How Off-map Arty REALLY Works

[Treeburst155]

GreenAsJade,

No, because if the critical moment passes without a spotting round firing, the strike is blind. It's too late. After that you are just adjusting a blind strike even if you can see the target point (green line). You're wanting to adjust a blind strike, where Wicky is dealing with a strike that never was declared blind. There's a big difference. Once blind, always blind.

Definition of blind: ANY arty strike where the spotter does not have LOS at the critical moment.

Characteristics of a blind strike: Almost always off-target, cannot be reliably adjusted (green line or not), can never be made to convert to desireable observed strike behaviour.

Here are few critical moment times I tested for:

US 155mm....60 seconds

US 105mm....30 seconds

US 81mm.....30 seconds

German 155mm....60 seconds

German 105mm....60 seconds

German 81mm.....30 seconds

Note the US 105 and German 105 are different.

Treeburst155 out.

[Treeburst155]

Wicky,

Nothing you do with CM arty is gamey. The only thing close to gamey you can do with arty is spend hours figuring out how it works, like me.

I'd like to point out something in my original post that is somewhat related to the "Wicky Tip". Once that first spotting round goes out, your spotter can catch the next train to Berlin. His strike will still be good. Wicky's spotter starts without LOS and establishes it before the critical moment. You can also be there for the critical moment (with LOS) and leave immediately after.

Treeburst155 out.

[Treeburst155]

Thanks for confirming the Wicky Tip, Combined Arms! I missed that post. With Wicky's tip verified I think we should call it the Wicky Strike.

"Hmmm.....maybe a Wicky Strike is in order for this slow-ass Corps artillery." I like it.....the Wicky Strike.

Treeburst155 out.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by GreenAsJade:

So back to my question then.

Suppose you see that at 60 there's no spotting round because LOS is blocked. Normally what you would do is cancell the firing orders. Now it seems that you should be able to give adjustment orders. There should be a 60s delay added to the round, so you have time to get back into LOS again and everything will be fine. Right?

No. There will be no additional spotting rounds, no new chance of spotting round if the first spotting round went into trouble (e.g. didn't get fired due to missing LOS).

And to make the mess complete adjusting this strike will be off-target, too, just at a off-target different spot.

How any of this is even remotely realistic or an improvement over CMBO is bejond me.

[Carl Puppchen]

Hello. I am the person who wrote the artillery section for the CM Wiki.

I am going to paraphrase this WAY down for the site, to say that if the spotting round goes out in the times indicated it will always be on target, else you probably have a 1/6 chance or less of it being on target. Recommend that you cancel the strike at that point or resign yourself to a crapshoot (sometimes you don't have time to retarget, especially if you have Russian / Italian arty which takes FOREVER to bring down).

This reinforces the "target ahead" theory (I need a better word for it) which means you pick a target 5-7 turns ahead of your movement and try to get your spotter in LOS 1-2 minutes (1 minutes or 30 seconds is all you need, but this is cushion) prior to the strike arriving. This is a bread and butter CM tactic especially when you are attacking (lots of times on defense you will have TRPs).

I wish that there was more randomness in this... but that is for another thread.

Thanks for all the work in figuring this out.

[Treeburst155]

Carl Puppchen,

The "target ahead" theory is a proven way to handle arty. It's called a "Wicky Strike".

Redwolf,

I prefer to think of arty as "abstracted", rather than "messed up". What's messed up is the manual because it doesn't tell us how arty works. That omission cost me a lot of guys when CMAK first came out.

BTW, arty works exactly the same way in CMBB. It's just that the problem rarely comes up in CMBB because there is no dust.

Treeburst155 out.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

I prefer to think of arty as "abstracted", rather than "messed up". What's messed up is the manual because it doesn't tell us how arty works. That omission cost me a lot of guys when CMAK first came out.

I'm sorry, but I really don't get why BFC had to make an already bad artillery mode worse for CMBB (and CMAK), just to make it weaker.

It was bad enough in CMBO with no holding at one place (targetted and zeroed in with spotting rounds but no FFE until you say so), just to nme the most obvious thing.

But now, the behaviour is basically: the spotter tells the battery to fire spotting rounds. A few minutes later the spotting round is supposed to be fired and will land or not land where the spotter can see it. Let us ignore for one moment that magically the round is never fired when he would not see the landing point.

What basically happens is that the spotter says "Hey, I didn't see the bloody spotting round coming down. But you know what, teatime is due and this gets boring, lets do FFE anyway." And FFE the battery goes. That is about the most unrealistic thing you can do and the most unrealsitic way to mode off-target artillery strikes.

Now, even worse, once it is off-target, re-adjusting does not put it on target either, even if the new spottings rounds are observed. That it is always (100%) on-target if the first-try spotting round is observed, but never (0%) on-target when re-try spottings rounds are observed is nothing but a plain bug.

Now, don't get me wrong - too much control and reliability in CMBO artillery? Yepp, that was the case. Worth tuning down? Sure. Fix it by making it screw up in less and less realistic ways? Nope . Then go on and don't document it? Priceless .

[Wicky]

Technically it should be called a 'stumping' but I'll gratefully accept a 'wicky strike' for my 15 minutes of fame

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

Carl Puppchen,

The "target ahead" theory is a proven way to handle arty. It's called a "Wicky Strike".

Treeburst155 out.

[JonS]

Originally posted by Redwolf:

nothing but a plain bug

Since this is presumably the way it is meant to work, as far as BFC are concerned anyway, it isnt really a 'bug'. The rest of your post I agree with (as if that would surprise anyone ). Now for a bit of humour: does anyone recall all the chest thumping rah rahs when artillery spotting rounds were first introduced?

[ February 13, 2005, 01:19 PM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[Treeburst155]

This whole study of how arty actually works would probably never have happened if it weren't for the dust in CMAK. We had exactly the same arty behaviour with CMBB, and nobody griped about off-target observed strikes. This is because they rarely happen in CMBB.

Once I lose a bunch of guys due to some game behaviour I don't understand, or that appears to contradict the manual, I'm going to test and test and test until I figure out what happened. This is why I don't think manuals should be vague like CM manuals are. Somebody WILL figure out how things really work if they get stung often enough.

I think the effect of the new dust on arty strikes was not anticipated, nor was it discovered during testing. Then again, maybe they just liked the idea of dust quite often causing bad arty strikes.

As for arty realism in CM, I'm not too worried about that. I just want to know how the stuff works so I don't wipe out my own people.

Treeburst155 out.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by JonS:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Redwolf:

nothing but a plain bug

Since this is presumably the way it is meant to work, as far as BFC are concerned anyway, it isnt really a 'bug'.</font>

[Treeburst155]

Observed fire can go off-target with rockets. Rockets have no spotting rounds. Hmmmm....maybe rocket strikes are ALWAYS treated as blind strikes as far as accuracy is concerned (except for TRP and prep bombardment). I sense another test coming. The question:

What percentage of observed ROCKET strikes are on-target?

If the percentage is low, I would suspect rocket attacks are just another blind strike to the program. This means players need not bother getting rocket spotters into LOS because it does absolutely no good to do so. Hmmm....

Treeburst155 out.

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

How To Hit Your Target Every Time

This section deals with guns ONLY. There is never any guarantee with rockets. I'm also assuming the spotter remains unmolested during the delay period, and while the strike is underway.

Accurate arty strikes require the following things to happen:

1) The spotter must have LOS to the target point when it is targetted (blue line).

2) The spotter must have LOS at the exact moment the first spotting round is FIRED.

That's it!

I beg to differ.

I'm playing a game where I KNOW an American 105mm observer has a perfect LOS to the target - but the area which he can see around the target is limited.

He NEVER hit it in several tries, including firing somewhere else entirely and then coming back.

There was no smoke, no dust (all his rounds fell miles over!), no suppression, no nothing.

However in every case the spotting round fell out of his LOS.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Mike:

I beg to differ.

I'm playing a game where I KNOW an American 105mm observer has a perfect LOS to the target - but the area which he can see around the target is limited.

He NEVER hit it in several tries, including firing somewhere else entirely and then coming back.

There was no smoke, no dust (all his rounds fell miles over!), no suppression, no nothing.

However in every case the spotting round fell out of his LOS.

I think (Treeburst, can you verify) that the decisive thing is LOS to the point where the spotting round would fall, not to where you aim.

Since on-target rounds fall with a given radius that would mean if you target exactly at the edge of visibility, lets say 200 meters, then the round can fall 1 meter long, at 201 meter. If that happens the strike is off-target.

Once off-target it is effectively not adjustable (adjustable only to other wrong places).

[Dook]

A quick question relating to what Treeburst has dubbed the Wicky Strike:

As I recall, if you targeted blind in CMBO, the timer for shell impact would count down at half the normal speed. For example, if the timer showed the strike would arrive in 3 minutes, it would actually arrive in about 6 minutes. The time to impact would decrease by one second for every two seconds of actual time elapsed on the movie replay. Once you gained LOS to the target, however, the timer would start counting down at the normal rate.

If you wanted to devote a lot of time to it, this system provided a great deal of flexibility with timing and targeting artillery strikes by moving in and out of LOS. And as long as you regained LOS at the crucial moment, there was no loss of accuracy.

I frankly haven't paid as much attention to how artillery works in CMBB and CMAK. Does the timer still work this way?

[CombinedArms]

To comment on a few points in turn, answering Dook first:

1) No, I believe the timer in CMBB and CMAK is "what you see is what you get". The time for a blind strike in the latter two games is longer than an observed strike and ticks off accurately.

2) One way to get that flexibility Dook speaks of is to start an FO out away from observation, then walk him toward the desired observation point. This seems to open some interesting possibilities for experimentation.

3) Yes, Redwolf, this is an unrealistic system but it's what we have to live with till CM2X and understanding how it works helps one to avoid its worst features.

4) I think I know how we got here; if we follow the progression from CMBO, it basically makes sense, even though the end product is less than ideal. A) In CMBO, blind strikes were generally accurate. There was a longer delay, but most of the time they landed on target. An off target blind strike could happen, but it was rare. Lets assume that the moment of observation worked just as it does in CMBB and AK. It wouldn't really matter because most strikes, blind and observed are on target, and the blind strike has already paid it's price with the delay.

In CMBB, BFC decided that blind strikes weren't sufficiently penalized. Now most blind strikes are going to be off target. BUT, since there's no dust, as TB observes, there's rarely a situation where the target becomes unexpectedly obscured at the "spotting round" moment.

C) IN CMAK the same arty model is used as in CMBB. It had worked OK there, so why change it for what was supposed to be a minor re-do? BUT, the introduction of DUST creates this unexpected problem with the precise moment of the firing of the spotting round being the key to accuracy. My guess is that in a game of this complexity, BFC never realized that they'd introduced a new element that made their arty model (unchanged in this one respect since CMBO) problematic. And since they didn't realize they'd created a problem, they never explained it in the manual.

Ultimately, I just see it as a problem we have to live with until CMx2 and am grateful to TB and Wicky, among others for helping to make things more workable.

[Brent Pollock]

Being in LOS during the initial call might shorten the delay time.

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

[snip] This means players need not bother getting rocket spotters into LOS because it does absolutely no good to do so. Hmmm....

Treeburst155 out.

[Sanok]

I still say, that off-map arty in BB and AK is almost useless. The shells fall so spread out, hardly any of them actually do any damage.

[CombinedArms]

I almost always target rockets on the first turn in prepared bombardment mode on the theory that:

1) They're so inaccurate that knowing where the enemy actually is won't help much, so there is not much to gain by waiting till I probe enemy positions.

2) I want to shoot them off before my own men get very close.

3) In that case, LOS really doesn't matter because prep bombardments are always accurate.

4) If I want to delay the shoot a little, I can always add minutes to the firing time of the prep bombardment.

The only time when you might want to get LOS to speed up the shoot is when a rocket FO arrives as a reinforcement. Then you've got to calculate the time it takes to get the FO into a good observation positionm (since they usually arrive to the rear) vs. the speed up of direct observation. It might be wise to try a Wicky strike...call in the target unobserved, then start walking toward the observation point. You can always cancel if the observed strike would be shorter (test length beforehand), so there's not much to lose by this tactic.

[Treeburst155]

Originally posted by Mike:

I beg to differ.

I'm playing a game where I KNOW an American 105mm observer has a perfect LOS to the target - but the area which he can see around the target is limited.

He NEVER hit it in several tries, including firing somewhere else entirely and then coming back.

There was no smoke, no dust (all his rounds fell miles over!), no suppression, no nothing.

However in every case the spotting round fell out of his LOS.

Hmmm...I'd have to see this to believe it. I seem to recall a test I made in which a spotter had a keyhole view to the target point. He could not see but a very small area around the target point. The spotting rounds went out. They hit outside the spotter's keyhole view, and the strike was still good.

I think you had a brief obstruction at the critical moment which soon cleared. This made the strike a blind strike. You then got spotting round #2 to fire because the obstruction cleared.

Treeburst155 out.

[Treeburst155]

Originally posted by Redwolf:

I think (Treeburst, can you verify) that the decisive thing is LOS to the point where the spotting round would fall, not to where you aim.

Since on-target rounds fall with a given radius that would mean if you target exactly at the edge of visibility, lets say 200 meters, then the round can fall 1 meter long, at 201 meter. If that happens the strike is off-target.

Once off-target it is effectively not adjustable (adjustable only to other wrong places).

I think this is incorrect. My testing indicated that the impact point of spotting rounds had zero bearing on whether or not a strike was accurate. The only thing that matters is whether or not the FIRST spotting round is FIRED. It could hit in China and the strike would still be good.

I'd love to see a PBEM file or saved game file that showed differently.

Treeburst155 out.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Redwolf:

I think (Treeburst, can you verify) that the decisive thing is LOS to the point where the spotting round would fall, not to where you aim.

Since on-target rounds fall with a given radius that would mean if you target exactly at the edge of visibility, lets say 200 meters, then the round can fall 1 meter long, at 201 meter. If that happens the strike is off-target.

Once off-target it is effectively not adjustable (adjustable only to other wrong places).

I think this is incorrect. My testing indicated that the impact point of spotting rounds had zero bearing on whether or not a strike was accurate. The only thing that matters is whether or not the FIRST spotting round is FIRED. It could hit in China and the strike would still be good.

I'd love to see a PBEM file or saved game file that showed differently.

Treeburst155 out. </font>

[Seanachai]

Say what you like about Treeburst, he's full of helpful info and insights.

And he really put the 'female' back into 'female impersonator'.

Give Roxy our love. We miss you both.

[Treeburst155]

Originally posted by Redwolf:

So LOS to target point, but spotting round would fall long out of LOS, so no spotting round gets fires and inaccurate strike.

You're still placing importance on the impact point of the spotting round. I've never seen a strike go blind where LOS was NOT obstructed by something visible like smoke or dust. My keyholed spotter failed to see the spotting rounds; but his strike was still good.

Seanachai,

Roxy gets out of prison very soon. Don't encourage her. The wrath of Pengdom might be unleashed upon you.

Treeburst155 out.

[ February 15, 2005, 08:59 PM: Message edited by: Treeburst155 ]

[Blazing 88's]

Links don't work for the CMwiki-Artilery page. Can someone direct me to the correct link please.