Aardicus

I have notice this same behavior at times in my QB battles. Seems to me any nearby unit with smoke capability will smoke enemy units if you have friendly infantry advancing nearby and in jeopardy of being fired upon by the enemy units. I've also seen a mortar smoke an area in front of an enemy tank so as to protect a group of my HT's that were dashing for a flag=-) It worked, so I can applaud their actions instead of chewing them out for disobeying my original orders=-)

The only real solution to the long artillery delays is to be on the defensive(i.e. probe, attack, assault) and purchase a pre-targetable marker. It significantly reduces the time it takes for a fire mission to reach ground zero.(i.e. normally 3 min. reduced to 45 sec)

One quick note on airpower in Combat Mission. At one time I and my primary PBEM opponent held that airpower was useless, only included for historical purposes. That is until in a QB my airpower destroyed his KING TIGER as it was engaging my Jumbo He had been sitting in one spot for several turns in full view of my forces.( actually he and my Jumbo were "playing ping-pong"(his term for ricochet after ricochet)) In another it was useless except it bottled up my opponents(different person than from ealier) armor(maybe got a commander or two) until I saw it strafe an armored carrier causing the crew to abandon. So generally speaking it can have positive effects but is too unpredictable in just about every aspect.(i.e. when the heck is it gonna show up). Just my two cents...

My experience with quick battle has been the opposite. With the allied player able to choose a "historically disproportionate" number of easy-eights or fireflys the vaunted Tigers and Panthers no longer have the overwhelmingly superior guns but still suffer from slooooooooooow turrets and no gyro-stablizers. An early game hit from the allies 76mm(usually with tungsten)usually results in a burning German tank. Though this is just my 2 cents...

I have a simple solution, dont allow the house to be blasted by direct HE fire. Kill the tank or suppress the inf. gun. just my 2 cents p.s. It seems to me that putting more than one or two squads of inf. in the same building is counter to proper tactical spacing SOP. Kind of like clumping infantry in the open or trees, artillery will massacre them, but casualties can be minimized if they were are spread out a bit.

Mortars also normally can fire smoke rounds and they are tallied seperately from standard rounds. Ive found it tricky to use it consistently, the crewmen seem to want to use the HE much more than smoke and often fire one smoke then go back to HE. Need more practice to be able to blanket and area with all available smoke so that it is effective.