Artillery

[Von_Clausewitz]

Hi Gunship,

Playing some more battles yesterday, i had a few questions/concerns regarding artillery:

1/ Does a canonball not bounce in this engine? Roundshot seems useless to me. By that i mean it does not seem to cause much losses at all.

2/ Canister fire does not seem deterring enough. I noticed that a batallion can stand at point blank range of a battery, get pummeled with canister repeatedly, and although they seem to take quite a bit of casualties they do not rout.
Outside of Guard units that might stand their ground under canister fire, most battalions would rout usually after a few shots with moderate losses.

Is artillery behavior moddable? i know that getting the balance of canister casualties/impact on moral is very tough, it is one of the things that gave us the most headaches in NTW3 and still the balance does not seem quite there.

VC

[Garnier]

Solid shot can kill troops in multiple regiments if they are close together -- solid will usually kill a swath for a short distance if it hits. It won't kill a few in one regiment, bounce over the next, and kill a few in the one after that.

[Von_Clausewitz]

Solid shot can kill troops in multiple regiments if they are close together -- solid will usually kill a swath for a short distance if it hits. It won't kill a few in one regiment, bounce over the next, and kill a few in the one after that.

Is the bouncing represented graphically or is it abstracted?

VC

[RebBugler]

If I may...No, cannon balls don't bounce, but solid shot is your best option for 200+ distances. Regarding canister, not sure what's been done with the Nap mod, but stock canister numbers kick butt.

I'm perfectly satisfied with the balance of artillery we've established with SOW. Sometimes it's effectiveness is deceptive to folks because so many factors are figured in, experience of units factors in BIG, both on the receiving and dishing out ends.

There are some mods out now here that make artillery next to useless, really disgusting, this is the case of one of the most established MP mods.

Yeah, artillery is moddable, sometimes I wish it wasn't, gives all our work here in finding that realistic historical balance bad press.

Having said this, it's not perfect, and never will be...but it can always be improved, by cool heads and patient, realistic, legitimate testing...what the SOW team does best.

[Von_Clausewitz]

If I may...No, cannon balls don't bounce, but solid shot is your best option for 200+ distances. Regarding canister, not sure what's been done with the Nap mod, but stock canister numbers kick butt.

I'm perfectly satisfied with the balance of artillery we've established with SOW. Sometimes it's effectiveness is deceptive to folks because so many factors are figured in, experience of units factors in BIG, both on the receiving and dishing out ends.

There are some mods out now here that make artillery next to useless, really disgusting, this is the case of one of the most established MP mods.

Yeah, artillery is moddable, sometimes I wish it wasn't, gives all our work here in finding that realistic historical balance bad press.

Having said this, it's not perfect, and never will be...but it can always be improved, by cool heads and patient, realistic, legitimate testing...what the SOW team does best.

Hi RedBugler,

Thanks for the answer, it was my impression that the roundshot does not bounce.

What modders do with the artillery in their mod i think would reflect positively/negatively on their mod, not really on the game itself. It is a good thing to let people mod as many parts as possible, if it was not for the massive modding community behind TW, their sales i am sure would not be as good. Most their games are unplayable before decent mods are made. Obviously this is not the case with SOW which is very good out of the box. Unfortunately you will never satisfy everyone no matter what, that's why giving the possibility to people to make the changes they want within boundries a very good idea.

Canister is very powerful in SOW, it is so also in the nap mod. It causes a lot of casulaties, in the nap mod, i am sometimes surprised with how long a unit can take it. From my readings on nap warfare (my area of expertise, i do not know much about the civil war), no unit could stand under canister fire past a few shots, except on occasions by Guard units.
There are accounts of battalions fleeing after 1 round of canister that caused moderate casualties or after 1 enfilade canon ball taking out a row of men....

I guess the roundshot effectiveness might be decieving du to the fact that casualties might be taken, but not enough men died yet to throw dead bodies on the ground... I'll have to test it more

Overall you guys did a great job on the game, i am working on getting my napoleonic clan to adopt the game and play it MP, while we await anxiously a MP nap mod.

VC

[NY Cavalry]

RebBugler,

When was the last time that you played GCM? Artillery was adjusted closer to stock some time back. Fire up GCM and open up the Antietam map and then come back and tell us what you think.

What we need is proximity losses. That is, units that are bunched up should receive more casualties. This would help in deterring bunching up infantry regiments and forming up artillery parks.

Personally, I play with my own mod which is a hybrid of my personal settings, GCM, and stock artillery.

And another thing, your team is very good and this game is the best game on the market.

We could take it to the next step if we could get a series of maps which connected that would represent the Shenandoah Valley or some other place such as the Boston Mountains area of north Arkansas. Then a campaign could get set up.

Also, you have a gold mine with the Napoleonic fan base. A fan base that may be larger than the Civil War fan base.

[Garnier]

@RebBugler

Your post is quite insulting.

Artillery in GCM accounts for 15% of casualties on average. We don't have universally accepted historical figures, but most of us agree this is reasonable.

[Von_Clausewitz]

@RebBugler

Your post is quite insulting.

Artillery in GCM accounts for 15% of casualties on average. We don't have universally accepted historical figures, but most of us agree this is reasonable.

Hi Garnier, i downloaded your MP mod yesterday and tried it, i like the options added to the interface.
Thanks for your work, it seems you have a lot going on on your website/forum to support a MP community for SOW, i know how much work goes into modding, and how much of our ever shrinking free time is volunteered for that.

As stated earlier my knowledge is extensive in nap warfare, i do not really know much about the ACW and so i do not want to cause any controversy here. My question was really about the nap mod as i have some idea what to expect under canister fire from a nap battalion.

Getting proximity casualties is a good thought, massing infantry in one spot should have consequences.

VC

[Garnier]

Getting proximity casualties is a good thought, massing infantry in one spot should have consequences.

Indeed it should.

Currently only solid shot causes more casualties when fired against massed targets. Other artillery ammunition as well as all small arms do not -- or if they do and no one told us about it, it's way too small to notice and isn't mod-able.

[Saddletank]

Is the bouncing represented graphically or is it abstracted?

VC

It's abstracted.

Canister is very powerful in SOW, it is so also in the nap mod. It causes a lot of casulaties, in the nap mod, i am sometimes surprised with how long a unit can take it. From my readings on nap warfare (my area of expertise, i do not know much about the civil war), no unit could stand under canister fire past a few shots, except on occasions by Guard units.
There are accounts of battalions fleeing after 1 round of canister that caused moderate casualties or after 1 enfilade canon ball taking out a row of men...

You can mod things by working towards achieving these effects by looking at the morale effects of casualties, rather than the power of artillery.

I play MP in the HITS & Couriers group and Marching Thru Georgia on this forum has issued a mod that makes units retreat after fewer casualties, then rally, return to the action, and so on which we feel gives a better representation of how ACW regiments behaved under fire. We did this because the overall casualty percentages armies were suffering in our games seemed to us to be far too high. This also makes units more fragile when getting pummelled by canister and you need a fresh regiment to stand up to that sort of punishment - a unit that is already a bit frayed at the edges or tired will quickly fall back under canister fire.

The mod is here:

http://www.norbsoftdev.net/forum/modifi ... e-fire-mod

The game still seems to produce casualty rates that are too high but one can I suppose explain that by assuming a certain percentage of the "losses" suffered by a unit in a battle are stragglers, men hiding, the lightly wounded, men "helping their wounded comrades to the rear" and so on. A unit might be listed at the end of a battle as having 70% casualties but in fact 2/3rds of these would return to the colours after the battle.