PZIVB AP Use

[Charles22]

DRG said:

Artillery priority hexes that a human player is issued with at the start of the game ( the number depends on the battle type and the number of FO's he has ) and can place where ever he want.

And the AI doesn't have an arty "cheat" that can see your units. I think everybody who starts playing this game thinks that at least once. We had one guy complain the AI always targeted his units then found out he played large unit games on small maps and the AI couldn't miss where ever it dropped arty but the AI IS programed to pay attention to road junctions and areas behind hills out of sight just like a human player would and it will detect firing events like mortars just like a human player would.

Don

Ohhhh, I wasn't aware you got more pre-strike spots for every spotter. Hmm, I could have swore I saw a set number per the type of battle on that, but perhaps that's on a spotter per battle basis and I didn't realize it.

Still, you haven't EVER seen the AI attack an unknown hex with air forces have you? It's obvious the artillery is random, though of course it didn't used to be in some SP versions. I sometimes marvel at the foolishness of the AI artillery as it may be wasting away half it's artillery on a totally unknown spot where I haven't something even remotely close, but at such a time it has plenty of units it has spotted and doesn't re-direct it's partial guessing game to focus on what it does see. That's not necessarily bad for the game overall, but does look to be flawed thinking. I don't ever concentrate all my artillery on one spot, but I almost always will focus on something that i can see. Somehow, I just can't get my head around the notion of firing on a position where I haven't the faintest idea that something is there or not. Strangely enough, I never use it for smoke either. And to top it all off I almost never run out of arty ammo, though my field-based ones would if I didn't re-supply them.

Yes, I remember back in the old days, especially with SPWAW, where I would put my 88's on hills, usually just 2-4 of them, and right away the enemy arty or air would go right after them, despite their silence to that time.

[Charles22]

mobhack:

Planes, if targeted on some hex will search around for a target. The search zone is quite large. The AI may have plotted that plane 3 turns back, on something else you did (tanks moving on a road nearby say that were in LOS to it), or just simply on a random hex in your deployment area, or as 'road rage' on your road network, or near an objective cluster.

I don't think there was anything within 20 hexes of those five units. They were purposely in a non-eventful area. The idea is to find a woods hex for all five of them, with the ammo boys in the middle adjacent to them, so no movement need take place to resupply. The VAST majority of the games, no kind of retaliation whatsoever bothers them with such placement, even though tell-tale smoke is evident once they get going.

There was just no reason for that strike. The first plane took a slight SW course from a northern entry point, and going strictly by the course I don't think there was a single unit along that path, even within 6 hexes of the path, for the entire map, so obscure was the placement. I cannot recall the number of air attacks after that, but the very next one came from the south in a NW direction. I had the same reaction to both of them, once I saw the planes "Uh oh, there goes my ammo dump and IG's!" It was that obvious what they were out for. Like I said, I have played the game enough to see the arty will pull a rabbit out of a hat every once in a while, but it's also so stupid as to usually not react to four IG's with smoke trails that are very obvious, so it's not much of a gripe for it to luck out, especially since it is obviosuly random a great deal of the time, but the planes, if it hadn't been for that strike, even when they do strike at empty space, it's always apparent to me that something was in the general vicinity that it has spotted before, but that clearly wasn't the case here. Actually, if you had a flyby where the plane aborted, and even on the same turn the next plane did the nuke strike, that would make some sense, but for what appears to me to not be a random aerial strike force, to pinpoint it so clearly with no help is quite a mystery to me.

[Charles22]

mobhack:

- it will target hexes you fired direct from, or even Z fired from (if you do the 'hill dance' of popping up to fire and retreating back behind the crest - expect some arty presents, if it has some unassigned batteries. Popping smoke grenades is also an 'AI interest' item now - since you did that it must have ben important - so I'll send presents.

I have definitely seen that in this game. One of my sole hopes of stemming the Polish blitz is to use my 37mm SPAA's is the shoot and scoot role using the back hex of a hill and behind the hill again. Yes, some arty decided to try to do something about that.