Underpowered gunpowder units?

[ignasigh]

Hi all!

First of all, sorry for my english.

I'm wondering if the actual gunpowder units are underpowered. I've made a couple of tests with a musketeer normal unit and a musketeer which its attack ratio has been increased by 20 (13 vs 33) against the same foe unit.

I've maximized and aligned both units of 180 in 2 rows, hence men and guns per voley are 90 each time.

Honestly, I believe that 33's results are pretty more realistic than 13 because enemy unit deaths are more or less as follows:
13 - 181-->166-->159-->134-->127-->116-->98 (then we switch to swords)
33 - 181-->164-->134-->127-->110-->86-->56 (again we took swords)

Well, this is 1 vs 1 unit, but try to imagine it in the middle of a chaotic battle, I would expect more deaths from them (take into account that those units are a crap in melee attack and their range is not like longbowmen)

Ok, what are your opinions?

[Landwalker]

Gunpowder units and crossbows both have statistical problems with their projectile attacks. If you look through the descr file for projectiles, you'll notice that all crossbow bolts and firearm bullets (and possible ribaults, I don't remember) have the radius of "0", whereas all other ranged weapons have radii of at least 0.1. This drastically reduces the effectiveness of gunpowder and crossbow units.

In order to fix it, go into the text file and find everywhere "radius 0" occurs, and change it to 0.1. This should make musketeers/handgunners/arquebusiers, as well as crossbows, function the way they should.

Cheers.

[delra]

What is the exact meaning of this "radi"? Bigger wounds?

[Landwalker]

I think the radius of a projectile is the area within which it has an effect--notice that artillery units often have larger "radii", because when their ammunition hits it affects a larger area.

Obviously, with a "radius" of zero, your missile isn't going to be affecting very much. How it affects anything at all is still a bit confusing to me, but the result is that in many cases when the projectile should be striking a target, it isn't because of its lack of an area of effect.

Cheers.

[ignasigh]

I think the radius of a projectile is the area within which it has an effect--notice that artillery units often have larger "radii", because when their ammunition hits it affects a larger area.

Obviously, with a "radius" of zero, your missile isn't going to be affecting very much. How it affects anything at all is still a bit confusing to me, but the result is that in many cases when the projectile should be striking a target, it isn't because of its lack of an area of effect.

Cheers.

Hi LandRANGERWalker

I'll try and let u know. I'm wondering why javelin units have damage = 0...is that wrong too? I noticed that javelin units don't kill as much as I expect (hastati killed more )

See ya!

[delra]

Looks like we need Point Blank here. :-)

Who's doing sikrit pagan rituals?

[Point Blank]

damage is damage to structures

Can someone please test whether radius = 0.1 or 0 is having an effect on missile fire? No time to test right now but if there is a difference will fix it for RC 1.4

[ignasigh]

damage is damage to structures

Can someone please test whether radius = 0.1 or 0 is having an effect on missile fire? No time to test right now but if there is a difference will fix it for RC 1.4

Hi PointBlack

I can ensure u that damage is increased a lot! If you see my first comparison between 13 and 33...well, take the 33 row and that's the actual (and more realistic) values for 13.

I didn't test in crossbows, sorry!

[Landwalker]

Point Blank: I changed the radius from 0 to 0.1 in my game, and I have noticed much more effectiveness among the affected units (crossbows and gunpowder). I haven't run any tests to determine exactly what the difference is, and since I'm not at school over the holidays (and thus away from my desktop), I can't run them right now. I admit that the perceived difference might be a "placebo effect", but I'm confident that the improvement in performance is significant.

If anybody is able to run this test over the holidays, that would be great. If not, I'll do it when I get back to school around January 3rd.

Cheers.

[Pdguru]

What are you changing, and where?

[Landwalker]

What are you changing, and where?

In the projectiles data file (again, I'm away from my desktop so I can't check to be sure), there should be the data for all of the missile types in the game. By default, the "Radius" values for all crossbow and handgun projectiles is zero. Change all of these to 0.1 and you should be set. It may take a couple of minutes to actually search out all instances of Radius 0, but with some inventive use of the search function (or simple diligence) you should be able to knock it out without much trouble.

Cheers.

[Pdguru]

Experimenting now. The change of 0.1 to radius does not seem to make a big enough difference. In my mind (probably not realistic but what looks right to me), I want a series of vollies to be pretty devastating to a steady advancing line.

So, I set radius to 0.3, mass to 0.5 and added body_piercing and it seems to be what I am looking for. For example a single unit of pikemen advancing on a single unit of arquebusiers lost over half it's men in the march, the impact of the bullets visibly tearing up the formation... just like I want it. The pikemen still got to the gunners, but were in a bad state by then. As I say, might not be realistic, but it suits my expectations.

[Pdguru]

Now, just did the same with single unit of advanced musketeers attacked by a single unit of high armored dismounted broken lances. The latter got a real pasting on the advance, down by 50% - but when they reached the musketeers - revenge was sweet.

[delra]

Way too much to my taste. Those are not machine guns...

[kasimmorathi]

I can't say that it's too overpowered. There is a good reason that gunpowder pushed out standard projectiles despite how unstable it was to begin with. Musket bullets were massive and could tear through limbs fairly easily, so that could account for the radius. Not to mention ricochets and just wild inaccuracy. Keeping their melee power and defense down helps balance this out, but I still have some trouble using gunpowder units, except for artillery. I'll take a group of Genoese Crossbowmen over Musketeers any day, which kind of defeats the purpose of introducing gunpowder.

[delra]

Yeah, all this gunpowder stuff doesn't fit very well into the game. Maybe when KK hits units limit he will get rid of all those musketeer losers... :-)

[Pdguru]

Interestingly, I just watched a large "replay" battle which I had won pretty convincingly as Kievan Rus versus Lithuania, and in which I had a fair number of cossack musketeers in my army.

In case any reader of this doesn't know - replays are not duplicates/videos of battles but are a real-time battle which replays each move you made in the original (and the AI does what is did before because that's the way it is). With the new stats, the result of the battle was actually much closer... I killed more enemy in the early stages but it seemed to force the AI to be more aggressive. Give it a try.

[Byzantium]

The thing is Muskets had deplorable accuracy even a few hundred years later in the Napoleonic era.Look at a battle like Talavera for example - A few million fired musket balls for a few thousand casualties and not all of them will have been caused by musket fire.I've had a few battles using gunpowder and i think it's pretty much spot on.
I'm not saying they dont need a tweak but they have the potential to be game killers imo.

[delra]

For me they should all be kicked out... Let's have more heavy cavalry instead. :-)

[hellfire15]

maybe they should be able to shoot through multiple ubits like ballistas?
btw can someone upload the changed files?