What to do with capured artillery ?

[GMcClellan]

Must be a typo because all the other rules concerning captured artillery sounds logical to me. If it's a game limitation, It should be regarded as a bug and needs to be fixed considering how important artillery rules are to the game.

It's to represent that the infantry unit in question is now manning the guns. You may be able to argue that you should be able to detach enough men to represent the gun crews, but that's not the engine currently.

[Verdun1916]

Page 18 of the manual says:

'it is possible to capture enemy artillery, either as a result of melee or by overrunning the artillery
with charging cavalry. While the captured artillery is stacked in the same hex with a unit of the
opposing side, it can be turned and fired in the next turn. If the artillery unit requires setting up it
may not be used by the capturing army if they turn it. Fire once captured is automatically halved
and the battery cannot be moved to another hex. If the artillery unit is abandoned, then the
owning side can recrew the battery and use it normally. Captured artillery units count full value
towards victory conditions.'

The way I read this is if you have a unit in the same hex with a captured artillery unit you can turn and fire it the next turn after capture. However the guns will fire at 1/2 value and can't be moved from the hex they were captured in. The part about artillery that requires setting up is a little confusing I think. It might mean that setup artillery can't be used at all, or maybe so long as it is not turned it can be used? Hard to tell.

I wonder why captured artillery needs to be in the same hex with a unit from the opposing side.

Could be a game engine limitation ( captured artillery retains the original units “colors/bases”) , but if you can shoot with it perhaps you should need to maintain the ownership by force ;

It's intended to be so to simulate reality. Gunners were specialists and in a minority in any 18th century army. If you captured an enemy gun or battery you had no spare artillery men off your own you could just send in to man captured guns. So if you wanted to use the captured guns then and there, it would have been men of the infantry or cavalry unit that captured them who would have to turn them around, load and fired them. The prievious owners would off course be either dead, wounded or have run away for the most part. And even if you managed to capture a few of them they would not be very willing to help you use the guns to fire on their fellow brothers in arms. This would off course impact the efficiency of both loading, firing and hitting with captured guns as infantry or cavalry, even though they knew the basics of loading and firing cannons or mortars were no artillerymen. All this is simulated in the WDS games by the fact that you have to keep a friendly unit in the same hex as the captured battery to man them, the firing stats for firing a captured battery is reduced and you can't move the guns other than turning them. The latter is logical considering that the vast majority needed horse and limber to be moved. Said horses or limbers were not kept next to the guns during a battle, but a ways to the rear. So in a situation were a battery was captured, the defenders would have had a good chance off atleat saving the horses (those that had not been killed or wounded allready) and the limber. So it was not likely that the new owners of the guns would manage to capture the horses and limbers aswell in a battle situation and hence they could not just go gallavanting around the battlefield with the guns they had just captured.

So no, this is not a bug.

[TheGrayMouser]

I wonder why captured artillery needs to be in the same hex with a unit from the opposing side.

Could be a game engine limitation ( captured artillery retains the original units “colors/bases”) , but if you can shoot with it perhaps you should need to maintain the ownership by force ;

It's intended to be so to simulate reality. Gunners were specialists and in a minority in any 18th century army. If you captured an enemy gun or battery you had no spare artillery men off your own you could just send in to man captured guns. So if you wanted to use the captured guns then and there, it would have been men of the infantry or cavalry unit that captured them who would have to turn them around, load and fired them. The prievious owners would off course be either dead, wounded or have run away for the most part. And even if you managed to capture a few of them they would not be very willing to help you use the guns to fire on their fellow brothers in arms. This would off course impact the efficiency of both loading, firing and hitting with captured guns as infantry or cavalry, even though they knew the basics of loading and firing cannons or mortars were no artillerymen. All this is simulated in the WDS games by the fact that you have to keep a friendly unit in the same hex as the captured battery to man them, the firing stats for firing a captured battery is reduced and you can't move the guns other than turning them. The latter is logical considering that the vast majority needed horse and limber to be moved. Said horses or limbers were not kept next to the guns during a battle, but a ways to the rear. So in a situation were a battery was captured, the defenders would have had a good chance off atleat saving the horses (those that had not been killed or wounded allready) and the limber. So it was not likely that the new owners of the guns would manage to capture the horses and limbers aswell in a battle situation and hence they could not just go gallavanting around the battlefield with the guns they had just captured.

So no, this is not a bug.

No one said it was a bug that I’m aware of , someone questioned why a unit needs to remain in the same hex as a captured artillery piece. A 500 man battalion is really not needed to crew a few captured guns. My guess is it would not be simple to change the engine to allow a captured artillery gun to fire without a unit with it. ( whether it would desirable or not is a different question)
I am fine with the way it is, except when you try to move units thru a hex containing captured artillery , all movement stops and you get the “ captured artilley “ dialogue pop up. Never capture artillery in an important crossroad haha!!

[Verdun1916]

Could be a game engine limitation ( captured artillery retains the original units “colors/bases”) , but if you can shoot with it perhaps you should need to maintain the ownership by force ;

It's intended to be so to simulate reality. Gunners were specialists and in a minority in any 18th century army. If you captured an enemy gun or battery you had no spare artillery men off your own you could just send in to man captured guns. So if you wanted to use the captured guns then and there, it would have been men of the infantry or cavalry unit that captured them who would have to turn them around, load and fired them. The prievious owners would off course be either dead, wounded or have run away for the most part. And even if you managed to capture a few of them they would not be very willing to help you use the guns to fire on their fellow brothers in arms. This would off course impact the efficiency of both loading, firing and hitting with captured guns as infantry or cavalry, even though they knew the basics of loading and firing cannons or mortars were no artillerymen. All this is simulated in the WDS games by the fact that you have to keep a friendly unit in the same hex as the captured battery to man them, the firing stats for firing a captured battery is reduced and you can't move the guns other than turning them. The latter is logical considering that the vast majority needed horse and limber to be moved. Said horses or limbers were not kept next to the guns during a battle, but a ways to the rear. So in a situation were a battery was captured, the defenders would have had a good chance off atleat saving the horses (those that had not been killed or wounded allready) and the limber. So it was not likely that the new owners of the guns would manage to capture the horses and limbers aswell in a battle situation and hence they could not just go gallavanting around the battlefield with the guns they had just captured.

So no, this is not a bug.

No one said it was a bug that I’m aware of , someone questioned why a unit needs to remain in the same hex as a captured artillery piece. A 500 man battalion is really not needed to crew a few captured guns. My guess is it would not be simple to change the engine to allow a captured artillery gun to fire without a unit with it. ( whether it would desirable or not is a different question)
I am fine with the way it is, except when you try to move units thru a hex containing captured artillery , all movement stops and you get the “ captured artilley “ dialogue pop up. Never capture artillery in an important crossroad haha!!

Dion mentioned it as a bug in one of the comments above I believe.
No, maybe not, but then again even if the batallion leave a detachment behind (in game this could be simulated with the recrew function present in the ACW series for example, nut sure if the 7YW has this function though) the rest of the batallion would block the guns anyway preventing them from firing if they advance beyond the guns (unless the captured battery contains mortars or possibly howitzers as they could technically fire over ones own troops no matter the terrain.). Unless the terrain would allow for over shooting.
But it's also logical that an infantry unit has to stop when entering the same hex as a captured/abandoned gun battery. After all the individual cannons we see represents batteries containing multiple guns, and all the equipment that whent with it. This would pose a substantial hinder of the strict linear movement of the day. It would take time for a batallion to navigate itself through/past the battery with it's guns, limbers and possibly dead horses and possibly even fascines and other crude fieldworks to reform on the other side of it. This is represented with the unit beeing forced to a stop when entering said hex.

[TheGrayMouser]

It's intended to be so to simulate reality. Gunners were specialists and in a minority in any 18th century army. If you captured an enemy gun or battery you had no spare artillery men off your own you could just send in to man captured guns. So if you wanted to use the captured guns then and there, it would have been men of the infantry or cavalry unit that captured them who would have to turn them around, load and fired them. The prievious owners would off course be either dead, wounded or have run away for the most part. And even if you managed to capture a few of them they would not be very willing to help you use the guns to fire on their fellow brothers in arms. This would off course impact the efficiency of both loading, firing and hitting with captured guns as infantry or cavalry, even though they knew the basics of loading and firing cannons or mortars were no artillerymen. All this is simulated in the WDS games by the fact that you have to keep a friendly unit in the same hex as the captured battery to man them, the firing stats for firing a captured battery is reduced and you can't move the guns other than turning them. The latter is logical considering that the vast majority needed horse and limber to be moved. Said horses or limbers were not kept next to the guns during a battle, but a ways to the rear. So in a situation were a battery was captured, the defenders would have had a good chance off atleat saving the horses (those that had not been killed or wounded allready) and the limber. So it was not likely that the new owners of the guns would manage to capture the horses and limbers aswell in a battle situation and hence they could not just go gallavanting around the battlefield with the guns they had just captured.

So no, this is not a bug.

No one said it was a bug that I’m aware of , someone questioned why a unit needs to remain in the same hex as a captured artillery piece. A 500 man battalion is really not needed to crew a few captured guns. My guess is it would not be simple to change the engine to allow a captured artillery gun to fire without a unit with it. ( whether it would desirable or not is a different question)
I am fine with the way it is, except when you try to move units thru a hex containing captured artillery , all movement stops and you get the “ captured artilley “ dialogue pop up. Never capture artillery in an important crossroad haha!!

Dion mentioned it as a bug in one of the comments above I believe.
No, maybe not, but then again even if the batallion leave a detachment behind (in game this could be simulated with the recrew function present in the ACW series for example, nut sure if the 7YW has this function though) the rest of the batallion would block the guns anyway preventing them from firing if they advance beyond the guns (unless the captured battery contains mortars or possibly howitzers as they could technically fire over ones own troops no matter the terrain.). Unless the terrain would allow for over shooting.
But it's also logical that an infantry unit has to stop when entering the same hex as a captured/abandoned gun battery. After all the individual cannons we see represents batteries containing multiple guns, and all the equipment that whent with it. This would pose a substantial hinder of the strict linear movement of the day. It would take time for a batallion to navigate itself through/past the battery with it's guns, limbers and possibly dead horses and possibly even fascines and other crude fieldworks to reform on the other side of it. This is represented with the unit beeing forced to a stop when entering said hex.

I know what your saying with all the equipment and debris from artillery, however the phenomenon I’m referring to is after you already have captured an enemy artillery, for ever after in game when you have units moving thru THAT hex , whether drag or drop or one hex at a time, it causes the gameplay to stop because of the dialogue pop up. No actual movement hinderence actually occurs to the units you are moving, they don’t lose move points or anything, you just need to needlessly click more to get them to continue.
As far as I know, captured artillery has the same stack value as non captured, so it really shouldn’t be harder to move thru one or the other.
Be a nice option to be able to destroy/spike the guns though.
Cheers!

[Verdun1916]

No one said it was a bug that I’m aware of , someone questioned why a unit needs to remain in the same hex as a captured artillery piece. A 500 man battalion is really not needed to crew a few captured guns. My guess is it would not be simple to change the engine to allow a captured artillery gun to fire without a unit with it. ( whether it would desirable or not is a different question)
I am fine with the way it is, except when you try to move units thru a hex containing captured artillery , all movement stops and you get the “ captured artilley “ dialogue pop up. Never capture artillery in an important crossroad haha!!

Dion mentioned it as a bug in one of the comments above I believe.
No, maybe not, but then again even if the batallion leave a detachment behind (in game this could be simulated with the recrew function present in the ACW series for example, nut sure if the 7YW has this function though) the rest of the batallion would block the guns anyway preventing them from firing if they advance beyond the guns (unless the captured battery contains mortars or possibly howitzers as they could technically fire over ones own troops no matter the terrain.). Unless the terrain would allow for over shooting.
But it's also logical that an infantry unit has to stop when entering the same hex as a captured/abandoned gun battery. After all the individual cannons we see represents batteries containing multiple guns, and all the equipment that whent with it. This would pose a substantial hinder of the strict linear movement of the day. It would take time for a batallion to navigate itself through/past the battery with it's guns, limbers and possibly dead horses and possibly even fascines and other crude fieldworks to reform on the other side of it. This is represented with the unit beeing forced to a stop when entering said hex.

I know what your saying with all the equipment and debris from artillery, however the phenomenon I’m referring to is after you already have captured an enemy artillery, for ever after in game when you have units moving thru THAT hex , whether drag or drop or one hex at a time, it causes the gameplay to stop because of the dialogue pop up. No actual movement hinderence actually occurs to the units you are moving, they don’t lose move points or anything, you just need to needlessly click more to get them to continue.
As far as I know, captured artillery has the same stack value as non captured, so it really shouldn’t be harder to move thru one or the other.
Be a nice option to be able to destroy/spike the guns though.
Cheers!

Ah ok! Sorry I misunderstood you then. But now I get what you were refering to.

Indeed it would. You can spike guns in the ACW titles. That function should be in all the black-powder era games. It should be usable for both captured enemy guns but also for ones own artillery so you can spike guns that are at risk off beeing captured by the enemy.

[LarkinVB]

I know what your saying with all the equipment and debris from artillery, however the phenomenon I’m referring to is after you already have captured an enemy artillery, for ever after in game when you have units moving thru THAT hex , whether drag or drop or one hex at a time, it causes the gameplay to stop because of the dialogue pop up. No actual movement hinderence actually occurs to the units you are moving, they don’t lose move points or anything, you just need to needlessly click more to get them to continue.
As far as I know, captured artillery has the same stack value as non captured, so it really shouldn’t be harder to move thru one or the other.

I will change it to an on map display instead of the pop up dialog, so it will not interrupt.

[TheGrayMouser]

I know what your saying with all the equipment and debris from artillery, however the phenomenon I’m referring to is after you already have captured an enemy artillery, for ever after in game when you have units moving thru THAT hex , whether drag or drop or one hex at a time, it causes the gameplay to stop because of the dialogue pop up. No actual movement hinderence actually occurs to the units you are moving, they don’t lose move points or anything, you just need to needlessly click more to get them to continue.
As far as I know, captured artillery has the same stack value as non captured, so it really shouldn’t be harder to move thru one or the other.

I will change it to an on map display instead of the pop up dialog, so it will not interrupt.

Fantastic !

[S Trauth]

Spike guns - I don't know - did they do it in all periods that the engine is going to cover? I kind of doubt it -in some periods they wouldn't have conceptualised that- and in fact artillery was more important than the damage it caused in firing - even if the odd pleb understood what to do -it would have had the impact of basically killing a high value capture on the field as opposed to having an asset to be able to ransom.

And I imagine it would have applied to REN (above) because I know it applied to the period not too far afterwards that way. The guns were largely used for sieges in any event- and too big of a caliber, as well as the limited to no mobility they'd have on a non-siege battlefield.

--

One thing that I ran into in SYW (am not saying I disagreed with the decision) -but you could take an arty unit and then not fire it because in taking the hex because of the unit size in the OOB -technically you were then trying to fire (even a captured piece) in an overstacked hex - which wasn't allowed; irrespective of it being captured or not.

REN can work a little differently but that would be due to the OOB coding sizes, and not a change in the engine (off the top of my head).

[Verdun1916]

Spike guns - I don't know - did they do it in all periods that the engine is going to cover? I kind of doubt it -in some periods they wouldn't have conceptualised that- and in fact artillery was more important than the damage it caused in firing - even if the odd pleb understood what to do -it would have had the impact of basically killing a high value capture on the field as opposed to having an asset to be able to ransom.

And I imagine it would have applied to REN (above) because I know it applied to the period not too far afterwards that way. The guns were largely used for sieges in any event- and too big of a caliber, as well as the limited to no mobility they'd have on a non-siege battlefield.

--

One thing that I ran into in SYW (am not saying I disagreed with the decision) -but you could take an arty unit and then not fire it because in taking the hex because of the unit size in the OOB -technically you were then trying to fire (even a captured piece) in an overstacked hex - which wasn't allowed; irrespective of it being captured or not.

REN can work a little differently but that would be due to the OOB coding sizes, and not a change in the engine (off the top of my head).

Well for as long as there have been muzzle loaded metal cannon there has been spiking off them through out European military history. Guns were never ransomed, knights were, and later officers, but not guns. Artillery was high value targets for capture yes, so they could be 1. incorperated into ones own artillery park to increase your own number of guns and 2. as trophys of victory. However the first one was by far the most important reason. The reason for that was simply that artillery was extremely expensive to manufacture. More so in the medieval period and early renaissance than later. But it wasn't until the industrial revolution that artillery became simpler and less expensive to produce in large numbers.
Hence it was important to prevent the enemy from capturing your own guns not just from a purely tactical standpoint on the battlefield, but also on a stratigic and economical level. If you lost an artillery piece that meant you were down one gun that could not be easily, nor cheaply, replaced while the enemy was up one gun which he would use against you given the chance. So destroying/damaging them became important very early on from keeping the enemy from beeing able to use your own artillery against you.
Off course spiking was not a permanent measure for rendering an artillery piece useless. After a battle a spiked gun could be brought back to working order again by either removing the spike or drilling a new touch hole. But it was not something that could be done on the battlefield, or necessarily in the field. But it was still just a temporary way of putting a gun out of action that would in no way the enemy from beeing able to use it again at some later stage if he had managed to capture it. But that also gave you the possibillity to recapture it and but it back into service yourself.
When attacking enemy artillery off course you wanted to capture them and eventually be able to haul them away for the above mentioned reasons. But if the chance was high or immennet of the enemy recapturing them before you could do that, spiking them, blowing them up or simply knocking the wheels off it's carriage was certainly not unheard off to prevent the enemy from simply remanning them and resume firing on you with it through out the era of muzzle loading artillery. Off course talking about the scope of a single battle here since neither spiking nor knocking wheels off carriages puts an muzzle loading artillery piece out of action permenantly. And it would not hinder anyone from ransoming them back to the enemy later, although I have never heard of one single insident were field artillery was ransomed back. Unless you were refering to the ransoming of a fortress or castle containing artillery. In that case artillery within it might be part of the ransoming deal. However that didn't stop a garrison from spiking or destroying the guns anyway before handing the fortress or castle to it's new owners. This was done at Bohus fästning, a fortress in what is now Sweden. It was built in 1308 and destroyed in the mid 18th century. Through out it's history it changed hands several times between Norway (later Denmark-Norway) and Sweden. In 1658 it was finally handed over to Sweden through the Roskilde peace treaty. Before the Danish garrison handed it over to the Swedish they spiked the guns aswell as destroyed everything they could within it, incuding the kitchen.
The Danes also ransomed Älvsborgs fästning, another very disputed fortress in what is today Sweden, back to the Swedish on two occasions, in 1570 and in 1613. On both occasions the Danes damaged or destroyed everything they could before handing it back to the Swedes. This including the spiking of any artillery they could not bring with them when they left.

And yes it is true that during the 13th century artillery mostly consisted of siege bombards in Europe. However field artillery/foot artillery for battlefield use was becomming a common thing within most European armies by the mid 14th century, albite in small numbers compared to later. And field/foot artillery had been in use in China since atleast the mid 13th century.

So the option of spiking both ones own and captured enemy guns is certainly relevant to all the current titles in this game series. And in the end it's up to the player to choose if he wishes to spike artillery pieces or not. But historically speaking it was done through out the age of muzzle loading artillery.