Windbusche Jaegers (ETW Unit)

Windbusche Jaegers are elite light infantry unique to Austria in Empire: Total War.

Game Description

Windbüchsenjäger are woodsmen, hunters and poachers – men with a good grasp of field craft. Their speciality is skirmishing, to disrupt enemy formations with harassing fire, or to stop the enemy doing the same to their comrades. Unlike other light troops, however, they carry airguns. These weapons give them a distinctly unfair advantage!

Apart from the fact that is silent, with no muzzle flash or smoke, the windbüchse (“wind rifle”) has a 20-round magazine and fires as quickly as the jäger can pull the trigger. The gun can drive a ball through a plank (or a man) at 100 paces, but the velocity of shots drops as the air reservoir empties. Austrian gunsmiths have produced a deadly, if delicate, weapon in the windbüchse! However, it needs a highly trained and very fit man to use it properly: pumping up the air reservoir is a huge effort.

Historically, these airguns were not a success. They were quiet, but they did not work after rough treatment, something that was inevitable in battle. Napoleon Bonaparte hated them and decreed that any captured “assassin” with an airgun was to be executed, not treated as a soldier.

Overview

Windbusche Jaegers are the Austrian functional equivalents of the riflemen available to nearly every other faction. Simply put, Windbusche Jaegers are the finest rifle infantry available to any faction. Although they have 25 percent less men than regular light infantry, they make up for this deficiency through their superiority in accuracy and their much higher fire rate. Unforunately, only two regiments of windbusche jaegers can be recruited at any time, meaning that Austria will have to rely heavily on grenzers, jaegers, and colonial light infantry for most of their armies. Windbusche Jaegers also require their own unique technology (Airguns) in order to be recruited at all, making them truly specialized.