Artillery feedback
Recently I've been using artillery units quite a bit and I feel like improvements could be made to their gameplay balance.
1) Stone throwers, while decent at attacking walls do not seem cost efficient as a whole. I could see them being of great value when attacking walls manned by top tier infantry, but in general you're better served by recruiting elite infantry of your own and sending them up the walls. Not only will they most likely be cheaper and quicker to recruit, they will outperform ballistas in field battles and also in most city sieges where the walls are manned by weak levies. Siege units also, I believe, require workshops and the appropriate tech for every civ, while infantry of course does not.
2) Bolt throwers I think are by far the best of the bunch with decently high lethality at long ranges and low friendly fire rates even when firing at enemies close to friendly troops. Like all artillery, they're still pretty expensive, but they outperform most lighter missile units by a mile when shooting at approaching armies.
3) The automatic version of the bolt thrower looks great on the unit card, as it exchanges some range and projectile damage for twice the firing rate. The reality is something else entirely, though. They fire scatter shot javelins and almost never land more than one or two per volley. Generally they seem to consistently overshoot their targets so that the lowest javelins hit while most of the cloud passes over their targets' heads. The projectile is also much lighter and will not consistently one-shot armoured targets, let alone penetrate multiple foes, the way the regular bolt throwers do (or perhaps it's just the +90% damage I get from triple L3 siege workshops?).
Oh, and it's fixed in place and cannot be moved, which is especially bad for this particular weapon because it has by far the lowest range. Thumbs down for this one.
4) Onagers I've only had a chance to try in custom battles because they are so time consuming to unlock in a campaign. They seemed like a compromise between stone throwers and bolt throwers, though. Slightly more lethality against infantry but less range than ballistas. They also have the poison shot ability, but it seems entirely pointless to me. The animal carcasses seem to cause less casualties than rocks and the debuff is not too dramatic and lasts only about five seconds. It also affects friendly troops in a huge radius, so using them to debuff engaged enemies is pointless. I guess you could use it to weaken enemy missile units, but a bolt thrower would simply kill a bunch and rout the unit instead.
5) Ballista ships are pretty broken because they have virtually infinite ammunition and coastal city defenders don't have the wits to move out of their range. They're actually garbage at killing anything, but because they are safe from ground units, they rack up tons of free kills anyway. They are also the most infuriating thing ever to operate, as they frequently lie about their current state, often not firing when they claim to be firing and firing when they claim to not be firing. They also sometimes close in on their targets or refuse to fire for no apparent reason and get stuck on each other and shorelines all the time, which is super aggravating because ships in R2 cannot reverse.
Overall, I feel like artillery, while a ton of fun, is too costly in terms of both money and other requirements to really ever be much more than a novelty. Even when it is good, you can get by without it and when money is tight, artillery is the last thing you want to spend it on, while other units, most notably infantry, are essential to battlefield success.
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Originally Posted by Ivan_Moscavich
