"Pause" orders

[Der Kuenstler]

It appears to me like pause orders only work for movement, right? So it's not possible to order a mortar to fire after a 30 second pause instead of firing the whole minute? Or you can't order infantry to fire after a 30 second pause to conserve ammo?

[Gpig]

You are correct, sir.

[Der Kuenstler]

Dang - that would have been a nice feature...

[Vergeltungswaffe]

You can occasionally work around it with things like putting a covered arc just short of your target and giving a small move order, with delay added if needed, so that you don't begin firing until well into the turn.

[Peregrine]

If a mortar is set up and can attack the target at the start of a turn you can order the mortar crew to do a short move and at command delay + 10 second increments later it will stop firing.

This way for example it fires for 37 seconds then stops shooting when it starts to move.

This is sort of along the lines of what Vergeltungswaffe said but you shoot first then order a move to stop the fire.

In my experience on board mortars against infantry are only good for pinning a squad and one minutes fire is usually overkill for that. On the other hand when attacking AT guns it usually takes most of a minutes fire or more to knock it out so saving rounds shouldn't be important.

[Other Means]

The trick to conserve mortar ammo is:

to get a delay at the beginning of the turn, give the mortar a target with a "rotate" order away from it. The mortar will rotate away, then back and fire. You can fine tune this for the delay you want.

As stated in the post above, to get a delay at the end of the turn give a paused movement order. This tends to be not as good as you then have to wait out the setup time when you've moved.

[Der Kuenstler]

Great ideas guys - thanks!