Test on effectiveness of anti-infantry artillery

[Engrish]

Alright, so I conducted some tests to see which anti-infantry artillery was the best.

My format was to get 20 artillery pieces and 20 Milanese peasants (cause they are traitorous scum and must die) and count the casualties by the time they got within charging distance of the artillery. The map was Grassy Plain with no weather. No other variables were manipulated.

I got some surprising results nonetheless.

Ballista- 100/1500 casualties (approx.)
Mangonel- 350/1500 casualties (approx.) (friendly fire expected)
Ribault- 200/1500 casualties (approx.)
Monster Ribault- 100-150/1500 casualties (approx.)
Monster Ribault (barrage fire)- 300-400/1500 casualties (approx.)
Rocket launcher- 350-400/1500 casualties (approx.)
Culvern (explosive shot)- 250-300/1500 casualties (approx.)
Culvern (solid shot)- 650/1500+ casualties (approx.) <<<<New winner
Cannon (explosive shot)- 250-300/1500 casualties (approx.)
Cannon (solid shot)- 400-450/1500 casualties (approx.)
Monster Bombard- 250-300/1500 casualties (approx.)
Basilisk (explosive shot)- 300/1500 casualties (approx.)
Basilisk (solid shot)- 500-600/1500 casualties (approx.)
Serpentine- 600/1500 casualties+ (approx.) (seems to become more accurate as enemy approach)

I retested it just to be sure and got 601 casualties.

To be completely scientific, I probably should have retested each of these a few times, but I have a life and of the ones I did retry, I got very similar results.

[jman47]

thats seems pretty normal to me, after all the serpentine is a smaller cannon used specifically for an anti-infantry role

[Thompson45cal.]

Thanks for the sharing the stats

[clandestino]

Serpentine- 600/1500 casualties+ (!!!)

So it's 30 casualties per weapon if I got that right? Not much if you consider that they are only peasants.

[Tankfriend]

Nice work at finding out those killing qoutes, I guess the serpentine has become quite a bit more attractive as an artillery weapon...

So it's 30 casualties per weapon if I got that right? Not much if you consider that they are only peasants.

I guess it might seem quite a small amount, but would better armored units fare better against a cannon? Haven't seen any soldier getting up after being fully hit by a cannon, so I think these 30 casualties per weapon will be more or less equal despite different units as long as the amount of soldiers and their formation remains the same. So, 30 dismounted chivalric knights would sound a lot more impressive, wouldn't they?

[King Sama]

So it's 30 casualties per weapon if I got that right? Not much if you consider that they are only peasants.

I belive peasents are more spread out so higher up units like dismounted knights who are also in tighter formations (as said armor doesnt make a difference) would have more casualties

[clandestino]

Haven't seen any soldier getting up after being fully hit by a cannon, so I think these 30 casualties per weapon will be more or less equal despite different units as long as the amount of soldiers and their formation remains the same.

Totaly right. Altough I think that 30 casualties per weapon is small amount generaly, not only for peasants.

[Engrish]

Don't forget you have a huge amount of overlapping fire with 40 cannons firing away. If I had only 2 cannons targeting the same number of peasants, I would expect the casualties to be much higher.


By overlapping fire, first imaging a single cannon ball streaking through a line of peasants. Now imagine a dozen cannon balls criss-crossing through each other's paths going through areas that were already culled by the other shots.

Also, don't forget that the peasants were charging straight at the cannons without stopping and the test ended as soon as the peasants got within 20 feet or so of the cannons. Looking at the data on the monster ribault w/ barrage fire, I would expect having 2 in my army to deal out no more than 30 casualties to the enemy, however in regular battles, you could easily expect more than 200 casualties out of them against a full sized army at battles end.

Bear in mind this is not a test on how many casualties you can expect in a battle, it is merely relating the effectiveness of each artillery to the others.

[Tankfriend]

Of course there is no way of directly comparing the amount of casualties between the perfect situation that your experiment has provided and the without doubt more chaotic one in actual combat, but the main tendency should remain the same I guess.

However, there is also the fear-effect that the weapons can have, which leads to further deviating results concerning the overall usefulness (raw firepower is good of course, but a little extra is not without benefits).
I for example usually keep my monster ribaults from firing until the enemy units have reached almost point-blank range - that way, the enemy usually gets a full barrage of brutal firepower (hard to miss at that distance), which can cause weaker minded units to rout instantly and probably draw other units with them.

[Pirates Yarrr]

My favourite thing to do is get a monster bombard (thats the huge one with the wooden frame right?) and when the enemy are sieging in a quick battle, and when they are all lined up waiting for the ram to get busy I sent it out through the gate but not outside, and let it fire. Got a streak of 100/200 kills with one shot, just a line of flying men

[Surgeon]

A somewhat conclusive test, but not very complete at all. Frankly I think what you should have also done was test a single artillery piece against a single unit of peasants. One type of artillery (e.g. Culverin explosive shot) can have more kills per shot than another (e.g. Monster Rebault), but be much less accurate. If you're facing off against a huge horde of 1500 men then the chances of missing are greatly diminished.

[Engrish]

Actually, when you do 1v1 tests with artillery, you are much more under the shadow of chance rather than actual ability. If I was to conduct a 1v1 test 20 times I would likely get the same result through statistical averaging, but the likelyhood of getting an average and conclusive result from just a 1v1 test is very slim.

Case in point: The monster bombard. The thing deals out a huge amount of punishment but is very likely to miss. A 1v1 test would probably see a mixture of completely missing the peasants all together, or completely flattening them into a bloody pulp.

Another way of thinking about it would be polling a single person to get their opinion on who they want to be president. From there, one could conclude that since your test base was 1 and they all voted for candidate x since there was only 1 person, candidate x will receive a 100% of the votes.

[Surgeon]

That's the point. The artillery's accuracy is a part of its ability. If a Monster Bombard wipes out an entire unit of peasants with one lucky shot (75 kills) but doesn't hit on any other try out of 20, then it effectively killed 75/1500, or about 0.05 of the entire army. If a Monster Rebault consistently kills about 30 peasants per try out of 20 tries then its effectiveness is around 600/1500, or 0.4.

By the way, you forgot to test Ballistae, Elephant Artillery and Rocket Elephants.

[Engrish]

I see your point but I don't think you are following my logic. In a "which unit is better 1 on 1" scenario, having a large sample can distort your results, but when you are trying to compare something, the larger your sample base, the more accurate your results.

As in the case with the monster bombard, due to the fact that it will only shoot off about 3 rounds in the time frame, it really is a matter of chance whether or not any of those rounds will find their marks so any one result is not a statistical average.

I'm taking an advanced stat class right now by the way.

Oh and good point on the ballista. I'll try the elephant artillery just for giggles, but I'm not exactly sure where to find the elephant rocket artillery. I haven't seen that available in the custom battle setup.

Updated. I didn't put the elephant artillery in because it was an absolute joke. The peasants routed before they were even halfway there. It was just complete carnage.

[Old_Scratch]

While serpentines are the best anti-infantry cannon, I think the gap in casualties between the serpentine and the basilisk would be much smaller if you used regular shot. Unless you're playing kingdoms or a mod, explosive and flaming cannon shot is terrible at killing infantry or anything else for that matter. It's highly inaccurate and the shot doesn't bounce, which minimizes its damage potential. I've won many a cannon shootout because I used round shot and my opponent used explosive shot.

[Surgeon]

I see your point but I don't think you are following my logic. In a "which unit is better 1 on 1" scenario, having a large sample can distort your results, but when you are trying to compare something, the larger your sample base, the more accurate your results.

As in the case with the monster bombard, due to the fact that it will only shoot off about 3 rounds in the time frame, it really is a matter of chance whether or not any of those rounds will find their marks so any one result is not a statistical average.

I'm taking an advanced stat class right now by the way.

Oh and good point on the ballista. I'll try the elephant artillery just for giggles, but I'm not exactly sure where to find the elephant rocket artillery. I haven't seen that available in the custom battle setup.

Updated. I didn't put the elephant artillery in because it was an absolute joke. The peasants routed before they were even halfway there. It was just complete carnage.

Heh, even though we're both talking English we're not speaking the same language

See what I mean is, for accurate results you need several independent samples. Having 20 1v1s is effectively taking 20 independent samples. A 20v20 is pseudo-replicated, since the 20 samples you took are interdependent (like you yourself said; shells landing on the same spot thus not killing as many, and other distortions like that). Granted, taking several 20v20s can also be considered as separate samples, so maybe that should be done first. For the most accurate results, we'd probably have to do both 1v1s and 20v20s, but first we need to find someone with no life...

By the way, I was kidding about the Rocket Elephants since they're the most overpowered monstrosity in the game, even more so than artillery elephants. I'll go do a sample of Mangonels now, but just to be sure - did you position your captain artillery piece in rank with the other artillery or did you leave him as was?

[Kennylz]

To tell you the truth, I've found the ballistae to be the best of all of them. Cheap and they have sniper accuracy. With any other artillery there is a great accuracy loss. Outside of that, yes, serpentine is the best for raw kills but the Rocket Launcher is hell on their morale and pretty deadly itself.

You should also add Mangonels to that list.

Ballistae= An Assassins weapon to dependably take out Generals, elite units, and elephants. With a Serpentine you might aim for those ritterbruders, but you could hit anyone in the army, like the levies. With a ballistae the bolt goes right where you tell it. Also it works better when defending inside a settlement during seiges than cannons

Serpentine= Best cannon for infantry.

Rocket Launchers= Battle winners. Those rockets scare the crap out of guys and do wide spread damage so you will pretty much always hit a lot of people if you aim it at an army and do far more casualties than just shooting at one unit of peasants.

[Engrish]

I need to try the ballista again, I know. The first few barrages fell pathetically short but once they started finding their marks their damage was pretty devastating.

As far as Mangonels, I don't have kingdoms so I couldn't test it. If somebody else has it and is willing to follow the same format, I would appreciate the data.

[Engrish]

I moved everything to the back in a straight line so the captain was in formation.

[Surgeon]

From 2 runs I got an average of about 350/1500 + 3 friendly fire incidents (that oil goes all over the place).