How is heavy artillery damage applied? Each bombardment component is 3 shots - but does that mean that it can only kill 3 infantry per fire? Maybe it should work like how missile damage is spread out in an "area"
Realistically? Much less. Since accuracy hovers at around ~10%, you'd need on average 3 artillery to hit one fortified infantry. But yeah, one shot would be one kill.
Artillery in Aurora are not terribly good against regular infantry from a resource perspective, especially the heavier sort. I don't see this as some sort of problem... they are good against Static units though and vehicle of all types.
No they're not. As per my tests, they don't have a rate of fire significant enough to hit infantry unless heavily massed. Since static has the same fortification leven than infantry, it's also not very effective against it.
i mean heavy artillery obliterates infantry. it's just not efficient against them, which is as it should be.
You can test this for yourself, just set up a fully fortified formation of infantry and try to kill them with Heavy Artillery and you'll see they don't obliterate them at all.
I think artillery is an easy fix - just make it work like missiles where damage is "spread", since the whole point of artillery is the spread of shrapnel over an area. This would make it so that each artillery component based on initial damage will get many more shots overall - but each shot will still be subject to hit chance and the reduced penetration of the shrapnel will make sure that armor isnt as affected by arty as infantry is.
In effect artillery already do "spread" as it has 3 shots and not one... which is kind of representing the wide are of effect of artillery and other bombardment weapons.
The game are abstracting combat and I feel that allot of the wants and interpretation have more to do with a tactical use of these weapons systems which the game really does not try to simulate. It simulate a military conflict on a planetary scale.
The different weapons strength and weaknesses are to simulate the rough usage of those weapon system.
In real life for example the main gun of a tanks are quite effective against infantry and have a big area of impact while in the game it only fire one shot and can only kill a maximum of ONE soldier per combat phase... this is an abstraction as the main use of that weapon is against armoured targets.
Other weapons such as CAP are mostly representing heavy grenade launchers or heavy machine gun type weapons and in real life these weapons are quite lethal to infantry but they often are used more as suppressing weapons rather than to kill stuff, just like most weapons are. In the real world weapons are used in tandem with each other to be more effective as a whole than they are individually, the game really don't consider such tactical usage of weapons but only look from a strategic perspective.
This is why weapons are a bit stereotypical in what they do because of game balance. If you had one weapons that was good against everything then everyone would take just that weapon.
The only thing that fortification does is to help troops to avoid being hit... this can be through electronic interference, camouflage, bunkers, force fields, perfect knowledge of the terrain, pre constructed mine fields, underground tunnels to hide troop movement or a combination of them all more likely. Anything to give the defending army a large advantage over the enemy.
This is why I don't like that you can simply destroy the fortification outright... I also don't believe it is necessary as it is not that hard to invade as it is. The initiative will almost always be in favour of the the invading as they control the battlefield and if they engage or not, they can bring more forces if necessary and most likely they defeated the space forces to get there. If it is not decently hard and difficult to invade then using defensive forces simply is pointless.
In my opinion it is WAY to early to judge if it is too easy or too hard to invade planets... we have to give it time and see how it goes.
