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On September 26 2017 13:49 andrewlt wrote:
Which artillery would you say is underperforming other than hellblaster volley guns? I had fun with most of the empire's artillery. I especially enjoyed luminarks the most even though steam tanks are more versatile. Nothing like two-shotting some giants, heroes and lords and just cackling about it.
Artillery is great on paper and great in single player. But for some factions (I'm looking at you, dwarfs) they are extremely hard to use in multiplayer against a skilled player. The flame cannon for example, almost never pays for itself unless your opponent basically let you use it freely. Same goes for the organ gun. It's too easy to shut down arti with cavs, or for short range artillery, to wreck them with skirmishers.
Suppose you want to use a flame cannon against the wood elves. Their glade guard will shut it down before advancing their infantry. So you would need to outmatch them with quarellers and thunderers. You now have way too little to spend on your infantry and suddenly you can't defend against a potent infantry line or a cavalry build. And so on and so forth.
I think that most infantry units, and especially dwarf infantry, should have slightly higher mass especially when braced. It's just way too easy to run a chariot or cavalry unit pass everything and kill what you don't like deep inside ennemy lines.
Now stuff like the gob lobber, hammer of gork and other ROR arti can be extremely, extremely good. And against the AI that is really dumb, won't flank properly and won't go for priority target with their cav and monsters, everything goes. Organ guns wreck chaos stack so bad it's not even fun. They blob up and run into their range with chosens and stuff like that, making them insanely cost effective.
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I think the point of infantry having such low mass is it makes for pretty charges.
Dwarves should definitely tho... low center of mass and all that. + Show Spoiler +
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I don't think that artillery is even really that good in single player. There are a few exceptions -- hellcannons and rocket storm batteries being the most notable -- but most artillery pieces just underperform compared to what you'd expect from their stats. Given their expense, niche/specialized role, limited ammo, and vulnerability, artillery units should generally hit like motherfuckers. They just don't. What I've found playing around with various mods is that you have to double to triple their damage to start seeing decent performance from many pieces (particularly from the blob killers).
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On September 27 2017 00:10 xDaunt wrote:
I don't think that artillery is even really that good in single player. There are a few exceptions -- hellcannons and rocket storm batteries being the most notable -- but most artillery pieces just underperform compared to what you'd expect from their stats. Given their expense, niche/specialized role, limited ammo, and vulnerability, artillery units should generally hit like motherfuckers. They just don't. What I've found playing around with various mods is that you have to double to triple their damage to start seeing decent performance from many pieces (particularly from the blob killers).
Only relevant when fighting AI:
If you position them correctly, pretty much every artillery piece is worth its own weight in gold, especially since the AI has such a hard time dealing with it. For all cannons (in the historical sense), you deploy them at your flanks, slightly forward with enough distance so the enemy doesn't aggro them. They become basically wind spells at that point. The enemy lines crush into yours, they shoot into enemy flanks, and the shots bounce and rip through their lines. This occasionally doesn’t work because of the terrain, but overall it works and easily gives you over a hundred kills on each artillery piece, giving them fast exp which makes them even more destructive. Depending on the enemy, you achieve even multiple of hundred kills with ease, making. It works greatly for all sorts of catapults too while minimizing the friendly fir when firing into an engagement. Also keep in mind to not deploy your artillery on the same flank you want to crush with a flanking force. Funnily, helstorm rocket batteries are one of the few artillery pieces that don’t benefit much from this setup but since they can be effectively in a regular setup behind your troops it doesn’t matter.
So basically you just have to get the notion of deploying them with your troops out of your head. They need a small protective force though, I usually use part of my cavalry force for that since they tend to either get engaged in the beginning of the battle or not at all so I can either immediately can move my cavalry to the opposing flank or I just have to fight of a small force which gets whittled down by the artillery while approaching. After clean up the cavalry once again moves to the opposing flank.
You also have to keep in mind the angle at which they are shooting at the enemy while he is engaged with your mainline, if it is too steep the ricochets gets through to your troops. They still should perform greatly and feel free to ignore this advice when Warhammer II comes out and you are playing skaven 
For helblaster volley guns I usually prefer a checkerboard formation where the volley guns can shoot through the gaps into the flanks of the engaged enemies.
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On September 27 2017 00:10 xDaunt wrote:
I don't think that artillery is even really that good in single player. There are a few exceptions -- hellcannons and rocket storm batteries being the most notable -- but most artillery pieces just underperform compared to what you'd expect from their stats. Given their expense, niche/specialized role, limited ammo, and vulnerability, artillery units should generally hit like motherfuckers. They just don't. What I've found playing around with various mods is that you have to double to triple their damage to start seeing decent performance from many pieces (particularly from the blob killers).
Mortars are pinpoint accurate on ground attack once your mainline is engaged and can be used to deal tremendous damage to enemy infantry blobs fighting your front line while giving a very large morale penalty. Grudge throwers are basically the same things as mortars. On VH the mortar is the only reason Gelt can really win any battle at all early game.
Cannons are "meh" unless you can hit enemies on the flank. They can do terrible damage if you position them on a flank and micro them and your army correctly but it's a lot of work.
Many races are highly effective if you just draw a very long line of line infantry and advance it into melee letting the overshooting units on the flanks either swing into the rear of the enemy line or continue on engaging archers or artillery.
It's a very easy to use tactic compared to how well it works.
Edit: One thing to consider when properly positioning things like cannons and their guard units. How much damage would a similar amount of cavalry units do? Because rear charges with cavalry are crazy good. And I'm a person who loves guns in the game.
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On September 27 2017 01:09 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:
Edit: One thing to consider when properly positioning things like cannons and their guard units. How much damage would a similar amount of cavalry units do? Because rear charges with cavalry are crazy good. And I'm a person who loves guns in the game.
I only very rarely run with more than 2 artillery pieces and the cost/value those bring with the described setup is unbeatable with cavalry I feel like, especially since they don't take any damage themselves. And since I am using highly mobile troops as guardunits they aren’t out of the main battle for long. Though as I said there are a few cases where terrain screws with your artillery. Being under artilleryfire also adds its own morale penalty so routes happen faster when you decide to rearcharge that particular flank with your cavalry. And since you usually have at least one piece of artillery to force the engagement / for being able to attack in sieges immediately, I don't see a problem with having 2 artillery pieces. When properly deployed, I also feel like they are requiring much less effort than cavalry since lots of cavalry doesn’t do so good after the charge bonus wears off so you have to cyclecharge (this might be a difficulty related observation though, I usually only play on very hard which has the same hidden statbonuses to the AI armies as legendary does, without these boosts you might be able to let your cavalry hang around)
EDIT: Also this works with only one artillerypiece of course but I feel like when using only one with most races you will use a mortar / catapult / trebuchet anyway which is fine deployed behind your lines.
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Cannons are nice but they become obsolete with steam tanks...
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On September 27 2017 02:51 Manit0u wrote:
Cannons are nice but they become obsolete with steam tanks...
Thats kinda true, but not every faction has steamtanks. It is really ridiculous how powerful and versatile those are. Sniping units from afar? Check. Tanking? It’s in the name dummy. Melee? Sure. Will hold the line? Of course. At least they are slow and expensive. I usually try and keep myself from recruiting more than 8 for lore reasons.
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I'm not sure that cannons really do that much more damage (if any at all) on a flank than a unit of handgunners. And handgunners are certainly far more versatile.
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On September 27 2017 03:10 xDaunt wrote:
I'm not sure that cannons really do that much more damage (if any at all) on a flank than a unit of handgunners. And handgunners are certainly far more versatile.
I am not sure about the comparison, they are definitely more versatile. Can't myself to fire up another empire campaign (or any campaign really if I am honest) with the launch of Warhammer II so close, but ~130 kills no matter the enemy where pretty normal for my cannons of each factions. If you beat that with handgunners on a regular basis, they are better in every regard but I highly doubt that. You can hit so much more units with each cannonball, I’ve seen volleys tear to entire units. On the other hand it is hard to compare damage in Warhammer since even if the handgunners get less kills, they could have dealt equal amounts of damage.
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On September 27 2017 03:19 waffelz wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2017 03:10 xDaunt wrote:
I'm not sure that cannons really do that much more damage (if any at all) on a flank than a unit of handgunners. And handgunners are certainly far more versatile. I am not sure about the comparison, they are definitely more versatile. Can't myself to fire up another empire campaign (or any campaign really if I am honest) with the launch of Warhammer II so close, but ~130 kills no matter the enemy where pretty normal for my cannons of each factions. If you beat that with handgunners on a regular basis, they are better in every regard but I highly doubt that. You can hit so much more units with each cannonball, I’ve seen volleys tear to entire units. On the other hand it is hard to compare damage in Warhammer since even if the handgunners get less kills, they could have dealt equal amounts of damage.
My handgunners are always over 100 kills and typically over 150 because I use them as my main source of DPS. I've never been able to get cannons or hellblaster volley guns to perform at a similar level. Hellstorm rocket batteries and mortars have done well for themselves against the right enemy. I would expect artillery to absolutely shred masses of units. They just don't do it as much as I'd like.
EDIT: The one thing that cannons are good for in the open field is sniping big monsters at a distance. But handgunners trivialize large monsters anyway, so I'm not sure how valuable this really is.
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My memory of my empire runs must been wrong then. I could have sworn I wouldn’t get that high kill counts even while firing in the enemies back the whole time, but it has been a while.
EDIT: Funnily, I always found them lacking in their supposed main role as large unit snipers. They miss too often and 2 ranged units of your choice counter almost all large monsters anyways. So maybe canons are just “bad”, even if you make them work^^
EDIT2: also just for clarification, I am talking about single unit with the killcount, not all together.
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They tightened up the accuracy of cannons with the Norsca patch, realizing that players needed a way to kill off all of the new Norsca monsters. So if you haven't played much since then, you probably wouldn't have noticed the changes.
And when I'm talking about kill counts for my handgunners, I'm talking per unit. So when I have these armies that each have 6 handgunners in them, they always do the bulk of the killing for me relative to other units.
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On September 27 2017 03:41 xDaunt wrote:
They tightened up the accuracy of cannons with the Norsca patch, realizing that players needed a way to kill off all of the new Norsca monsters. So if you haven't played much since then, you probably wouldn't have noticed the changes.
And when I'm talking about kill counts for my handgunners, I'm talking per unit. So when I have these armies that each have 6 handgunners in them, they always do the bulk of the killing for me relative to other units.
Yeah I haven't played empire since then, I feel like regular ranged units are still better then, maybe one cannon to occasionally stun them.
I guess stay 19th century classy in terms of warfare, you are doing something right as it seems. I would like to claim the small victory of pointing out that handgunner hits are not even close to being as satisfying as a heavy hitting cannonbarrage. When the combined map is out I will do another empire campaign with you in mind.
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I only started playing after the Norsca patch. I was pleasantly surprised at how accurate artillery was compared to previous Total War games. The moment they were available, I started using 2 luminarks on my elite stacks to kill enemy heroes/lords/monsters in 2-3 shots.
My handgunners never got anywhere close to those type of kill counts in my campaign. I'm playing on the normal unit size (my computer is 7+ years old) and I typically use them to attack armored lords/heroes/monsters and the small, armored elite units.
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You know, I meant to use the luminark in my latest campaign just to see whether it had improved since vanilla (especially given the buffs that Gelt gives to it), but my campaign ended before I could really do it. I'm going to have to bring some with me when I invade the New World in my first Mortal Empires campaign. There's certainly going to be plenty of monsters that will need killing.
EDIT: Ok, I just fired up a custom battle to see, and holy fuck, you're right. I had 2 luminarks fire at a chaos lord and 2 luminarks fire at a unit of chaos warriors. The lord lost 1/3 of his health every time he got hit. My first shot on the chaos warriors killed over 40% of them.
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Isn't there also a RoR version of the luminark that has a net-ability? Sounds like a real killer with the improved accuracy. Sniping all those dragons and monsters in the combinded campaign.
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The RoR luminark is OP as hell. Kills the enemy lord on its own before the battle really starts and has net.
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Can't wait for the nekkid wyches DLC 
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Just finished Norsca campaign. One of the more enjoyable ones imo. One of the downsides is that the early roster is pretty flipping boring. I auto resolved more than I ever had before.
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EPT
