Total War Encyclopaedia

Basic Unit Statistics (can be modified by difficulty level, arts, skills, traits and retainers)

Recruitment Cost	2510
Upkeep Cost	320
Melee Attack	4	11%
Charge Bonus	9	18%
Bonus vs Cavalry	0	0%
Range	250	38%
Accuracy	20	20%
Reloading Skill	75	75%
Ammunition	500	625%
Melee Defence	4	11%
Armour	1	6%
Morale	4	8%

Strengths & Weaknesses

• Very fast rate of fire.
• Average accuracy.
• Weak in melee.
• Average morale.

Requires

• Buildings:

Description

Industrial machinery, applied to the battlefield business of killing.

Gatling guns are a form of artillery, although they are only really useful against men. The guns have an exceptionally high rate of fire, good range, and do terrible slaughter. Accuracy is adequate, although this would be considered far too good by anyone being targeted! With numerically small crews, Gatling guns are weak in close combat, but this is not their role. They should be used to deliver devastating fire support. Dr Richard J Gatling invented his mechanical masterpiece as a way of making war less horrible. He genuinely felt that if he could bring superior firepower to the battlefield, there would be a lessened need for soldiers to go into harm's way. Instead, he gave armies a new way to kill on a massive scale. The Gatling gun was not an automatic weapon. The user had to crank the gun, so that as each barrels rotated, it was loaded, fired and the spent cartridge extracted, the equivalent of having several rifles fired one after another. Unlike a machine gun, however, it handled stoppages and misfires as a matter of course: a defective cartridge would simply be pulled from a breech and a fresh one loaded as the barrels went around. Electrically-powered Gatling guns are still in use today. The GAU-8/A Avenger in the nose of the USAF's Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft is a truly formidable weapon. Occasionally, smaller "mini-guns" also feature as exceptionally macho weapons for the noisier kind of Hollywood action hero.