No Smoke Artillery

[MattP]

So I'm playing a scenario and I have a nice off map wespe battery.   It has about 100 or so rounds of HE and 30+ rounds of smoke.  Nice.    So I pound the position I want to attack with HE with the plan of smoking out the position before assaulting.   However, despite having 30+ rounds of smoke after the shelling, by using up all of its HE the battery became unavailable (i.e. "Empty").   Is this right?  Huh?

Apologies if this is a repeat question already asked and answered....

Thanks!

Matt

[WillS]

That's just how it works for everyone. Howitzers will not be able to shoot their WP rounds if they have expended all their HE ammo. And shooting WP dips into your HE also.

I'm not sure why this is, it does seem a bit off, but it's not just your game.

Mortars I have found can shoot all their HE ammo and still have their WP rounds left. Makes for tough decision making in scenarios like the one you were fighting. Maybe someone who knows more about howitzer rounds can explain more in detail.

[A Canadian Cat]

The reason is that artillery behaved that way at the time (no idea if it still is or not). The battery would have a certain number of HE shells and a certain number of Smoke shells and a certain number of charges. Once you used your charges you could not fire anything no matter what shells you had around.

The game does not distinguish the three things separately but simplifies things slightly to say you have some number of HE rounds of which a certain amount can, optionally, be smoke. I believe in reality the number of charges used per shell varied according to the mission so if you were shooting at long range you used your charges faster. I'm not 100% sure about that last part.

The mortars are different because they actually have separate shells that were either smoke, WP or HE.

Bottom line is the behaviour is based in reality even if it feels a bit odd. It is one of those things you have to remember.

[MattP]

Thanks for clarifying and very good to know for future reference. Makes little sense to me that a battery would have more shells than charges, but I suppose such is life in the '44 Wehrmacht. Is this something nationality based, as I can't see the USA running out of charges..................................?

[Das Morbo]

This is silly.

Charges are much easier to produce (just propellant in cottonbags) and thus aviable in much larger numbers. And because of this, you can  be certain that a battery ran out of shells before it ran out of charges in most cases.

By the way, this behaviour also appears with the well-supplied Allies.




Up until a while ago, there was a programming error in CM, that led to artillery being "out of ammo" even when they shot their smoke only... very frustrating to have 100+ HE shells laying around and not being able to use them! This has thankfully been solved somewhere in Version 3.x of the game IIRC. Unfortunately it hasn't been solved the other way round.

This is not such a problem. Here is a workaround for future matches: shoot only about 30-50% of your HE, then shoot all smoke, expend the remaining HE as needed.

You have to be patient with Battlefront - they are just a very small company with many titels released, so their ability to work out such problems is limited.





Best regards
Morbo