Artillery Battery Size

[Heretek1914]

Is there a particular reason to not max out the guns? Assuming we have high level officers, money, and guns to spare, why is the 'rule' to only put 12 guns into a battery?

I remeber the one bit I saw said something about how the damage drops but that was due to inefficiency. Whether this was referring to the efficiency stat or just 'its inefficient' is unclear to me.

[Wright29]

Infantry and cavalry also suffer from being bigger. A 2500 sized brigade won't do worse than a 1250 brigade, but you'll suffer from diminishing returns for sure. Cavalry is more pronounced. A 750 skirmisher cav unit will not do much better than a 450 unit. But the reason you want more men in a brigade for cav, infantry, and artillery is melee resistance and to avoid being shattered.

[edwardstoner]

Originally posted by BigJKU316:

Originally posted by Krumpf41:

Why would a 12 gun battery go through its ammo faster than a 24 gun battery? Each cannon in the battery would historically have an assigned caisson to carry the ammo for each piece. The ammo capacity should scale with the number of guns in the battery so a 24 gun battery wouldn't use up ammo faster than a 12 gun. Make sense?

I think the bigger issue is that the large batteries just eat your supply wagons alive as the wagons don't scale up.

Someone else may know if artillery battery supply is fixed or scaled with guns. I haven't noticed one way or another. It should scale as you stated for initial supplies.

Yes a 24 gun battery would use its ammo at the same rate as a 12 gun battery. But it would use twice as much ammo (or the same as TWO 12 gun batteries) thus putting twice the buden on the supply wagon.

You can fully load your wagons at the Camp (25,000) so you can do the Up scaling on your own units. Also you can set a supply wagon to supply ammo to rifles or to cannons or to both. So if you want to control your ammo use for your infantry, you could in dire straits.

[edwardstoner]

I appreciate this thread and all of the expert comments. I had not thought of using units limited to 12 but the logic here is inescapable and consistent with my experience. Thanks for sharing the results of all your testing and experience. I will definitely do it at the next battle. Suh!

[ohener]

Originally posted by Luunyrkki:

Historically speaking the game actually gets this correct since ideal size is somewhere between 6-12 guns, with more guns just presenting logistical issues, command issues and more targets for the enemy

Although if that's the case then the AI should probably be limited to much smaller batteries as well. Right now part of the reason parrot rifles are so useless is that the AI gets tons of really huge batteries that take forever to kill, and even if you do damage them with counter-battery fire it doesn't actually reduce their effectiveness (or worse, it actually improves it).