Artillery accuracy degradation and TRPs

[CMplayer]

I'm sure you're all familiar with the following, but I'm just curious whether it reflects real life practice:

I'm targetting an enemy position with artillery but don't have good observation of the enemy. So I use 'Shift to TRP' and from there 'shift fire' to the enemy position. If the TRP was at accuracy level 5, This gives an accuracy 4 FFE on the enemy. Subsequent FFEs will lose one accuracy level each time, but if you reshift to the TRP and then reshift to the enemy position you can maintain level 4 the whole time. It seems like the only tradeoff might be that it takes a bit more delay between salvos.

My question is just whether this is fair, realistic, accurate, intentional, unintentional, gamey or whatnot. Sorry if this is an old stale question

[ 01-09-2002: Message edited by: CMplayer ]</p>

[MajorH TacOps Developer]

First you need to separate out what is realistic and what is a needed game abstraction.

In the real world, contemporary arty does not deviate significantly between salvos against area targets. If a salvo "misses", subsequent salvos are not usually going to significantly wander away from the impact point of the first salvo unless the gunners intentionally or unintentionally change the lay of the guns or unless there is a significant sudden change in wind conditions between the guns and the target.

For contemporary arty, "random scattering" between salvos is not particularly realistic - it is however an often necessary game design abstraction intended mainly to reduce gamey abuse of unobserved arty fire missions. In the real world you don't know if a particular salvo in an unobserved fire mission hits anything or not so you walk the salvos around the target area hoping one of them will be productive. In a game where the player can see everything on the map, a random scattering abstraction helps keep him from abusing the system.

In the case of unobserved fire missions, the random scattering can also be considered to represent the gunners walking the salvos around the target area to increase the chance of hitting some unseen target.