Artillery

[Miki]

Hi gents,

First of all, thank you for the game.

Second, I have noticed that artillery efectiveness against infantry has been changed slighty towards less casualties and more supression taken. I think that's OK.

Third, It seems that artillery effectiveness against vehicles/tanks has been beefed up a lot. From my limited experience Artillery is a true tank killer now. Even 105's kill many panzers easily every turn. I have not tried mortars yet. Anyone has noticed this or I am wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards
Miki

[Pyros]

Hi Miki,

I am not aware of such a dramatic change concerning arty lethality on tanks but I may give a very good solution to adjust the game according to your preferences:

In the preferences menu, set:

Tank Toughness to 105%-110%
Infantry Toughness to 90%-95% and
Artillery Effectiveness to 80%-90%

This way you may achieve a balance that will satisfy you.

cheers,
Pyros

[narwan]

Hi Miki,

that may be very true, especially if the panzers you were using have relatively thin armor. There's a good chance that a tank in the blast circle of an artillery round gets hit by flying shrapnel and/or the concussion from the blast (more than in MBT). Panzers with thin armor on certain sides or especially those with have no armor on one or more sides (like many SP-AT's) can suffer badly from artillery.

Narwan

[Mobhack]

There were no changes between MBT and WW2 in the arty (some think the blast circles are new, but they are not and have been there all the time - we just added a switch (originally just for debug, but we allowed this for the end user as the playtesters liked it) to show the circles graphically.

I will monitor this thread and see what the consensus is. But it is possibly because the armour in WW2 (esp top armour) tends to be thinner than in MBT. And many open-topped "shell spitoons" exist.

Anecdote: The first Royal Tiger kill in Normandy was with a 2 inch mortar. The guys who fired it cannot agree if the tiddly little 2lb bomb went straight down the turret hatch or simply into the ammo truck it was parked beside and replenishing from. Either way - the turret was lifted by an internal explosion, a halftrack nearby was abandoned, and the other Royal Tiger exited the village sharpish! .

Cheers
Andy

[cbo]

There was a well-documented test conducted in the UK in 1942 where 16 Churchill tanks were driven through a 600x400 yeard area, pounded by 72 25-pdr guns firing at 72 RPM for 8 minutes while the tanks drove slowly through the area.

Just for the fun of it, I tried replicating that by parking 16 Churchill IIIs in such an area and pound them at roughly 84 RPM (24 guns each firing 7 rounds pr. 2 min. turn) for three turns. The catch is, that in the real test, they timed the shells for airburst whereas SP represents the shells gonig off on impact.

In the real test, many tanks were hit, one lost a track and another suffered damage to a bogie but managed to crawl out of the area.

The SP equivalent produced the following:

Game: tanks destroyed/immobilized
#1: 3/2
#2: 6/3
#3: 5/4
#4: 3/3

I did a fifth run, monitoring the hits

#5: 2/2

The two kills were by top hits, the two immobilizations were from "NON-PENETRATING" hits. There were plenty of both that did no damage. There was also a lot of side and front turret and hull hits which did no damage, but the PEN value of the 25-pdr hits on these locations could sometimes go as high as 5 (most are less though).

The 25-pdr has HE-Pen=2.

I replaced the Churchills with Crusader IIIs with lesser armour, particularily top armour which is 1 vs the Churchills 2

#6: 8/1 (one or two imobilized vehicles were later destroyed)

In this case, 6 were destroyed by top hits, one by side turret hit and one by a front hull hit.

Replacing the Crusader IIIs with open topped M10s resulted in carnage

#7: 11/3 (two of the immobilized vehicles were later destroyed)

All destroyed fell to top hits, which also caused most of the damage to the immobilized vehicles.

In the final test, I replaced the M10s with Staghounds with thin side and rear armour (1) but changed the top armour to 10 to prevent top penetrations.

#8: 5/3

In this case, all the destroyed vehicles fell to side turret and hull penetrations.

IF the number of vehicles destroyed or damaged by artillery fire is excessive - and I'm not saying it is - then there seem to be two culprits:

A: Too many top hits, as this is the real killer
B: The penetration value from HE is too high. In this test, a gun with a HE-pen value of 2 could end up anywhere between 0 and 5 and thus would be deadly to many armoured vehicles, particularily those with thin armour.

That's my take, anyway

Claus B

[Mobhack]

Remember to add WH size to the HE pen, as some (not all) shots will add Random(WH) to this as a "weight" factor. same as with direct AP fire. Max pen can therefore be the sum of both.

Open topped vehicles have almost no defence against HE or AP rounds if hit on the top (even rifle/mg rounds will go through if fired from a higher level and produce top hits).

Cheers
Andy

[cbo]

Andy,

Forgot about the warhead thing - in this case it is "5", so I guess that theoretically, the penetration could go as high as "7" (HE-pen=2 + warhead =5).
I assume that the randomness in the penetration values of HE hits on armour is there to represent the difference between shell fragments hitting the vehicle (very limited effect except for open-topped vehicles) and a direct hit by the complete shell, which could have rather dramatic effects?

Anyway, I'm currently in a campaign battle as the Italians, battling the French in the Alps. Somehow the bastards managed to drag a bunch of Char B1-bis up there . My AT-guns and puny Italian tanks are not really a match for those and the infantry seems more keen to run away than do close assaults, so I've been pounding the Char Bs with 75mm and 100mm artillery. I'd say that even if artillery may seem really deadly to AFVs when you are on the recieving end, it doesn't seem so when you need it to destroy opposing armour The 75mm guns have made no impression, while the 100mm guns have claimed 3 Char Bs. They have only fired at tank concentrations (mostly 2-3 tanks around the target hex sometimes a few others further away) and mostly out of LOS from the artillery observer. They have now fired most of their ammo, so that is about 250 rounds of 100mm HE to claim three tanks. A likely explanation for this result could be the thick roof of the Char B - it has top armour of "3" (which is correct, I was so shocked I looked it up )
My own pesky M13/40 tanks with top armour of "2" have been hit by French 60mm and 81mm mortars as well as 75mm and 105mm artillery, though not to the same extent that I've pounded the Char Bs. Still, I havent lost a single vehicle to enemy artillery, not even an immobilization. The supporting infantry is running away, though!
Incidentally, the bastard AI started the game by dumping a pre-emptive turn 0 barrage on the only left-right road. I did the same to the AI the difference being that I had stacked up on the road, he hadn't This was 75mm fire and had no ill effects on the M13/40s either (a platoon of infantry had to sit pinned for a couple of turns though).

Claus B

[serg3d]

I've tried
Tank Toughness 105%
Infantry Toughness 95
Artillery Effectiveness 90%
Tanks (TIII) still often killed by 120mm mortars. I donnow, is it realistic ? How often were tanks killed by heavy mortars in WW2 - was it exeption, or nothing special ?

[Pyros]

A Troop of the 5th Field (4x 25-pounders) has been assisting the 21st Maori Bn in the defense of Platamon (Greece) against an attack of the I/3 Panzer Regiment of the 2nd Panzer division [100 tanks+)

....The Germans thought even next morning that the position was only lightly held. They therefore attacked with only a motor-cycle battalion and it was soon pinned down by infantry fire and by the guns. A Troop was busy. One shoot was conducted on targets that could only be seen by the infantry on the left flank, and an infantry officer corrected the fall of shot in rough-and-ready fashion, though to good effect. By the afternoon a tank battalion had reached the front and tried to attack; but the going was bad and it made slow progress. The guns harassed all movement below, including that of the tanks, and they were joined in this by the battalion mortars, anti-tank rifles and machine guns. At dusk, however, a medium troop or battery opened fire on the OP and guns, killing one gunner and wounding four others.14 A Troop returned this fire until shellbursts cut communications with the OP.

Defensive fire by night had been provided for and when enemy tanks passed through the ‘SOS night lines’, as they were called, A Troop brought down fire on the prearranged plan. Had the gunners been more certain that their targets were armoured they would have left the cap on their HE 117 fuses, thereby imposing a delay which, though very slight, would have made penetration of armour more likely. As it was they took the cap off; but even so the infantry reported next morning that several tanks and armoured cars had been put out of action. They caught the German force moving out towards the left flank and again when it returned.

A heavier attack started up soon after dawn on the 16th, above the tunnel and away to the left on the mountainside. A Troop was soon in difficulties. It was heavily outgunned and enemy tanks, mortars and artillery brought heavy fire to bear on the hill from which the OP was trying to operate, wreathing the ruined castle in smoke. Tanks came up the rough mule-track which ascended the hill, but several shed tracks or suffered other damage from the rocks, and others ran on to mines laid by the sappers (whose demolition of the tunnel itself had created less of an obstruction than had been hoped). Ammunition for the 25-pounders was running low and many tempting targets had to be neglected....

[snake]

Yes,
My tanks get slaughtered with artillery. Also, the Poles always buy between 20 and 26 75mm guns so as the German with 38T's and Pz IVc's, I get slaughtered. Against the French, it's 75's and 105's with the same result.
My men do about right so I think the kill against tanks is wrong. I say this because I've been buying cheap 82mm morters and they have been destroying the enemy tanks like TP7's, Char B's, H20's etc. Nothing is safe so I don't buy the 'early weaker armor gets killed' theory. I even turned down the art effectiveness to 10% and the results don't change much.
And this is not coordinated spotted artillery but random fire.