Howitzer`s and Canon

[Chamba]

Hi guys,

first of all, thank you for this beautiful and impressive mod. I realy enjoy it.
I played it alot in the last time and iam very excited.

Iam an player who is looking for realistic battles (tactics and strategy, historic etc.) and gameplay and as such iam happy with this mod cause of the uniforms, overall gameplay, campaignmap and of course battles as well but:

1.Howitzers
In fact of realistic gameplay, the howitzer`s damage and accuracy are not realistic and destroys alot of this napoleonic feeling and of course most of the time the battle.
Cause its to much accuracy like a laser pointer and its damage is to much.
One howitzer battery (3 guns) is often killing with one shot 1/3 to half of my regiment (h/h mode) and make them running.
Why i should buy cannons when i can get "laser pointed guns" like howitzers?

Back to realistic, howitzers are not like this how it is in this mod. Not that accurate, not so much damage.

Is there a way to reduce howitzers damage, accuracy and guns in a Batteryunit? From 3 to 2guns or maybe just 1gun per battery?

For example: The english/british batteries had in each battery one howitzers.
The french had 2 howitzers each battery. Example: Battery: 6x6pdr canons and 2xhowitzers.


2.Canons
Number of canons in a battery

In napoleonic time armys had between 2-4 canons per 1000men.
In this mod i have, depends on gun type and nation, between 3-6 canons in a unit.
Most of the time i fight against Armys with 4-5 artillery units. This mean i have to fight against aprox. 6-8k soldiers. But there are not that much. Just only about 6-8 regiments of infantrie and 2-5 cav units.
Represent aprox. 2k men. Not 6-8k.

I find canon numbers in a battery to much cause of realism and in fact of gameplay. Should be 50% less canons.
Most damage in the napoleonic times during battles came from musket fire line vs line and not from canon shots or howitzers. They are able to support and sometimes they are the fingertip for success but not battle relevant like they are in this mod.

Is there a way to reduce the guns?


3. shooting range
I feel the shooting range is to high. Not in fact of realistic if i take the range in meters the weapons are able to shoot in that range but wouldnt it cause of missed accuracy and battletactics of musket volleys and so on.
More in fact of gameplay cause of the maps.
They are only front to front battle maps without much strategy and it would be nice to have a lower shooting range for all, infantry cav and guns.
I realy like it how it is represented in the Mod Napoleon Totalwar3.
Also i realy like the weapon and battle mechanics in this mod, like out of sight and others like weapon range.

It is possible to make a submod or anything like this what include a better realistic and tactic gameplay or some of Ntw3 mod?
Or maybe a change of artillery guns/numbers per unit? That would be very nice.


What u think of it?
Thanks for replies and criticism.
Maybe some have the same or other impressions.

[TheRomanRuler]

I support! Expect in game there should be only 1 to 2 cannons per 1 000 men.. i just like it that way.

[Pdguru]

All good points made, IMHO.

Now, I will say up front that I always play as th French, so all my comments come from that perspective.

I utilize a mod which forces me to produce guns only in select major locations, so I have to take acre of them, and move them expeditiously to my forces. I did this as being able to produce them like water seems a tad too easy.

As for the numbers, I would support a low limit on artillery unit numbers because they are such a significant impact on battles. I also agree that the howitzers are too deadly - yes indeed.

In the spirit of ideas instead of complaining... my suggestions are:

1. Reverse current prevailing game logic... See what can be done to make artillery effective at long range and less effective up close. My intent with this is to try to encourage ranged use of artillery early in the battle, just as they were are the time.
2. Dramatically increase the morale effect of artillery which, in my humble opinion, was also its main damage factor. Change the damage of artillery from casualties to morale, especially grapeshot.
3. Make artillery very expensive and hard to manufacture.
4. If possible make it impossible to kill but easy to rout - my intention being to have artillery survive battles (unless the army is totally destroyed) and thus make it less necessary (or even impractical or unecessary) to manufacture it and perhaps help reduce the artillery-dominated armies that seem to be created by the AI.
5. Find a way to enable the use of small guns to accompany infantry brigades - add some drama to the close action without adding the game-changing effect that artillery can have
6. Find a way to give artillery a high effect on morale for it's own army's units, like a general, perhaps? I believe it made a significant positive impact in that regard.
7. Find a way for the loss of artillery to have a significant negative effect on it's own army.

That's all for now.

[Chevalier IX]

I will say that at times the abundance of Howitzers and other various forms of indirect fire artillery makes me feel at times that this is in fact the Franco - Prussian conflict of 1870 rather than the one of our respective era.It is not a game breaker for me but there is room for revision,especially seeing as how often it is employed by the ai

[Akmatov]

This is exactly on point with my feelings. I have just returned to NTW and am reading Chandler alongside so while no expert I was astonished to find the 1796 Army of Italy equipped with 3 6-gun batteries. Those 18 guns totally dominated the battlefield in my first small battle as the small Piedmont force tried to close with the French. They were blasted into rout without ever firing on the French. Felt more like 1914 than 1796.

While I have no researched this, it seems to me that there are about twice as many guns present in a battery as there should be. I'm thinking batteries should be 2 to 4 guns, not 4 to 8. Is there any support for this idea?

If not, could someone please tell me how to adjust the number of guns per battery myself?

EDIT
Just read that the 1796 Army of Italy started out with all of 60 cannon. I'm going in and halving the size of my batteries, I think that will give a much more realistic representation of artillery.

[Chamba]

For everyone who have the need of more details or information about napoleon`s armies. Here is a link for a realy nice documentation about
Napoleon, His Army and Enemies.
Campaigns - Battles - Strategy- Tactics - Commanders - Uniforms - Maps

http://napoleonistyka.atspace.com/

[LawL_LawL]

The batteries in game are never realistic, as realistically batteries always fielded both guns and howitzers, in approx 1:3 ratio of howitzers to guns. From what I know Napoleonic Prussian batteries fielded 6 guns, and 2 howitzers. If you were to make it more realistic, you should produce "half batteries" of either 2 howitzers, or the 6 guns that would realistically accompany the 2 howitzers.

This is exactly on point with my feelings. I have just returned to NTW and am reading Chandler alongside so while no expert I was astonished to find the 1796 Army of Italy equipped with 3 6-gun batteries. Those 18 guns totally dominated the battlefield in my first small battle as the small Piedmont force tried to close with the French. They were blasted into rout without ever firing on the French. Felt more like 1914 than 1796.

While I have no researched this, it seems to me that there are about twice as many guns present in a battery as there should be. I'm thinking batteries should be 2 to 4 guns, not 4 to 8. Is there any support for this idea?

If not, could someone please tell me how to adjust the number of guns per battery myself?

Edit: If you play as Piedmont, I dont care what the reason for it is, but undoubtedly you should be at a vast disadvantage for the entire length of the game. You are a minor faction whose borders comprise of one city, against the nation of France, you are not meant to pull off some Hollywood stunt and lead your puny forces against an army of France.

All good points made, IMHO.

Now, I will say up front that I always play as th French, so all my comments come from that perspective.

I utilize a mod which forces me to produce guns only in select major locations, so I have to take acre of them, and move them expeditiously to my forces. I did this as being able to produce them like water seems a tad too easy.

As for the numbers, I would support a low limit on artillery unit numbers because they are such a significant impact on battles. I also agree that the howitzers are too deadly - yes indeed.

In the spirit of ideas instead of complaining... my suggestions are:

1. Reverse current prevailing game logic... See what can be done to make artillery effective at long range and less effective up close. My intent with this is to try to encourage ranged use of artillery early in the battle, just as they were are the time.
2. Dramatically increase the morale effect of artillery which, in my humble opinion, was also its main damage factor. Change the damage of artillery from casualties to morale, especially grapeshot.
3. Make artillery very expensive and hard to manufacture.
4. If possible make it impossible to kill but easy to rout - my intention being to have artillery survive battles (unless the army is totally destroyed) and thus make it less necessary (or even impractical or unecessary) to manufacture it and perhaps help reduce the artillery-dominated armies that seem to be created by the AI.
5. Find a way to enable the use of small guns to accompany infantry brigades - add some drama to the close action without adding the game-changing effect that artillery can have
6. Find a way to give artillery a high effect on morale for it's own army's units, like a general, perhaps? I believe it made a significant positive impact in that regard.
7. Find a way for the loss of artillery to have a significant negative effect on it's own army.

That's all for now.

Agreed on some points, but I think artillery should cause heavy casualties. Artillery should be a weapon that utilizes attrition to wear down its target's morale, but also physically cause great damage, and a unit both under sustained artillery fire and then directly attacked by other ground forces should be teetering on the brink of routing. Artillery should not boost allied morale, but rather just demoralize the enemy progressively. I also think artillery should have poor fatigue resistance, to turn them into a weapon of opportunity, and not something that is simply deployed and left to its own to blow away enemy forces for the entire battle tirelessly, but a unit that should be player managed and give fire in order to support an assault or repel one, or simply weaken the enemy line prior to an assault.

[Chamba]

Regarding pdguru`s post:

1. I find artillery (the canons) is ok now in fact of range damage. Howitzers need to be changed in acuracy -) they do to much damage cause of acuracy.
Grape shots overall are to much damage and moral hitting.

2. Should be not changed cause more moral damage make batteries unbeatable.

3. Absolutly agree!!! Batteries/Artillery should be much more expensive and should be hard to manufacture (tech tree etc). In respect to realism, artillery is the Queen of battles and after a battle the captured artillery was a honour for the men who had captured it! Sometimes regiments got an achivement in form of artillery guns to respect there courage.
Artillery means not only the guns and some men to use them, artillery means a lot of equipment what we doesent see on total war like the artillery train, munition wagons, horses, gunsmith and equipment, etc....
For a batterie of 6 guns they need more as 100 men support and all that other staff.

And the artilleryguns had to be made not that easy like a muskete.
For example some production numbers from Prussia:

Artilleryproduction Prussia 1763 bis 1786
Canons (3-24 pfündige): 1011 Haubitzen 7-30 pfündige) 219 Mörser: 42

All together prussia produce only around 55 canons per year! (1763-1786)

Maybe we have to think about it to make production of Artillery some more harder and much more expensive. And we should reduce the numbers of artilleryunits overall.
That reflects that artillery was the queen of the battlefield and they used to be protected and wisely used.

And maybe, dont know if this can be made, we can capture artillery like we can capture ships as well? Is this possible? After a won battle we have the chance to capture and use enemy artillery (just 1 men per unit left so we need to refill this captured unit, but we got them in our use after winning the battle). Just some thought on it.....only an idea....to bring new tactical improvements to the game.


4. Got the same impression that AI produce to much artillery in some cases. Artillery should be limited to use for a army stack. Each 6 Units (Cav/Inf) they can provide 1 Artillery unit. Or maybe change the numbers of artillery guns in a unit from 6 to 4 and from 5 to 3 and 3 to 2. ( is there a way that i can change it by my own?)

5. hrm....we have the horse artillery, what is fine to make a fast movement to the flank or to support infantrie.
Dont know what u mean with small guns?

6. Like this thought on moral effects of own artillery cause it make infantry support and artillery in the near more valuable, BUT: it will build up some kind of "unbeatable force". Maybe we think about of use the Guard artillery to have this effect. Not all the artilly, just only guard artillery. (did they have this already? dont know, have to prove)

7. See as 6, if we lost guard units, we should have this effect on moral. It should be also for the lost of every guard unit, artillery, infantry and cavallery. If they give moral bonus, they should do the negative effect if they where lost/routed.

[wiskey78]

Regarding pdguru`s post:

That reflects that artillery was the queen of the battlefield and they used to be protected and wisely used.

Artillery is the KING of battle, becuase it was and is the main source of casualties, infantry is the Queen of battle becuase it is always getting F'd .

[St3vo T]

soz

[St3vo T]

use pack file manager and open LME 2.1 go to db, find unit land stats open and change the number of guns on the cannon types, but you must keep 6 men per gun so change men in unit accordingly. i modded using this my stats are as:

4pd: 2 guns Infantry support
6pd: 3 guns Main battery
8pd: 2.... Main
9pd: 2.... Main
12pd: 3 .... Main
All Howitzers: 2 .... Main

good luck

[Ramesses II The Great]

1.Howitzers
In fact of realistic gameplay, the howitzer`s damage and accuracy are not realistic and destroys alot of this napoleonic feeling and of course most of the time the battle.
Cause its to much accuracy like a laser pointer and its damage is to much.
One howitzer battery (3 guns) is often killing with one shot 1/3 to half of my regiment (h/h mode) and make them running.
Why i should buy cannons when i can get "laser pointed guns" like howitzers?

I am sorry man, that's not the game's fault if you don't know how to play! I am a heavy howitzer user i don't waste money on cannon. My enemies use howitzer on me and i take heavy damage. But i know how to play strategically, so i know how to take out enemy guns before they become a threat!! If you don't know how to play that's not the game's fault, what you should be looking for, is how to become a better player in facing howitzers!!

[Dicer]

I agree with Dino Howitzers are quite easy to over come even before they become a threat but i can see how they can be irritating due to the vinnilla deployment zones I recommend you get a larger deployment zone mod and see how that makes a difference -i also play with 40 units so i don't really see the AI mass Arty but I am usually out gunned but that's the fun of the game and strategy of it no ?