is there any point in mechanized artillery?

[newageofpower]

ORIGINAL: Uemon

Sadly i think Vic needs to rework artillery and rocket/missile launchers, they are simply impractical for how much they cost. Artillery in particular, if you use ranged attack option, its prohibitively expensive to operate. Usually 2 motorized artillery brigades max out my early logistics completely with just the ammo heh.

Rockets and especially Missiles are pretty good, because it's very hard to stop them from plastering your infrastructure.

I agree that the way mech arty works needs buffs to be more realistic. Right now armored crew + non-mech arty is basically strictly superior to self-propelled arty, which shouldn't be the case at all.

IRL self-propelled guns don't derive much survivability from their armor (it's very thin and only intended to prevent near-misses from being kills) but the fact they can deploy, do a rapid fire mission (extremely effective with MRSI) in under a minute, then GTFO and reposition for the next fire mission before counterbattery attacks land.

[zgrssd]

I just had this one pop up in my YouTube feed. I have not yet seen it myself, but I think it might be usefull for this discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZowkN8Q1Prw

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

I just had this one pop up in my YouTube feed. I have not yet seen it myself, but I think it might be usefull for this discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZowkN8Q1Prw

Okay, let us see:
- Ability to actually keep pace with the Tanks.
Ingame: Excluding roads, tracked is always slightly faster then wheel. On Plains Wheels take 150% the AP.
On top of limiting how far the whole unit could move in case it is inside the formation, this could also limit how many attacks you had left after reaching the combat position.

- be able to be used in the actuall attack, rather then pre-emptive ranged attack:
Independant towed/foot artillery is usually used for Ranged attacks, to shell the enemy as part of a siege. However it can be used in actuall combat - both offensive and defensive - where it is subject to enemy artillery fire and enemy breakthroughs.
So this would be a question about how much better at resisting the Mecha Artillery is to enemy artillery fire and broken through small arms
Artillery in the defense does serve at preveneting enemy breakthroughs, thanks to having many attacks

- More resistance to small arms fire then towed artillery:
In the game, this is a mixed bag:
1. It has 220 base Armor strenght, rather then the 50 of unarmored Artillery. If you give the normal Artillery +200 Armor strenght with combat armor, it would be unfair to not also give the Mech Artillery +200 Armor Strenght
2. Mechanized Artillery does count as hard target, wich usually means a halving of the incomming damage from most sources. But it also has less HP vs Infantry. And I am unsure if/how sideskirts would apply here.
I can not really say how well it performs without a test

- Resistance to counter battery fire
In the game that kinda falls under the units HP and entrenchment.
The ability to quickly change positions would mean a higher HP

[BlueTemplar]

EDIT : This is not just about defense & hit points, don't forget about caliber/armor thickness !

It's much easier to put thick armor plates on hard targets compared to soft ones...

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

They would be considered "mechanized" for posture stratagems like Blitzkrieg? If so you'd want to put them in your tank brigades to maximize the posture bonuses.

This was in the patchnots of the last beta:
"-MissileLauncher and RocketLauncher and other mechanized Launchers now use the Gun Tactics Skill (instead of Tank Tactics)"
So, they used to. But propably no longer?

Hmm, but you said yourself :

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

Units have a Movement type (Foot, Wheel, Track), a Combat type (Infantry, Gun, Tank) and a binary hardness (Soft/hard target).

However of those 3, only the movement type is currently shown.
While you are pretty unlikely to get infantry that uses anything but foot (or wheel for motorized) movement type, Buggies do fight as Tanks but move as wheeled. So you have to treat those 3 as seperate things altogether

So anything specifically Wheeled or Tracked (including Motorbike Infantry, Trucks, Buggies, APCs), Walkers (and also maybe Automated Turrets, Aircraft (and Jetpack Infantry ??)?) would be affected by Blitzkrieg / Fluid Defense / Recon in Force ?

Because if it was about Combat type : Tank only, why would not the Postures say "Tank", rather than "Mechanized" ?

[zgrssd]

Because if it was about Combat type : Tank only, why would not the Postures say "Tank", rather than "Mechanized" ?

Because the game is in early access, half the mechanics might not be set and it has a single developer/programmer.

And as the saying goes: "The 2 most common problems in programming a cache invalidations, naming things and off-by-one errors."

Also the text on the Stratagem is only a string. And not even auto-generated one. It might not actually explain what the card affects are anymore.

[BlueTemplar]

Because the game is in early access

Why would you think so ? It isn't mentioned anywhere, the game version is bigger than 1.0, and since the "Open Beta" is called "beta" and not "alpha", this suggests that the game itself is not "beta"... though on the other hand the developer still seems to be adding new features... so depends what do you mean by "early access"/"beta" I guess ?

But anyway, what kind of units did you see those "mechanized" modifiers affect / not affect ?

[BlueTemplar]

ORIGINAL: Soar_Slitherine

Tracked vehicles have a much lower base movement cost than wheeled vehicles offroad, though - they're faster by one-third on plains, for example. I don't think independent artillery can be equipped with APCs for tracked movement, either - at least I couldn't find any option to raise a mechanized artillery formation the last time I invested in APCs and looked for it.

Have you tried making a custom "Foot" Arty/APC Battlegroup ?

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

I just had this one pop up in my YouTube feed. I have not yet seen it myself, but I think it might be usefull for this discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZowkN8Q1Prw

Thanks, this was quite informative !

[Soar_Slitherine]

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar

ORIGINAL: Soar_Slitherine

Tracked vehicles have a much lower base movement cost than wheeled vehicles offroad, though - they're faster by one-third on plains, for example. I don't think independent artillery can be equipped with APCs for tracked movement, either - at least I couldn't find any option to raise a mechanized artillery formation the last time I invested in APCs and looked for it.

Have you tried making a custom "Foot" Arty/APC Battlegroup ?

I did not consider it because of the -15% attack penalty, but I suppose that is actually a valid alternative to investing in mechanized artillery models. 300mm arty should have more firepower than the 180mm maximum for mechanized even with the -15% penalty (doubly so on the defensive), the APCs are more mobile and APC-towed artillery doesn't require protection from a separate unit since the APCs protect the guns against breakthrough, which is particularly useful for closing encirclements. So now that you've mentioned it, it does make the actual mechanized artillery model type sound rather bad.