How to call artillery in WARDOGS

Two numbers, and everyone forgets the second

Artillery in WARDOGS is a solved problem the moment you have both halves of a firing solution. Azimuth turns the gun. Elevation decides where the shell comes down. Most crews we have played with work out the first one with a compass and then guess the second, which is why so many opening rounds land in a field.

The guessing is understandable. Elevation depends on range, muzzle velocity, shell mass and drag, and none of that is written on the gun. So we built the artillery calculator to do the arithmetic and hand you both numbers at once.

Know your gun before you place it

There are two pieces of indirect fire worth learning, and they are not interchangeable. One is a vehicle you buy. The other is something you build on the ground.

The SPH-2 is the one people picture, and it does not reach as far as people picture. Two and a bit kilometres on a board ten kilometres across is a quarter of the map, so the gun has to be driven forward of spawn and parked where the fight will be. What it does inside that circle is the sell. A 450 damage shell with a 7.5 metre killing radius removes whatever it lands near.

The trade is the reload. Twenty-seven seconds between rounds is a long time to be wrong. Miss twice and you have spent a minute achieving nothing while your team asks where the fire support went.

The L81 goes the other way. A quarter of the damage, and it comes back in six and a half seconds. That changes what it is for. The SPH-2 is a scheduled event. The mortar is a conversation with whoever is calling it, and you can correct three times in the gap between two SPH-2 rounds. Its shell also falls steeply enough to drop behind cover the howitzer would have to arc over.

Running the gun

Here is the sequence we use. It takes about fifteen seconds once you have done it a few times.

• Place the gun. Click where you actually parked. Not where you are heading, not roughly. The solution is only as good as this click.
• Place the target. Your spotter gives you a landmark or a grid. Drop the pin.
• Read the azimuth and turn the barrel to it. Zero is north, ninety is east.
• Read the elevation and raise the barrel until the sight shows those mils. Take the high arc if anything stands between you and the target.
• Fire, then watch. The first round is a question. Where it lands tells you what to change.
• Correct and repeat. Move the target pin to where the shell actually hit, and the calculator tells you the difference.

That last step is the one that separates a gun that lands rounds from a gun that makes noise. You are not trying to be right first time. You are trying to be right by the third.

The one number on the SPH-2's sight we would never aim by is the range in its RNG column. That figure is the gun's own estimate, worked out to one fixed height on the map, and on flat shots it reads hundreds of metres further than the shell really travels, so raising the barrel until it matches the distance drops your rounds short. You set the mils the calculator gives you, and the HUD RNG figure printed beside them tells you what that column should read once you have, which makes it a quick check before you fire.

The high arc, and why your shells hit the hill

Every artillery solution has two answers. A shell fired at 30 degrees and a shell fired at 60 degrees can land in exactly the same place. The low one gets there fast and flat. The high one goes up, comes down steeply, and clears anything in between.

If your rounds keep clipping a ridge that is nowhere near the target, you are firing the flat one. Switch to the high arc. It takes longer to arrive, and it arrives.

This matters more on Bakurani than anywhere else. The map is full of hillsides and the Control Zone often sits in a bowl, so a gun parked in the valley has terrain in the way whether it looks like it or not.

Spotting, and the relay

A gun without a spotter is a coin flip. You cannot see the far side of your own range ring, so somebody has to tell you what happened.

The cheapest fix in the game is a pair of Binoculars at $75. That is a rounding error against an $8,000 gun and it turns one teammate into a working forward observer.

Then start a relay on the calculator and give your spotter the code. They drop targets, you watch them appear on your board, and nobody has to read coordinates aloud over voice while being shot at. We have run three-person gun lines off one code, and the difference against calling it manually is not close.

Where to park

Range is your first constraint, so solve it first. Put the target on the calculator, look at the ring it draws around your gun, and find ground inside it. Only then start choosing how hard you are to find.

• Behind terrain, not on it. A gun on a hilltop has line of sight to the enemy, which means the enemy has line of sight to the gun. You do not need it.
• Off the roads. Vehicles move along roads and will find you by accident.
• As far back as the ring allows. Your gun costs $8,000 and dying with it is the most expensive mistake available to you. Take the rearmost position that still reaches, never the closest one you can find.
• Move after three or four missions. Somebody eventually works out where the shells are coming from.

You can plan all of this before the match with the map explorer, which shows spawns, towers and terrain as separate layers.

What it costs to be wrong

An SPH-2 is $8,000. Against a $10,000 opening balance that is most of your money on one vehicle, and it only earns that back if the rounds land on people.

So our honest advice for a first artillery match is to build the L81 instead. It costs you nothing but the time to put it up, the six second reload teaches you correction far faster than the SPH-2 does, and being wrong with it costs a shell rather than a vehicle.

Learn the loop on the mortar. Buy the gun once the loop is automatic.