ARTILLERY AMMUNITION

[keedor]

I have often wondered why, in N:TW, the artillery does not spend ammunition like all the other units which use firepower. This gives them an unfair advantage, especially during very long battles, when they can shoot constantly from beginning to end!

Now I kow that the guns were Napoleon's favourite arm, but even these ran out of ammunition (or often came very close to doing so) in reality.

Perhaps if a sequel is ever released this can be addressed - maybe giving artillery units a seperate roundshot and canister total - and we would then think twice before beginning our prolonged bombardments!

[Horcerer]

I could (you could, too, its pretty easy.) Make a mod so that artillery will rapidly (hitting rock bottom in a few minutes) run out of stamina, and so that when they are exhausted they have extreme loading times and inaccuracy, if you want.

Not ammunition, but atleast giving a nerf to arty. I dont know if the AI would take it into account though, its pretty bad.

[Fast Johnny]

In Shogun2 FOS, which came out after NTW, the arty has a finite amount of ammunition. Assuming that the developers got the idea, about arty having limited amount of ammo, I would think that in any future game that features cannon would most likely have limitations. Also, many of the mechanics used for weapons and different formations in NTW were gleaned from Empire, as I understand, which incidentally has the same thing with unlimited arty ammo.

[Hellsteeth30]

Just bring more arty than the other guy, issue resolved.

[Hellsteeth30]

Sadly they have a stupidly expensive GW licence to pay for so you're stuck with another Warhammer game first before they do anything else.

[Fast Johnny]

I did hear that they have two teams: one working on a historical TW and the other doing the fantasy TW. So, we may actually see another historical title being announced even with the fantasy ones being developed. Let's hope they are funded at least equally and the talent is divded up evenly.

[Darcaem]

Originally posted by Fast Johnny:

I did hear that they have two teams: one working on a historical TW and the other doing the fantasy TW. So, we may actually see another historical title being announced even with the fantasy ones being developed. Let's hope they are funded at least equally and the talent is divded up evenly.

But they said the new historical title would be set in an era "we have never visit before", so sadly it seems it wouldn't be another napoleonic era game...

Perhaps a pike and shoot time peroid?? Fingers crossed for an Spanish Empire SXVI Total War XD I would love to command the "tercios"

[Turtler]

My gut feeling is that it's partially to balance out the relative inaccuracy and lack of damage they have in early game, and especially to cater to sieges. Where they really could bring up a virtually unlimited amount of ammo to bombard more or less at will.

That and honestly I don't think there are that many cases of artillery running out of ammo in the Napoleonic Wars. Don't get me wrong, it absolutely happened, but not that frequently. You'd be more likely to have your batteries overrun or the like than to have the ammo supply give out "normally"

So I can kind of see why they did it, but it's still derp.

[Gerfreckle]

I think the reason they made it unlimited was to reflect just how important and devastating artillery was in the Napoleonic Wars, which was often the cause of far higher casaulties than the infantry was.

[Turtler]

Originally posted by Primus Pilus:

That doesn't explain away why rockets fire backwards off their fixed launchers, and solid propellent kinda can't be adjusted for range.

Wasn't saying it was perect or particularly smart. If anything I do thinkthey should have added in ammunition, I just can sort of understand why. But yeah, vanilla Napoleon is pretty screwy.

Originally posted by Primus Pilus:

So presumably up and down elevation was all these crude rockets were capable of for adjusting target range. The obvious in game issue is how accurate rockets are, and there's just no possibility that they were accurate at all.

Indeed.

Originally posted by Primus Pilus:

In addition, limbered artillary crew members will not suffer losses from enemy gun fire, which is a huge glitch that should have been fixed shortly after release.

Technically, they can and do. It just takes an AWFUL- and I do mean literally- amount of fire. Yo ucan also see this kind of unrealistic endurance if you get into melee with them. it seems like the consensus is that the cannon unrealistically "absorbs" some of the damage that its' crew should suffer.

Originally posted by Primus Pilus:

If they had a mind to improve siege gameplay, it should probably take more than a few cannon vollies to crash the walls lol.

Eh, Depends on the kind of fort. Certainly star forts were quite durable in the face of artillery, but even they would eventually crumble (and I think part of it might have been speeding up for the sake of earnest gameplay). But your just average wall? Yeah, that would come down pretty quickly.

Though I will be the first to say Napoleon gameplay is off kilter. I just think the artillery is one of the relatively lesser issues with it.

[astrid.ingmarsdottir]

I realize that this thread is getting to be fairly 'old' by now, but I would still like to add my own tuppence for what it might be worth. There are painfully few actual records extant, to my knowlege at least, about what was issued on the average to artillery. However, on the eve of the battle of Friedland, Victor's 1st Corps of the Grand Armee had 30 guns on its inventory--2 x 12pdr guns, 22 x 6pdr guns, and six howitzers. The ammunition carried in the Corps artillery parks had sufficient ammunition for 220 rounds per howitzer and between 314 and 330 rounds per field gun. At a rate of fire of about one round per minute, the field guns at least had ammunition for about 5 to 5.5 hours worth of steady firing. Perhaps half the ammunition was actually available immediately at the batteries allowing for two to two and half hours firing, with the rest being a reserve in the gun parks.

Infantry on the march would normally have, in the case of the French, 35 rounds in the cartridge boxes with perhaps an additional 30 issued prior to going into action. Even with 65 rounds of ammunition, this only allowed perhaps 30 minutes of steady firing at two rounds per minute or 20 minutes if the men achieved 3 rounds per minute. Reserve ammunition could be brought up in caissons from the supply trains, but resupply could be a time consuming exercise at best in the general chaos and confusion of battle. Thus it was entirely possible for infantry battalions to exhaust their their initial issue of cartridges long before the artillery exhausted theirs.

The main upshot of all this is that for game purposes in Napoleon Total War, having the infantry begin to exhaust their supply of cartridges quickly is fairly accurate, if somewhat annoying. Still, the action timeframes in the game tend to mean that battles are rarely long drawn out affairs and tend to be relatively quickly with one side or the other deciding it is better to live to fight another day than to stay and be slaughtered in an heroic last stand.