Counter-battery fire: mini guide

[Hrubeshova]

I found counter-battery fire is pretty effective in a certain situation. So I'll write a mini guide in order to help you to get rid of enemy annoying arties.

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First of all, removing enemy arties is, in fact, quite a difficult in this game.

If enemy arty unit is isolated, you can charge your cav into it and destroy it relatively easily, but it is a rare situation. In most cases arty unit is accompanied with other arty or infantry brigade. In such a case it is suicidal to charge cavs into arty.

Infantry brigade can do severe damage to a arty unit in a volley and rout it instantly, and in fact this tactics is quite a effective when size of the arty unit is limited because you can remove the unit instantly. However, it has a risk to lose a lot of morale and condition and allow your brigade routed, and to make thigs worse, if the arty unit has enough size to prevent you to remove it with a volley, it revives after routing and annoys you again.

Using skirmisher is a more safer way, but it takes quite a few time and costs them a lot of damage. In most cases it result in a loss of detachments or costly casuality on your special skirmisher units.

In fact, arty unit is vulnerable to enemy fire because its cover is limited as compared with infantry, number of men of arty unit is limited and arty cannot inflict damage at high rates, which brings us potentialities to make counter-battery fire effective...

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For successful counter-battery fire, you have follow these things

1. Use rifle guns, not use smoothbore
   You need rifle guns to hit the target with your shots and infilict damage. Smoothbore guns aren't reliable at long range despite of their high damage.
   
2. Use shrapnel shells, not use solid balls
   Get your arty close within shell range. Solid balls cannot deal enough damage to enemy units. This is another reason that shot-ranged smoothbore isn't recommended to use in counter-battery fire. I recommend 10pdr Tredegar, 10pdr Ordnance and 10pdr Parrot.
   
3. Focus multiple arty units on one enemy unit.
   As shown above, arty unit cannot inflict damege at high rates. So you have to focus multiple arty units on one enemy arty unit and eliminate it as fast as possible. It also means you need enough number of arty to excuse counter-battery fire. In fact low damage rate of arty gives us two good effects; minimize our casuality and enable us to eliminate enemy arty steadily without rout them.

In most situations that satisfy these requirements, your battle should be deadlocked. In such a situation arty can deal a huge damage on its enemy units so first of all you should remove enemy arty at all cost...

[Volodio]

Does it really worth it ? I don't find enemy artillery that efficient, except when they shoot with cannister but if it's the case I can shoot them back with my infantry. I usually put my artillery between my lines, let them shoot with cannister and they kill thousands of soldiers like that.

[uhamster9]

There aren't too many maps where you've got time to counter battery. When you're defending you should focus your arty fire on enemy infantry, and when attacking you're strapped for time. Stone River (CSA) and Chancellorsville (CSA) are two good maps for counter battery where you can eliminate most if not all enemy arty since you're attacking but not really under time pressure.

[CrashToDesktop]

Uhamster got it right - 99% of the time, you don't have time to whittle down the enemy's artillery brigades, there's always something else that needs killing more urgently.

Furthermore, if you didn't know, Rifled cannon actually have theirshell damage nerfed compared to smoothbores, who deal all their damage. The only advantage Rifled cannon have is usually their range - but then again, there's the James Rifle with 1300 range. :P And besides, most people move their cannon up to support, so range isn't nearly as important.

[Luunyrkki]

I think the game models artillery much the same as infantry. That is you are firing at the crew not at the guns. This is why counter-battery is ineffective, as in reality it would be knocking out guns and not crew. In game terms this means that you need to cause 25 casualties instead of one.