Artillery and mounted

[ethan]

A bit late to this discussion... but a couple of thoughts:

- When you have a small amount of artillery, say two bases, putting it on a flank to shoot at mounted seems to make the most sense.

- Small amounts of artillery in the center just are in the way, they can't shoot over your own troops which are likely to get in the way as they close with the enemy.

- When I have used more artillery say 6+ bases and especially heavy artillery I tend to deploy them on the flanks shooting on the diagonals of the table (enfilade fire) which makes them much more effective as they are likely to see more targets and less likely to be obscured by my own troops. With enough heavy artillery and some light foot there is no reason to advance really, they enemy will come to you or just slowly get shot up.

So it seems to me on possible solution would be to allow artillery some limited ability to shoot over friendly troops, so those more than X distance away from enemy non-skirmishers (X would need to be determined by playtesting probably in the 6-12MU range). This give a bit more positive encouragement to have it in the center as it was more likely to achieve something.

[ravenflight]

Well, I had my first game today where I DIDN'T use my artillery against the mounted. Mainly because the terrain kinda precluded the plan that I wanted.

It DID end up with a completely mauled centre for my enemy (one BG completely shot to pieces by my artillery) and a complete win in the middle, however it also resulted in my mounted not doing very well against the wing. I had to run away basically. I did end up turning back to fight, but it seemed a bit weird the cream of the French mounted turning tail and running from some crappy Scottish horse on nags. I may be over-estimating their abilities.

I'm gonna post an AAR.