Single Player; Handgunners / Outriders vs Volley Guns?

[bill.stevens]

My Empire campaign has gotten a bit hectic; In spite of my best efforts, I'm somehow fighting on four different fronts simultaneously (Orcs, Norsca, Chaos, and Vampires), and my armies are far from friendly territory. I have enough money for Upkeep to not be an issue, but the "supply line" mechanic is limiting the number of armies I can field. I need to make the armies that I do have as efficient as possible.

I'm considering ditching my handgunners and outriders in exchange for Volley Guns (With Nuln I can get high ranks from scratch). The latter can penetrate multiple units, has longer range, a moral debuff, greater damage, and ignores shields. The one disadvantage I can see is that they're less maneuverable, but that really a deal breaker?

P.S. As long as we're on the subject, are the steam tanks and luminarks expensive and pointless novelties or would I regret not bringing one or two?

P.P.S. I sadly cannot field 19 steam tanks per army; I'm not THAT rich. Yet.

[Mrhappyface]

Hand Gunners, Hellstorm Rocket Batteries and a bunch of heroes to hold down enemy troops/throw down magic.

Lord, 2 Warrior Priests, Light Wizard (for net), Bright Wizard, 3-4 Hellstorm Rockets, maybe a Captain or steam tank thrown in there and the rest handgunners.

[fmalfeas]

You may want to customize for who you're fighting.

Luminarks are absolutely the bane of Vampires, and can do good work on Norsca too since it'll wreck their troll forces.

Against Chaos, there are three major 'classes' of enemy (not counting dragon ogre types which are their own horrorshow). Heavily armored but not super fast, lightly armored and ungodly mobile (Horsemasters especially), and the 'why have you forsaken me?!' that is Chaos Knights.

So a really effective army for the vampire front may not work so hot against chaos, and vice-versa.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Mrhappyface:

Hand Gunners, Hellstorm Rocket Batteries and a bunch of heroes to hold down enemy troops/throw down magic.

Lord, 2 Warrior Priests, Light Wizard (for net), Bright Wizard, 3-4 Hellstorm Rockets, maybe a Captain or steam tank thrown in there and the rest handgunners.

Why no Helblasters, though? They put out incredible amounts of damage to all targets.

[Not online!!!]

Originally posted by fmalfeas:

You may want to customize for who you're fighting.

Luminarks are absolutely the bane of Vampires, and can do good work on Norsca too since it'll wreck their troll forces.

Against Chaos, there are three major 'classes' of enemy (not counting dragon ogre types which are their own horrorshow). Heavily armored but not super fast, lightly armored and ungodly mobile (Horsemasters especially), and the 'why have you forsaken me?!' that is Chaos Knights.

So a really effective army for the vampire front may not work so hot against chaos, and vice-versa.

i'd use the standard army template.

Aka, Lord, Hero, Sorcerer (fire or any other decent damage spell). Mainline is halberds and some gunners, arty is entirely comprised off Hellstorm rocket batteries. (atleast 3 better 4.)
use checker bord and lightning strike to eliminate one horde after the other or in combination with garrisons and walls .

[Mrhappyface]

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Why no Helblasters, though? They put out incredible amounts of damage to all targets.

You can get Helblasters if you want but personally the Hellstorms are better: better range, splash damage, indirect fire and anti-infantry. Helblasters just don't put the same work in against hordes and their direct fire and shorter range mean you can't hammer the enemy as much before they close the distance. And though they are good against all types of enemies, you've got your handgunners to melt big monsters and heroes.

[fmalfeas]

Against Chaos forces, I'd personally want to bring either one or two Great Cannons, or a pair of outriders or demi-knights /specifically/ to target Hellcannons, shaggoths, and giants long before they can do much damage at all. Those are high danger units that aren't overly worried about rocket batteries. So either best them with speed and damage, or blow them up at extreme range. Same for Norsca, just with Mammoths.

Orcs and VC don't really have anything that I feel would make it really, really worth dragging out a great cannon over rockets.

[bill.stevens]

Originally posted by Mrhappyface:

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Why no Helblasters, though? They put out incredible amounts of damage to all targets.

You can get Helblasters if you want but personally the Hellstorms are better: better range, splash damage, indirect fire and anti-infantry. Helblasters just don't put the same work in against hordes and their direct fire and shorter range mean you can't hammer the enemy as much before they close the distance. And though they are good against all types of enemies, you've got your handgunners to melt big monsters and heroes.

I was bringing Helstorms already, but only two. They ARE a nightmare against every form of infantry from goblins to chosen.

Still, I was wondering what was best for everything the can't handle; direct fire, armor piercing units seem to be an essential staple in every army: why mess around with handgunners when volley guns are apparently better?

[zefyris]

2-3 hellblasters per army late game are monstruously efficient, because they're not just good versus infantry, contrary to HRB. This is a direct solution to AI's elite cavalry for example. Chaos knight will melt before doing anything.
Sure the range is shorter, and the arc of fire is more direct so in siege they will mostly be here to destroy towers, so you really don't want more than 3 ImO, 2 having my preference.
But the ability to destroy any elite unit befores the elite unit can do anything is invaluable.

Also, they're ridiculous in auto resolve currently. getting 400 kills each in AR is the usual pretty much.

[wrought82]

helstorms are too good anti infantry to pass up when AI so loves playing infantry imo, same goes for outriders with grenade launchers and they work amazing together with outriders slowing down and detouring the enemy giving helstorms more time to work their magic.
However if you dedicate more than a few slots to antiinfantry you need the rest of the army to be equally specialized.
Id recommend demigryphs with halberds unless you have some very tough heroes to hold the line in which case you can try gunners. you're still gonna have a bad time vs flying and cavalry heavy armies if you dont have some strong melee units though

[bill.stevens]

Originally posted by Not online!!!:

i'd use the standard army template.

Aka, Lord, Hero, Sorcerer (fire or any other decent damage spell). Mainline is halberds and some gunners, arty is entirely comprised off Hellstorm rocket batteries. (atleast 3 better 4.)
use checker bord and lightning strike to eliminate one horde after the other or in combination with garrisons and walls .

Four Helstorms? Impressive; I was religiously bringing only 2 artillery per army at most since their value drops like a rock when the lines meet. If Rockets are just that good I'll gladly risk taking more.

[Not online!!!]

Originally posted by bill.stevens:

Originally posted by Not online!!!:

i'd use the standard army template.

Aka, Lord, Hero, Sorcerer (fire or any other decent damage spell). Mainline is halberds and some gunners, arty is entirely comprised off Hellstorm rocket batteries. (atleast 3 better 4.)
use checker bord and lightning strike to eliminate one horde after the other or in combination with garrisons and walls .

Four Helstorms? Impressive; I was religiously bringing only 2 artillery per army at most since their value drops like a rock when the lines meet. If Rockets are just that good I'll gladly risk taking more.

It depends on the faction for VampireCoast i tend to run 2 carronades and 3 mortars aswell as gunnery weights (1-2 ) for my siege armies and necrofex spam for regular armies.

Hellstorms are nuts btw, i'd also reccomend that you take over whisenland with nuln ASAP if you go for arty.

[Hurricane]

Hellstorm are the best arty by far...

Hellblasters kinda suck. Short range and about as good as handgunners. Outriders are good for chasing down units and kiting infantry.

Mortars are a good start and decent in sieges but helstorms just outclass them and always hit.

[fmalfeas]

Always remember that Helstorm Rocket Batteries are about area saturation. Just one of them can fail you badly. Two of them can work. 3-5 of them /will/ work. They have a huge area over which they fling the rockets and because of this, a single battery can completely fail to hit what you're aiming at. But if you have 3 or more aiming in the same general area, /everything/ is going to get hammered reliably just due to probability. It reaches the point of far too many rockets being launched per volley for it to not be total area saturation.

Maybe a hero on foot could escape the blasts if positioned just right. But no unit of troops is coming out of it without major damage.

And the blast area from what I've seen is (to use really crude measuring methods) about 4.5 blocks of spearmen wide, 2.5 blocks deep. So if you fire on the center of their line with 5 batteries, you can expect to hammer around 6-12 units, the way the AI tends to start formations. That's with all the batteries targetted on the unit at the center.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by zefyris:

2-3 hellblasters per army late game are monstruously efficient, because they're not just good versus infantry, contrary to HRB.

I'm going to guess you meant to say they're monstrously inefficient, not efficient.

Which hasn't been my experience, though. Doesn't matter what they fire at: cavalry, monsters, infantry, whatever. They massively outperform other Empire artillery, each one usually getting a few times as many kills as other artillery units. And they can keep firing once the melee is joined.

I also hate the tendency of Hellstorms to blow up your own units in a wide frontal cone immediately in front of them.

[Monochromatic Spider]

There's no single Empire doomstack that handles everything with perfect efficiency. But various units handle different things reasonably well.

Handgunners are really good at killing isolated single entities. Hellstorm rocket batteries are great anti-infantry. Hellblasters are good'ish against infantry, great against cavalry, not bad against single entities, but they struggle for range and if something closes ground then they cannot move away.

Halberdiers and greatswords are decent'ish infantry that does well enough at taking long enough to die that you can murder whatever is murdering your infantry, but being infantry you obviously don't want to shoot hellstorms at them. Steamtanks are overpriced somewhat, but you can heal them, they're pretty much immune to hellstorm and AoE spell friendly fire, and they will not rout.

Really, there are options to handle pretty much anything, but mostly it is going to revolve around finding ways to dish out ranged damage without having your frontline completely crushed in the process.

I haven't played as much Empire as I probably should have, but I reckon a couple of hellstorms, a couple of hellblasters, a bunch of thunderers, and then whatever combination of heroes and infantry suits your fancy to delay and give the shooters time to do their thing.