[Religion and Revolution]: Swords, Guns, Cannons and Ammunition

[devolution]

I am very much in favor of introducing the artillery profession for the following reasons:

- Currently, the cannon yield is only useful if building ships or artillery units. The problem is that these builds "compete" in economic terms with all the other options and hammers are generally better spent elsewhere. In my opinion, the buildable artilley is also too expensive.
- The problem is worse for the AI, it cannot coordinate artillery production at all, so the cannon yield is almost useless for them, they are better of producing muskets since they
know how to equip infantry and cavalry at least. (The AI actually ends up selling their cannons in Europe since they cannot decide what to do with them )
- Flavor and consistency, the other types of military units are professions, so why should not artillery be treated the same way.

 

[Sarin]

Not all non-arty military units are professions. In fact...most of them are not. There are only four military professions available to colonies (five if you count scouts), with kings having their parallel, while there are eight different land military units that are not implemented as professions.

If you can teach AI how to use them, it will be fine, however, I believe that it will call for removing the light-heavy artillery distinction. It will become meaningless for player, as switching a unit between those two types will become available and quite easy.

 

[devolution]

I was referring to (general) unit classes. We have infantry, cavalry, artillery. We could make the combat model more interesting if we'd were to have light and heavy distinctions\variants (possibly excluding the scout).
And yes, I am primarly interested in how the AI deals with things, the game is already filled to the brim with features that it cannot use and I would personally never introduce anything unless the AI can deal with it.

EDIT: I forgot to clarify that I would leave the current artillery units available, in other words the new artillery profession would come in addition to the existing (non-profession) artillery variant.
We could call it colonial artillery (I'm sure we could bikeshed it a bit better....) and I would be happy to discuss its stats etc.
Don't hold your breath for this feature though, as other stuff has much higher priority!

 

[Schmiddie]

I have already tested what happens if light and heavy artillery would be professions - I did a complete overhaul of this units/professions. However, at that time I was not able to implement how an artillery profession can bombard - since currently only units can use the "bombard" feature. Therefore I deleted this test version on my harddrive.

Indeed....also an artilley profession would require cannons, so this would be no difference to the existing system - but it would be easier to use them since you do not need to wait until the hammers have been produced.

We will think about this feature in the future. Maybe we can pick up an overhaul of the military units and professions together with a feature that allows different professions in different eras (i.e. developments).