Hail!
A new member of the blitz here requesting advice from the experts!
In the larger scale battles I play as the germans I tend to take a battery of long range artilley to represent corps lvl assets. My question is which is the best and or most realsitic unit to take?
In several games I've used 170mm but they never seem to counterbattery allied 155mm off board artilley. This makes me think the 155mm allied may out range the Germna guns.
Any advice?
I've noticed the same, 170mm rarely fires counter battery at 155mm even though it has 7,5 km longer range.
In SP WaW Long Tom and 170 K18 has the same range which is false but explains the rarity of CB.
Which 155mm do you mean? The US OB has three different types of 155mm arty alone. The M2 being the most common for games as that was the standard for the later war years has the same range as the german 17cm gun. So no counterbattery fire between these.
And remember that counterbattery is never a given. You can have the battery with the highest range, experienced crews and enemy batteries firing every round and still not get a single counterbattery volley off. It's hard and in ww2 times took quite some effort and time to get rounds on target in CB fire.
Don't forget that off-board CB fire is very abstract in the game. It is NOT like firing in the game itself where you fire and then see if you hit anything. You will only see CB strikes that have already hit the target and do damage. So feel free to imagine the turns they don't 'fire' as turns where they try to git the enemy guns but hit empty ground instead.
If off-map CB fire were much easier it would be far too powerful. The side with the best (longest range) guns would soon dominate the game. Worse, you'd see players run to guns with the highest possible range in the hope of avoiding CB fire. Maybe even skip offboard arty altogether if the enemy has a higher range gun in his inventory.
It may help to think of it as each round you devote a battery to off-map CB fire you're firing it at the enemy guns. But the odds are low and you get just one chance per round to fire. The longer you keep them at it in consecutive turns the better the odds get (especially if an enemy battery keeps firing continually, eg round after round). But they're not great odds.
The plus side is that if you do hit you often knock out a valuable enemy asset. The downside is that during the time you have it firing CB the enemy is pounding your grunts.
You choose if you want to commit a battery to off-map CB fire or not. As the game works now either way can turn out to be the better choice. There's no best option, which makes it pretty balanced.
Narwan
Good info there Narwan. Myself, I normally get to impatient and start chewing up the corn fields instead of waiting.
But the basics is; the gun with the longer range may CB, but will be out of the range of the enemy off map battery.
One tactic that I sometimes use is to purchase offboard guns of value with relatively limited ammo. Then I blast away with them from turn 0 as interdiction fire: Thou Shalt Not Go There without paying a heavy price while I zip my units where I want them.
When the tubes are down to 4 to 6 rounds each, I quit using them. They'll sit and wait to CB-fire those last few shells at my opponent's guns, which probably are still firing because they've been probing around at 0.5+ delay and dropping only a round a turn.
Onboard mortars then actually take up the job of supporting my other arms, which ideally already have gained the tactical defensive with the help of the interdiction fire.
That seems to maybe maximize the strengths of offboard artillery in my experience.
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Narwan Wrote:Which 155mm do you mean? The US OB has three different types of 155mm arty alone. The M2 being the most common for games as that was the standard for the later war years has the same range as the german 17cm gun. So no counterbattery fire between these.
Not quite correct, M2 has 23km and K18 29,5km, big difference but the game doesn't show that.
Can't comment on the historical ranges, the game use the same range for both (220).
Just what I said, game has false data.
Not sure if that's true. I do know there were guns that could fire different types of shells that had differing ranges. In other words, longer range but smaller bang. So it could well be that the range in the game fits the HE loadout. I'm no expert on arty but I suspect the K18 could well be such a gun. In those case the game picks the max range for the 'standard' shell, not the 'extra-range' shell.
If you have some info for me to show that the gun is wrong in the game please let me know, I certainly won't claim the game is perfect in it's units stats.
Narwan
Did some more digging into this range thing for offmap arty. It's abstracted too. It's not direct representation for actual range like for onmap units. It doesn't have to be as each offmap battery can hit any hex on the map. It's only use is for determining offmap CB capacity against other offmap batteries. So a range of 220 for an offmap battery doesn't mean the guns have a max range of 11000 meters, it just means it can CB fire against batteries with a range of up to 219. That's why the offmap ranges start at 200 and slowly work their way up (there seems to be a max value it can have too so they all have to be measured into a narrow range of values).
Offmap batteries are categorized into groups and given a 'range' corresponding to the general category. So types with the same 'range' in the game can have a different range in reality. Why? Well if a type had just 500m more range than the enemies types it would mean it needed to be in exactly that uppermost 500m range for it to be able to fire on the enemy without the enemy being able to fire back. So if that gun was given a longer range in the game it would gamewise be assumed to ALWAYS be in that 500m interval distance. That would be silly. So guns are placed into general categories.
As to the 17cm K18, I've seen 4 different max ranges for it sofar after a bit of searching all apparantly depending on which of four types of ammo are being fired. So it does indeed look like the range in the game is linked to a specific ammo type (and not the one with the biggest range).
A super longrange CB variant of the 17cm offmap battery with more range but a lower HEK and WH size in addition to the one already in the game would seem to be a viable option (especially as this task was what the type was originally intended to do) but the german OB is already filled to capacity so another unit would have to go make room for it. Not something the designers are eager to do, I'm afraid...
Narwan