Artillery

[lugh]

I'm just curious to know how everyone uses their artillery or if not why not?

I'm nearly finished a Spanish game and when gunpowder came along I was secure enough (Iberia and the Holy Lands, but leading the GA points) to experiment a bit.
Took my finest general (8 star with 3 command boost from titles, +3 specialist attacker too) and made a small sigle stack army, pavise arbs, Lancers, CMAA and Halbs and two demi-culvs.
The army chews up everything! Now admittedly, everything is at least 4 valour to begin with, but a cannon bombardment shakes the hell out of the enemy and I've been wracking up the biggest kills I've ever seen in an attacking battle. Breaking stacks of Genoese 6000 odd to my 800-900 and killing or capturing 20-25:1. My general, after 20 years heavy fighting is now a superb poor odds attacker, and the army is going from strength to strength, reinforcing takes the valour down a little, but I don't have a single unit below 5 val, and one unit of Lancers is 8 and is extremely scary

I never really thought of using artillery like this and thought it maybe only worked for cannons fear factor but my new French game I've a feudal army with catapults instead of demis and while not quite as impressive, their still chewing up simialarly teched and command star armies.

So any else have good ideas I can use, cause I'm having more fun with the battles than I remember having in a long time. Big battles are no longer a chore!

[Vladimir]

Get those cats up to V8 and hit troops running towards you dead center. Very nice.

[Budwise]

Wow, you two pretty much got a grip on artillery. I was never so lucky and to tell you the truth, I never got much valor into them to be of much use. One thing they do well is shoot my general in the back of his head if I don't babysit them.

[Matty]

good on defence if you can protect them well enough (every archer zeroes in) and on attack for sieges - although I reduce the castle to dust I don't seem to be able to hit the soldiers inside. Any other attack and I can't use them very well.

[Vladimir]

Well my artillery had about 200 years of Pope target practice. Oh ya, and a 9 star expert defender.

[ajaxfetish]

My biggest problem was getting them the valour to increase accuracy. With their inaccuracy to begin with I can't seem to hit much of anything to raise their skills.

Too much frustration so I stopped bothering with them.

[Kaiser Sosa]

Artillery is ****ing brilliant! Especially the Organ Gun on D! They run before they are even engaged then your archers pick them off.

[Patron]

Are serpentines supposed to kill infantry from a long distance?

[Geezer57]

Are serpentines supposed to kill infantry from a long distance?

When they first start out, they're not very good at much of anything. Give them some valor (say 4-6), though, and serpentines turn into the middle-age equivalent of a sniper rifle. They're then great for killing Generals at long distances, well before most melee can take place.

[Ludens]

My biggest problem was getting them the valour to increase accuracy. With their inaccuracy to begin with I can't seem to hit much of anything to raise their skills.

Put them under a good general. If that option is not available, sniping the enemy general always gives a boost (and it appears the game is programmed to give an accuracy bonus when targetting the commanding officer, given the number of generals flattened by big, flying rocks ).

[Roark]

Ballistae - Rarely use them except for sieges on forts in early.
Cats - Bridges, fort sieges, and extremely elevated defence positions against big armies.
Trebs and Manglers - All sieges before 1280 a.d.
Organ guns - All defensive armies
Demi & Siege cannons - All offensive armies (for the siege).

Don't really use the others.

[lugh]

Put them under a good general.

Yeah, mine are under a 9* general, so that's level 4 valour from the outset.

Using 'em on offense I exhaust my demi and culv ammo before even moving off my battle line, unless I'm facing an aggressive general, the Muslims and Sicilians always seem to be aggressive defenders for some reason.

[crpcarrot]

Wow, you two pretty much got a grip on artillery. I was never so lucky and to tell you the truth, I never got much valor into them to be of much use. One thing they do well is shoot my general in the back of his head if I don't babysit them.

one suggested method though i dont use this myself is send the artillery into h2h against pesants ro low quality units. the artillery unit gains more valour due to its small number. then keep merging the depleted units.

bridge battles are also another good way to make a lot of kills and increase artileery valour the convetional way of course.

keep targettting elite units killing one of them is worth more in vlour than just killing vanilla spears. i think the killing higher vlour units transfers more vlour as well.

[lugh]

Yeah, someone here got me in the habit of calling it valour transferance. You see it in action in Jedigenerals aswell.

[EatYerGreens]

Yeah, someone here got me in the habit of calling it valour transferance. You see it in action in Jedigenerals aswell.

I've used that term a number of times, recently, but it wasn't me who thought it up.

It is most apparent when you examine the battle logs and see what happens to the valour scores for individual soldiers within a unit.

For instance, archers will have picked up valour, even though you know for sure that they had no physical contact with any enemy troops in the battle - they only shot some. If they were targets with inherent valour (i.e. not the boost from the general) then that is carried to the archer who shot them.

I recall one telling example, where it was a meleé unit and one of the soldiers was credited with 4 or 5 kills but had not gained any valour increase. Presumably all his victims were valour 0. Further down the list within that very same unit was another one who'd only made one kill but his valour score had jumped by 2, so it must have been a high valour opponent.

The old 1=1, 2=2, 3=4, 4=8, 5=16 rule for valour vs kills doesn't seem to apply.

Actually, that example of 4 kills but no boost has to be some kind of anomaly, otherwise there would be no way for valour-0 troops to 'get off the mark', so to speak, since all the early battles mostly consist of v0 versus v0 combats.

EDIT Reason: small but crucial spelling correction

[lugh]

I wonder how command stars affect the transferance then. Like you said most of the early battles are val0 troops, but under commanders they fight like they're val1 or val2 etc. Would killing val0 spears under a 4* general mean that your troops get the credit for killing val2 troops?

I don't generally pore over my logfiles but I've definetley noticed the transferance. A favourite tactic is if you're outnumbered, go for their best units, if you can survive long enough, the army racks up enough valour to keep fighting and dispose of the lesser troops.

Do archers pick up valour more slowly than melee troops? As in a ranged kill is worth less than a melee kill. I never seem to be able to valour-up my archers excepting HA, and then it's mainly from hunting down routers.

[crpcarrot]

the archers valour up more slowly becasue any one of them can hit the enemy with an arrow therefore on avarge it will take longet for each archer to gain 1 valour but hopefully in h2h troops the same soldier is fighting till he is killed so he has a cahnce of making more kills, well it made snese a few seconsds ago

[EatYerGreens]

Personally, I don't think the portion of valour level which is due to general's boost is transferrable, even if one considers it really ought to be.

My reasoning for saying this is that the battle logs only ever show the base valour level of the men in the 'before' and 'after' columns, so it is not possible to make observations which support or contradict any particular theory.

This is a pity since, when analysing old battle logs, it would help to make it more apparent that a side won because it possessed an all-round valour boost. The information is there, I think, in that you can read the command rating of the opposing generals but you have to go looking for it and remember to account for the boost yourself.

As for 'ought to be', this would make sense if it was a no-star general up against one who conferred a valour boost. They may get steamrollered off the field but they deserve due credit for every kill they inflict, these being soldiers with improved attack, defence and higher morale than their own.

Then again, it could begin to work against the side with the boost. If fighting against larger numbers of troops lacking a boost, they might win at first but, as losses mount, transference of valour to the other side makes its survivors progressively tougher to kill, negating the valour advantage and making sheer numbers count in how the battle finally resolves itself.


In regard to valours accumulating valour any slower, I don't think so. It's quite common (for me) to see archer units scoring 30-60 kills yet suffering no losses to themselves, never having been fired at or caught in meleé. You will then need the majority of them to individually be v1 or above for the unit average to increment to v1.

Part of what makes h2h units acquire valour 'more rapidly' is their loss of men. Whatever individual valour gains were made, averaging out 1's, 2's, 3's and zeroes between fewer individuals makes it more likely the unit valour will increment sooner and more frequently thereafter.

I find this most noticeably with cavalry. In their first battle they may lose more than half their men and gain little or no valour. Afterwards, 15 survivors kill and capture more men in their second and subsequent battles than the full unit of 40 did in its first one and the valour goes up by leaps and bounds. At under 10 men strong and valoured up they frequently have the highest kill/capture score in my whole starting 16!

[lugh]

Then again, it could begin to work against the side with the boost. If fighting against larger numbers of troops lacking a boost, they might win at first but, as losses mount, transference of valour to the other side makes its survivors progressively tougher to kill, negating the valour advantage and making sheer numbers count in how the battle finally resolves itself.

I don't normally see this though. When you have a compact high valour force under a high * commander against even insane numbers of low valour troops it's usually a matter of defeating several armies in a row, as you defeat one entire army, their reinforcements muster in large sections and then assault again etc etc, rather than one extended melee where enemy units are fighting for similar lengths of time as your own.

I definetley think that credit should be given where boosted-valour troops are killed, even as you say where you are defeated by a high ranking general, your men still managed to kill at least some of a more superior foe.

I find this most noticeably with cavalry. In their first battle they may lose more than half their men and gain little or no valour. Afterwards, 15 survivors kill and capture more men in their second and subsequent battles than the full unit of 40 did in its first one and the valour goes up by leaps and bounds. At under 10 men strong and valoured up they frequently have the highest kill/capture score in my whole starting 16!

This is why I find RK indispensable in the early campaign. Highly maneuvrable, hard as nuts and they rack up valour like a good thing!