Erk, Culture shock

[Nightblade]

Listy said:
I'm curious, how do you move them through terrain at anything close to a useful speed? Surely advancing at one hex a turn means your attack grinds along and is a sitting duck for arty, and runs the risk of timing out?

Artillery is a big problem for every kind of strategy one can plan, as you never know if the opposite side will target what they can spot or will make "random" arty missions and sometime devastate well hidden moving troops he never ever saw (on a PBEM a friend nearly killed 2 of my infantry squads and suppressed some more like this, without even knowing it ).

So as i hide my tanks in the beginning while having my infantry going forward (either on foot or on apc/ifv/truck), if the opposite side will plan arty missions on what he is spotting, it will rain on the infantry.

If i notice the artillery landing near my tanks, it is at 99% of of those random missions based on luck/wishfull guesses, and there i will move my tanks, as luck is a factor that did not always favored me before in SP:MBT

Timing out and moving pace is not a real problem for me :
-I don't play scenario based on few turn and huge maps that would force me to basically rush as quick as possible to the objectives and lose tanks without being able to prevent it (and so lose the win victory points conditions).
Playing on pure luck (rushing on the objective hoping the enemy will miss or the shell does not penetrate) is way too random for me.

-For the map size i usually play , there is no problem for slow advancing tanks to reach the objectives before the end of the game.

Basically, all really depends on how the enemy artillery missions will be planned.

But the more i play, the more i use tanks as firing support and not as offensive spearheads, because the loss of points when one tank is destroyed is really too much a penalty on your final score when you play a relative small battle (as it is what i do often in SP:MBT), often preventing you to get better than a draw despite you know the enemy has been beaten.