Large Long Term Smoke Screens

[Peterk]

This is an obvious one but with the number of new players and with the increased vulnerability of infantry to MGs and the more common occurence of open ground, I thought maybe this tip would come in handy to some newer players.

If you use off-board artillery to toss up a smoke screen to protect and advance, you may be disappointed by i) how little area actually gets covered (especially with mortars) ii) how quickly that observer ammo gets depleted. Here's a little tip to get a nice big smoke screen that you can keep up for almost as long as you require.

Most smoke rounds tend to be redundant (ie. there is already a round on the board that is already providing almost the exact same cover), so with this in mind simply retarget the smoke screen slightly EVERY turn (you want the green Adjust Fire target line) away from the places where you already have smoke. The spotter delay kicks in so the guy won't be firing throughout the entire next turn, you'll get just a few good rounds at the end. By moving the target around constantly, you'll have a bigger screen that will stay up longer because your spotter isn't using so much ammo on each turn.

[Michael Emrys]

Can you use a Target Wide command with smoke? I never tried this, so I don't know.

Michael

[Foobar]

I havent tested this, but I am thinking that using spotters with fewer 'tubes' might help as well. There are varieties of off-board 81mm that come in 4, and iirc 8 or 12. It seems to follow that the fewer tubes will burn up the ammo m ore slowly, and still do an effective job of covering a 50 meter radius smokescren.

Has anyone found this to be true?

[Peterk]

No.. you can't use a target-wide with smoke. I wish. Actually what I would like for smoke is a straight-line pattern, but in absence of that I use my little trick to expand the size of the screen and it works well.