Realistic Artillery Management - FOO Rule

[Vesku]

I suppose that's a valid perspective. My take on the same thing is that, if the infantry and armor arms enjoy nonreal benefits x in this game, then a desire for balance would suggest that artillery should enjoy nonreal benefits roughly equivalent to x. Yes, I suppose it's "gamey." But what are you going to do? The whole thing is gamey: eye of God, leaching opfire to exploit IGOUGO, biggest infantry AT bangstick wins, snapshooting ATGMs.

-- 30 --

We have a bit different point to view to the game. I like to make realistic the things I can and try to live with the ones I can't.

[Vesku]

so...I agree with you and you call me 1600 lbs of bird shite!
Bloody hell mate, it seems safer to disagree with you even when I agree!
Contrary viking!
BTW...it seems that walrus can get to 4500lbs...that's 2 tonne!

As for Gold spots...they are much better now in the recent versions.
Only one in a ME, no matter how many FOO.
I got 8 in an assault with 3 FOO recently...that seems fair.
You'd have mapped out the plots for an assault surely.
8 'stonk' points for 3 FOO and a bunch of Batt and co commanders over a 5 KM front doesn't seem too over the top.

However, I'm sure you'll disagree, and no doubt call me something to boo.... I'll save you the trouble and quote Kipling...
—the big, ugly, bloated, pimpled, fat-necked, long-tusked walrus of the North Pacific, who has no manners except when he is asleep" , except obviously he meant South Pacific :soap:

Ouch! I wouldn't want that much lard to land on me

The fewer Gold spots is a good fix, now you get a reasonable number of them instead of ten every fight.

I know you've noticed how deadly couple of mortars can be, FOO rule is a good way to lessen arty's effect.

[Cross]

I've been convinced - by those more learned than me - that although a FOO could handle two target areas simultaneously, it was the exception not the rule.

So one target area, one FOO; is probably a realistic limit. But for me this still leaves the matter of 'sheafs' (US) or dispersed artillery, rather than the single hex concentration.

Personally, I think the FOO rule helpfully addresses gamey artillery, but goes too far by only allowing a FOO to target a single hex.

In my mind, the most standard and useful artillery strike is a line.

I bet many of you remember when all SP artillery rounds landed in this pattern:

*
-*
*
-*

For those of you who don’t, IIRC every round would land in that line pattern without exception; the line may have been off target but once the first round hit you knew where the rest were going. I prefer the way it is now, but my point is the importance of the 'line'.

The current FOO rule forces you to have about four FOOs if you want to pound a front of 500m, say a tree line. Which is just too far from realistic.

If one were to agree to a rule that allowed a target area (one of my earlier suggestions) it may prove difficult to police, but how about allowing a player to plot artillery within a 100M of one another?

This way you can choose any pattern you like:

Line
Linear
Bracket
Tight circle
Wide circle

This would allow a player to replicate real life strikes, without permitting plots all over the map.

From a policing standpoint, it wouldn’t be much different than the current situation. The only thing you’d be looking for is artillery landing close to adjacent.

[Imp]

Cross Wrote:
If one were to agree to a rule that allowed a target area (one of my earlier suggestions) it may prove difficult to police, but how about allowing a player to plot artillery within a 100M of one another?

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If not at least allow to place all adjacent to each other. If you have a target in a tree line you hit the area not pound one spot.
Actualy having a LOS can be detrimental, might be more effective but probably don't need to be as little drift so the target hex & all adjacent got pounded while anything 100 metres away is untouched.
So if units where spaced in shouting distance I have got 2 tops.

Another example you see a company of infantry moving dispersed across open ground. Not worth firing espec if FOO has a LOS as you will miss most of them. Oh a line might work well. The idea in my view is to break it up by pinning some so easier to deal with.

Adjacent is reasonably easy to monitor & while not ideal means you can at least get some frontage. 100m is logical as all overlap assuming spread to adjacent hex.

As it stands the rule means buying small calibre arty to suppress as its what they are good at is a waste. May as well buy big stuff to kill as enough will fall to suppress if doesnt.
So now instead of buying a sensible arty mix I want to squeeze out as many big boys as I can & realism has just flown out the window.

[Weasel]

The current FOO rule forces you to have about four FOOs if you want to pound a front of 500m, say a tree line. Which is just too far from realistic.

You are mistaken here. A FOO targets a hex, which is indeed realistic. He would pick an 8 figure grid (1234 5678 which should put him within 10 meters of the target) and calls arty onto those cooridinates and then adjusts from there. Now yes there are box barrages etc in real life, but SP can no more model that then they can Over Watch.

So to get back to your point: Once the rounds land the FOO has two options:

1. adjust the fire - if he does this he must adjust ALL targeted guns into the new hex.

No FOO in any army can determine from a shoot which individual gun is firing errant. Indeed in real life if a gun is way off target like what happens in SP (I just had two 3" mortars firing at the same hex land about 500 yards apart, shoot the mortar commander on that one) the entire battery is taken off line until they can work out which gun is errant and correct it. They do this by having each individual gun fire onto the target one at a time, observing fall of shot. It is too dangerous for the grunts on the ground to have a gun firing short or wide

2. leave the rounds land as they are and continue with FIRE FOR EFFECT. This would simulate your 500 yard barrage. However, if an adjustment is later made, then #1 comes into effect.

The key is to KEEP IT SIMPLE. The FOO RULE as it stands is a very dumbed down version from when it started, yet players still get confused. If you add in fire patterns and multiple targets per FOO then it becomes a monster again.

But thanks for bringing this up, it at least gets more players interested in it.

[Weasel]

As it stands the rule means buying small calibre arty to suppress as its what they are good at is a waste. May as well buy big stuff to kill as enough will fall to suppress if doesnt.
So now instead of buying a sensible arty mix I want to squeeze out as many big boys as I can & realism has just flown out the window.

Vesku's 75mm guns seem to be pounding my poor old Cdns just fine. They are landing in an area of about 300m x 300m and are a real pain in the butt. Indeed, he states my 25lbs are just as much a pain to him.

[RERomine]

1. adjust the fire - if he does this he must adjust ALL targeted guns into the new hex.

No FOO in any army can determine from a shoot which individual gun is firing errant. Indeed in real life if a gun is way off target like what happens in SP (I just had two 3" mortars firing at the same hex land about 500 yards apart, shoot the mortar commander on that one) the entire battery is taken off line until they can work out which gun is errant and correct it. They do this by having each individual gun fire onto the target one at a time, observing fall of shot. It is too dangerous for the grunts on the ground to have a gun firing short or wide

I'll parrot in on this since I was involved in the discussion over at Shrapnel. I'm going with the assumption the objective is to achieve as much reality as possible. If I'm off base, please forgive this misguided soul

Technically speaking, by adjusting all guns to the original target, you are effectively saying you CAN identify which guns are off. The SP artillery model allows rounds of a given battery to be more widely dispersed than in reality. Assuming all guns are set up properly, have similar tube wear, firing rounds from the same lot, fire from reasonable proximity to each other, under the same weather conditions, etc., they should be able to all put their rounds in the same hex if that is the intent. They might all be in the WRONG hex, but they should be together. The SP artillery model doesn't allow this to happen. That is a "gamey" aspect you aren't going to get rid of.

With respect to the artillery sheafs suggested by Cross, that is reality. Artillery would only be concentrated (converged sheaf) in one spot against hard targets. In game terms, a platoon of infantry in the open represents four separate targets, while in reality they are just "infantry in the open". If those infantry squads are advancing 100m apart, why would you target one? If the FOO has eyes on, it's possible all rounds could land on target, effecting only the one squad. What you want in this case is an open sheaf where the blast radius of rounds from one gun reaches, but doesn't overlap, the blast radius of the next gun and so on. This would impact the entire platoon and is a reality.

Seems to me it's not to hard to simulate and still keep to the spirit of what you are trying to accomplish with the "FOO Rule". It goes with the single premise you can tell what the original target was in the first place. That's fairly easy to do, as long as fire isn't directed at the edge of the map. The map centers on the target, whether the rounds actually hit them or not. Based on that, it would be possible to allow sheafs suggested by Cross, if you ignore the "gamey" paradox. In this case the paradox being, you have to adjust all guns because you can't tell which one is off, but to adjust them, you need to be able to do just that.

Just define what sheafs you want. Make the rule that all targeted hexes from a single battery be under control of a single FOO and have to be adjacent to one other target from the battery or within two hexes, what have you. I figure if you can verify all guns from a battery target the same hex, you can also verify they are being fired in an acceptable, agreed upon, sheaf.

Another aspect of artillery that should be considered is the "walking" or "creaping" barrage. As the rules are now, the target is the hex and not what was in the hex. If infantry is hit by artillery, they are going to move. You shouldn't have to cancel the existing mission just to adjust the fire 100m because the infantry insisted on leaving the impact zone. Again, that's not realistic. The FOO would not really start the whole process over again from scratch.

While I'm typing, has any discussion be fronted on keeping artillery units together? Seems to me that goes hand in hand with the FOO rule. Some folks widely separate their guns to avoid counter battery fire. This effectively means a four gun battery would have to come up with four very different firing solutions to engage one hex. I thought I would just toss that out there :)

[Cross]

The current FOO rule forces you to have about four FOOs if you want to pound a front of 500m, say a tree line. Which is just too far from realistic.

You are mistaken here. A FOO targets a hex, which is indeed realistic. He would pick an 8 figure grid (1234 5678 which should put him within 10 meters of the target) and calls arty onto those cooridinates and then adjusts from there. Now yes there are box barrages etc in real life, but SP can no more model that then they can Over Watch.

So to get back to your point: Once the rounds land the FOO has two options:

1. adjust the fire - if he does this he must adjust ALL targeted guns into the new hex.

No FOO in any army can determine from a shoot which individual gun is firing errant. Indeed in real life if a gun is way off target like what happens in SP (I just had two 3" mortars firing at the same hex land about 500 yards apart, shoot the mortar commander on that one) the entire battery is taken off line until they can work out which gun is errant and correct it. They do this by having each individual gun fire onto the target one at a time, observing fall of shot. It is too dangerous for the grunts on the ground to have a gun firing short or wide

2. leave the rounds land as they are and continue with FIRE FOR EFFECT. This would simulate your 500 yard barrage. However, if an adjustment is later made, then #1 comes into effect.

The key is to KEEP IT SIMPLE. The FOO RULE as it stands is a very dumbed down version from when it started, yet players still get confused. If you add in fire patterns and multiple targets per FOO then it becomes a monster again.

But thanks for bringing this up, it at least gets more players interested in it.

Hi Chris,

I'm a big fan of the KISS approach (Keep It Simple Stupid).
In fact I think the FOO Rule should be simplified even more; but still allow for barrages in a line.

What is the primary purpose of the FOO rule? It sounds like it is to keep players from plotting individual guns all over the map.

Perhaps the most complicated – and superfluous - part of the current FOO rule, is the correction procedure. This addresses a separate issue that I agree may be slightly gamey, but in the grand context of the game it’s not nearly as big a deal as targeting individual guns all over the map.

A simplified FOO rule, that allowed for barrage lines, might look like this:

1. One target ‘sheaf’ per FOO

2. FOO may plot a sheaf by targeting guns within 2 hexes of any other gun.
FOO can cluster his guns, plot them in a line, a circle and even a curve. As long as they are plotted with no space greater than a single hex.

3. Whenever a FOO chooses to correct or adjust fire, he must plot his guns according to rule number 2.

KISS :whis: (where's the big lip-smacking smiley when you want it? Our smilies are just way too war oriented ;) )

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I won't pretend to be an expert on artillery procedure, but I believe FOOs used a ‘pivot gun’ (UK) or ‘Base gun’ (US) which was the point from which other guns ranged their guns.

If a FOO wanted to hit all along a north/south tree line, and his pivot gun hit the southern edge, the rest of the battery (each knowing their relative positions from the base line and each other) would aim accordingly, knowing there first shots are targeted along the tree line.

Here are a couple of quotes I found that give you sense of the level of control observers actually had:

In WW2 a correction to range in yards given to each gun so that its fall of shot would be roughly in a straight line with the pivot gun at right angles to the line of fire, or in a barrage along the barrage line or with concentrations to converge guns onto the pivot gun's aimpoint.

When ranging was complete and Gunfire ordered then the link procedure (using rapporteur or window methods) was carried out between the two TCPs. The controlling CP passed their range and switch to the other troop CP, which adjusted it and ordered it to their guns. This conversion was to the nearest 30 minutes and 50 yards. Both troops used position corrections to ensure that their guns were aimed in a roughly straight line at right angles to the line of fire, the rounding gave the combined fire of the two troops greater spread. There were procedures to reduce or increase the spread of a troop's fire. Normally the observer adjusted the Gunfire to ensure it was covering the target.

For large targets the fire of troops, batteries or regiments could be moved individually so that the full target area was covered, although in multi-battery concentration this was quite large in any case. The alternative was sweep and/or search by which the guns varied their aim-point in line and/or range every round or few rounds. The observer (or fire planner) ordered the size and pattern of these variations.

A troop normally fired with its gun barrels parallel.
Gun lines of fire could be converged or diverged to concentrate or distribute the fire of a troop.

The observer could also order concentrations (which meant the guns did not fire parallel but 'converged' their fire) and distributions (which 'undid' concentrations or increased the troop frontage. Both were usually relative to the pivot gun, and for simplicity in the CP the observer could order the range at which the concentration angle was to apply.

British practice was to fire with each troop aiming its guns roughly in a straight line at right angles to its line of fire. This was achieved by 'position corrections', ordered to the nearest 25 yards in range and added to the ordered range by each gun. If the guns were deployed in a fairly straight line then these corrections would start for the gun furthest from the pivot gun when the switch was about 20° or more from the zero line. The distances were tabulated in Range Tables Part 2. The GPO ordered them "Position corrections No 4 plus 25" - No 4 gun added 25 yards to all subsequent elevations order during the engagement.

[Imp]

I agree if place all in same hex & get 300m coverage thats fine & adequate for game purposes.
But I still think should be able to place adj say a 3 hex cluster all touching for simplicity.
Better would be all spaced round & adj to target hex.
This gives 2 fire options spaced & tight so if FOO has a LOS so gets tighter spacing of rounds he can at least compensate.
You are risking him up front & for certain target types a LOS is a penalty due to lack of spread

[keepitloki]

Do you play WAW type SP or MBT type SP, because in SPWW@ and MBT the rounds tend to land all over the shop anyway. But I have noticed that in WAW the rounds all seem to land pretty close together. Could this be causing some confusion and dissent over the FOO rule? I personally am a fan of the FOO rule but agree that it has to be kept simple (from experience: anyone who played round 2 of Op Sealion?). Apologies to Yogi especially, who played with a different set of rules to his opponent, which is even more confusing (and that was my fault I suspect)
Also I wouldn't agree with the big guns vs small guns theory. Butukojay is killing my guys with 90mm mortars while I'm learning just how useless a 12" naval gun can be (and we're playing the FOO rule).
A rule of thumb might be: if you can't clearly remember the FOO rule after drinking 6 pints (Canadian beer) it's too complicated.