Artillery firing across sea

[LuciusSulla]

Artillery could fire across the sea as long as its range is enough.

Which means, an Axis artillery placed in Syracuse could hit Malta and greatly reduce its garrison's readiness and entrenchment; basically rendering Malta undefendable.
Furthermore, an Axis rail gun placed at Dunkirk could hit London. England really has no means to counter it if the German place some Anti-Air or Interceptors nearby.

Both the scenarios are not realistic and gives Axis an upper hand. Is it possible to fix this in a patch?

[Kornstalx]

Both the UK and Germany had railway guns that were designed to fire across the channel at the Straits of Dover (as well as static artillery emplacements for this), but you're right none should hit London. That's about 3x as far as their range (Gustav was about 30 miles, it's ~90 miles from the Calais coast to Greater London). As far as Malta goes, it's about 50 miles from Sicily a the narrowest point.

So yeah, you're right in that this is a bit gamey.

[ERA101]

Larger map may fix some problem with current game balance.
Change unit stat may not good as it effect a lot of game balance.
Reduce the range of the artillery will make it useless.
Move city position is also not realistic.

[LuciusSulla]

It might be fixed without changing the artillery range or the map. Perhaps it is possible to modify the script that when deciding whether a target is within artillery range, sea hexes are counted as infinite distance. Just like how the command range of HQs are modified by terrain.

[ERA101]

I think it’d be very difficult to code.
The supple distance and unit range is different.
And some sea hexes should be possible to bombard across.
(Some hexes in baltic sea (near Denmark, Leningrad, etc.)