Smoke

[Graeme]

Has anyone noticed the AI react with arty fire to vehicles moving on a road and kicking up smoke?

I try to keep road movement to a minimum although sometimes its unavoidable, but I cant recall being punished for using the roads yet.

[gila]

What you are talking about is DUST,not smoke which will linger longer.

The AI will fire on a position where you already been,where as a HU will use dust trails to fire where you might be going.

Stay off roads in coloums in dusty conditions.

[Graeme]

Originally Posted by gila

The AI will fire on a position where you already been

Makes sense why I cant recall being punished for road use then. So Ill only be punished if there are a few stragglers still on the road. Ill keep an eye out if they have a go at the dusty road.

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Graeme

Makes sense why I cant recall being punished for road use then. So Ill only be punished if there are a few stragglers still on the road. Ill keep an eye out if they have a go at the dusty road.

See Game Guide -> Release History -> WinSPWW2 Version 1.0

Specifically:

Some notes on the new AI "Artillery Interest" routines.

Previously, the AI arty routines targeted those troops which were spotted in its own phase and would then fall-back to the routines to beat up objectives, or approach roads etc. Thus you could do the "hill dance" of moving up from behind a ridgeline, firing and popping back down, drawing only normal return op-fire while exposed but ending your move out of LOS, so the AI would not assign arty on these units. The new AI artillery interest routine is linked to events which the human player is told about during game play, but which previously the AI was ignorant of. Basically - anything which generates a message that your human opponent (in a PBEM) could use against you, the AI now knows about as well. The AI artillery interest routine takes events which the human player would spot, and assigns a chance for the AI to assign available artillery to the general area of this event. Trigger events include flipping an objective hex, making direct fire smoke, making smoke from dust trails from vehicle movement, direct fire events (including direct area fire with the Z key), normal on-map artillery firing indirect fires (which generate smoke in the hex), and engineering clearance operations. All things reported to a human opponent, and now available for the AI to assign delivery of a few "presents" to as well, just as your human PBEM opponent would.

I have coloured in the relevant sentence, and part of it, for emphasis.

Cheers
Andy