I Hate!!I Hate!!!II Hate Arty!!!!!@#!$%@

[Dbroe]

Does any one have any low cost way of finding and destroing spotters.I've tred scout car,teams,and snipers.

Snipers had some success but when i use them on real poeple the game does not give them ammo;Is this just a glich on my game or have others had this problem?

[Guest Rob/1]

Try shelling them with big ass arty like 14 inch naval guns they work like a dream.

[Loki]

Arty has its place on every battlefield. If the spotters are setup right you'll never see them. The best way to minimize loss's is to be in good cover and move quickly over open area's.When cover isn't possible you get massacred. Look at the Normandy invasion.Open beaches with MG's and mortars lashing down.

Try giving your opponent a taste of arty and accept your loss's, because you will have some. PERIOD.

[Guest Pillar]

I buy the "Anti Spotter" unit. At 12 points each, I can yet again rely on game mechanics and uber units to avoid what would otherwise require skill and thought.

[Neil Kemp]

First, arty are dangerous. About 60% of all combat casualties are caused by arty fire.

The Russians recognized this. It is my understanding that if they detect an OP (artillery observation post). They will fire 1 regiment for 3 minutes the the 1 kilometer grid square surrounding the point the OP is centered on. I don't he the Order of Battle in front of me but that is a lot of lead

[I/O Error]

The number is actually 90%. No lie.

Artillery, for the last 2000 years, has ALWAYS been the real killer on the battlefield. We are simply making that even MORE true today.

[groundpounder]

I use crack sharpshooters to find and kill arty spotters. They are fast, stealthy, deadly at long range and good at spotting targets.

gp

[StellarRat]

It's probably too used in CM for size of the battles we play. I mean everyone buys some if they get a chance, right? That's because it's so devastating. Historically, I think it wasn't as easy to get as it is in CM, but I have no facts to back this up.

One thing I didn't realize before CM is how dangerous 81mm mortars are. In the old PanzerBlitz game they only had an attack rating of three that was pretty low because the German infantry platoons rated a six (I think.) I think the 81's should have been at least a six. Comments?

[CATguy]

not owning my copy of panzerblitz any more I think the low rating was due to the effect of the counter representing a certain number of gun like a battery. Ohh those were the days! I think I got that for xmas in 1978....

[Slyss]

Artillery is the most impressive weapon modeled in the game. It comes from anywhere and kills indiscriminately. It destroys a tree as easily as a man. You cannot stop the inevitable, so learn to use artillery more precisely yourself. Do not feel the need to beat something you cannot see, embrace it and use it to pummel your enemy more relentlessly then they did to you...

"Hitler built a fortress around Europe, but he forgot to put a roof on it." ---Franklin Roosevelt

[Private Pike]

I'm not sure artillery was that difficult to get, any eye witness accounts I have read about the Normandy battles talk about the masive amounts of allied artillery. Allied soldier also seem to comment on the large numbers of German mortars

[jasoncawley@ameritech.net]

The old Panzerblitz (PB for short) game seriously underrated mortars, and light artillery generally. They had a huge step up to 105mm arty, giving it 40 FP, while 120mm mortars got 15 and 81mm got 3. CM (and ASL before it) have it more nearly right. Mortars were very effective and quite common. Every infantry battalion on both sides had a mortar unit in its heavy weapons company. They are as important and regular a part of WW II infantry combat as machineguns or bazookas/panzerfausts.

Incidentally, part of the PB problem was game scale, part was designers choices, part was the combat system. Mortars have very high rates of fire, and PB turns are 2 minutes and the scenarios ran 10-15 turns typically. Well, the average light mortar battery did not have the ammo to fire continually for 20-30 minutes without resupply, because the shells can go down the tubes very fast. But PB had no ammo system at all. The designers compromised by lowering the FP of the units with limited ammo, in the mistaken belief that low FP for all game would be about like higher FP for shorter periods. Not with their somewhat silly odds-based combat system it wasn't.

In CM, light and medium mortars, on map or off, are good for a few minutes fire only. That fire is much more effective, in part because it is hitting smaller units (squads not PB platoons), but also because it is the real deal of full ROF ammo use and a real combat system that doesn't pretend lots of guys in the same place are safely from an explosion just because there are lots of them there (like the PB odds system did).

As for the availability of off board arty, the historical reality is that the Americans had tons and tons of the stuff. There were single FOs that called down 140 fire missions in one five day battle, 40 a day at the peak of it, with 6 FOs working in a battalion. Each of those would be about half a CM module, maybe a third of one. Each U.S. battalion in the line in the Normandy fighting had the support of around 5000 shells per day. The Germans had not seen anything like it, even vets of the eastern front (live ones anyway).

The Germans were not as well off. The battalion mortars would usually be available, if they had ammo. The heavier 120mm mortars were also common. In the real arty, they did have large numbers of 105mm artillery pieces, but they tended to have serious problems. Allied planes took them out, or took out their ammo vehicles, or artillery took them out, or they ran out of shells and the trains to bring more were shot up by planes or the tracks and bridges were smashed by bombers, etc.

As an example of the effective of Allied air superiority, witnesses reported that when U.S. artillery spotter planes flew along the front, every German battery within a few miles would fall silent. They would get clobbered if they fired, as the planes called down counterbattery fire on them. This is one reason the Germans liked mortars so much - they were much easier to move again, shoot and scoot fashion, since they are so light compared to tube artillery.

A realistic protrayal of artillery support in CM would be very pro-Allied in allowed weights. The Germans would have 81mm mortars available if they wanted to buy the support. 105mm arty or 120mm mortars, they might have 1 module of support of one or the other in a larger fight, but nothing like always. The U.S. would always have 81mm and 105mm support available, and in larger fights they could have several of each (realistically, 1-2 81mm and 4.2" mortar plus 1-3 105mm arty), and perhaps 155mm (0-1 modules) but not always. Brits would be between the two, with 3 inch mortars always and 25-lber most of the time.

That was the real balancer of the better German tanks, not Hellcats and Jacksons and Pershings and Sherman Jumbos everywhere.

If you want it in the form of a rule, I'd put it like this.

Germans should have 1 81mm, and 0-1 105mm or 120mm, one or the other. Americans 1 81mm, 0-1 4.2" Mortar, 1-3 105mm, 0-1 155mm. Brits 1 76mm/3" mortar, 0-2 25-lber/88mm. Those are the levels of support the front-line portions of 1 battalion might reasonably expect in a fight.