nwg

Moopere and the CB crew, I don't know if it's me (it may well be) but I'm not enjoying the current CB version as much as I did the older versions.

"My" problems are :

As I've said many times, there are not enough crew men to artillery batteries, they can be destroyed far to quickly.

Howitzers are still no good.

Rifles are no good.

If it were me I'd make the following changes to keep it interesting :
Add a load more artillery crew, more like the standard ntw2.
Make Howitzers a bit better - half way between now and when they were to good.
Make Rifles better, they are not worth buying at present.

As it stands now I've lost interest in CB, which is a great pity as it was so good for a long time.

Since ETW arrived they have been only a few games of CB, which is pretty understandable with ETW still only 5 weeks old.
I thought our last battle was one of the very best we have played, so for me i find it as good as ever.


You may have a point Gunner if you have less arty than your opponent then yes you will lose yours maybe a bit quicker than might be expected, but i would say we are talking only small margins, so maybe a few more crew would be reasonable.


Again i think OK but fine margins only.
I used Howey's in our first battle this week and they had 171 kills without cannister, also i felt they forced you to move forward because i was able to fire on your infantry over the protection of the land. (mind you that may be wishful thinking as you always attack anyway )
The point I'm trying to make is i was happy with there performance in that battle.
Howey's do seem to still make an occasional appearance, as has been said many times we don't want them deployed in preference to traditional arty.
Maybe a very slight improvement may be OK.



I think maybe you got a bit spoilt with rifles in the earlier versions fella
while I'm still having nightmares about attacking you with massive florins advantages and being slaughtered by them.
Sorry to get monotonous but i would suggest again that maybe only a tiny improvement for me would be acceptable.
Is it fair to say that on the Napoleonic battlefield, rifles would have had only a tiny influence on the outcome of the engagement ?
I'm pretty sure that M will suggest that an occasional appearance of a unit or two of rifles is all thats needed for a accurate historical representation of a Napoleonic army, and i would go along with that.

In short mate answering your requests
YES
YES
YES
But only to a small degree

It was - no doubt about that, the arty crew survived (somehow) and I never wasted cash on Rifles !.


That's my point, you either have to have more arty than the other guy, or don't bother with any, because they will be zapped before you get any decent use from them.


Huge scale, 171 kills, for firing all there ammo, is not worth whatever they cost now, not worth it at all.


I attacked because I had no artillery, becasue of problem one above, so it's either attack, or sit doing nothing till the oter side runs out of arty ammo......that could be a long time sitting being killed doing nothing getting bored, I'd rather attack in that situation.


They used to be a good unit at a high price, I never had more than two of them. Now they are an average unit at a price well above other Lights, I won't be buying them any more, that has to say something about Rifles !.

As I said at the start, it might just be me, playing badly, so not to worry too much, just my comments.

If you have less arty than your opponent it seems perfectly reasonable that you are going to loose out in the arty duel.



Yes could have been a few more, but i wasn't to disappointed with this,
As we have been saying in ETW, you have to have arty for a balanced game, and yes the kills may look poor as you could have 3 units of line for the same price, however in reality you cant get 3 units of line in only 1 unit slot



For me they were much too good a unit whatever the price, and were deciding battles by themselves.

The heady days for CB were v3.2 I do believe. Lots of players (relatively), lots of games. I can't separate my enjoyment of CB today from my satisfaction with ETW. iow; I know what you're saying but I can't tell if I'm just enjoying ETW more or CB less....




The crew of most artillery units (probably all. .. I can't remember now) got yet another boost in CB321 and are now so high that they are well over my own personal comfort level. I agreed to increase them to this size for gameplay reasons and sometimes you do have to do this even though you stretch historicity to breaking point. Its assumed that the gunners are now representing not only the bombardiers but also the infantry company usually attached to artillery batteries.

In a previous version of CB I experimented with decreasing the accuracy of the cannon in order to reduce the effectiveness of counter battery fire as I agree that it seems as if counter battery work is far too effective given citations throughout most accounts of how -ineffective- this should have been. However, it was not a successful experiment and although counter battery fire looked a -lot- better shooting at other targets became so incredibly bad that folks stop buying cannon.

I can't say for certain, but my suspicion now is that something is 'wrong' with the ballistics model used in the game. Probably we don't get enough 'bounce' and penetration of roundshot once it first strikes the ground...or something similar.

The problem of losing the crew to your enemies artillery is one then that ultimately I don't think we can do much about. Even if I increase the numbers to 150+ per battery you opponent will similarly benefit and all that will happen is that the counter battery fire segment of most battles will elongate. "Toughing out" a counter battery exchange is probably not the way to go unless you are certain you have a large artillery superiority. I've been of this mind for a while, if you are sustaining a lot of casualties on your batteries, withdraw them for a bit, even if it means leaving the guns behind and moving your crew behind a hill or something.




In so far as outright kills go I agree. But they are not for this (in my humble opinion). In fact, its been my long standing opinion that artillery as a general rule is not about huge numbers of kills - its about the -potential- for huge numbers of kills. You enemy will almost without exception modify their tactics around your deployment of artillery and this is what its for.

My preference would be to remove the special howitzer battery altogether and add shell to the cannon batteries, but in RTW as opposed to ETW we're limited to a maximum of two ammunition types so we'd lose canister on the field.

I agree that Howitzers appear to still be lacking in accuracy...or something.... In watching the games of CB321 played so far I'm quite surprised to see the difference between howitzer shell and rockets for instance. Howitzers have far far better accuracy than rockets, yet he sheer volume of output from a rocket battery makes them useful in a way howitzers are not.

My inclination based upon the games I've watched would be to raise howitzers batteries to 5 guns (from 4) and decrease rocket batteries from 6 to 5. Having said that though, I can't help but feel that some of this is a visual thing. Did you notice how everyone perceived howitzers as being less useful now than in CB30, yet howitzers are actually much much more accurate now - I'm certain its to do with the removal of the 'fiery' explosion graphic. Rockets are perceived as being very useful, yet their accuracy is horrible, but they still have a big explosion effect which gives you the visual feedback we all love at long range.

Once thing I certainly don't want to disturb is a players want to take cannon. I don't ever want a player to ponder whether to take a cannon battery or a howitzer battery and decide in the end it makes no difference. There should be clear reasons for taking each and the choice should be in favour of the cannon in >70% of cases otherwise we easily go back to the bad old days of howitzers ruling the field.




I'll cop that on the chin, its a fair comment. The choice to reduce the truly effective range of the rifles was probably as experimental as the choice to change the position batteries to use shell instead of canister. Pretty radical stuff. I was quite interested however to see the Grogs do something similar with their C or D mod version.

The reason this happened is that I can't find a single reference to a rifle company or battalion, in formation, firing into the enemy in volley fashion at 200-300 yards. I don't know why this is, perhaps it was no more than military dogma, or perhaps there is a -good- reason, but there you go. Heaps of single instance citations of officers being killed or other similar stuff by apparent single shots from rifles at long long range, which I find a tad suspicious frankly, battles were noisy right? Bullets flying everywhere...who's to say these deaths were single shot? Anyway, if dedicated rifle companies really did shoot at longer ranges than their musket wielding brothers the difference appears to have been slight indeed. The other problem which tipped the balance in my mind was that in NTW2 the rifles reload way way way (way!) too fast. The only infantry to reload and shoot faster are musket armed guard troops. Completely wrong! Even the best rifle armed soldiers would be roughly 2-2.5 times slower to reload. 1-1.5 volleys a minute seems to be commonly accepted.

The right thing to do would be to change the animation to reduce speed and increase the effective maximum range by say 50 yards, unfortunately I lack the skills to do this, and I'm not sure how such a change would be received anyway. As it is, they are tweaked so be a type of super light. Which is to say that their truly effective range is not dissimilar to light muskets yet their maximum range is better, and much better than line muskets. The perfect weapon to counter your enemies light really but I've always been careful that in a firefight the line should win easily against either light muskets or rifles - this provides the right balance against light or rifle spammed armies in my view.




Its already too high. If we were to keep the ratios consistent with NTW2 they position batteries would have 180 men, almost double what they have now - it would be a bit ridiculous.




This is a fair comment. My approach to this as described above would be to add a gun model to each howitzer battery. Not sure if its worth a new CB revision for this alone, but it might be.




Yeah, less certain about this. There should never be too many of these guys present. Remember that each CB unit is a regiment. How many regiments of rifle armed soldiers would you expect at each battle? And why would they be there? In my own mind (and I'm as wrong as next next guy and just as often) I'd like to think of rifles, as opposed to musket armed lights, a bit like rockets. Interesting and adding colour but rare and meant for a specific purpose.




I've lost a lot of interest too, but I'm almost convinced its because ETW has such possibility. Mind that my heart doesn't race in ETW as it did in NTW2/CB though and I still don't know why....something is seriously missing for me in ETW, wish I knew what it was.

Thanks for the comments Gun. At the end of the day, once I'd put the final seal on CB321 I had definitely come to the conclusion that the further a faction moved from the centre line of performance the less competitive it was. Took me a long time to get there mentally but I'm pretty sure of it now. All the middle performing factions are pretty good in my opinion, but outliers like Britain an Russia are not, part of the reason for that is the 20 unit limit, part is also the coarseness of the resolution in the statistics. The difference in primary fire stat going from say 15 to 16 is really huge for instance....nothing to be done about it but to change all factions to have similar performing basic troops and add the variation/flavour of a faction via its support troops (guard, cavalry, artillery, etc)

Best regards,
Moopere

Ok, fair enough, I must have been having a bad day, don't know what I was thinking about, the cannon crews are fine.....er.....I must have hit my head on something when I posted that !.

If you don't want to change things, that's ok, if it's not going to be used it don't matter anyway !.

A few small changes might have helped bring it back to life, as Empire MP is looking like it's dead untill the arty problem is fixed and the Lordz mod arrives.

Moopere, how would you feel if I made the following tiny changes so CB could be used in the CB League by the few players that are intrested.

RIFLES : Range increased from 60 to 70, no other change.
HOWITZERS : Cost lowered by 150 florins, no other change.

Combined with this I like to throw out there a little "rules" suggestion - after having played Empire for a month now.

Possible new rule for CB games.
INFANTRY lines must be either 2 or 3 ranks deep, NOT 4 as before.

INFANTRY may form square, this is a "block" that must be formed as sqaure looking as possible no matter how many men are in the formation.

A Infantry square must be at least an equal distance away from the next sqaure, like this :



Squares can not be very close to each other making a "line" of squares, there has to be a gap between them at least the size of the square.

As we have a very limited number of interested people, all of who can be trusted, I think this "odd" rule could be made to work.

I've no objection of course. Folks are free to mod the mod

I'd strongly suggest that its not in the games best interests to adjust single stats without accounting for that change throughout the game though or you risk throwing the balance out. for instance:




The change from '60' to '70' is in IGU. Keeping other stats the same this increases maximum range by 30 actual scaled yards and adds about 50f to the cost of the unit.



I'd be very careful of this. Save the cash by reducing something else and get the cost savings that way. For instance, dropping the extra range that howitzers currently have back to 12lb max range will drop their price by a hundred florins or so.




Again, its up to you, but the engine in NTW plays quite differently to ETW, I'd be cautious myself.




I'm pretty sure we tried this an age or so ago and it was just too complex and difficult in the middle of battle. Inevitably the 'square' would have auto fire on still which then meant we had a big shooting block and so on and so forth.

However, its entirely up to the guys fighting I guess, if everyone is okay with the idea then it won't be a problem.

Regards, M.

Well that was the whole idea - it's the only thing in ntw2 that is anywhere near a square.

Anyway, not to worry. I think CB has maybe had it's day, the same as the standard ntw2, I was only trying to bring it back to life !.

Perhaps you didn't hear the call of FOURRRRRRRRRRR

Gents all this talk of the demise of CB is really depressing me, with the problems in ETW i feel there is still something to offer.

If there was a way to slightly improve rifles and Howey's a small amount without having to upset the whole balance of things then i would be in favour.

Not sure reducing the range of Howey's to the same as 12p to bring down the cost would work though as you have the shell capability in 12p so you certainly take them.

Perhaps, I'm not sure. It was hard for me to get a game at the best of times without staying up past my milk and cookies time Now, with 99% of the old crew playing ETW I've got no hope whatever.




I'm not against pushing out a point release. Its trivially easy for me to do and perhaps its the right thing for me to be doing rather then drop the ball at this late stage and end up with yet another variation of the NTW2 base.




Its true and one of the reasons that the howies ended up the way that they are now. There is more than a fair argument to just drop them from the game altogether.

What I'd like to see personally is the suggestions people have and the 'why' of those suggestions. Saying rifles should be better is ok as an opinion, maybe even as an expression of fact, but I'd like to see the 'why' from the games perspective, what will it add, how can we explain this historically and why is the unit not performing this 'why' right now.

To kick this off I want to make a rather radical suggestion myself.

Suggestion 1) The basic line infantry unit across all factions should have the same stats. Thats right sports fans :0 I'm serious.

Pro:

All factions become useable/winnable.


Con:

A definite part of the flavour of the NTW2 game is its distinct army makeups. The Brits with their unbeatable musketry and the Russians with their absolute stoic morale are great examples of this.


Reasoning:

Historically this suggestion is rubbish, its a gameplay based idea only. The basic infantry formation should be the backbone of all the different factions armies, if your line is too expensive to buy 50% of your army as line or if its so cheap you could buy 18 of them and still lose the battle then the gameplay is off. Right now some factions struggle or are not played at all and this is the reason why (in my view). The hard limit of 20 units means that we can't be as flexible with unit characteristics as is the case in a miniatures game or other PC based games without low unit limits.

Observations to support suggestion:

- British armies are 50% light or militia... something is obviously wrong if you can't afford enough line
- Russian armies tend to be made of Grenadier and militia, no musketeer. Again ... what the?!!
- Spanish armies similar to Russian, Portuguese suffer as do the Brits
- More historically plausible OOB's when players choose France or Prussia or Austria or UN.

Other units in a factions choices will remain essentially the same as now, with perhaps a tiny tweak only when necessary to make sure there remains a differentiation between unit types (in case Grenadiers look the same as musketeers or Line look the same as highlanders for instance)

If folks make a similar argument for their own pet likes/dislikes I'll be more then willing to look at a point release on CB to 3.3

Cheers, M.

I'm not in favour of this BUT I am in favour of making them closer stat wise, for example, if the shooting stats now range from 14 worst to 17 best, I'd be happy to see them all either 14 and 15 or 15 and 16, kind of closer together, with a small price difference, rather than all identical.

My big beef about Rifles is they are a game unit which deserve to be used, currently they won't be, that tells me there is something wrong.

The same thing applies to Howitzers. I accept that they did (both) became too powerfull, but it must be possible to tweak them somewhere between where they were, and where they are now, if not, well they have to stay the same as now, and not be selected 90% of the time.

Not a bad response. I slept on this idea and can see the value. Simply raising the firing stat for some and lowering for others and not making other changes will make some currently very cheap line extremely expensive though ... however, I think if additional tweaks are kept to a minimum with a focus on line cost falling in a tight group between 425 - 475 then maybe this is the right way to go.




Can't argue with that, and for the same reasoning as Howitzer units. Nice models, historically justified, great to see them in-game.




But why? Too expensive? Too little differentiation between them and the existing light infantry? Would players in fact choose light over rifles today? If so, why? What are people doing with their light troops that would make buying a rifles unit compelling and useful where a musket armed light unit wouldn't be?




Depends what your expectations of howitzers are. This is a serious question now, what do people expect from their howitzer batteries? My personal stance is that the answer should not be 'high enough kills to be good value for money' and the reason is that this is what causes them to be chosen in preference to cannon. Howies are super easy to use, set and forget, cannon are hard work, as a result cannon should be the big battlefield killers, howitzers should be special purpose.




You know, I'm actually reasonably ok with this myself, though of course I am not the only one playing the game so I am open to others views. Big cannon have shell and ball, small cannon have ball and canister - this pretty much covers things in 90% of cases in my mind. Howitzer are a wild card in the current CB game which is meant to surprise and demoralise the enemy because of its long range.

But..

Anyone following the CB discussion threads will know I'm not 100% happy either, heres my own reasons:

1) Accuracy still so bad that a resolute enemy can afford to advance against them and simply choose to take his losses as they can be fairly minor.

2) The area of effect of an exploding shell is quite a bit smaller than that of rockets. I'm tempted to increase it for howies and decrease it for rockets. THe idea here is that when you do finally hit something the effort is worthwhile (ie; more than 1-2 kills). Also tends to work better for counter battery fire against open order gunners.

Got to be careful though men, howitzers have a canister ability too, though not many seem to use it. Nevertheless its there. I feel that Howitzers despite how they seem today are actually balancing on the brink of being the super weapon of choice. If they were modded to make them really hit stuff 30-40% more often then you'd have a single unit with extremely long range, good kill ability + canister = very potent indeed!

Cheers, M.

I feel the same. I suspect my little apathy to etw is not cause of this 18.century uniforms (course i would prefer a grog mod supported by the lordz for a good Napoleonic Era game) or the failure of artillery but it s because of the maps. While i was playing ntw2 or CB i was feeling that i am on a battle field but when i begin a fight with etw i feel like i am having a "room"-battle. Just like the different feeling of playing tennis and squash. Also detailed texture of maps makes it hard to concentrate on the battle. Detailed Grass,soil,forest blinds me, wah! I really miss CB maps to be honest.

Hmm. I wonder if this is the problem for me too? It could be. I had another look at the picture Gunner provided in the conversation above and the terrain is really simple...functional, but simple. It doesn't distract you from your men and the work they have to do.

Hey Gun, how hard is it likely to be to create maps that are more like NTW2 and less like ETW do you think?

Regards, M.

A few different things here.

Rifles : I used to take 2 per battle because of their long range and deadly killing power, I agree they were too good and needed changing. Now I won't be taking any but taking Lights in their place at over 100 florins cheaper for much the same result as you get with rifles.

Howitzers : Of course Moopere is right, we (I) don't want a super unit, but my understanding of Howitzers is that there was a lot of them on a battlefield and I think they should be devestating against large bodies of troops, right now they appear not to be, but maybe I'm not undestanding this correctly.

Etw maps : They are smaller than ntw2 maps, not sure how much smaller, but they sure seem to be small to me.


I find the maps to be better with graphic details turned down - which is madness I know.

It might be very easy to make ntw2 "style" maps when there is a map editor, at the moment it's possible, but a very very very complex process, which I barley even understand. Badger is the real map expert, compared to him I'm a mere novice. I can only say that new Empire maps will be more like ntw2 maps - if there made by me.