I'm coming over from the noguns TWs, give me the rundown on the basics of musket warfare
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Empire Total War
I'm coming over from the noguns TWs, give me the rundown on the basics of musket warfare
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Have main line of line infantry 5-6 units is a good amount stagger them, have a reserve line a tactical bound behind them of around 3-4 units.
[xx--xx--xx--xx--xx] Main line
[--xx--xx--xx--xx--] Reserve
Use main line to shoot the enemy a few times then charge with reserve line. Don't forget to turn fire at will off when the reserve line moves into the firing arcs of the main line.
Bring cavalry and artillery as well
Is friendly fire as harsh as reality or dulled to be less punishing?
you can seriously mess up your own troops with friendly fire
Even your lancer cavalry can friendly fire each other if you're not careful.
one big, wide line, as, until you unlock fire by rank, only your front line shoots. then you can start making lines that are 3-4 in depth
advancing with melee is better in a thin column because it presents a smaller venue to be shot
skirmishers do crouch, which allows them to be placed in front, but will be hit by friendly fire when they retreat
slight terrain elevation does block line of sight for firing
artillery has unlimited ammo but is inaccurate
cavalry should only be used against light infantry and artillery, there's too many men with bayonets even in a half-defeated unit of line troops
dragoons and other mounted gunners make up 10% of armies but make up 98% of friendly fire cases; turn off Fire at Will until its time to unleash them on routing enemies
the AI will gladly run and reposition in your line of fire, so just set up your lines and let your men do the rest. they'll also frontcharge your lines with unsupported cavalry, so you can just kill them off the bat
the town-building micromanagement is satisfying when you finally get enough money to put into your infrastructure
are there any really good mods for ETW? I've long given up on ever getting a sequel to this game, despite it being one of my favorite Total War titles...
>are there any really good mods for ETW?
The startpos mod that makes all factions playable.
I second this, playing as Knights of Saint John was very interesting. Making the most out of almost nothing, diplomacy is now a matter of life and death.
That sounds like a fun campaign. Was the first step to try and secure somewhere like Tunisia for more income/foothold?
The blood mod
Darthmod, everyyhing else is too annoying. Imperial destroyer would be best but muskets are weak as frick, and units are so expensive that no one builds anything unless you give ai money cheat on vh
make a line
wait for the AI to come to you
win
if you're attacking do the same but advance with a small force at an oblique angle instead, and when the AI shits itself up, advance into range with your main force and win
Soooo... just like real-life line infantry tactics?
Not defending moronic AI from Empire, but that's literally how line battles worked.
Sure it was
thats the formation if your moronic. I have a reserve in literally every battle i fight, also napoleon total war map size is like 1/10th of a real battle.
>Historical battle maps are somewhat larger, and require somewhat more complicated methods of confirmation. Lodi appears to be at least 1.5km square through mensuration; Waterloo in-game takes place on an approximately 2km square space, with, for instance, about 135m between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte. (In real life this gap is approximately 10 times that distance, suggesting the scaling factor that was used). Again, this is consistent with the XML data in the files, so no odd scaling surprises here either.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?345583-Some-data-on-the-size-of-NTW-battlefields#:~:text=The%20units%20are%20each%2064m,more%20complicated%20methods%20of%20confirmation.
If the maps were 10x larger then im sure the lines would be a similar
play Hawks European Warfare or Scourge of War.
That picture really illustrates how much more infantry France was able to field against all those Allied nations combined
it doesn't really illustrate much in that regard. The British couldn't field large armies in mainland Europe because of the limitation of having to transport them and the other glaring problem of logistics.
hmm you are correct. But the Prussians showed up late didn't they? Napoleon was at least a capable general when it came to getting there fastest with the mostest.
wait, you were referring to the blocks in the map? they don't demonstrate numbers, lol. organization differed from army to army, and the French were in attack formation, so their troops would be in deep columns. Otherwise the French were almost even with the Anglo-Dutch at Waterloo.
yes I was looking at the blocks and I know they were different sizes but close enough for a quick estimation. The map is deceiving then, makes it look like the French outnumber the Allies almost 2 to 1.
Imperial France very rarely had significant numerical advantages during the Napoleonic wars, and frankly Napoleon himself was no tactical genius. France just had significantly better cannons than most of continental europe had at the time. It was a technological gap, and Napoleon, himself an artillery commander, just understood how to apply that advantage.
Most of the Napoleonic wars were really just a succession of continental monarchies humiliating themselves because their military hierarchies were aristocratic rather than practical and had become paralyzed by formality, blind adherance to tradition and an unwillingness to adapt or embrace changing technologies that were reshaping the battlefield. France's key strategic advantage is that the revolution had cleaned house and left its military with a far more competent chain of command.
>and frankly Napoleon himself was no tactical genius
Your ass must've deformed your tactical forum armchair, at this point.
The man was so far up his own ass that he compared himself to Charlemagne unironically. Glorifying historical figures, especially populist dictators without much in the way of real accomplishments, is a bad look.
Saying Napoleon is "no tactical genius" when he has 70 victories to 7 defeats in the book is a bad look, no matter where, when, and how you put it. it doesn't matter what you think of his personality or autistic self cult, he was near invincible on the battlefield.
>The man was so far up his own ass that he compared himself to Charlemagne unironically. Glorifying historical figures, especially populist dictators without much in the way of real accomplishments, is a bad look.
So did almost every great monarch you mong
>its a bad look
back to plebbit you simpering queer, mindless contrarianism to the point of 'Napoleon was no tactical genius' is a bad look
>muh optics
>if you ignore everything he accomplished he didn't accomplish anything
post nose, angloid
Yeah, and Caesar compared himself to Alexander, so fricking what? If anything Napoleon's military victories are much more impressive, Charlie's grandpa did most of the work for him at Tours, he just had to genocide a bunch of unwashed vikangz and kick out the Lombards who were on their last legs anyway.
>Glorifying historical figures, especially populist dictators without much in the way of real accomplishments, is a bad look
You just dropped your purse, ma'am
Mongoloid, Napoleon was one of the greatest minds in military history. Charlemagne had abobawdely nothing on him.
See: Austerlitz, Jena...
Austerlitz took place because a moronic Russian monarch fell for Napoleon's psychological tricks instead of following his commander-in-chief's far superior strategies. Kutuzov later went on to defeat Napoleon when he invaded Russia.
>a succession of continental monarchies humiliating themselves because their military hierarchies were aristocratic rather than practical
>Kutuzov later went on to defeat Napoleon when he invaded Russia.
average /vst/ user's knowledge of history
>doesn't know anything about artillery
moron
Fredrick the II would have dabbed on Napoleon, he admitted it himself.
Boy Napoleon just outnumbered his opponents with cannons.
Napoleon reformed the entire french army in a way that allowed him to outpace the enemy and choose his own battles and allowed his marshals the flexibility they needed to take action on their own.
This would already be impressive enough but in battle he was also great at deception, scouting, defeating in detail and (almost) always had cavalry ready to maximize enemy casualties after a victory
You managed to say so much yet so little
That's not true. The one way how they managed to beat Napoleon later is to not target him in battle but go for his Marshals.
Blücher even copied Napoleon but also never managed to beat him alone, despite getting the chance to do so.
I think what fricks up napoleon and empire is that historically infantry v infantry fights weren't actually squares of people facing each other and soldiers would somewhat disperse and utilize cover against the enemy, basically every squad should be capable of skirmishing
Of course the game itself got bigger problems than the fights being historically inaccurate, like the incredibly moronic campaign and battle AIs that will loiter in front of cannon and move hundreds of 1 unit armies around europe
I remember in Waterloo (1970) the armies are marching into position and there's a shot where they have to go around and through some small bushes so their formation frays a bit
It's such a tiny thing but I realized then that that NEVER happens in Total War
Because unit pathing is the single heaviest processing task in gaming and TW games stress pathing more than usual because they have 20 blobs of 160 entities on each side. The reason older games have such poor and buggy pathing in general is because pathing bogs down CPUs and their solution to not turn the game into a stuttering mess whenever a unit has to round a corner is to put this process on low priority, so it just gets lost in queue when your system has to render a lot of other shit.
Pathing continues to be a modern touching point for computer science--the algorithms today are barely better than the ones we used 20 years ago so all that's changed is that systems have more resources available to throw at inefficient algorithms.
Dawn of War 2 simulated the kind of terrain-entity interactions you're looking for because it had squads of 3 units and rarely more than single-digit squads, and it still ran poorly. These things just don't scale up to large entity counts with current methods, and if you find a way to make it work Harvard will give you a million dollars.
At this point, I prefer abstracted unit sizes like Ultimate General
in real life you didn't automatically win just because your enemy took that one step over the magical range line and you got the first volley off. You also couldn't rely on your enemy suicide charging their cavalry at the start of every battle and then start readjusting their lines by marching their units back and forth each other in range of your lines.
That's the basic rundown of how to win in musket total wars, and other than often having lines, it has nothing to do with real life.
Buy 10+ line infantry
Put them in a big line
Let enemies walk into you
gg
I have no idea if it's true but in Napoleon tw i would always hit enemy lines from the side and it felt like it killed them twice as fast
it's called a flanking bonus
it's called enfilading fire
Didnt even know it was a thing, in my young brain I just thought to do that because there wouldn't be gaps between them when I shoot.
get 3 cannon explosive shot, win the game. Protect your flanks.
Put cannons in valleys and slight dips in the terrain wo they have to shoot slightly upwards.
If cannonballs come from above they just plant into the ground but if they fly at shallow angles they skim along the ground plowing through formations.
Until you have fire by rank, only the first rank of line infantry will shoot, so drag your lines out as thinly as possible.
There's little benefit to flanking and enveloping as line infantry lacks the accuracy to score good hits against the narrow side of a formation, so generally you should have some infantry dragged out long enough for their firing angles to cover every approaching enemy, then hold the rest in reserve.
Once the enemy has taken significant casualties, you can toggle off fire at will and have your reserve charge. Charge bonus means units charging will crush ones standing still shooting, but you want to soften them up from range first so that you can be certain their morale will break on the charge. Then your melee troops can just go down the line triggering chain routes.
Friendly fire is brutal, so managing fire at will is important.
Skirmishers fire from a crouched position, so they won't eat friendly fire as long as they're stationary, but they move upright so be mindful that it can be dangerous to reposition them once the main lines engage. They're also really, really fricking good in Napoleon but only average in Empire.
Cannons are the best thing on the battlefield and even with a significant deficit in troop numbers/strength, the side with more/better artillery will almost always win.
Cavalry is generally mediocre against line infantry even in the best conditions because they're functionally spear infantry, but they're great for running down skirmishers or sniping artillery the AI left unsupported. Generally, keep your cavs in reserve and use them to run down anything that routes rather than using them as main combat units. This also means you generally only want 2 or 3 units of them in an army
Empire's land combat is one of the worst in the series and generally just kind of dull. There isn't much to do, unit variety isvery limited and battles get repetitive quickly because the same thing always works.
Is Napoopan worth picking up?
I played Empire back when it came out and vaguely enjoyed it enough for 2 campaigns despite the broken AI and all the bugs and jank.
I have a hankering for a strategy game where I just watch artillery and gun lines mow things down but 30 bucks for a 12 year old game feels pretty steep. I have FotS but a lot of its design choices and campaign balance irk me and I abandoned my recent campaign, so I'm not sure if moving backwards in releases is going to get me what I want or just compound the things I already didn't like.
What did you not like about FOTS? I was playing Napoleon recently and it definitely plays more like a polished ETW in general.
>What did you not like about FOTS?
The economy is fricked. Like base S2, most 'econ' structures take more time to earn back their construction cost than there are turns in a campaign and the majority of your income ends up coming from trade.
Trade nodes are a trap and don't make enough money (even in a trade-dependent economy) to offset the cost in upkeep of both occupying them with trade ships and keeping an actual navy in the area to protect them, especially because navies need expensive repairs after every few battles (or every autoresolve)
Naval autoresolve is fricked--an extension of an issue with base Shogun 2. Rather than having a substantive algorithm like land battles, it just reduces a % of your fleet's guns/crew/hull every autoresolve regardless of the enemy's strength, essentially taxing you repair costs for using autoresolve
The AI is a mess and streams individual units at you rather than armies or fleets. This is especially annoying with navies as lategame there will be dozens of singular low-tier wooden ships streaming into your waters every turn, many of which are skirting around the FoW because the AI has perfect information and tries to avoid your assets. You can't autoresolve these fights or else 3 battles against wooden gunboats will destroy your entire lategame ironclad navy and you have to constantly move around checking the fog of war because if a single one gets past you it'll shoot your home port and shut off all trade income for a turn--which is likely to plunge your income deep into the negatives because the economy is fricked.
Land combat is boring because cannons start with explosive shells and will mostly just win battles entirely themselves.
Siege battles are awful because they recycle the base game's siege maps.
There's more but I'm going to run out of space. I just don't much care for fots.
I don't think any of that really crops up in NTW from what I remember, cannons are strong but can't win battles entirely by themselves and require more careful positioning than FOTS armstrong army deleters.
>give me the rundown on the basics of musket warfare
Set up a big single line, when the enemy engages you, fold the non-engaged part of the line into the side of the enemy. When one side of the enemy starts routing, fold that line into the side of the enemy too.
Never go on the offense. Offense is terrible. Bring an overwhelming amount of artillery. The AI is smart enough to realize it has to attack you, turning every battle into a defensive battle. Keep your artillery right behind your infantry so if the enemy artillery can hit them, you can hit their artillery with yours. always counter battery. Artillery is where you win the battles. Infantry are just meat shields and cleanup. You want something like 2 artillery per 1 infantry. You can do 3-1 but if they have cavalry you could have a harder time.
>You want something like 2 artillery per 1 infantry
Don't actually do this by the way, artillery are crazy expensive and have absurd upkeep. You're far better off having fewer artillery but more armies than one expensive army with the 'perfect' unit ratios. Just learn how to win battles with a little less and you'll have a lot more to make use of on the campaign map. And you'll almost never actually have to counter-battery enemy cannons, because the AI naturally separates their infantry and artillery and leaves them exposed as they advance. Just bring along a unit or 2 of cavalry you can use to snipe the guns once they're exposed.
>artillery are crazy expensive and have absurd upkeep
They are the most cost effective unit by far. Mid game you can wipe entire armies before they can even reach your infantry. Heavy artillery armies stacks the advantage so far in your favor you could run one stack from paris to moscow without ever having to reinforce. Late game one artillery is worth like 10 infantry because quicklime is moronicly strong.
But the accuracy
>They are the most cost effective unit by far
The issue remains that they cost a lot individually and need to be massed in a specific quantity and supported by sufficient infantry to reach the critical mass where they dominate. They are great when you need to confront your opponent's main force, but the majority of battles in a campaign are against undefended settlement garrisons or scattered stragglers of 3-5 units and you can generally just cover more ground, faster, by having more armies of cheap units and limiting cannons just to one more expensive force you use to eliminate the strongest enemy position.
canister shot is overpowered. simply place the cannon at front or on a high ground, wait til the AI enemy is in range and cut them to shreds. Have units directly behind the artillery ready to double time ahead for protection. You can win against almost unlimited enemy in sieges with them when they breach a wall
Anyone here plays Napoleon Total War on modern hardware? I kept on trying to find solutions online and tried uninstalling, compatibility modes, and changing drives. Reading around my CPU is too new and there is something about DRM protection on the latest i5s or something.
>Reading around my CPU is too new
The new ones cheap out on single core preformence, yes.
Not him, but that's not true. I bought an i5 12600k specifically because the single-core performance is so good.
Try this
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/
Is there any alternate history mod for E:TW or N:TW where the byzantine empire survived?
empire looks very dull, the combat sounds in general and the musket fire sounds are so bad, they sound like tiny children fire crackers. Its the most inconsiderate/loveless made tw game in the series.
Cannon sounds are good though.
I’ve been playing a lot of EU4 and now I want to colonize natives in 3D. Can I watch my line infantry gun down hordes of indigenous peoples and colonize their lands in Empire Total War?
Yeah, just pick colonial nation. France, Netherlands, England, Spain all have game heavly focused on colonies.
>1 province France.
>1 province Spain.
I will never forgive them for making the map like this and then making it incredibly hard to even mod the map like in Medieval 2 where you had Middle Earth and shit
/thread
is really all there the problem
France and Spain are very strong and quite isolated from eastern great powers.
Problem is just shitty AI who never guards them well and enables players to cheese it.
The map is great, though. There are a lot of details of terrain and structures within a province to fight through that make them interesting. Advancing on France is one of the highlights of any campaign because the province is enormous and there's so much different terrain, rivers and towns and fields and mountain, to work through before you actually close in on Paris.
It's one of the great things about Empire that was lost with future games. Increasing the overall number of settlements and subdividing territories just means you can crawl from settlement to settlement and virtually all of your battles in a campaign, offensive or defensive, are siege battles. Empire's map, and huge, wealthy provinces full of stuff provided a completely different experience when pushing through a map and gave you a reason to actually have field battles--often several in succession, before you could reach the major settlement and take over the whole province.
>feel like playing etw again
>game crashes in the first battle
The true Empire experience
I found the Rights of Man mod with few graphics updated to be the far best way. Million different units just unnecessarily bloat the game and minor factions are just not made to be playable on this map.
Funny, I just started an E:TW campaign the other day. Playing as Russia, dealt with Crimea and Dagestan first so by the time I got around to attacking Courland so I could access the Baltic all of the major European powers had formed a web of alliances. The instant I invaded Courland everyone went to war with everyone else.
I didn't mean to destroy Europe, I just wanted some trade lanes without Barbary pirates.
I actually hope this game gets the next mobile port since Rome and Medieval 2 have been good on Android and I think the battles in Empire would lend themselves well to mobile since they're less dynamic and more about positioning.
Empire 2 never ever.
Anyone try the Empire Total War 2 Mod? I played it through a few times and it's pretty fun. I think that having 2,500 units is a bit overkill, especially considering some seem hugely esoteric or even joke units (I saw some Pirates of the Carribean stuff for example).
I just love all the extra factions you can play as though, the music is also pretty slick.
Theres too much bloat and minor factions besides portugal denmark and mughals are too tiny on map with such a large regions that i lose any immersion as you cant follow historic objectives (venice cant conquer adriatic coast, denmark has no schleswig-holstein etc.)
I don't mind the ton of factions, but I do find that the bloat in units is too much, and often leads to even more silly things than the base game. EG: Fighting the Thirteen Colonies and their army is 90% 'Voodoo Priestess' units that hurl fricking fireworks or something.
I've been playing it. I don't know if this is a thing in the vanilla game too, but as Sweden I can get trade agreements with literally almost everyone and reach absurd income each turn, whereas the AI doesn't do this. It's just stupid. Also I thought I would be surrounded by hostile Denmark-Norway, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia, but Poland-Lithuania and Russia want to ally me, so I can just take all of them one by one. They have the historical grievances modifier, but apparently it doesn't matter, even if I constantly get minus relations from sabotaging Russians with my million spies. Maybe my absurd income made the AI not want to start hostilities.
Also the Mughals want to trade for Estonia every turn...
Also the google translated unit descriptions are shit, and the different unique companies should be actually limited. Now they're just different skins with mostly the same stats. You can make your whole army of the same local company.
I don't know what the point of the plug bayonet tech is since you can seemingly get to attach bayonets if you just have a barracks or whatever. There's too many units to make sense of it all. It doesn't matter if I get "Line Infantry" or upgrade tech and get one of five new different "Line Infantry Swedish" or "Regiment of Foot" etc. Some of the specific named units are just worse for a larger amount of money. You can pay more for having one less point of morale if you want, but you have to read through all those redundant units to find out.
Also the cannons don't really know how to shoot over your own guys and the canister shot fires up into the air, spraying bullets a mile behind the enemy. This shit didn't happen in Napoleon.
I agree with all the points you made, the concept is fun to play around with but the amount of units is just too much to the point of absurdity (including some strange things like being able to recruit 'Greek Female Infantry' in Switzerland for example).
The trade agreement thing I'm not sure of, I tried the mod out on Normal difficulty, so I thought it was just because the game was an easy setting, but it might be a mod issue?
Ez mode: spam line inf on max width until you get fire by rank, then go 3 ranks deep. Encircle the enemy so youre firing on them on all angles. Just keep shootin til they dead.
Complex mode: integrate cannons into your line with cannister shot, one unit between each line inf unit, and put howitzers on back line, and flank with some cav to frick up their line inf from behind. Round shot is useless though, only go cannister, shrapnel, percussion n quicklime
Man this game is frustrating, you are constantly warring against 5 different faction and each of them refuse peace, even if you occupy their capital.
10 turns in with prussia and I am at war with poland, austria, england, bavaria, saxony and sweden
Old TW games have very jank diplomacy. Factions hate you for being 'expansionist' but there's really no way to prosecute wars effectively except to take territory. So much of your economy is spread out in little nodes on the map and you can't protect them from 20-stacks of line infantry except by confronting their armies on the field and destroying them, but that just sends the remnants scattering, which can retreat an unlimited number of times, and leaves them open to raid your economy right after because there's no actual way to block their movement. Better to just constantly push the line of battle forward by taking territory, so the enemies armies aren't in your industrial heartland--but then everyone hates you for it, and they hate you more the more you fight them and the more you win, no matter how bad continued war is for them.
They made diplomacy (and various other campaign mechanics) a little better in future games but it's really silly that they depicted era defined by the strategy of pushing for the enemy capital to force a treaty and didn't bother to update their diplomacy system from Medieval 2.
Darthmod makes the game really awesome. Doesn’t do anything crazy still plays great just feels more like it should.
Last time I played Darthmod it bloated the unit pool by adding like 20 'unique units' to each nation.
At least they felt meaningful, instead of being four different types of female militia or something similarly stupid. A couple of named famous regiments mixed in with the nameless cannon fodder brought some flavour. And since they were capped it didnt go full moron like it does in ETW2
Arty center demolishes the moronic AI in Empire. Have 2 or 3 units of arty in center with cannister, then use line infantry to form a shallow V on either side of the arty. The AI will literally beeline your arty and walk straight into encirclement every, single, time.
>Napooleon
I sleep
Total War musket games are so inaccurate.
It's literally one big line vs other big line with no actual reserves.
Napoleonic battles are too complex and covered too large territories to be simulated in present day total war.
Pitched battles were just endgame of earlier manouvers, which dumb ai is too stupid to simulate and cant really be done on turn based map
>It's literally one big line vs other big line with no actual reserves.
basically US civil war then
Pretty much
Americans don't know anything of strategy. They were a buncha milita farmers with guns in the civil war.
I just have a big line of men, have them fire a volley, fix bayonets, charge, then repeat until victory or death
Is Napoleon any better, this shit is just plain unplayable for how terrible the ai is.
it always was better.rd422p876hgkprinceofmacedon6hGhtyuo