Arty penalty
 

Is there any way to shut off the artillery penalty? Most of the battles I create for myself are assault or defend against an assault. Vietnam reality was to use a wall of steel in order to defend US troops in night lager, or if they were air assaulting.

I don't mean kill the idea but I only play myself and the AI. I want to be able to make the arty call on my own. Just a switch? Maybe? I like a lot of noise.

Re: Arty penalty
 

Since it's just you and the AI....what does it matter? If scoring is an issue simply deduct the arty overload points from P2's total and recalculate

Re: Arty penalty
 

Bear in mind there's no overload if you're assaulting so you can buy as much as support points allow. Meanwhile if defending you can probably buy enough for maybe 20% of your force; a 2.5% overload penalty isn't that onerous.

Re: Arty penalty
 

It just makes me feel like I'm cheating to disregard it. I'm old school honor bound. It's just 2.5%?

Re: Arty penalty
 

You are cheating.:D

Re: Arty penalty
 

That would be 2.5% of your TOTAL force, or one-half of artillery points over the 15% allowed while defending (or delaying).

Re: Arty penalty
 

I think you maybe able to hack the artillery overload penalty by purchasing artillery for both sides, but say in your example, for the NVP set rounds to zero, and/or set reinforcement turn higher than scenario turn. Then, the game may not assess a penalty to the American side and the AI won't use the artillery pieces of the NVP.

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Re: Arty penalty
 

I think there is a chance they may counter battery fire though.

Just my view but system works well enough, certainly better than having nothing. Idea is to balance as having lots of artillery makes the battle easy and therefore your loses lower.
It does not matter if historically large amounts were used the penalty should still apply as ithe reasoning for using it was probably exactly what I just stated.

Re: Arty penalty
 

Artillery Overload is applied to the player that buys excess artillery - it has nothing to do with what the other player does. Both could overload and thus pay penalty points to each other.

(cannot be bothered looking at the exact numbers in the code - it should be in the Game Guide in any case)
If you are an assaulter - you can buy as much as you like, no limits
If you are attacking (advancing) - its something like 25% limit
If you are in a meeting engagement, its something like 20%
If you are delaying or defending, its lower still

Should you go over the limit, a fraction of your overspend is given to the other side as artillery overload points.

When purchasing - the artillery %age is displayed, and changes colour if you are overloaded.

Some folk are a bit OCD and worry if they have say 50 points of overload charged to them - that is nothing in a game of thousands of points. 1000 points may be worrisome though. But it is up to you to decide if giving the other side a few hundred points is worth the extra batteries (i.e. you bet that you will do more damage than you gave away).

Now in the next version of the game the artillery overload will not be applied to scenarios, since the scenario designer "knows" what the force balance should be. So the scenario would be the sort of thing where you have 2 SF teams and 27 batteries of supporting 175mm off-map sort of thing. Suhir made a valid suggestion regarding scenarios, and I will be running with that.

Arty overload is deliberately there to guard against the sort of player you might meet in a PBEM who has 2 observers and some scout cars on table, and 72 batteries of SMERCH launchers with cluster bombs off-map. (Exactly the situation I recall happening in the 1970s in a National 1/300 WW2 tabletop competition before army lists. One guy bought enough FOOs, and the rest of the points spent on off-map batteries. That's why army lists came in the next and subsequent years!.)

Then there was the Warhammer army that consisted of precisely 1 invisible dragon - now that one was cheap to buy and very easy to paint :rolleyes:

Re: Arty penalty
 

SPWAW did that to me once. My Australians were under enough fire to shatter my front line. Then the smoke came. Then forward limped two attack cars and the Chicom headquarters. My surviving soldiers wiped the enemy out in four shots.

troopie