Artillery overpowered?...

[Quaade]

I had this suspicion for a while, and while the fighting is against peasants and outnumbered the same applied to the larges stack prior to this one. Not only did the cavalry not get the bonus, but had deliberately used an army with few infantry... However, seeing as artillery historical were quite vulnerable when engaged it´s odd that in these two battles I lost none.

Given that they didn´t manage to reach the artillery, but would expect more losses to my artillery than 0. Something another posted about and I had had an odd feeling about for a while, seeing armies with equal or more artillery than infantry. One could use the argument that artillery units consists of infantry along with a few cannons, since rolling along 1.000 cannons is quite unrealistic, but their should be some downside to using them over infantry since they are devastating to casaulties and thus wins most battles where they are in superior numbers.

Even in greater and grander battles than this one, the casaulties to artillery is next to nothing. As the other poster suggested, limit how effective they are like cavalry, up the price for them to limit the use of them and/or make them suffer more in battles so the reinforcement price comes more into play. As he had noticed, they were much better than cavalry, even more than historically since they suffered less than cavalry and their price and reinforcements were not set accordingly.

While I don´t believe setting cannons on 100 ducats as a base is a great solution, they could up it to 40 and make them suffer more in battles.

Actually a small rework to artillery could be cool, by making them pricier and available from start by having trebuchets. Realisticly, this should be balanced so that in a decent army only 1 or 2 where available, for larger nations 5-6 would be total (using other means to siege castles in smaller armies).

They should however adjust the artillery bonus to siege accordingly, making it scale less to numbers and perhaps more to tech. So that a fort that outtech the cannons would require double the number of cannons and cannons outteching forts would require less. Instead of the bonuses now, where you need a large amount of cannons to get the highest bonus which only suggest that PDX believe them to be in large numbers by design. Do hope for a fix to this however

 

[GChapman]

Damage is done in the front row, artillery is sitting in the back row. So as long as your first row holds the line, your artillery dont take any damage. If your artillery end up in the frond row, it will take damage. This is true for every unit. Also Infantry and cavarly in the second row dont get damaged. Artillery however can fire from the back row, so the can deal damage to the enemy. Infantry en Cavarly in the back cant deal damage. If Artellery is in the front row, they are very weak and they will suffer lots of casulties.

 

[lolada]

They could tweak artillery numbers a bit, something like limiting it to max 50% of infantry number - the way cavalry works. That would kill 20inf-20art army composition. It would also indirectly make cavalry more important.

 

[Quaade]

Damage is done in the front row, artillery is sitting in the back row. So as long as your first row holds the line, your artillery dont take any damage. If your artillery end up in the frond row, it will take damage. This is true for every unit. Also Infantry and cavarly in the second row dont get damaged. Artillery however can fire from the back row, so the can deal damage to the enemy. Infantry en Cavarly in the back cant deal damage. If Artellery is in the front row, they are very weak and they will suffer lots of casulties.

Yet did some testing afterwards, where I kept pushing this army against rebels with less and less infantry due to casaulties... even though more artillery ended in the front row, they didn´t take much losses

 

[ecrurudesby]

They could tweak artillery numbers a bit, something like limiting it to max 50% of infantry number - the way cavalry works. That would kill 20inf-20art army composition. It would also indirectly make cavalry more important.

I've had similar thoughts myself; something to remove completely unrealistic artillery numbers from mid to late game armies. The problem comes from the fact that artillery units in the back row provide defensive pips to the unit in front of them. Changing the way this happens, for example by extending artillery combat width and extending the reach of this defensive support, might be one solution. As well as adding an insufficient support mechanism like Cavalry has, you could change the regiment costs from 10-25-30 to 10-20-40 and buff artillery, all the while making them more scarce.

 

[Tacticus101]

Infantry and cavalry will go in the centre of the line.

Those rebels only have 6000 troops, your infantry and cavalry alone outnumber them.

Thus the rebels cant reach your artillery even when they end up in the front line.

 

[Quaade]

Infantry and cavalry will go in the centre of the line.

Those rebels only have 6000 troops, your infantry and cavalry alone outnumber them.

Thus the rebels cant reach your artillery even when they end up in the front line.

Yet as i stated a bit further down, I did some more testing and ended with some battles with only very few infantry and where artillery were in front row. Yet infantry was still the one getting hit massively while artillery lost about 100. So even in front line they manage well...

 

[Tacticus101]

Yet as i stated a bit further down, I did some more testing and ended with some battles with only very few infantry and where artillery were in front row. Yet infantry was still the one getting hit massively while artillery lost about 100. So even in front line they manage well...

That is the same thing. Infantry are in the center of the line (bare in mind it is infantry regiments that matter, not numbers. You could have 10 regiments with 1 man in each), so they get the full brunt of the attacks. Since they are already damaged, they will be less effective and die.

The artillery will be filling the edges of the line once they move to the front row, and often will only do so once some of the enemy regiments have run out of moral. Most likely only a couple of artillery regiments actually got attacked and mostly at the end of the battle since you outnumber them so much. In the screenshot you showed, you have twice the number of front line troops as the rebels and far outnumber them in power, there is no way their troops could ever reach your artillery.

Artillery ARE much more vulnerable when they can be attacked. That is why 20-20 artillery-infantry ratio doesn't work , if you ever fight more than one battle you end up with artillery in the front row. Take a entire army of Artillery and see how many casualties they take, they will be huge. Particularly at that point in the game where artillery have yet to reach their strongest point.

 

[Incompetent]

I think of artillery as the spellcasters of EU4. They chuck fireballs at the enemy from afar, but they also cast buffs on your frontline troops (they lend half their defensive pips). So they strengthen the damage *and* the resilience of your army. They quickly get wrecked if they come under direct fire, but that basically never happens unless more than half of your regiments are artillery. The frontline troops form an impermeable barrier until they are broken. (I have a hard time picturing what this is supposed to represent - if the cannons are parked behind a solid wall of friendly infantry, so that the enemy can't touch them, wouldn't the cannonballs keep hitting your own men?)

By comparison, there's almost no synergy between infantry and cavalry in EU4. At best, the cavalry just do their own thing on the flanks. At worst, the infantry get in the way and the cavalry is put too far to one side or on the back row, where they just have to sit and watch. (The way cavalry behaves on the battle screen makes me think they are only capable of slow movements in tight formation, like a phalanx of infantry.) Then there's the fact that you get zero penalty for forgetting to bring any cavalry, but a huge penalty for too much cavalry.

 

[Quaade]

The artillery will be filling the edges of the line once they move to the front row

At least one artillery unit was in the center and not at the edge during battle?

 

[MrParadux]

I really, really dislike hard thresholds like the one already existing for cavalry. Adding another one of those is not the right way to go. Either make it a gradual effect so all of your troops suddenly fight like crap from one second to the next because one infantry guy died, or find another more elegant workaround. In another thread there were some interesting suggestions like allowing cavalry to attack not only the front line. But no more hard thresholds, they are very much just band-aids and not very fun to play with

 

[justin6477]

They could tweak artillery numbers a bit, something like limiting it to max 50% of infantry number - the way cavalry works. That would kill 20inf-20art army composition. It would also indirectly make cavalry more important.

Instead of a combat ratio, I would suggest just halving the back row relative to the front row... or have combat widths for front and back row grow at separate rates. That way we limit the ubiquity of artillery, because they're not OP so much as they are over-represented, without invoking an a malus should your infantry get killed off.

As for Cavalry, this could be where the rule about flanking around and hitting the back comes into effect. If your front and back rows are equally spaced, the enemy will be able to flank you and strike the artillery, but added cav or infantry on the ends will prevent that.

 

[Ixal]

There should be an encirclement mechanic were units can attack the back row directly under some circumstances (Cavalry should be good at this)

 

[Quaade]

Yup, that´s the post I´ve read too and did like the idea of cavalry being more flanky and used more against artillery, which were historical use even before this period and after

 

[atwix]

inti

Yet did some testing afterwards, where I kept pushing this army against rebels with less and less infantry due to casaulties... even though more artillery ended in the front row, they didn´t take much losses

your test is only confirmation bias.

You are forgetting tons of other modifiers in that fight, that caused the wipe.

Try sending a 20k infantry 10 k cavalry 20k artillery stack versus a 100k french stack so to speak. If you reinforce that fight with 200k baalanced army, you will end up with a LOAD of artillery losses even if you win, since your intitial army took load of artillery casualties, because they becamze front row after your initial stack of 20k infantry and 10 k cavalry got killed/retreated after 2 combat rounds.

your army simply wiped peasants due to morale damage.

next text, try using 6k artillery versus 6k peasants.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think of artillery as the spellcasters of EU4. They chuck fireballs at the enemy from afar, but they also cast buffs on your frontline troops (they lend half their defensive pips). So they strengthen the damage *and* the resilience of your army. They quickly get wrecked if they come under direct fire, but that basically never happens unless more than half of your regiments are artillery. The frontline troops form an impermeable barrier until they are broken. (I have a hard time picturing what this is supposed to represent - if the cannons are parked behind a solid wall of friendly infantry, so that the enemy can't touch them, wouldn't the cannonballs keep hitting your own men?)

By comparison, there's almost no synergy between infantry and cavalry in EU4. At best, the cavalry just do their own thing on the flanks. At worst, the infantry get in the way and the cavalry is put too far to one side or on the back row, where they just have to sit and watch. (The way cavalry behaves on the battle screen makes me think they are only capable of slow movements in tight formation, like a phalanx of infantry.) Then there's the fact that you get zero penalty for forgetting to bring any cavalry, but a huge penalty for too much cavalry.

Cannonballs are ballistic weapons--they go over your units and land in the enemy forces.

And artillery being deadly is reality--in modern warfare infantry is not really for fighting, but rather for fixing the enemy in place to be killed from the sky (artillery or aircraft.)

 

[LordPavel]

They could tweak artillery numbers a bit, something like limiting it to max 50% of infantry number - the way cavalry works. That would kill 20inf-20art army composition. It would also indirectly make cavalry more important.

Heu ... If i need inf. for have strond artillery, I will had more inf., not more cav.. ^^
If i need inf. or cav. for have artillery, maybe I will had cav..

 

[Lacost]

They could tweak artillery numbers a bit, something like limiting it to max 50% of infantry number - the way cavalry works. That would kill 20inf-20art army composition. It would also indirectly make cavalry more important.

Yeah, very funny. You need 25 arty regiments to siege down level 8 forts. To fill the front row without having to take a military tactics hit would require 50 additional infantry regiments. Now sieging down forts with a 50 regiments army is already extremely costly but having to do this with 75k troops in some high attrition province is purely insane.

 

[Incompetent]

Cannonballs are ballistic weapons--they go over your units and land in the enemy forces.

And artillery being deadly is reality--in modern warfare infantry is not really for fighting, but rather for fixing the enemy in place to be killed from the sky (artillery or aircraft.)

My impression was that the kind of devastation brought about by early-modern field artillery was through firing them in a low arc. If you fire a cannonball in a high arc, it might hit one man on the head and then bury itself in the ground, but in a low arc it would be more like a bouncing bowling ball, hitting several men in a row and flinging them (or pieces of them) backwards like bowling pins. This is even more true with canister shot, which would spread out in a cone from wherever you fired it, so it was only effective at close range and there's no way you could fire it over your own infantry's heads without raining death down on them. (With the invention of shrapnel shells, you could achieve this effect at longer ranges, but that only came into action in the 19th century.) There were mortars and the like designed to fire stone balls over a high arc, but they had much less killing power in a pitched battle, and were used more to hit enemies hidden behind walls and other obstructions.

19th-century and later artillery was of course much more powerful, firing explosive/incendiary shells that would kill over a large area, regardless of the speed or angle of impact. At that point, artillery tended to fire at close to 45 degrees to maximise range. But that's not the sort of artillery we are talking about for most of the EU period.

 

[Quaade]

Try sending a 20k infantry 10 k cavalry 20k artillery stack versus a 100k french stack so to speak. If you reinforce that fight with 200k baalanced army, you will end up with a LOAD of artillery losses even if you win, since your intitial army took load of artillery casualties, because they becamze front row after your initial stack of 20k infantry and 10 k cavalry got killed/retreated after 2 combat rounds.

And it´s not confirmation biased to send an army of half size into french??? my other tests were with a disappearing number of infantry and with larger rebel stacks. They should at least have had some casaulties at some point while they received practically none, even when infantry were down to a 1000 and I checked the battle and saw artillery in front line, center of it all.

I will do some more testing, this initially to see how to best build an army and wanted to see how much damage and how many artillery I could have before they became to damaged.

Yeah, very funny. You need 25 arty regiments to siege down level 8 forts. To fill the front row without having to take a military tactics hit would require 50 additional infantry regiments. Now sieging down forts with a 50 regiments army is already extremely costly but having to do this with 75k troops in some high attrition province is purely insane.

Yeah, that´s why I said they should perhaps change it to be more techscaling, so an equal-tech needs only 6 or 10 artillery to get the modifier.

My impression was that the kind of devastation brought about by early-modern field artillery was through firing them in a low arc.

They did fire in a low arc to go through the regiments, and usually bounced from the earth too which they couldn´t do if fired in a higher arc. However they did usually position them on hills or similar places where they could shoot over their own infantry.

Even at a low arc, they could still shoot over regiments and cause damage to the enenmy, though this was rarely used since it actually meant they couldn´t see the enemy and thus didn´t know if they hit them or not