The Engineer School is a type of ordnance building in Napoleon: Total War.
Description[]
Military engineering needs much study to be practiced well.
The school teaches all the specialised skills that an officer of engineers will require, such as surveying, the use of explosives, military architecture construction, the arts of siege warfare, military illustration to create maps, and much else besides. Some tactical skills are taught as well, but engineers are not usually expected to command armies and issue orders to gentlemen of quality. However, this hard-won knowledge helps create better officers and improves the recruitment of military units.
Sappers and miners, like artillery experts, had a long history of being permanent retainers in royal armies of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Thanks to the likes of the French Marshal Vauban (1633-1707) and his magnificent fortifications, the need for military engineers to create, or break into, defences grew, not lessened; during the 18th Century. The elaborate and layered defences that he and his successors developed required skilled architects and builders. Engineer officers became a corps of highly educated experts, while leaving the hard, mucky work of digging to the rank-and-file sappers and common pioneers!
General Information[]
Requires an existing Ordnance Board and the research of Standardised Artillery. Engineer Schools may only be built in factions' capital regions. They are able to recruit all artillery types, including the most elite units that cannot be trained in any other ordnance building such as Artillerie à Cheval. In addition, they give an extra chevron of experience for many units that otherwise would be missing out on free experience if trained in lower-tier ordnance buildings.
In The Peninsular Campaign, the Cannon Foundry line of buildings is absent. Instead, the army line of buildings produces all land military units.