why buy armor?

[bhutnath]

Listy said:
A note on ammo trucks:

A switched on opponent will put you in a world of hurt if you clump your blokes around ammo supplies.

You mentioned arty with ammo dumps. Arty will give away its position by smoke. A lot of players I know keep an eye on the back field for just such a target. So does the AI I believe.

When an ammo dump goes bang its very enthusiastic about it.

I would like to know if the arty becomes visible (not just smoke) after a few rounds of firing. Here is what I have been doing, if I get a SP arty system or multiple barrel rocket laucnh system like the b-21, I buy a dump per vehicle . Shoot and run to dump, reposition, shoot run to dump. Most of the time the opponent's counter battery fire drops on nothing.

Recently I have been wondering if I cant get cheaper but towed arty system which not only are equaly effective but offer me a continous barrage capability which i loose with scoot and shoot.

So I buy myself a arty brigade (3-4 regiment) with one regiment of same callibre guns with cluster munitions. I buy one dump per cluster mun equiped tube and 1 dump per platoon of regular arty.

Then I scatter them around all over the map. Since a dump can supply over 2 hex the regular arty platoon is arange in a 'traible' where each arty is 2 hexes away from the a dump. The expensive cluster mun equipped guns are all alone by themselves with their own private dumps! (but 2 hex away to escape blast if dump is destroyed)

Each time I fire I use some guns to add more smoke on the map. Now, here is where I dont know if the guns become visible with few rounds, for otherwise there would be about 60-90 odd, smoked hex on the back part of the map within 2 turns of firing with only 48 or so of them containing an arty piece. I do loose some arty in the course of the game, but so far my opponents have given up on taking them out. One advantage of keeping all guns of the same callibre is the opponent has to guess which are the cheap non cluster and which are the expensive ones!

I havent played too many games yet, so i suspect there may be a lot of learning to come by the way of a game with seasoned opponent.
-Ak