All artillery pieces in SP come with their own plotting board, and integral 'GPS' survey so you can just drop a mortar off the back of a truck and start banging away at some random target once halted. batteries have no need to have their sights paralleled (which means pieces close by each other and in LOS, or hours of theodolite survey work if not, pre GPS days).
Even in the 1930s, SP game arty is of the modern 'excalibur' type. The player does the job of an integrated computerised artillery system on his 100% accurate map and 100% knowledge of own forces positions etc. The player does all the allocations of fires.
There is absolutely no point in tighter groupings for unobserved map fires, since that aids the player-as-God with his 100% accurate map (everything is exactly where it really is if known about). So the God player could then simply vapourise everything on the map using casual unobserved map fires.
Therefore map fire in the
game is
deliberately penalised over 'theoretical' precisely
to guard against the God-player syndrome. Only pre-game plots (ie turn 0 bombardments or programmed bombardments) or fire onto 'gold spots' have scatter that is in line with the theoretical. Any other plotted fires with no eyes-on the target is subject to scattering.
- the accuracy rating is for direct fire mode only - ie plinking tanks and bunkers over open sights. If the thing is an off-map unit only then it has no need for the statistic (but if you remove it then someone will make an SP arty piece with it..).
- Hip-shoot artillery in SP is based mainly on the observer, and accuracy from his being 'eyes-on' target. Thus if he has a laser arty designator, or a radar to see through the clag etc, or even GPS arty - he still needs to be eyes-on.
- Number of observers, and GPS (IIRC) gets you 'extra' gold spots in meeting engagements etc. But these need to be placed thoughtfully, registration cannot be done in-game - or the Player-God
would abuse his eagle-eyed battlefield integration of all targets and plot onto stuff that only Private Snuffy (with no radio) actually has knowledge of, not the arty commander.
- Speed of call depends on the observer skill, and also the gunner's skill. Also the time frame (1930s arty takes longer than 1950s, 1990s is faster, etc).
- Skill of battery and skill of observer does reduce scatter, even for unobserved map fires. So plot unobserved map fires from a skilled AOP and they should generally not deviate as much as say it was called by Lt Divot, of the Catering Corps with arty skill of 0
.
- Counter-battery is for off-map idle batteries, and battery skills are highly relevant. A 65 exp battery might not fire often, a 90s one probably much more, in a battle. (Increased number of enemy off-map batteries that fire on you also helps as you will test for each one in turn).
So if you want super-accurate arty, either be very prescient in the pre-plotting of registered gold spots, (or manoeuvre so he is guided onto these) - or get an observer into a position where he has eyeball on the target. Extra tech helps him, but a bog-standard AOP with LOS does fine.
Andy
Re: M777A1 vs M777A2 Excalibur
Threaded Mode