Originally Posted by
MajorStoffer
I would just like to say that the rifles currently in game are massively underpowered, especially with elite troops.
Imperial Infantry, for instance, have 35acc/reload at rank 2 veteran (or possibly 38 reload, can't recall exactly, let's call it mid-30s for ease). This is the exact same stats as unvetted French Fusiliers in Napoleon: Total War, and slightly above Spanish Line Infantry in Empire.
Now, this is kind of silly for a couple reasons.
Imperial/Shogunate/Republican Infantry all appear to be equipped with a rifle called the Snider-Enfield, a British modification of an earlier American breech-loading rifle. The model used in game looks almost the exact same as stock photos, and can be differentiated from the older, 1853 Enfield also used in Japan at this time due to lack of ramrod and slightly longer length. This is a rifle designed to be fired roughly ever 6 seconds by an average soldier, with an experienced solider able to fire every ~4 seconds with reduced accuracy. This weapon further has an effective range of ~550m. Furthermore, beyond the raw weapons, factional infantry are supposed to represent the "New Guard" of Japan; these are men supposedly from Samurai classes, given good training under their own officers and foreign veterans, armed with the best weapons currently available.
However, with their current stats, they operate like 18th century musketeers, with an effective range of tiny, and a reload roughly the same as Napoleon's Fusiliers. These are veteran troops armed with superior weapons, and they are incapable of inflicting more than 10-15% hits per volley at maybe 75m, roughly every 12 seconds. Now I understand allowances have to be made for balance, hence the 550m range is out of the question, but factional infantry and above should be positively deadly when engaged in sustained firing against virtually any target. The reality of line-battles in this time period was very high casualty rates, and while vanilla's near 100% hit rate was undoubtedly silly, the rate of fire was not, nor the idea of high casualty rates. The number of losses in the historical Boshin war were so low due to morale; troops fled quickly from these extremely lethal engagements, rather than stand and withstand barrage after barrage every few moments.
Now, if these was a purely ranged game, I could accept these reductions to help establish balance and draw at combat (though I'd still argue factional troops aren't powerful enough in relation to standard line troops), but the problem is when melee is added in. Troops with 30/30 stats can't stop a Samurai charge under almost any circumstance, despite the reality of this conflict being head-on charges died, and died badly. These unrealistically poor firing stats makes melee much to viable in a direct confrontation, and when viewed in comparison to previous TW entries, it looks downright silly.
I'd certainly like to see a more pronounced role of experience in combat ability, which I believe is part of the intention here, but across the board, these troops should perform better than their previous iterations in Napoleon and Empire by a large, nearly galactic gulf in quality. Even green-as-grass troops with armstrong guns and breech-loaders should cause immense casualties on troops with older minie-rifles or teppo, to say nothing of sword and spear armed Samurai. Veteran troops should simply erase them from the face of the map.
I'm all for making melee viable, but their strength should be that if they close, they can do immense damage to range-focused soldiers, but to close they should be forced to use terrain, cover, distractions or human shields (Spear levy ahoy!), not be able to charge across an open field and destroy modern troops. 300 engineers and invalids held off 3000 zulus for a reason, much the same reason that Saigo Takamori won the battle of Toba-Fushimi against a force several times as large as his own.
I hate to be overly critical; I love every single iteration of Darthmod, but we're dealing with a completely new era now, and the current stats for ranged troops are, quite patently, completely ahistorical and unbalanced, not representative of their equipment or training.