Effectiveness of Artillery

[phoenix]

I'm sure it has been discussed. Isn't it a kind of parallel discussion to the lethality of tank combat discussion? In both cases, the game doesn't seem to model what you might imagine would be real world casualties, per turn, but the overall casualties at game end are either way above historical or roughly similar, certainly never way under - am I right? So if you up the artillery effectiveness you could end up with seriously decimated units with full time casualty results even further from the historical, no?

That would be my concern. Of course, as far as arty goes, you might suggest less availability to counter-balance this, or changes so that the arty couldn't just be targeted as it is now, even with the spotting limitations. But that would also make things less realistic in many scenarios, where strong concentrations of arty were available (and where, in fact, it would be more realistic to play not with the default rules but with spotting by the map ticked, so as to be able to prep possible positions.)

For myself, I still worry more that overall casualties are sometimes too high, sometimes way over the historical, even if you play out a scenario with strict historical movement and tactics, and this shows in the big scenarios very clearly if you're not very careful with the men you have. You can easily end up with not enough men to carry things forward to their historical conclusion. In large part I think this is because many players know the actual historical battles really well, and so can play accordingly, or else can practice the scenario against the AI, or else have played it against other players before. Not having arty by map checked is a kind of counter to this, but with this kind of background knowledge possible then having more effective arty could be really too lethal, because at present I feel the arty usually cannot stop an attack dead as it could historically, but historically intelligence about axes of attack and objectives wasn't like it is in the game, so I think it's probably useful that it's limited like this.

Not that I'm much of a player. But those are my thoughts.

Peter