Graymane

==================== When and how you use it? Offensive vs defensive use. What caliber do you prefer and why? Anything else you can think of that would be useful. ==================== 1. Depends on the situation. Terrain, enemy force composition, friendly force composition and mission. Generally, the bigger the caliber, the less accurate and less timely it will fall. This means that you will need FOs in LOS more often. You may also need vet FOs to reduce times. You have rockets, mortars and arty pieces. You can have either DF game pieces or spotters. It is almost always the case that you want spotters. Spotters have the advantage of good foot speed and fairly easy to hide. They also have the advantage of using the commander to help spot. The terrain, mission and force compositions will work together to determine what you need. For wooded areas and open spaces with little cover, 81mm and below are generally sufficient against infantry and light vehicles. For pillboxes, bunkers, buildings and towns, larger calibers will be needed. For wooded areas, allied VT arty is wicked and effective. The mission will dictate how many points you can spend on arty. It is usually more effective to buy more smaller calibers than fewer larger calibers. This allows you to both concentrate fire on an area but leaves your options open for firing other locations at the same time. Arty on the offense: Use it in 3 modes. First mode is supression. This is useful against smaller pockets of resistence along your advance. You can use indirect fire here. The purpose is to keep the enemy's head down so that you can advance your infantry to more advantageous spots. Smaller calibers that fire more often are best here. Second mode is smoke. This is most useful when you need to provide cover for an advance. Accuracy is not as critical and you want to cover a wider frontage than is possible with suppresive HE fire. Your troops may also be close so you don't want to hit them with HE. Therefore, you use smoke near the enemy between your movement force and them. Any caliber works well here. The downside of smoke is it uses A LOT of rounds. Third mode is killer mode. You want to kill the target, either by burning the buildings or directly hitting troops. In this role, you need a lot more arty than usual. You will be using it instead of infantry or armor to kill the target. You need your on map arty or FOs in LOS of the target area or you will need target reference points on the target area. You should prep the objective for 2-3 rounds and then call off arty and attack with troops and/or armor. Since I tend toward smaller size engagements, I tend to have less arty and I use it most often in the suppression or smoke role and use my troops to kill the enemy. Arty on the defense: This is far more dependent on force compositions. If the attack is mostly armor, than arty is less useful and your points may be better spent on AT or engineering obstacles. Against infantry, you will probably want at least 2-3 TRPs. Put your spotters in LOS or use TRPs on reverse slope assembly areas before your defensive positions. You will need some type of forward OP/LP to tell when the enemy is assembling. Save 1-2 arty pieces for final fires on your own positions. Since your troops will be dug in, they will survive better than the attacker. On defense, if you have enough TRPs, you can afford to leave your spotters in safer locations. Against mounted infantry, put TRPs along likely Avenues of Approach and force the infantry to dismount. Just one last tip. On some maps, it is VERY obvious where spotters are going to be and possibly also troop concentrations. On these open terrain maps, it is more important to hit first as your opponent may pre-empt you. If he hits your spotter locations, you can very well lose all your arty. Therefore, keep it spread it out, even at the cost of going to indirect fires. One final pointer. Don't leave foot troops in the same spot for more than 2 turns if at all possible, even on the defense. During setup, split your infantry into teams to get more foxholes. Put one set of teams in your best defensive positions and the other set in secondary positions. On the first turn or so, link up the teams. The terrain will dictate where, but keep them well spread out. This will reduce the losses you take to arty fire. There is no way your opponent will be able to shift fires quickly enough to kill all your infantry if you keep them moving during the arty prep phases. [This message has been edited by Graymane (edited 01-10-2001).]

Can you send me a copy of this please? dennison@mitec.net.