Still not happy with artillery

[Didz]

I'm still not happy with the way artillery functions in ETW.

It seems to suffer really badly from target fixation, continuing to fire at its initial target even after it has routed off the field despite having another unit right in front of it closing for the kill.

Plus I've noticed that if for some reason it loses that target e.g. it literally leaves the field, they often turn on the nearest target to them even a friendly unit standing next to them and proceed to blast the hell out of it in frustration.

They still continue firing after you have told them to stop, and in some cases I've had to order them to limber up just to get them to stop firing.

Definately, not as well programmed as the medieval artillery in MTW2.

[Slaists]

I'm still not happy with the way artillery functions in ETW.

It seems to suffer really badly from target fixation, continuing to fire at its initial target even after it has routed off the field despite having another unit right in front of it closing for the kill.

Plus I've noticed that if for some reason it loses that target e.g. it literally leaves the field, they often turn on the nearest target to them even a friendly unit standing next to them and proceed to blast the hell out of it in frustration.

They still continue firing after you have told them to stop, and in some cases I've had to order them to limber up just to get them to stop firing.

Definately, not as well programmed as the medieval artillery in MTW2.

Well, all guides recommend targeting the ground in front or behind the target unit. It's quite inefficient to ask the artillery to 'follow' a moving target. Targeting the ground (auto-fire off), they will shoot until you ask them to stop. True, they might still shoot out the last remaining loads they have in one or two of the cannons, but that does not bother me too much. At least in my battles, after the artillery reloads, they stay quiet if asked to do so.

My bigger problem is the kamikaze AI cavalry who will try to sneak to your indirect fire artillery units no matter what the odds and who is standing next to them. Seems quite unrealistic to me: sacrificing the most valuable units outright for trying to silence a cannon. Outright charge by the whole army (and THEN trying to sneak the cavalry behind) seems like a more appropriate solution to me.

Have you seen this guide: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ghlight=royal? It's a pretty good read.

[Marquis of Roland]

Cavalry starts the attack at the same time as the infantry, only they get there faster

[Didz]

Well, all guides recommend targeting the ground in front or behind the target unit. It's quite inefficient to ask the artillery to 'follow' a moving target. Targeting the ground (auto-fire off), they will shoot until you ask them to stop. True, they might still shoot out the last remaining loads they have in one or two of the cannons, but that does not bother me too much. At least in my battles, after the artillery reloads, they stay quiet if asked to do so.

I'm not actually talking about following a target, although they obviously will do that and will continue to fire at it even if the shot travels the full length of your battle line destroying half your own army in the process. I've even had a kamikaze artillery units destroy themselves by firing sideways into their own guns in an attempt to hit an enemy unit that was flanking it.

But the target fixation problem is something different. What I mean is that they keep firing on their very first (initial) choice of target regardless of everything else going on around them. That target might be 2 miles away, routing and well out of range, and they will still keep firing shot in its direct in the hope of hitting one of them even though another enemy unit is standing 50' away shooting their gunners.

Incidently, I learned the hard way never to tell the artillery where to fire or what to fire at. Once you do that they become fixated with that spot of ground, building, or whatever and just won't stop firing at it unless you tell them to limber up, press HALT 16,000 times, smack their officer round the face with a wet kipper, and piss in their beer. And even then I've unlimbered them again and seen them start bombarding next doors vegetable patch despite the fact that battle has shifted 2 miles down the road.

My bigger problem is the kamikaze AI cavalry who will try to sneak to your indirect fire artillery units no matter what the odds and who is standing next to them. Seems quite unrealistic to me: sacrificing the most valuable units outright for trying to silence a cannon. Outright charge by the whole army (and THEN trying to sneak the cavalry behind) seems like a more appropriate solution to me.

Yeah! I know what you mean its pretty lazy programming. There are some obvious pre-programmed priority targets in the AI routine where the programmers have just left things unconditional rather than include exceptions.

Another one is the obession that all artillery has with counter-battery fire. That has been carried over from MTW2, but at least in that you could get them to stop and target something else if you wanted to.

Seriously, though I've found the best solution to get the artillery to change targets is to make them do something that makes it impossible for them to keep targetting what they are currently firing at.

So, for example if they have fixated on bombarding an enemy artillery battery 2 miles away, then sometimes switching to cannister will stop them shooting at it and get them to focuss on the incoming infantry, as long as you don't switch back to roundshot.

Likewise if you have made the mistake of asking them to bombard a building then sometimes making them limber-up and unlimber again will get them to stop and focus on the enemy infantry nearby, although usually they will just go back to bombarding the building until its destroyed even though the infantry have left.

The worse thing that can happen is letting them keep firng at a target the leaves the battlefield, this seems to trigger a response which causes all the guns to turn 90 degree's and fire at the friendly unit next to them, so its best to try and stop them firing at routed units as soon as possible.

Another trick that sometimes works is to switch off 'Fire and Will' and pump the HALT button repeatedly until your sure they have stopped firing. Then if your lucky clicking 'fire at will' back on will get them to choose another target, as long as there are no enemy artillery in range.

[Marquis of Roland]

So, for example if they have fixated on bombarding an enemy artillery battery 2 miles away, then sometimes switching to cannister will stop them shooting at it and get them to focuss on the incoming infantry, as long as you don't switch back to roundshot.

I don't use cannons much, but I have a strong feeling you might blow away half of your army.

But limbering/unlimbering is the safest way to do it; it takes longer but as far as artillery mechanics go in this game up to this point, better be safe than sorry

[Forward Observer]

I love to use the big guns, but I totally agree that they are still buggy. The only improvement that I have noted that the patch took care of was the limber/unlimber bug where they simply refused to limber up when given the command.

Just today, I was putting down a rebellion in India. It was going to be a cakewalk since most of the rebels were armed citizens and the first salvo from my howitzer battery had taken out the enemy's only unit of fixed demi-cannons and also their general.

However, afterward the rebels got organized and they did mount what appeared to be real unified infantry assault. As they approached, I went to switch my flanking lighthorse 6 pounders to canister. Since I did this just before the approaching rebels were in canister range, I turned the fire at will button off thinking that I would turn it back on when the enemy got into effective range.

To my surprise, all three guns seemed to belch their canister loads sideways out of the rear of the cannon. I mean the barrels were pointed at the enemy, but the cannister sprayed sideways to the right taking out 28 of the 60 light dragoons I had protecting their right flank.

I only lost about 50 men for the whole battle, but it sure stuck in my craw that over half of them were lost due to the bugs that still plague the artillery.

Cheers

[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.

[Marquis of Roland]

However, afterward the rebels got organized and at least did mount what appeared to be real unified infantry assault. As they approached, I went to switch my flanking lighthorse 6 pounders to canister. Since I did this just before the approaching rebels were in canister range, I turned the fire at will button off thinking that I would turn it back on when the enemy got into effective range.

When you unlimber you have to immediately click off fire-at-will and always direct artillery fire yourself, otherwise random bad things like canister coming out sideways will happen.

Ceasing fire requires you to click both "halt" and then limber within 1 sec.

[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.

[Slaists]

I'm not actually talking about following a target, although they obviously will do that and will continue to fire at it even if the shot travels the full length of your battle line destroying half your own army in the process. I've even had a kamikaze artillery units destroy themselves by firing sideways into their own guns in an attempt to hit an enemy unit that was flanking it.

But the target fixation problem is something different. What I mean is that they keep firing on their very first (initial) choice of target regardless of everything else going on around them. That target might be 2 miles away, routing and well out of range, and they will still keep firing shot in its direct in the hope of hitting one of them even though another enemy unit is standing 50' away shooting their gunners.

Incidently, I learned the hard way never to tell the artillery where to fire or what to fire at. Once you do that they become fixated with that spot of ground, building, or whatever and just won't stop firing at it unless you tell them to limber up, press HALT 16,000 times, smack their officer round the face with a wet kipper, and piss in their beer. And even then I've unlimbered them again and seen them start bombarding next doors vegetable patch despite the fact that battle has shifted 2 miles down the road.

Well, it seems you're talking about auto-fire of the artillery. I never use that since I lost half of my line infantry unit in the first ETW battle. I know it's tedious, but I always do tell my artillery where to shoot. On the reverse side of that token: I never have more than 2-4 pieces of artillery in my armies. 2 of those are direct fire and 2 are indirect.

As to that micro-management: never caused any real trouble along the lines of the artillery refusing to shoot or stop shooting.

By the way, the auto-fire mess you are describing is not unique to artillery. Some light infantry units (chasseur britanique in particular) continue to fire after the enemy has routed. They just empty their ammo into the blue sky. Toggling auto-fire off or pressing backspace does not stop the shooting, just moving the unit does.

[Marquis of Roland]

But my artillery is the major killer in my armies, and I only use 3 units. Some people are using 5-6. Its far from a novelty weapon, except maybe rockets, I even tried maxing out their xp and they still can't hit a thing.

[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

[AussieGiant]

Keep in mind gentlemen, CA have said there are such things as "breached cannons" which did happen in the real world and is represented in the game.

While watching one of my 4 howitzer batteries I noticed what Didz described earlier.

BOOM, a whole bunch of body parts, horses and timber went in all directions for no apparent reason.

I sat there is silence thinking that the end of me using artillery in the game, then I realised...

...fouled shot, game over for that crew.

Them's the breaks for arty crews.

[Marquis of Roland]

Eh, I already got used to playing the battle over whenever that happens

I agree with forward observer. In fact, I don't think any army can beat the same amount of artillery units. I was playing around with arty last night and tested it against line infantry (and pretty much everything else, but line infantry did the best). Didn't even fire until canister range and still routed them. To me, that is a sign that artillery as a single unit is more powerful than any other single unit.

Now, can you imagine 80 howitzers with percussion shell, there is absolutely nothing in the game that can survive against that. Maybe some sneaky natives or light infantry can stealth up and shoot them but you get my point

[Forward Observer]

Keep in mind gentlemen, CA have said there are such things as "breached cannons" which did happen in the real world and is represented in the game.

While watching one of my 4 howitzer batteries I noticed what Didz described earlier.

BOOM, a whole bunch of body parts, horses and timber went in all directions for no apparent reason.

I sat there is silence thinking that the end of me using artillery in the game, then I realised...

...fouled shot, game over for that crew.

Them's the breaks for arty crews.

In the case that I described the gun did not blow up, but instead blew cannister at about a 135 degree angle to the barrel rearward through the ranks of the dragoons on their flank. Then the gun went back to firing normally. I didn't realize it but I have another instance of this happening recorded on a battle replay. In this instance it happens twice with the same gun taking 4 or 5 dragoons the first time with a solid shot and then about 20 the next time with cannister. In both cases the gun is pointing and firing at an enemy directly forward of its position.

I guess I simply will not park my cavalry so close in the future, but what I described is definitely another artillery glitch that I can't believe the developers intended.


Cheers