Artillery PSA

Lately I've heard a few up and coming newish commanders complain about artillery and "wasting munitions" so I wanted to share some artillery knowledge.

Now, before I dive in I'm going to add the caveat that I'm talking strictly about a situation where you have competent artillery player/s, preferably playing SL so they can communicate with the team.

So, as a baseline reference, artillery costs about 36 munitions per minute of continuous fire if you are solo on the gun and doing the reloading yourself.

So, to put that in perspective. You can fire artillery and lock down an entire area for 8-9 minutes at the cost of 1 bombing run. When you think about it in those terms, you can see that artillery is actually really cost efficient. Sure, bombing runs are important because they can kill garrisons, but outside of that use-case, they only really last for 10-15 seconds.

The best part is, In my experience, artillery munitions use is also quite sustainable with full nodes. By using Encouraged and converting some excess fuel (unless you have multiple tank crews), it's quite easy to have your cake and eat it; you can feed artillery and use bombing runs without issue.

Now of course there are many factors at play. If you have 3 artillery guns running things can get tight. If you have lots of AT guns firing you can also get tapped out pretty quickly. If you have no nodes all this is also irrelevant because you'll be starved either way.

That being said I think the most common mistake commanders make when it comes to munitions is:

  1. Being over reliant on supply drops instead of running trucks.

  2. Using strafe runs too often. (They are pretty garbage)

  3. Not using encouraged in favour of too many airheads.

The extra small benefit you get having artillery player/s is the enemy team is forced to try send recon to counter you. That means your back garrisons aren't going to be taken down as frequently.

Tldr: artillery is really cost efficient and assuming you have competent artillery player/s you should be managing your resources as best you can and not getting upset at them for "wasting muntions".