Effect of Artillery Past 700-800 Meters

[Mr. Doran]

What exactly is the point of shooting at ranges exceeding 700-800 meters? Even with large batteries of positional guns there almost never appears to be any casualties being produced; even with extended bombardments lasting over an hour. Morale does not seem to be visibly impacted either. I understand that long range bombardments with minimal effect happened historically but the effect is kind of ruined when you the player know the fire is ineffectual. Most of the time it seems the game would be doing me a favor if the artillery did not attempt to fire past 600 meters.

[zu Pferd]

Morale loss on bad troops, mostly, possibly identified by your scouts, most probable by giving away your
position intentionally.

The guns were commanded well or badly. Commanders themselves left it up to the subordinate
and then reprimanded after the battle. You can hold fire ( I think) on the artillery menu, or doctrine.

[Mr. Doran]

 You cannot hold your fire to specific ranges by doctrine or this might not be as horrific of a problem. The effect of casualties at such ranges are often literately non-existent along with any negative effects on morale. Bad quality only goes so far as to a possible excuse as to why this could happen; once you start dealing with massed quantities of artillery it starts to become completely unacceptable. Casualties should be lower at ranges nearing a kilometre or greater but they should not be non-existent and they should be consistent over a period of an hour or greater with great volumes of fire present.

[JMM]

Maybe some adjustments to do...

Priority : I must finish the new version.

JMM

[Gunner24]

Interesting topic.  I have "been away" from HW for about 5 or so years so do not claim to know as much about it as I used to, but, a few things on this subject that I have noticed the last few months.  Not saying these things are right or wrong, just my general observations about artillery effectiveness.

1. Artillery formed in "Corps" with say 40-80 cannons do not seem to be anywhere near as powerful as they used to be.  It seems to me that they can get over run much easier than years ago.  Might just be my bad memory, or something may have changed.
1a note : I do like the way attacking formations approach the cannons and attack them, very good.

2. I agree it would be a good feature to be able to "hold fire"  - although I do not consider this critical.

3. Long range fire is not very effective, as it should be, all seems well there.

4. Short range fire does not seem effective enough to me.  When watching the attacking troops the men being lost do not appear to be as high as I would expect when getting right close in near the gun line - is canister ammo actually being fired ?.

5. The most serious fault I see is if an artillery Corps has a defend on line order, and is attacked, the artillery fight to the death.  I have never seen an artillery Corps withdraw even one battery away to safety when it becomes clear the whole Corps is going to be over run.  It results in 100% lost cannons - every time.

General comment : In the good old days of MP games almost every night a large artillery Corps could hold a good portion of the battlefield with little risk of being over run quickly.  I do not think this is the case now.  A lot of cannons can be lost very quickly if the batteries do not have close support.  I expect this is reasonable.

I wonder what a 3,000 man Infantry Regt would do as it got closer and closed to the gun line, how many men would it lose before it got to musket and bayonet range.  From my observations 3,000 men often reach the gun line with nearly full strength, maybe over 90% ?.  Does that sound about right ?.  Would around 10% lost, marching over open ground into a dozen cannons firing at them be about right ?.  We do have to remember there are a heck of a lot of variables at play here and so it can be very difficult to work out whats happening in detail.  How many guns in a battery, how many batteries firing on the same Regt ?.

Overall I would say HW|N looks and feels a lot better than it used to - and if forgetting about the minute detail, and thinking more about the big picture - the better it is.

I don't see any major fault with artillery fire except for item 5 mentioned above.

HW is still the only Nap game I'm interested in so I admit to being a bit biased towards it.

[Mr. Doran]

    I agree with your sentiment and your points line up with my observations, particularly points one, four, and five.

Here is a reference thread for other complaints about artillery not covered here:

http://www.histwar.org/forum/index.php?topic=8446.0

    On the general observation about massed artillery not being effective at holding its own ground, even against infantry attacks, is something I have seen quite a lot unfortunately. Randomness is part of the Napoleonic battlefield but I do not think the calculus is quite so fuzzy on the majority expected outcome you should achieve when a bunch of meat in close-order formation starts advancing into the sight of a few dozen cannons or more at less than 300 meters away. From the many tests I have ran, it is certainly evident massed artillery does not function as the obstacle of an incredibly steep wall it should present itself as. In regards to casualties I can't imagine them being dreadfully high unless the attackers were determined. It seems more likely such behavior would not be attempted to begin with in most situations against massed artillery, and if it were, a rout occurring before serious casualties could be inflicted.

   Part of the problem, which also produces a metric-shit-ton of other systemic issues within the representation, is the fact that we really do not have a proper representation of skirmishing or open-order fighting in general. If entire regiments and battalions were allowed to fight in open-order, light-companies detached, and of course in the applicable cases detached light-companies forming together to form grande bandes we might have a more-sensible-on-average interaction for infantry having some type of reasonable combat with and against artillery. Another reference thread:

http://www.histwar.org/forum/index.php?topic=8453.0

    In regards to point three I really have to disagree in totality, mainly because I do not think people realize how poor the under-performance really is, even with massed fire. Once the guns start firing from about 800 meters it is absurdly unlikely that they even damage a target even with an hour of fire. It is as if the accuracy table is discreet, rather than continuous, and at 799 meters there is still a 20% chance of a hit given X amount of fire but once you get to 800 or 801 meters there is a less than 5% chance of a hit given X amount of fire. Regardless if that is how the code actually works in practice it sure as hell feels like it functions as such. Six and twelve pound cannon should still be able to cause damage at ranges of one to one and a half kilometres, given the right circumstances, if you have enough guns firing on the area. And for whatever reason, all my intuition about how effective massed artillery fire should be at ranges of 700 to 800 meters or greater if it were truly the case that artillery fire into and past these ranges was completely ineffective, we should have the God given choice by doctrine and command to for our guns to not fire at these ranges.

    If for some reason I am not convincing enough on this lets put it another way:

    For a large enough sum of money, I reckon some of you, especially at your old-ages, would be willing to stand down range of a dozen six-pound smooth-bore cannon of the era and allow them to fire at you once at a range of 900 metres. If they don't hit the target you get this large sum of money as your reward. If they do, well, you know what happens. Now, I bet none of you would do it if there were instead seventy guns even if they were using powder with Russian sulfur in it. I personally wouldn't take the wager even with half a dozen sixes.

   Side request and questions for JMM:

    1. Is it currently possible to do reverse-slope bombardments?
    2. Does the bombard sector act as an attack ground or is it just a general directive to the AI to fire on any enemies within an area?
    3. Is it possible for artillery targeting one formation to hit another? In other words, when artillery fires is the result treated as a percent chance to hit a specific target or is it a percent chance to hit a specific area and then calculates if the shot that landed in that area hit a target.

    1. As we all know here, just because you are behind a slope does not mean you are immune to enemy artillery fire if the enemy cannon can place themselves at the right height and right distance away from that slope. They may not know what they are hitting, or to what effect of fire they are having, but that is an academic question to anyone unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of it.

    2. We should be able to turn areas of the battlefield into a beaten zone of shot and shell. If not already in the game, it should also enable use to attempt to bombard a reverse slope given the geometry makes it possible to do so.

[Gunner24]

A little bit more information, I have tried to do some one on one tests : One Infantry Regt v One Artillery battery.

In nearly all cases the Infantry won the day.  The battery did attempt to escape some times, but it was always too late to be saved.  Sometimes the Infantry did "avoid the engagement" but mostly they moved to the flank and destroyed the battery with not many troops lost.  This may be described as correct as the battery had no support or flank protection, so I would not be unhappy with that result.

As I said before these things are so very hard to "test" because any one test means almost nothing compared to when you get into action with 100,000s of men and 100s of guns all doing a lot of different things - all at the same time.

A large scale Napoleonic battlefield was not a nice neat chess board !. I think we need to accept a certain amount of confusion, be it intentionally programmed - or not

As things stand I would not say the artillery side of things is very badly wrong in any way except my item 5 mentioned earlier.  There will always be things that may not look 100% right, but as long as the game works and "flows" in a reasonable way I think we should be well satisfied with that.
...
Off subject ; I have already reported this to JMM. For me the very WORST thing wrong at the moment is the CiC NOT being able to be moved where you need him to go.  He is too scared of the enemy. It has very serious knock on VISIBILITY effects and for me is close to ruining the game.  It is much worse than any artillery problem - but I expect it should be an easy "fix".

[Gunner24]

I forgot to reply to this -

I bet none of you would do it if there were instead seventy guns even if they were using powder with Russian sulfur in it. I personally wouldn't take the wager even with half a dozen sixes.

You win your bet.  I would not stand in front of even a single cannon shooting cannon balls at me, no way.  Maybe if I were 20 years old and still thought I was indestructible and nothing bad can ever happen to ME.