Artillery suggestions

[jackx]

As it is, Artillery is highly effective against single targets, but actually quite useless in spreading attrition to several units over a prolonged period of time.
You can shoot one unit ragged without problems, but bruising two or three with that 8-gun battery in 15 minutes of fire, that isn't going to happen.
Similarly, you can absolutely slaughter one unit with canister, but not spread your fire on two units attacking frontally to hurl both of them back.
Of course, with smaller batteries, there's the risk of splitting it down to fairly ineffective pin-pricks, but that's a choice I'd like to give the player.

The first suggestion I have however is to set up a maximum number of guns, per type, per hex, per scenario.
It's ridiculous having say an 800 man battalion and 16 12 pdrs, all fighting effectively on a front of 150 yards in one hex, and 8 6pdrs and 400 grenadiers "filling" the other hex.
And while discrepancies of that sort can occur with infantry and cavalry as well, it's usually nowhere near as pronounced as with the artillery.

Second suggestion involves canister/defensive fire. One target, full effectiveness on that target. Two targets, it automatically hits both at 50%. (Triggered like infantry fire in square, i.e. by clicking on the guns, not any particular target)
That way you can no longer guarantee the destruction of a large battery by simply parking two units of infantry in its killzone.
This will also turn embedded lighter guns into less of a showstopper for a single unit and more of a general damage boost.

Third suggestion concerns the bombardment phase - have each battery able to fire x times at 1/x effectiveness (x being set in the editor, maybe with a value of 1 for every 5 minutes of turn length), so that fire can be concentrated or spread.

As you can tell, artillery being a precision killer more than an attrition spreader is bugging me quite a bit from a gameplay POV, but also from a historical POV. Standing helpless under fire should be a much more demoralizing experience for an entire body of troops, and not just the immediate victims, and precision shooting/concentration of fire shouldn't happen as often as it does, on account of bad visibility conditions and lack of swift communication.

I'm currently experimenting with splititng the batteries up more (with a maximum of 3 heavy, 4 other guns per unit), but while that gives more control over spreading/concentrating fire in the bombardment phase, it also gives a lot, probably too much flexibility... and of course it doesn't work with the AI, which will just run most/all of these units forward unsupported...

Edit: I suppose there's a suggestion #4, something that I pretty much overlooked until I implemented the above-mentioned splitting of batteries into smaller units - artillery stacking. Currently, you cannot move infantry into a hex with 2 artillery, or artillery into a hex with 2 infantry, but you can move one infantry or artillery into a hex that already has one of each, thus effectively triple-stacking a hex, where all three stacked units are capable of combat, and both artillery units can bombard.
This should either be always possible, i.e. move the 1 inf on top of 2 arty, or impossible, to where you cannot double-stack one type of unit and then still bolster it with another. I'd prefer no triple-stacking, particularly if my above suggestions, or something along those lines, were implemented, but I can live with it, and it might actually help making the MSU artillery work as intended...

[Tim Coakley]

Jackx,
great suggestions on here. I have taken notes for the future.

Tim