Artillery - UP

Latexlord wrote:

Well... For a balance point of view, having all the non-LOS in dark side seems really weird.

They should have split it : 2 non-LOS and 1 LOS only in dark army, and 1non-LOS / 2 LOS only for light... At least it bring different strategies in co-op...

About accuracy : medieval fantasy + game balance means they don't need to be as accurate as 21st century weaponry. Just need to be powerfull enough to neither be OP nor UP.

Artillery can't flee, they're all Unbreakable.
A hero in artillery will neglected their major weakness, it would raise their healthpoint from 5 to 17... Even more with the right equip... That would be a 300 % improvement It's fair that Artillery don't have access to hero.

I agree, or at least give a choice for all races to have either a lobbed/innacurate art or a more accurate but LOS restricted one. Though on the plus side, if your units are moving my artillery might pick off 1 guy if that by the time units are engaged making it a dangerous aspect to my units as well, not to mention how slow it is at reloading ><.

On the second note, I agree to a point. Artillery at least on the UD side of things is terrible at best. The only saving grace is when a PVE enemy has grouped up and I can throw a few shots before I have to let my melee clean up. Otherwise I risk doing more damage to myself then the enemy. I'd never use it in pvp due to it's weakness in speed/accuracy/hitpoints.

3rd note I wasn't tracking they fixed that, I just remember in some co-ops my cav or a group of archers would smack an enemy artillery unit and it'd go running off the map at the pace of a snail. So then probably not a hero but maybe some equipment that boosts its survivability, damage, or in the case of mine, accuracy. The only reason I'm using one now is it does slightly more damage then a group of archers in the long haul, and it fills out my AP rather then sacking and healing a lvl 1 group of unequipped infantry every round.

Quote :

The only reason I'm using one now is it does slightly more damage then a group of archers in the long haul, and it fills out my AP rather then sacking and healing a lvl 1 group of unequipped infantry every round.

This.

I personally consider a lot of things about arty to be incorrectly balanced, but I still use them for the reasons Rokun mentioned. The AP boost they give to my 2ndary army has been nice. It added a quick ~300 AP to my ~500ap 2ndary army pushing it over 800AP.

My 2ndary army farms almost as well as my primary now. In PvE, the extra AP bumps my gold gains up a bit and even though they arent big damage dealers, arty can be kept safe fairly easily. So when they are used conservatively, they have pretty minimal maintenance costs and thus pretty reliable gold returns per battle.

That said, using arty has definitely hurt my high MVP rate noticeably due to the added AP without the added killing power. Also, because of their niche advantages, theyre kinda slow to level up compared to my other units. So aside from the balance problems, theyre not really a fun addition to an army - oh... except maybe when they give me a new objective mode (Protect the weak-slow-moving-objective for 15 mins or until all enemies are dead). Brings me back to all those RTS single player campaigns.

All that said, I am curious to see what they can do when leveled up a bit. I've seen high level darkie (non-LOS) arty wipe out almost half my archers in a single shot in PvE - and then do it again the next shot to leave them running with 1-2 units. I've certainly seen it happen more consistently than my low level bolt throwers do it to my enemies. Fortunately in PvE, the darkie 13B guys have a horrible case of ADD that can be exploited.

Anyway, thats a purely anecdotal observation, so it might be RNG, and it might be Green Grass Syndrome, but between the token gold bump, my curiosity, and not wanting to regret researching arty, I'm going to level up and see.

Heh. For the trouble it took to get them, hopefully I may even get a return on the gold investment I put into them.

Also, my arty leveled up and received +3 Endurance. Leveling up melee, armor or endurance on artillery feels very pointless to me.

Ya, I'm doing the same, Hegorn. My main army doesn't have any arty, but my sandbox/2ndary one does. I might try swapping a cav unit and adding it's ap to get me another 1-2 skull throwers to see if that makes a bigger difference. Ahh well, got a lot of idea's to try out and see if it's a usable piece of equipment! So far it's moderately better then well equipped UD archers but that doesn't say much! Yours cost 300AP? crap my lvl 3 costs around 168, that could be why you see more success then mine. Still, despite UD's crappy ranged I must say it has some amazing melee units. Cost wise arty is pretty nice, easy to heal if they do go down, cheap, and hopefully when they hit the loftier levels will be very useful. I know I had the unfortunate event of running into a pair of godlike (max lvl) PVE cannons and next to no terrain to hide behind. My genius ally at the time decided to just charge his armies in since they had a single group of archers and a mass of light infantry, he got about halfway across the field before most of his units were dead or fleeing into the welcoming arms of the enemy.

I haven't artillery yet... But from what I guess, mixing it with cavalry doesn't seems really interesting... I think you it's to option that fit different purpose, and getting both in the same army build kind of reduced their respective power...

Rokun wrote:

Yours cost 300AP?

Using 2 arty in my experimental army.

Yea. I wonder if the PvE units have fixed stats per level up though. Hard to tell.

An example:

My artillery requires LOS, and spawns behind a forest about 7 times as wide as my arty. There is more LOS effecting terrain to either side and ahead. In order for it to be useful I need to manouver it to gain sight of an enemy, however by the time it is in position the battle is 1/2way done; when 'in position' (past the first forest) it cannot fire without hitting my already engaged units, and has no LOS on the safely targetted units as they are behind more terrain either fleeing or shooting. To actually have it serve a purpose other than driving up my AP I need for it to be able to shoot.

A suggestion:

Give arty that requires LOS 10 speed so that it has the ability to manouver for achieving that valuable LOS on the enemy.

Dobraine's anecdote is one of the causes of arty feeling difficult to form a strategy around. Its not reliably useful.

Dobraine wrote:

Give arty that requires LOS 10 speed so that it has the ability to manouver for achieving that valuable LOS on the enemy.

Aside from giving both Light/Dark both types of arty, this is a pretty good suggestion. 10 feels about right - maybe a little fast, but its a good suggestion.

or you could make arty so that it has to deploy.
It starts "packed up" with a higher speed so that you can move to a position, there you have to deploy (which takes some time). If you want to move you have to pack up again.