Some comparative data on cannon effectiveness

**BruceR** · March 24, 2010, 01:06 AM

Ran the numbers on artillery vs terrain last night. Tested 6 and 12 pounders in both ETW and NTW against forts and buildings. A couple observations.

1. Artillery of the same caliber are firing faster.

In ETW, an Austrian Horse artillery 6 pdr has a base reload of 30, and at EXP 0 a reload skill of 30. This leads to approximately one shot per 30 seconds under game conditions.

In NTW, an Austrian foot artillery 6 pdr has a base reload of 15, and at EXP 0 a reload skill of 35. This leads to approximately one shot per 20 seconds under game conditions. 9 pdrs are also marginally faster than before, while 12 pdrs fire at the same rate as before.

2. Terrain strength values for forts have dramatically decreased.

In ETW, the strongest fort has a terrain value of 1700. In NTW, the strongest fort has a terrain value of 800. Buildings in both games go from 150-300 (for non-occupiable buildings) and 500-800 (for occupiable ones). In both games, destruction of the building leads to a breach in the fort wall or the collapse of a building, killing all inside.

Damage appears to be pretty straightforwardly linear, with the weapon's damage score per round subtracted from the base value until 0 is reached. Weapons in NTW also tend to be slightly more damaging for a given calibre; an ETW 6 pounder did 15 damage per shot, while an NTW one does 20.

Hiding out in a building was always a bad idea in ETW; now it's even more so. The most powerful building you can seek cover in, at 800 terrain value, will take exactly 40 hits from 6-pound shot before collapsing and wiping you out. Since against static targets nearly every shot is a hit, this will take as long as it takes the battery of 4 six pounders to fire 10 shots each, or approximately 3.3 minutes for one battery. Due to the combination of factors above, this is approximately half as long as it used to take (7 minutes) for the same calibre battery in ETW.

Forts are even worse in NTW, due to the sharp reduction in their terrain value. The same 6 pounder battery will breach the strongest fort in 3.3 minutes of uninterrupted firing, killing all on the parapet above the breach, as well. In ETW this same act would have taken the same-calibre battery around 15 minutes of continuous fire. (In reality, of course, no realistically possible amount of 6 pdr shot is ever going to breach a masonry fort, which required heavier siege guns.) But in NTW...

3. Six-pounders are more effective terrain killers than 12-pounders.

The following gives idealized anti-terrain damage per minute for each calibre of gun in ETW and NTW (assumes a single gun with the max possible unit reload skill):

6 pounder: (ETW) 30 pts/min; (NTW) 80 pts/min
8/9 pounder: (ETW) 42 pts/min; (NTW) 75 pts/min
12 pounder: (ETW) 54 pts/min; (NTW) 72 pts/min.

Whereas 6 pounders were significantly weaker against terrain before, they are now somewhat stronger due to the decreased reload times for smaller and medium field guns.

The upshot is that terrain and forts in NTW in its current state have no effective value as cover or battlefield impediment, assuming the other side has even a marginal artillery superiority.

Notably, the buildings on the Waterloo battlefield appear from the data file to have been given terrain values of 16000, 20 times that of regular buildings, presumably to avoid Napoleon unhistorically rubbling Hougoumont and winning the battle that way. (In theory, it would take half an hour of uninterrupted fire by an NTW battery to destroy any building that strong.)