Artillery - New Rules

For those who have played the new Shiloh Campaign you are probably aware that there is a new optional handling of Artillery captures in the game. It changes quite drastically how capturing of guns occurs and how victory points are allocated for the captures. I made some tests to see what happens:

First only guns killed by counter battery fire now show up on the casualty display. This makes keeping track of artillery a bit more difficult and confusing since captured guns do show up on the VP side of the display.

If you capture a battery by melee you will see your VP for artillery go up by # guns X 30. The guns will be marked as "Captured" on the unit display.

If you remain in the hex with the gun, next turn you will be able to reface it or fire it. But you can not limber it. No recrewing an enemy battery.

On the turn after or whenever you have troops that have not moved on a captured gun you can spike the guns. This makes them unfireable and reduces their VP worth from 30 to 15 for the capturing side.

If the guns were originally your own and you recaptured them you can recrew them so that they can be moved the next turn. Assuming they haven't been spiked.

You receive no VP's for a battery unless you occupy the hex. If you move off the guns immediately lose their "Captured" status and you lose the VP's. For occupying test any unit counts (officers, wagons, guns, or troops). However, only infantry/cavalry units can fire or recrew guns.

Limbering guns now will make your artillery even more vulnerable now since melee against them results in capture instead of loss of guns as before. Not only can they shoot your crew easier but the melee is easier (no defensive fire). This makes cavalry in your rear a dire threat. One oddity, they stay limbered after capture. The enemy can't make them change formation so they can fire them. This is a bug that will probably be corrected later.

At the end of the battle he who occupies the battery hexes gets the Victory Points. This is going to be worse than the end of game run for the VP hexes. Guns will be all over the field of battle.

Unverified: I believe the guns attack factor is halved when fired by occupying enemy in addition to the crew quality modifier of "F".

I am sure I have missed some combinations so those playing Shiloh start watching for any more oddities of these new rules. But here is one very critical result of the change:

In scenarios where the Yankee's have the big batteries I actually found I could kill more Yankee infantry by shooting crews. In a Vicksburg battle I killed the crews of a couple of large batteries that tried to move to close to a crossing in support. Then every time they recrewed the guns I killed them again. Infantry fire that normally only kills 10-20 men will typically take out a crew. On a large battery recrewing may take 100-200 men so your shot that would have killed a few infantry actually takes out a small regiment equivalent. I did it about five times before they finally gave up recrewing.