Somebody on the Facebook Dust Tactics group just posted this:

"Finally heard back from FFG regarding Artillery Weapons and the Wiederbelebungsserum... All they said is that they are working on clarifying the rules and that there will be a new FAQ out soon."

So it sounds like their rulings in the emails we received weren't necessarily so final.

I tell you, if only the creators of the game gave it half as much thought as we do....

Loophole Master said:

Yeah.  I can understand a rule not being written clearly.  Often if you're designing a game, you think something is clear because you already understand the rule when you're reading it.

But the issue here doesn't seem to be clarity of those who wrote the rules, but that the people writing the rules didn't even think about this situation at all to begin with, despite it not even being a rare situation.  It really seems bizarre to me.

 heroes benefit from cover when paired with a squad dont they?

ReaverRandall said:

Yes, they do.

Major Mishap said:

Grenades are not considered an accuracy weapon, nor are flamethrowers.  Flamethrowers work best used excessively, on flamable targets, and on targets in completely enclosed spaces like bunkers where it can burn out most of the oxygen.  Grenades work best on targets without cover, or to keep people's heads down during an assault.    Cover from a building or wall can protect against both of them.

Artillery works the same way, without great accuracy, but with a lot more force.  I mentioned a 155mm shell earler, because it was fairly common in WW2.  It throws about 100 lbs of explosive.  A grenade is about 1 lb.  A 105mm shell is about 30 lbs.  That's a lot more power than a grenade.  To give an example of relative power, a 155mm shell is considered to have a lethal radius of 50 meters, as opposed to less than 5m for casualties from a grenade.  I've had debris from a 155mm shell fly past my head when I was over a mile away.

Even in WW2, they had timed fuses, and were beginning to work with proximity fuses, to give air bursts, which do a significant reduction to cover from artillery blasts.  Most WW2 rounds were impact fuses, but even 30 lbs of explosive blowing up on the other side of a room's wall is a lot more problematic than a hand grenade.  A chair can stop a grenade, but it takes a solid wall to stop artillery.

Grenades are designed to kill people completely in the open, and make other people duck, rather than kill everyone. There are lots of battle reports about people bunkering down in a room while being grenaded for some time, and coming out without major injuries simply because of light furniture for protection.  People don't walk out of rooms very often after being hit by artillery.  The blast can disorient, or kill, even if the fragmentation fails.
 

And you will need tons of 155mm explosives to clear out 2 guy's in a foxhole before you hit it - or 1 grenade.

Major Mishap said:

Very far from true.  A single air burst would do the trick, or the shock wave travelling through the ground if the consistency was right, or a near enough miss that they still got caught because they were at all exposed.

 Grenades were far from a guaranteed clear, even if they entered the foxhole, as soldiers were trained to dig grenade sumps in the foxholes, and a grenade rolling or pushed into one did nothing to the people in the foxhole.  Modern grenades have time and impact fuses combined, which makes the more dangerous, but WW2 had only timed grenades, so tossing a grenade back, or rolling away, or simply ducking if it wasn't right next to you, were frequently enough.  The trick was that grenades often came right before an assault, so if you were ducking, you weren't watching the soldier coming behind that was trying to shoot or skewer you on a bayonet. 

A grenade in a room without cover was a very nasty proposition, as overpressure and bouncing fragments created the famed chunky salsa effect, but experienced soldiers also knew about that, and would look for cover if they could get it in any building they were fighting in.  Again, a grenade pressaging an assault was a good way to go, as people had to defend against the grenade and then react to an immediate assault, but grenades were not the entireity of a good room clearing operation.

Grenades are good, purposeful tools, but are nowhere near as effective as the movies show them to be.

 Artillery ground bursts are not as effective as air bursts, and if the ground is the right consistency, can be even moreso, but grenades are very rarely timed well enough to be air bursts.  There's a reason the statistics show 90% of casualties in war at the front lines are caused by artillery.

Gimp said:

I was unaware that in WWII they had the accuracy to launch 1 shell from indirect artillery to strike two guys in a foxhole whether it was a airburst or not.

Dcal12 said:

The point of artillery is that you don't need perfect accuracy to strike two guys in a foxhole.  Artillery comes in fast, without warning noise, so unless the guys in the foxhole are already ducking, they are exposed when it goes off.  Bombs sometimes had screamers to demoralize the target area as they came in, and Stukas might have them on their wings, but artillery never does.  You know artillery is coming when it goes off, and not before. 

A 155mm shell has a lethal radius of 50m, a solid casualty radius over 4x that size, and the capability of throwing injuring shrapnel even further.  My point of shrapnel flying over my headA 105mm shell drops those numbers to 20 meters and 100 meters, but they're still far larger than the grenades's 5m casualty radius for exposed targets.  A casualty radius on 5 meters covers 78.5 square meters of area.  A casualty radius of 100 meters covers 31,400 square meters.  There's a bit of a gap there.  Put in visual terms, a grenade would endanger an area from the goal line to the five yard line of a football field for less than a thrid of the width of the field.  A 105mm shell covers over six entire football fields, including the end zones.

If foxhole guys don't get a lucky burst, they get caught with a good chance of injury if they're within 250 meters, and a good chance of death within 50 meters of the blast from a 155mm shell.  Even dropping that to 20m and 100m for a 105mm shell, the artillery gives a lot more area of effect than a grenade.  Even if the blast doesn't catch them directly, artillery shells were known to collapse foxholes on the defenders, sometimes smothering them, and sometimes forcing them to dig themselves out.  Either situation takes them out of the fight.  The shockwave from a near miss can take out a tank crew, or knock a soldier senseless.  Again, they aren't dead, but they are out of the fight.

The Nebelwerfer rolls 2 dice per model in a target unit because it fires lots of shells with each attack, that burst all over the target area.  The Petard Mortar only rolls 1 dice, but for the same reason, though it's a single point of explosion.  Shrapnel from artillery is a very dangerous proposition.  A squad might throw multiple grenades at once, to increase their chances of hitting the target, but they would never have the entire squad throw at once unless they were newbie fools, because someone should be firing to try and make the target keep their heads down to give the throwers more survivability.  Being shot before you throw a live grenade can be hazardous to your buddies if you drop it. 

 On the flip side, a grenade also has a hard time striking two guys in a foxhole.  If you have a height advantage to see the foxhole, which means the guys making the foxhole were untrained newbies, you can throw down into the position with more chance of getting in the foxhole.  Otherwise, you're throwing a grenade trying to make it into a hole (possibly a single man hole in WW2 about 3' across) that you can't see, with an object traveling slow enough to be seen and called out by defenders, and hoping the target doesn't see it to knock it into their grenade sump, or have it roll there naturally before it goes off.  They may easily simply have to duck, and stand back up immediately after the blast.  A near miss from a grenade has the same issues you think of for artillery with ground shape and softness mitigating blast, but to a far larger degree because there is much less force from a 1 pound grenade with less than half a pound of charge than there is in an artillery projectile with several pounds of explosive.

Flamethrowers suffer the same issues.  They can fire a stream of burning fuel, but it isn't a very accurate stream, and can have a hard time coming down on people in a foxhole.  An enclosed space like a bunker is an ideal target, because the flamethrower can burn out the oxygen, but flamethrowers have no penatration.  Anything hit gets burning fuel stuck to it, but you need to hit.  While that happens, people are firing at the guy with the flamethrower because they don't want him to have the chance to adjust his fire very well.  There's a reason a lot of people earned medals using flamethrowers; it's hard, and very dangerous for the user.

I'm going to agree with Gimp on this one for the same reasons for reality purposes.  Artillery in many tabletop games is rather wimpy compared to its real life counterparts, for example, a real artillery shot in the scale we are looking at on the board would be the same size as a tile.

It gets even worse in Dust Warfare unless they are getting some really huge templates with four range in DT = 24" in DW.  The M1 (range 4) has a 400m effective combat range, which makes each square = 100m and each inch >16m.  OUCH!  The fun part?  That scale would actually make the square a fairly valid size for the blast radius of artillery.  Of course that means the minis should be less than a tenth of an inch tall...