Fort batteries

[squarian]

After playing ROP for some time now, I've just clicked on a fort battery element for the first time and discovered something I found very surprising - fort batteries are field arty?!

I'm away from my other AGE games, so I can't check this against AACW's equivalent units - but surely for this period fortress guns should be heavy arty? Field guns were generally either 6-12lb, with smaller pieces assigned as battalion guns. Emplaced fortress guns were, to my knowledge, generally heavier than the field 12s - 18, 24 or up.

Was this an intentional decision or an oversight?

[squarian]

And again, from a practical game-play point of view, having fort batteries sucking up field arty replacements makes it effectively impossible to refit your actual field batteries -

since the game distributes replacements randomly, and since there are dozens of fort battys scattered around the map and relatively few actual field battys, and since they're competing for the same replacements, odds are that the forts will usually get the replacement and only rarely will replcmnts go to the real field bttys.

Moreover, this makes a nonsense of the field arty replacement option - unless you want your scattered garrisons at full strength, you're better off using the EP/$ elsewhere and buy whole new field battys.

Meanwhile, in every game produces vast surpluses of hvy arty because the only elements in the whole game using these replacements are your siege guns.

[Ebbingford]

Fort batteries should be using heavy replacements IMHO.

[squarian]

By way of authority, here's Christopher Duffy, Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860 (1975), 83:

"The 16- or 18-pounder 'culverin' was the mainstay of the artillery defense [of fortresses]. This piece consumed far less powder than the 24-pounder battering piece, yet its shot carried nearly as far and it had the power to wreck the parapets of the enemy siegeworks...The lighter pieces - 12-pounders, 8-pounders and 6-pounders - served very well on the ravelins and other detached works"

The "brummer" 12-pound fortress guns, which the Prussians originally pressed into field service on an emergency basis, were capable of being used in a field role precisely because they were Duffy's relatively mobile "lighter pieces" generally used to defend outworks. If the fortress bttys in ROP are meant to simulate these lighter pieces (in which case presumably the standard 18-pounder bastion pieces are factored into the defensive value of the fortress??) then they should be much more mobile than the models are at present - essentially no different than the "wheeled" field battys.

[Baris]

And again, from a practical game-play point of view, having fort batteries sucking up field arty replacements makes it effectively impossible to refit your actual field batteries -

since the game distributes replacements randomly, and since there are dozens of fort battys scattered around the map and relatively few actual field battys, and since they're competing for the same replacements, odds are that the forts will usually get the replacement and only rarely will replcmnts go to the real field bttys.

Moreover, this makes a nonsense of the field arty replacement option - unless you want your scattered garrisons at full strength, you're better off using the EP/$ elsewhere and buy whole new field battys.

Meanwhile, in every game produces vast surpluses of hvy arty because the only elements in the whole game using these replacements are your siege guns.

in the other thread about battle mechanics and also from other post i read but i dont remember where , that units targeting mostly bigger hitpoint units. reserve units such as artilery and supply wagons are targeted in rare situations.and i also experienced that, they are either captured or totaly destroyed or no harm at all. so they musnt need so much replacements. but what you fnd interesting than if regarded as field artilery in history while it moves really slow like it has very limited use. better to have some use by being more mobile against Bertram

[squarian]

reserve units such as artilery and supply wagons are targeted in rare situations.and i also experienced that, they are either captured or totaly destroyed or no harm at all. so they musnt need so much replacements.

True, arty and other support units rarely take combat casualties - but they are still susceptible to attrition losses, and in the game vs. Bertram I think both of us have a great number of arty bns at less than full strength.

But naturally, I'll happily take any advantage I can versus Bertram - he's beating the pants off me.

[Pocus]

I believe this is a mistake indeed. We definitively do have a distinction between heavy and medium artilleries replacements.