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EUBanana -> RE: Artillery in 1.5 (10/19/2007 6:34:12 PM)
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I think using the US as an example of wastage being irrelevant is deeply flawed, given most of the very brief time they were actually on the line they were involved in assaults, and they were holding a small section of the line - and the situation in 1918 from Spring on was atypical of WW1 anyway. I think looking at German or British figures will lead to different conclusions.
Anyway, thats a level of detail and historical haggling which I don't think is relevant. Yes yes, I know all this stuff about artillery and how many casualties it inflicts. I also know that its a corp level game (one wonders why artillery counters are in it at all in that case, beyond siege artillery maybe.)
I don't think additional wastage mechanics are necessary, where did I advocate that? I suppose thats not exactly a surprise when posting on a forum full of grogs who play games like WITP, the urge to add extra mechanics and haggle over historical authenticity and artillery casualty tables. [:D]. I thought that GoA elegantly handles bleeding the enemy with wastage, raids, and what have you with a single mechanic - barrages. I /know/ that artillery was not used like that - irrelevant to me. The bottom line was that it was a good mechanic to sum up all sorts of things and bundle it into an abstraction called a 'barrage', at the end of the day a game mechanic that lets the barrager convert some industry and some R&D into a means to sap some enemies who happen to be adjacent to these non corps level units called 'artillery counters' of their strength in a static warfare fashion. This actually strikes me as more historical than the emphasis on large scale encirclements over by the standards of the day fantasy scale distances of advance, but thats almost by the by, I'm less interested in the historicity of the individual mechanics than I am in the overall feel of the game and the variety of strategies that are in the players toolbox, waiting to be deployed.
Its a balance issue is all. I don't think the fact that a whole year of shelling in game inflicted 0 casualties implies that some rebalancing is needed is all that contentious, to be honest. Or a whole year of my shelling with R&D, air support and weaker trenches that did almost nothing, either.
I think the quicker entrenching is much better than it was before, and I was actually researching assault troops with Lascar as a result - something I never bothered with before. Thats a good thing, assault troops and tanks (and even trenches!) being not worth it was something that bugged me before and I opined about that too. This latest patch is pretty good progress I think, and needs only the slightest of tweaks IMO to take it pretty much to the exact sweet spot of balancing acts.
As for what I guess the damage a year of shelling with not very good guns against good fortifications should be, I'm not quite sure, but I know it should be better than 0, that much is plain.
assuming 1 barrage point is the equal of 2 infantry, the break even in attritional terms is clearly 1 barrage point doing 2 damage. So a four point worth barrage, which is typical for one of my maximum effort bombardments, should do about 8 to be a worthwhile strategy in the long term. Obviously it should deviate up and down from that depending on the precise situation, like with bad guns versus heavy trenches it should be more like 1-4, say, and with an ideal situation, good guns against troops in the open it should be higher than that, perhaps considerably higher like, say, 16. But lets say an average of 8. Everybody I've played in this game (and the AI) tends to keep the guns firing, presumably in the hope its paying its way. In the latest patch I don't think its even possible for artillery to pay its way, except perhaps in the late war when artillery R&D is real good and troops are advancing and thus unentrenched. So all these constant barrages are a complete waste of time. Even the readiness loss isn't very significant, a point here, a point there, a trench level if you are exceedingly lucky, so even in the supporting the attack role its of pretty marginal use. Of course I can only comment on the bombardments I've been on the receiving end of, but even when entrenched to a fairly low level (like 1, say) I've not seen any bombardments even come near to that break even.
So a tool from the toolbox has been removed. As the game has thankfully simple mechanics I think thats quite serious (not to say the game lacks depth, but if you took rooks out of chess, another game with simple rules but great depth, then it would seriously reduce the games options), and the lack of ability to wear down the enemy if he keeps a front packed with men, short of assaults, strikes me as very un-WW1-like.
(An assault, incidentally, is an extremely poor strategy from a purely attritional point of view in terms of industry because you pay 18 arms just to pay for the HQ point to send in the troops, so unless you dish out 18 more damage than you take - unusual, though possibly, I would say - thats not gonna work either, which kinda removes these 'if its a quiet front then attack' argument. The CPs mid to late war strategy surely has to be attritional, as it was IRL. As it stands you don't have an attritional option in the toolbox, and this is supposed to be a game about a war infamous for attrition tactics!).
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