. Whish is the main reason I use them little as civilised faction. When you can build them as Rome, money is no problem, at this point I also sometimes build an ele or two just because I can. But arty is sooooooo slow on campaign map. Naval transport helps.

**mountaingoat** · 05-16-2010, 11:23

have not used them , though one light cav suicide charge into them, and you might help out the AI economy

**Apázlinemjó** · 05-16-2010, 12:08

Originally Posted by zcb888

What do you mean "cheap"?

*cheapest, my bad.

**paleologos** · 05-16-2010, 14:09

I would like to modify the artillery in my game so that in the campaign map they move as fast as infantry. Does anyone know how I can do this?

**Ludens** · 05-16-2010, 18:31

Since this is about modifying the mod, I am moving this to the submod forum.

**Cute Wolf** · 05-17-2010, 09:43

actually, I've doing some mess about artillery unit peroperties in RTW for my mod (but that was far2 away from EB timeframe), and found that Artillery, when having too accurate projectiles, or too powerful shots, could made a doomsday machine that will take down cities to smoking rubbles in no more than 30 minutes. The trick of doing a realible, but not way overpowered artillery units lies in adjusting their accuracy, damage against buildings, ammo, and crew strength, as well as making consideration with Cavalry speed and power (you don't want puny artillery crews to easily pwn cavalry don't you?).

The ballista, scorpiones, and such small artillery could works fine on their own, without being overpowered with high accuracy ammo (using 0 as accuracy value), but the area impact artillery needs to got some really deep consideration.

Therefore, the best way to made realible artillery is getting them in "moderate accuracy projectile" about 0.05-0.1 accuracy values, get some strength to really damage the walls and towers (important if you consider large and huge stone fortifications), but also keep strong, fast cavalry units so they could be effectively countered. (but in another way arround in this argument, this way, we will end up made overpowered cavalry divisions)