No Smoke Artillery

[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.