Research: Artillery projectiles & Generals

[Roy1991]

Is it just me, or are arty projectiles strangely attracted to generals in some way?
If I set my onagers to fire at will at an enemy army, their general usually is one of the first to die.
This happens so often that I doubt it's just luck.

[Tamur]

I don't think I've seen anything investigating this, but it would be interesting to have some tests run. I've also seen more generals than I would expect die due to ballista fire &c.

[orangat]

The AI could be hardcoded to favour targetting general units. It would be quite easy to setup a custom battle to test this.

[Tamur]

Short answer after running a few tests: at least in 1.5, players either directly or "fire-at-will" targeting general units with artillery can expect the same as if they were directly targeting a non-general unit.

I ran about thirty tests this evening, Julii vs Brutii. I made myself the attacker, gave myself ten units of triarii for a spear wall just in case, and all of the artillery available (ballistas, repeating ballistas, scorpions, onagers, heavy onagers).

I gave the Brutii two Roman General cav units, made one general, and let the specific weapon fire at will.

The results...

Ballista - 4 tests, 2 fire, 2 no fire
Never killed the general, avg 8 kills

Repeating Ballista - 4 tests, 2 fire, 2 no fire
Never killed the general, avg 9 kills

Scorpion - 5 tests, 2 fire, 3 no fire
One general kill, using no fire - avg 8 kills

Onagers - 8 tests, 4 fire, 4 no fire
Two general kills, both fire - avg 15 kills

Heavy Onagers - 12 tests, 10 fire, 2 no fire
Ten general kills, all fire - avg 26 kills

Obviously the heavy onagers were 100% when using flaming shot. However, I think this is simply due to the fact that flaming shot consistently left 6 or 7 out of the 37 horses in the unit alive, so the general had a very good chance of being roasted.

Targeting one cav unit instead of the other made no difference at all in the kill rate. The average remained within a very close range on all weapons. Auto-targeting seemed more often to choose the non-general unit.

A couple of other observations: heavy onagers using flaming shot will kill 7-9 per hit. They rarely hit, but when they do they show why they're expensive. In contrast, regular onagers using flaming shot kill 3-5 per hit.

Second observation: flaming shot from onagers (heavy and regular) led to significantly higher kill rates than non-flaming shot, while on arrow-based artillery it led to significantly lower kill rates. This is due to the fact that in both cases the projectiles become far less accurate, but flaming onager shot explodes and does radius damage, while flaming shot from a ballista makes no difference except as a morale drop for the targeted unit.

[Ludens]

Interesting results Tamur. Could this be moved to the Ludus Magna?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Have you tested Cavalry v. Infantry as targets? I think hte larger targets seem to acquire more splash kills from flamer shots -- but I haven't specifically tested for it.