SPWW2 handicaps vs AI

[jivemi]

Originally Posted by DRG

We were hoping to start hearing from both sides Re:Z-fire ......ALL we have heard up to now are people complaining about it......not a lot of people but it's a theme that re-appears

Don't use it myself much but in a past thread somewhere I mentioned that Rommel's men used it in France, that the Eighth Army used it in North Africa, and someone else said that the US Army called it "reconnaissance by fire." In the Armor in Battle series posted by Old Gamer there's an interesting description of tanks using area fire against ATGs:

"I was more or less stymied along the road. This was not good. I also knew that the higher ground was drier ground. I decided then I’m not going down the road. I’ll see if I can go around. I used the ridge to my advantage to get to Marthille. Well, the
Germans must have known this. They must have gathered up from various sources this supply of antitank guns. They spent a lot of time, because this was November,and they were beautifully camouflaged. They had gotten enough underbrush so that they really...camouflaged these guns.There was no evidence of guns when we were going up. We had the light tanks leading, and they’re mobile. We did reconnaissance by fire [my emphasis]. We used .30 caliber. The light tanks were firing their coaxes,because they thought something was suspicious. They were firing. When you hit something solid, it flashes. Suddenly, we got flashes, so we knew we got something there. One of the light tanks, with its 37mm popped one of these suspicious places. Brush and all came down, and there was an antitank gun.So they started popping all over the place. The minute they saw this antitank gun, we had a medium tank come, and they shot 75mm rounds...In 45 minutes, I think we got the largest bag of antitank guns. We got over twenty antitank guns, about eight of them were eighty-eights, but we got them before they got us."--Brig. Gen. (ret.) Albin F. Irzyk

Additionally, from a gaming point of view, z-fire mitigates the "moving adjacent" problem, in which unsuppressed defenders take potshots at infantry who are theoretically 50 meters away yet are invariably spotted and blasted--even if the adjacent hex was the first they moved into that turn.