Artillery

[Arimus]

I was playing Nobody Comes Back as the allies and noticed something I don't think is working as intended.

The AI directed at least 2, probable 3 artillery units on an infantry company and when the company routed out of the bombardment zone, the batteries followed it, dead on the entire time. The company was routing thru urban streets away from what I believe was the spotting unit and behind friendly units. And amazingly, the unit did not stop, but kept moving till it was well away from the bombardment zone.

There appears to be only one enemy unit that had an LOS the entire time. I have a save, although I think the artillery has lifted.
Maybe excellent fire direction like this happened, but I would think it would be extremely rare.
On the other hand, I have never seen artillery miss or seen a failed fire mission (lost rounds, lost comms, temporary loss of LOS, etc)

I have noticed stacked artillery units seems to be common. Not sure if that was historically the case or not.

[jomni]

You can also do that manually, by constalty adjusting your fire every so often.  They also hit the spot and has little delay.  I guess that's just how the game works.  Maybe these are modeled behind the scenes.  You might see explosions and all but not much damage is being done as opposed to a stationary target.

[Arjuna]

Target tracking by arty is to be expected. IRL the forward observer ( FO ) would shift or adjust the bombard loc if he saw the enemy move. Once fire was registered, shifting the location by up to around 500m could be affected in under a minute.

Re never missing. I would caution here that it does miss, and more than you think. Remember you are only seeing the intel report for the enemy unit. You don't have perfect intel. Its exact location may be different from that reported. So you can be punding the reported location while in fact the actual unit has moved away... you just don't know it yet.

BTW that why I always check the currency and reliability of an intel report before I expend my valuable arty ammo. Make sure the reliability is high and the report is current.

[Arimus]

Jomni,

I don't find that to be the case. Against units in the open, suppressed and "taking cover", artillery causes a lot of casualties. In this case, the unit in question suffered 30% from this particular barrage. But, like I said it was at least two artillery units, probable 3. But I am not suggesting that the firepower of artillery is not accurately represented.

My argument is that timely, concentrated, accurate artillery fire from multiple units on the same target should not be automatic.

I am also suggesting that perhaps fire missions should have a small failure rate or at least a protracted adjustment time.

Yes, as a player, I can also stack artillery units and manually adjust to keep them on top of a particular unit.
However, I don't feel that is historically accurate. One battery, yes, but not multiple batteries.

[Arimus]

Or the lifting and/or shifting of fires could take several minutes and/or be very far off target.
 
Yes, I might be missing an enemy unit, I understand that, but I never see enemy artillery miss. The graphic is always right on top.
Occassionally, one of my units will move out of the bombardment zone and the artillery will not follow. Usually though, if the barrage is still going on, fire mission will get adjusted to stay on target.
Is the graphic not a good representation of hit/miss?
 

[Deathtreader]

Hi,

Perhaps the accuracy of the bombardment graphic has something to do with the zoom level you're playing at ie. at a medium zoom level you appear to be dead on but when switching to maximum zoom your barrage appears to be way off the target. I've played around with this apparent disparity before and it seems that you get better results when you target at maximum zoom. It's probably just wishful thinking on my part though........[:D]

Rob.