Planned artillery strikes

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by Jager:

Tell me why the attacker should not be able to strike with pre-planned artillery at known enemy positions?

Good point and fair enough - defender during setup, attacker during Bound 1 then!

How's that for a compromise that actually gets what is wanted?!

[Danny Chung]

This follows up on my earlier 2 posts on this thread.

I experimented with setup just to test if the Russian AI will get his load off on turn 1. For each test the Russian AI did get his rocks off.

Here are the results:

First Round of tests - Extreme Fog of War enabled (Axis troops concentrated in one area)

All Axis troops on bottom left hand corner of the map (from the German player's point of view) - result: Russian AI pounds area in front of central flag.

All Axis troops behind the central flag - result: Russian AI pounds area in front of central flag.

All Axis troops at bottom right hand corner of the map - result: Russian AI pounds area in front of central flag.

Second round of tests - No Fog of War enabled (All Axis troops concentrated in one area)

All Axis troops placed in turn at bottom left hand corner, in the area behind the central flag, and the bottom right hand corner.

Result: Russian AI correctly unleashes his load right on top of Axis troops each time (not surprising I suppose).

Third round ot tests - Extreme Fog of War (Axis troops concentrated in one area)

All Axis troops in front of left hand flag - result: Russian AI pounds area in front of central flag.

All Axis troops in area in front of central flag - result: Russian AI pounds area in front of LEFT flag. Now this was surprising!

All Axis troops in area near right flag - result: Russian AI pounds area in front of central flag.

Fourth round of tests - Extreme Fog of War (Axis troops deployed in similar fashion to default setup but teams combined into squads)

Result: Russian AI pounds area in front of left flag.

Conclusions?

These tests are by no means exhaustive - I just selected the extreme parameters - No FOG and Extreme FOG.

No FOG will guarantee the Russian AI will get his rocks off every time on your troops.

With Extreme FOG, the Russian AI seems to be less consistent, more like hit and miss but I am led to believe that a Russian AI, when firing blind, will concentrate on the larger flag positions.

The area where the Russian AI arty spootter has a direct line of sight will also influence the choice of where the AI wants his barrage to land as some of the other fellas on this post pointed out.