artillery targeting

[WanderingHead]

take over a discussion from here: tm.asp?m=1560017

ORIGINAL: MrQuiet (this thread)
In my exp, a force of (5 arty and 5 inf) vs (5 arty and X units) will allways see art vs art 2 times and no other units targeted by art.
You currently need to have more art than the enemy to supress other units.

Hence the great race to outbuild artillary which Germany usually can not win, and if they could even stay even with Rus they still have to split it up to protect the coast.

This seems very wrong to me. It seems worthy of change, if easy enough to do so.

I would propose that in the first round of artillery fire artillery (range 3) would target as it does today, artillery targeted first until there are no remaining artillery targets.

In the second round of artillery fire (range 2) artillery would first ignore all previously fired upon units, firing first on not-yet-fired-on artillery, then not-yet-fired-on other, then random target selection.

I don't know if this is easy to do. I'd actually rather not touch it, but my initial reaction to this mechanic is that it is just very wrong. I always thought it worked basically as I outlined above, I guess I didn't pay close enough attention.

"Suppressing" artillery in the second round doesn't do much, unless it damages it, since the artillery isn't going to fire again. The idea was to have it suppress regular units before they have a chance to fire. I don't think you should need a preponderance of artillery to get this benefit.

[MrQuiet]

I would have to agree with you.
The only reason I build art as Germany besides coastal defence is to 'cancel out' the Russian Art.

[WanderingHead]

Looking over the code, I think that the easiest thing to do is leave the first shot (range=3) unchanged, and for the second shot (range 2) simply let targeting be random. I.e. there would be no bias towards artillery, or not artillery, or not-shot-at, it would just be random and hence sometimes would retarget artillery and sometimes would target other land units.

[christian brown]

leave the first shot (range=3) unchanged, and for the second shot (range 2) simply let targeting be random. I.e. there would be no bias towards artillery, or not artillery, or not-shot-at, it would just be random and hence sometimes would retarget artillery and sometimes would target other land units.

Sounds nice that way.

[kondor]

You have my vote on this one!