Off Map Artillery Resupply?

[IICptMillerII]

Hi all, I've got a question concerning off map artillery ammo. I was wondering if it is at all possible to have off map artillery resupplied during the course of a battle, or simply set them to having unlimited ammo in the scenario editor. Are either of these things possible to do?

 

The reason I ask is because I have recently been re-reading the fantastic book "We Were Soldiers Once... And Young" by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway. For those that may not know, this is the book that the movie "We Were Soldiers" is directly based off of. Anyways in the book the Americans constantly have a lot of artillery support that they call upon throughout the battle, a battle which lasts roughly 1.5 days for Hal Moore and his men. I believe they eventually have a total of 24 tubes of artillery supporting them in the Ia Drang, that essentially fire non stop throughout the entire battle. In the book it is mentioned that some of the guns 'burn out' due to being fired so much and that others suffer damage to the hydraulics and the like. 

I know that in CM it is impossible to have a battle with a battle timer of 36 hours, and that a lot of the artillery fires in the battle at Ia Drang were not in direct support of the men in contact, rather they were harassment and interdiction missions away from the battlefield, thus beyond the tactical level of the battle. But many of the fiercest fighting occurred in the course of only an hour or so which is well within the limits of a CM battle, and during these engagements there was a lot of artillery coming down. 

 

Essentially what I was hoping to do was make a battle in the scenario editor for my own personal enjoyment where one side is very outnumbered by the other side, but compensate for this by having a lot of artillery on call. I do know that one way to go about doing this is to just give the fire support heavy side a ton of batteries, but I was hoping to avoid that by just having a manageable number of artillery batteries with either a lot more ammo, or unlimited ammo. I know that unlimited ammo is not a realistic notion overall, but for these purposes it would serve to simulate a firebase with a lot of stockpiled ammo, and ammo resupply while the firebase supports troops in heavy contact. 

 

Thanks!

[ASL Veteran]

Hi all, I've got a question concerning off map artillery ammo. I was wondering if it is at all possible to have off map artillery resupplied during the course of a battle, or simply set them to having unlimited ammo in the scenario editor. Are either of these things possible to do?

 

 

The options for ammunition are

Typical

Full

Adequate

Limited

Scarce

Severe

 

Unlimited is not an option.  Since the batteries are off map resupply is also not an option.

[fivefivesix]

I don't think either option you mentioned is possible (unlimited ammo or ammo resupply during a scenario). One alternative / compromise would be to have different batteries come on call as reinforcements at set times, which you could narrate in the briefing and reinforcement message as "ammo resupply at time x" or whatever you wanted. 

[IICptMillerII]

I don't think either option you mentioned is possible (unlimited ammo or ammo resupply during a scenario). One alternative / compromise would be to have different batteries come on call as reinforcements at set times, which you could narrate in the briefing and reinforcement message as "ammo resupply at time x" or whatever you wanted. 

 

Excellent suggestion! This actually makes a lot of sense. This, combined with a generous amount of artillery initially on call would likely do the trick! Thanks for the input!