France 14

[Volcano Man]

Regarding intermixing units and calling artillery, remember that IF must be plotted anyway - so if there is more IF artillery later on, intermixing units won't really matter still as spotters have NO impact on IF plots. IF can be plotted on any hex in range - so I guess the intermixing benefit would come from mixing up IF artillery from various units, but as Ed stated, then command ranges impact that and the artillery will quickly become unavailable.

So to summarize that, intermixing provides no benefit that I can think of, outside of the historical "throw a unit into the line" to keep it intact.

Yep, Rick is correct, but the game goes a bit further because if your plotted artillery unit does not have a spotter by the same organization (all the units highlighted in red when you select the artillery unit to plot a barrage for) then the resulting fire will be un-spotted and very weak regardless if it is spotted by someone else. I think that later on we want to encourage massing of artillery when the artillery is very much so a corps level asset (corps level breakthrough artillery) with masses and masses of guns, the likes of which no one can currently imagine.

At that point though, the same is (or would be) true, the range of these artillery units are generally low, and you have to keep your line units closely together (for reasons listed above) so if you want to concentrate your guns between two corps then chances are you won't be able to cover the other 2/3 of the corps front in which it belongs. And also, assaulting with units from two different orgs seems to be more painful here, so you definitely don't want to do that between two unit boundaries, so that in itself makes the boundaries quite weak. But I guess we will see how that works out at that point and keep an open mind. :)