How to Aim Artillery

Hey what's up guys it's Oakley and I'm going to be starting my tutorial series Tactics and Tutorials. So we're going to be covering the devastating effects of artillery. Now I'm not going to be telling you where to place your artillery, when and where to recruit them, blah blah blah, what I'm going to be talking about in this video is actually how to take control of your artillery. So once you do that you have to keep in mind that there are different types of artillery and different ranges and different situations that'll call for different uses of these artillery. So let's go ahead and take a look at the artillery themselves. As I said there's going to be three different types. Let's go ahead and start with the catapults. So catapults are basically your standard siege equipment and the animations are beautiful. They have high arcs of fire and can get very long distances. Something around a 45 degree angle will shoot you furthest. Hit insert to control the army, left click to fire, right click to zoom. Now you'll see from a distance units are very hard to hit and because your artillery have high arcs of fire there's a certain amount of variability. So even if you shoot in the same spot twice you probably won't hit the same spot so this makes hitting targets from a distance very very hard especially if they're moving. Now what I like to do is actually pick an area in front of the troops and just wait for them by the time I think they're in range. What you can also do is wait for your nearby allied artillery to start shooting the ones controlled by the computer and take that as a cue for when to shoot. You can see when you throw out these bolts you kind of feel like a goth mog and keep in mind you can also zoom which is a very very useful feature once they get closer and you want to finesse your shots a bit and even on the ricochet you can have some pretty good shots and yeah. The best use is going to be against walls ideally but you can consider your spears to be a wall and the enemy pinned against them are going to be easy targets especially when they get up close like this you can just tear through them. So even the smaller catapults will do a lot of damage. So again employ the zoom ability if you want for higher accuracy. Then you have these big ballista again these are for sieges but they kind of do the trick for large infantry blobs. These are going to have a lower arc of fire and so they don't have quite the range of artillery but they are a bit more accurate and when they do finally hit you'll find that they actually can tear through units and have more of a devastating impact. So what you want to do is I find aim a little lower than the infantry you're targeting. One because they're moving forward. Two because I tend to find these overshoot a little bit and if you get good enough you can even shoot over the heads of your troops like this and you know as I said really tear through the enemy units and do a lot to destroy them. You can also use the zoom ability again right click to zoom it's very useful. As I said you want to aim a little bit above your troops or sort of towards the middle of their bodies to their legs somewhere in there. The next part is going to be these dart throwers. These are going to be very fun to use I like them a lot. Not as devastating but you will see they have their own uses. So these are going to be low range and low arc projectiles. They're only meant for picking off a couple men and they pretty much excel at picking off units at close quarters. You can see here I'm just you know taking one man down, two men down and now that's not going to be very big in the large scheme of things but keep in mind that when you employ you know against mass troops you can do significant damage because these have high reload rates or if you actually want to start zooming in you can pretty accurately pick off high value targets so maybe a general, maybe it's some horseman or an elephant. So this is where these are going to excel when you control them is going to be to zoom in and pick off very high value targets. You can even see right here I'm going to pick off one of the troops engaged in combat. Yeah I totally meant to do that. Killed one of the Greek troops right there and when they approach I'm going to hit them again so these are actually very fun to use. It kind of makes a mini game in Rome so I would say you should definitely go check it out very very fun. Just mass your spears and then go to work with your artillery. So that's been it for this episode I hope you enjoyed. Make sure in the comments below to let me know if you're having any difficulties or trouble with specific things and I can go ahead and try and do a tutorial for it. Anyways thanks so much. See you next time.