Artillery crews sheltering squares

[james l henry]

Does the game allow artillery crews to shelter in squares? This did happen at waterloo.

[con20or]

It did - but no - not in this release. Artillery will attempt to escape when cavalry gets close unless you order them to hold and fire up to the last minute, hoping they will rout the cavalry.

[james l henry]

any plans to address this?

[Saddletank]

not in this release.

This bit suggests NSD might introduce this in a later release (patch?). Is that a likely possibility?

I have always strongly disliked the SoW mechanism for capturing guns as its one of the least justifiable a-historical processes in the game. Especially when cavalry defeat a gun crew. No group of cavalrymen would ever dismount to crew a captured gun. Guns should be captured and that's it - they're dead, useless to both sides. Placing an abandoned non-moving gun sprite in place with a few bodies around it would be a big step forward from what we have now.

Ideally though gunners should check for one response out of three options:

1) Try to limber and flee (if unsupported?)
2) Defend their guns (if very closely supported - friendly infantry within 50 yds?)
3) Run away on foot to seek the protection of the nearest friendly infantry unit (say within 100 yards)

1) and 2) could probably be easily managed now, but adding 3) would so enhance the game. An abandoned gun sprite is left in place and the infantry unit that protects the gunners just has that fact logged in it's database entry and a timer starts ticking. If that inf unit fails morale then the gunners are assumed to run away with it, but if it is still of good morale within 10 minutes and the abandoned gun is still within about 250 yards and no enemy within 150 yards of the gun, the crew goes back to its gun and resumes shooting (the run away and return can just be teleports unless you want to introduce sprites to show this happening). If the 10 minute timer runs out before the gun is free to recrew the gunners are assumed to depart permanently.

All these distances and times could be modified by experience or other factors of the gunners and the quality of the battery and division commanders.

But please, please remove for ever the fact of enemy crewing captured guns and turning them on their former owners, this was just done so infrequently it can safely be ignored.

[james l henry]

Saddletank

i agree

for some reason at waterloo the abandoned guns were not spiked - so after the cavalry had withdrawn - the crews in the squares simply re-manned them.

breakaway games managed a shelter in square function by using code in the gaame which allowed a unit to detach or attach to its battalion (artillery crews would run to the nearest square) i cant remember if the ai managed to do this, but i think so.

[voltigeur]

The attachment artsq.JPG is no longer available

so this is a different situation where the square has formed around the artillery I presume

cheers

[Saddletank]

Possibly. But having a gun crew sprite manhandle the gun inside the nearest square when threatened would be an improvement on what we have now - as long as it didn't sit in their firing! :woohoo:

[Gunfreak]

There is actually a variation on the square formation, were one cannon would be placed in a corner. In theory each corner could have a gun.

[mitra76]

Having the crews separate from the guns is not question of will (our list of "desiderata" for the future is very long) but a technical contraint. Now guns and crews are a single object, composed by different sprites but always a single object. Is not a simple question of animation or a split of the same object type like for the skirmishers, the two have to become different objects types, one of them "frozen" like the graphical dead bodies, the other with new different AI logic and formations. The change is massive also for a so little effect, because it hits deep inside the engine, and changes like this need weeks of testing because they can create problem to the layers of engine above them. You cannot imagine how many crashes the testers found and Norb corrected caused by the skirmishers splitting before all the side effects of this thing were resolved and it was one of first functionality done.

It is not like it will never be done, but having not 100 developers like the CA for the TW, we cannot do all what we projected in a single step.

[con20or]

Well said Mitra - the game has tonnes of cool new features. You should not dwell too much on what it doesn't have now when you have not even had a chance to play it yet. We want the same things you all do, it is just a case of time.