Empire artillery: how to use it to effect?

[Draxdevourer]

This mod makes for the best warhammer pc-game ever made. Gratz, and thanks!

I've been playing around with Reikland. Tried out their artillery pieces, but I seem to fail grasping the concept of how to use them properly.

I started the first few turns producing a great cannon and a mortar in Altdorf, thinking to make a Napoleon-like army. I proceed to attack some beastmen, and the artillery doesn't really seem to do anything. I make a few hits, and a few beasties dies, but far less than if I for example accost them with a squad of Pistolliers. Minotaurs seem to walk right through direct hits by both great cannons and mortars without casualties (I assume they loose a hp, but I kinda expected the great cannon to take them down regardless). In the end I dumped the great cannon and just keep a couple of mortars to goad the enemy AI into attacking my spearwall of helbardiers.

After a while I have a battle against a single squad of basic gors. The two mortar placements (8 individual mortar models) both fire on it continually while they walk(not run) towards me. They get reduced some in number, but far less than they would have by normal arrows for example. In the end they didn't break from mortar fire, but from charging the spear-wall of my helbardiers. So, very poor performance by my artillery fire considering my expectations.

I've tried the hellstorm rocket battery, and while having a destructive effect much closer to what I expected from my mortars, they are very soon out of ammo (making them kinds worthless against the multi-stack spawns of this mod, since they have no ammo for the second, or third, or fourth wave).

So, what am I missing? How am I supposed to use this weaponry to effect? (I play version 1.5.1 btw)


Thanks,

[GreatSword]

Hey bud,

Artillery are a little more difficult to master than pistoliers, but when you do, it is really fun! I can give you a couple of tips that might help.

1. Cannons are your best bet to bring down walls

2. If attacking troops, change the cannon ammo to "exploding shot" (or "grapeshot" if they get very close)

3. Try to target clumps of units with your mortars, and like you said, they are a great way to get the enemy to run to you instead of waiting.

4. MOST IMPORTANT, The artillery gets much better as it gets experienced, accuracy improves drastically. Start getting a few chevrons and your pieces will perform MUCH better.


hope this helps!

[hbk_123]

Hi

I have quite some fun battles with artillery so I think this might help you a bit:

1. You should use the great cannons to take down walls only (they should make short work of them). I don't even use great cannons in field battles though. They hardly get any kill IMO.

2. Mortars are not as good in field battles as they are in siege battles though. What I usually do in attacking siege is using my cannons to take down all the towers, dig a hole on the wall, position my mortars around the gate and shoot the enemies clump up in the center (that's a lot of kills)

3. As the guy above said, they are even better when they get some chevrons so try to work on that.

Hope this helps!

[Draxdevourer]

Thanks for the replies!

It seems my experience with artillery is much the same as yours then. That it's utility is highly situational, and even then a bit limited. A pity then.

I used a mortar, a hellstorm battery and a volly gun against a beastman army tonight. the mortar got them to charge, but did little else. The hellstorm battery shot at a squad of minotaurs. It was out of ammo before the cows had come halfway towards me, and at that point it had killed three of them (out of 10). Very destructive compared to the mortar (or the pee-shooting "great"-cannon), but ultimately far less destructive than a basic helbardier-squad even when left alone to deliver it's full payload. I'll be disbanding this weapon.

In the same battle I tested a volly-gun for the first time, and was able to place it so as to shoot over the heads of a squad of dwarven soldiers with deployed stakes so as to continue shooting through the whole battle. Even tho I managed to unload all the ammo into the charging gors from a good vantage-point, it seemed to do less damage than the hellstorm rockets. Another artillery-piece for the scrappers. I'm gonna have a lot of unemployed engeneers in Nuln now. Again, a pity.

Are the artillery-pieces of the other factions any better?

[GreatSword]

Well bud,

Artillery are not as effective vs beastmen because of their spread out formation. They are very good at soaking up the ranged damage to get into melee. dont scrap anything yet, keep practicing. When you face vampires, dark elves, chaos, chaos dwarfs, night goblins, you will see a big difference. Orcs are almost as good as beastmen at absorbing the shots. you'll get the hang of it, keep practicing.

[Kahvipannu]

Yeah, artillery can be devastating, and can turn the battle around. Biggest thing with f.ex. Mortars is the morale drop they give. If enemy is enagegd in a fight, and artillery pieces will start dropping on them, theyr morale gets crushed. Also I absolutelly love mortars in defensive siege battles due to the ballistic shots they have. You can shoot your enemy located outside your walls, on top walls (normal siege equipment works for this too), even bring the walls down beneath them, try to destroy theyr siege equipment, and sieges tend to get huge cluster-****s of troops at gates and walls, so...

Cannons wise, I usually don't use ones that can't shoot over your troops, too clumsy to use in openfield battle. but once you and enemy make "line" that your fighting with each other, bring artillery to the side, and shoot down "the line" of the enemy side, profit. Hard to pull sometimes, but oh so rewarding One good shot can rout entire enemy army.

Not to mention bridge battles, you can just sit back and watch enemy vaporize in the air, and run, if you have artillery with you.

Also rocket-batteries, and other low ammo artillery can make huge impact when fighting stronger enemies before the battle even starts properly. One little tip, when you lose all ammo, you can withdraw your artillery crew with "withdraw" button, I think it is "w" by default. Same thing if you notice they can't get away from charging enemy with theyr cannons, pressing that will make them drop the cannons, and you can cancel the withdraw, and equip the cannons again later.

Btw, what unitsize you play with, and difficulty?

[IrishBlood]

I agree with all of the above but a couple of tips:

You should treat them historically, e.g they are crucial in siege battles, but not essential in field battles (with some major exceptions)

Siege battles:

Historically if you were going to take a castle/town /fort with out artillery then you were in for a very very, messy fight! Even more so in CoW considering the uber units you'll be facing that are an absolute **********d to fight on city walls (dark elf halbardiers, black orcs, blood dragon knights to name a few).

Artillery is the empires major advantage when it comes to this, blow up the walls, slaughter them in the tightly pack streets and town square and keep your losses to a minimum!

Like wise when defending a a city arty (when placed correctly and withdrawn when necessary) can mow down the tightly packed enemy. Morters and organ guns are the best in my opinion, but the great canons and helstorm rockets can be pretty effective too.

Field battles :

Historically the artillery was placed in front, not behind the infantry line, blasted away at the enemy infantry as they advanced and was either abandoned (to be retrieved later if they won) or withdrawn if possible, when the opposing infantry forces met.

so basically the placement looked like this:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I do something similar, withdraw my cannon (its actually faster to just advance your infantry just in front of the canons at the last moment), wait for the battle line to become fairly solid and joined, then withdraw my arty to ONE SIDE of my army. I cant stress this enough, 2 sides is really hard to pull off.

Then as kavi mentioned above, I start firing down along the line, BUT always make sure you have at least 1 or 2 units of either heavy cav or spearmen to guard them because in my experience the enemy will always sent their cav to take out your heavy guns if they see them exposed on the flank.

Field battles (the exceptions):

The main exceptions are mountanous/hilly terrain or bridge battles. If you can easily have your cannons high above your men, but within range of the enemy and a good line of sight then by all means do it, but just be careful they dont blow up the back of your ranks (it can happen to the best of us )! For open field battles and mountainous/hilly battles I'd suggest bringing or or 2 artillery units, no more than 3 or 4. In field battles good solid infantry and cav are the key.

HOWEVER

When fighting bridge battles are your best friends. Never in my life have i seen as much slaughter as the damage I did to a chaos uber stack army as it crossed a bridge. I placed my experienced organ gun and helstrom rockets right in front of them on my side of the bridge, like literally dead in front of them, and opened fire with both at the same time ad the chaos army was just over half way across.

It was a massacre, they were torn to shreds! I also had that mercenary general (the one who's bodyguard unit is a light cannon squad) as well as 4 units of his light canons on hills surrounding my side of the bridge plus hochland long rifles and crossbowmen.

I held that bridge during archerons invasion as hochland (its the bridge crossing right beside hochlands capital) against 6-7 full chaos armies, most of them attacking 2 at a time, and they never came close to breaking through!


SO IN SUMMERY! artillery can be epic or useless depending on how or when its used so it justs takes practice is all!

[Draxdevourer]

Thanks for the tips!

/Kavhipannu,
I believe unit size is set to unlimited? Battle difficulty is set to hard, I think. Do this make a difference?

/IrishBlood,
Outstanding overview! Still, in a historical perspective artillery was also immensely effective on the open field as long as it was properly brought to bear. In that perspective, you wouldn't just use them pointed down the lane of a bridge or at the end of an alley. I kinda expected that if I was able to employ the artillery pieces properly, it would cause some damage even when the enemy AI does not cramp his units together. If knowledge serves me right, the initial challenge with artillery in the field was getting what in the game equals a proper zone of deployment. That the difficulty of moveing them around made them prone to in-proper deployment. This is aptly simulated in the game with combat maps where you have to deploy in the middle of a forest, or there is a large building right between your zone and the enemies. In these maps, artillery is rightly gimped. Still, when deployed properly I would have expected them to do the horrible damage history accounts for.

I've also been using few missile units in this game because the beastmen are fairly fast, and the battles become a nightmare with the need of extreme micro-management. However, I've been keeping a few for castle defences and last night Reiksguard Castle came under sige by a couple of scripted orc stacks. I was able to beat them using halebards, but close to the end I decided to test the killing power of my Bandollier mercenaries. The AI had become a little placid after the death of his generals and the rout of most of his armies, so I risked walking the handgunners quite close to a last large clump of enemies struggeling to climb up a lone ladder. AI didn't react so I stood them up like a fireing squad two rows deep rougly 10 paces away from the orcs. Then they opened fire. For each volley roughly 2-3 orc-boys went down (normal 1hp orc warriors). Like the artillery, this strikes me as somewhat weak.

Still, thanks for the tips. I'll be sure to test the effect of artillery on the other races as well, and experiment with it during sieges.

[IrishBlood]

Thanks for the tips!

/IrishBlood,
Outstanding overview! Still, in a historical perspective artillery was also immensely effective on the open field as long as it was properly brought to bear. In that perspective, you wouldn't just use them pointed down the lane of a bridge or at the end of an alley. I kinda expected that if I was able to employ the artillery pieces properly, it would cause some damage even when the enemy AI does not cramp his units together. If knowledge serves me right, the initial challenge with artillery in the field was getting what in the game equals a proper zone of deployment. That the difficulty of moveing them around made them prone to in-proper deployment. This is aptly simulated in the game with combat maps where you have to deploy in the middle of a forest, or there is a large building right between your zone and the enemies. In these maps, artillery is rightly gimped. Still, when deployed properly I would have expected them to do the horrible damage history accounts for.

Well you can feel free to give me some rep

Historically cannons were brutal in battle, but they were rarely the decisive factor in equally matched battles. You can do a lot of damage to the enemy in a field battle provided you use the tactics listed above. Its all about knowing when you need to redeploy them for maximum effect.

Blood dragons you can kill a lot of because their usually in closely packed ranks, same applies to other normal(ish) elites, such as Dark elf halbardiers, chaos chosen warriors, etc etc. But bigger units like minotaurs, ogres, trolls, etc are harder to kill because despite their size their actually much harder to hit. Its harder because the ai finds it difficult to accurately aim at 1 or 2 units dispite their gigantic size. But if you hit them i find they do a lot of damage.

A good way to fight them is to sacrifice a unit of spearmen to hold them in place while your cannons target the enemy unit with grape shot at close range. that way its very hard to miss. Its a bit of a heartless tactic, but if you dont take out those mega units they will do a hell of a lot of damage the longer their left alive.

[Kahvipannu]

Unitsize is in the gameplay-menu (?), somewhere in main menu still. It is from small to huge, and it affects how many men you have in one unit. I like to think artillery is most effective at huge, bigger targets, more men to shoot, and double ammount of siege-weaponry. Not a biggie, but still worth mentioning I think Rockets won't hit **** with small units, with huge they are way more viable option for example. Changes to unit-size only affect to new campaigns tought, so if a save game was started with medium, it will stay so, not sure if you can change that during game...

[stupar123]

Hmmm artillery is must have with me . I tend to play Nuln and I simply prefer Nuln Cannon ( of course mortars are here too . Get expirience with them ( as somebody already stated ) and they'll become sharpshooters

In open field battles I normally use 2 units of them to shot elite units ( minotaurs , blood dragons , black orcs etc. ) and general particulary . You would be suprised how easy is to gun him down with expirienced cannon !
I use mortars only in defend siege , they are fairly weak compared to other artillery but they are made for killing packed masses or crushing moral .

[Draxdevourer]

/Stupar,
May I ask, how many minotaurs/blood-dragons/elites are you typically able to gun down with two cannon-units in the average open-field battle?

[Numring]

Hope this helps, although much has been said. But now I can actually use that pic!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

causes:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[IrishBlood]

Hope this helps, although much has been said. But now I can actually use that pic!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

causes:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

excellent picture, thats exactly the kinda tactic I use, its historical too.

[Draxdevourer]

Thanks a bunch, I'll give it some consideration.

[nhinhonhinho]

Mortar can be useful in siege battle too. They can lob shell into enemy units. AI tend to stick tightly in the square so bring some mortars and you can destroy most (if not all) of them. Just don't forget to have a cannon or two to bring down the gate and towers plus some crossbow/gunner to shoot 'em