nwg

Yes, you are very probably right. I'm pretty uncomfortable with having no canister in the game at all, despite the fact that personally I hate it because I'm usually 'getting' it and not 'giving' it hehehe.

Righto then. For testing purposes I'll forge ahead with the following:

- 8/9/12lb cannon will lose canister and gain shell instead. This will be true of both the divisional (4 gun) and position (6 gun) batteries.

- 4 & 6lb divisional guns will remain as they are today

- Howitzers will enlarge to 4 guns again and will gain canister, at an appropriate range, as their secondary fire type (range will be pretty limited). I'll see if anything can be done to make the price more interesting without 'fudging' the numbers (maybe crew and ammo can be adjusted).

That list is going to challenge my skills because it all involves a bit of 'real' modding rather than just a simple tweak here and there. I figure we've got at least a month to 6 weeks before the end of this campaign round though so it should be possible.

I want to do a bit of work to take the rough edges off the recently re-weighted primary fire stat/price changes as well. I think we've moved in the right direction but the pricing feels a bit rough to me...we'll see where this goes and I'll happily take comments when the beta of CB4.0 arrives.

I'd encourage anyone reading this with an interest in CB to put forward their favourite ideas for tweaks. This might well be the last version of CB to be built on the NTW2 engine.

Regards, M

Sounds excellent to me,
Happy modding and tweaking

I will have a good think and see if i can come up with an idea of my own, but don't hold your breath

Sounds like a good plan to me.....one LITTLE thing I'd mention, does anyone take the "small" Elite Infnatry units ?....I sure never do, do we need it ?.

Well i have come close to taking them on a couple of occasions, if i remember correctly it was for using up remaining florins rather than anything strategic.

Yes, its a good point and I'm happy for folks to be thinking along these lines. I'd rather remove unused units and unclutter the selection screen if its possible.

The above observation is a clue as to the real value of a unit slot I think. Whilst its often hard to justify the price of a full blown guard top shelf regiment at the same time we feel compelled to field the largest number of men possible and therefore the small battalion sized units don't get chosen.

If we've all agreed to allow light troops that are in open order to form more than 4 ranks I'm inclined to remove the battalion sized light unit from each faction as well....any objections? I've not seen one fielded for a long time.

Regards, M.

Yes, likewise. But then, at the last moment despite being tempted by the small high quality unit I usually go for a full regiment of Grenadier.

I built these battalion units originally because I thought that given the new pricing in CB some folks might choose armies with 17 or so units and these little and relatively cheap units would be a nice addition.

The reality on the field of course is that quality is all very nice but numbers really count.

Regards, M.

I did once field a single unit of these smaller sized lights very early on in my game with Gunner, Alas it was in error and i had not meant to take them
Must admit i have not thought once about using them.
However i do have a feeling that in our encounter M, they may make an appearance, simply because the Swedes have no militia therefore no other relatively cheap unit option.

Moopere, feel assured, it is not because I don't replay that I could not be interested about this subject. It is because I don't see what to add.

Regards, gp.

Ahh, yes good point. Still, seems like there might never be a real case for using the smaller elite unit so I might drop it. I'll leave behind the battalion sized light unit for flexibilities sake.

Regards,
Moo

Heres an update on the testing thats happening for the next CB version:


- 8/9/12lb cannon will lose canister and gain shell instead. This will be true of both the divisional (4 gun) and position (6 gun) batteries. A not-so-good side effect of this is that the smaller weapons will effectively have smaller howitzers too (because of a range limitation). We'll find a work around with dedicated howitzer batteries below though. Ammunition will be increased to allow for the fact that shell is inaccurate and roundshot has limited kills / ball (this will increase cost slightly too)

- 4 & 6lb divisional guns will lose some ammunition in an effort to reduce their cost. As these are close support weapons I think they pretty much get killed before using their ammo runs out right now so this should be a positive change and will further encourage people to use them.

- Howitzers will enlarge to 4 guns again and will gain canister, at an appropriate range, as their secondary fire type (range will be pretty limited). These batteries are really fictitious as I don't think dedicated howitzer batteries were used by anyone as a field asset at this time. We'll make them the big 8" type howitzers with the longest range of all the field artillery, this will help out those factions who don't have a 12lb cannon option.

- Howitzer shell will have its accuracy improved as per CB30 (ie, a tiny bit). As with the 8/9/12lb cannon their ammunition will be increased to allow for their horrible accuracy.

- Fiddle about with costing a little bit to smooth out most factions unit line up.

- Remove the battalion sized elite unit

- Tweak the stats of the Ottoman and Russian Militia to raise their cost a little bit. Having such an insanely low price unbalances the game I think. They will both still be the worst performing and cheapest militia in the game, but hopefully the price can go from 25f now to something more reasonable like 50 or even 75f.

- Reinstate French Grenadiers, French Voltigeurs and Dutch Flankers to full regimental size. The French in particular have a giant hole in their unit choices due to not having a decent Grenadier unit available. Originally these units were reduced in size for historical reasons and also because the original CB didn't have rejigged costing. As we've had to accept several ahistorical problems and as a general recosting of units across CB has occurred it seems a little petty of me now to disallow such nice looking textured models.

More will be added as testing continues.

Regards, M

All sounds good to me, crack on and maybe we can get it up and running soon, how soon I wonder ?.

Oh dear! This nightmare will come back .

It's no nightmare GP, it's something that gives you a bit more choice in what weapons and tactics to use, if the exploding shells put you off, try a game with the volumn turned off !. It makes quite a difference.

Mmm. I'm not insensitive to this.

We'll have to get a few games played when the test version is ready. I'm pretty hopeful that changes to the big guns to include shell instead of canister will mean that we won't see a resurgence of mass howitzer batteries as the only fielded artillery.

However, perhaps the addition of canister to the howitzers batteries -will- make them seem too attractive? I'm really not sure at this stage. The new canister ability of the howitzers will be similar in range to the current 4lb cannon canister range (ie, pretty short)

One thing I do know is that we need to see Howitzers back on the field, but just how to do it without tipping the balance is the tricky part.

Regards, M.

Some of these maps really need a decent howitzer to give the attackers a better chance....it's odd, but it seems a lot easier to defend with CB than the normal version.

Normally I say it's easier to be the attacker, but not in CB ?.....the "decent" howitzers return will be very welcome to me.

I like lots of choice.