Hey Pete, I have just played the Ordeal at Overloon scenario and this scenario is ideal as an example to show what I was talking about when I said how you have, in this case, over half of your manpower tied up in artillery units not pulling their weight, unless you take control of them yourself.
There are 1917 personnel, 132 AFV's, 40 non AFV's and 24 guns in the line units.
There are 2316 personnel, 115 AFV's, 304 non AFV's and 108 guns in the artillery units.
As you know the game is not capable of conducting a preparatory bombardment before an attack. which is the most major of its shortcomings in my opinion. As I have said many times before this leaves the attacking side at a tremendous historical disadvantage and one of the reasons I don't enjoy playing the defending side.
There is no way to tell the AI where your center of gravity is and therefore where you want the maximum support from the artillery units.
There is no way to allocate ammunition, so no way for the guns to know how much ammunition you are prepared to expend over a set period of time, or any way to prioritize targets. By this I don't mean the priority for resupply, I mean the duration and number of rounds to expend in a set period of time, or its activity level if you like. Neutralize everything you see, only infantry in open, or only attacking units for example.
Unless of course you take control of it yourself, which is exactly what I do.
Most of the bigger artillery is held at the Divisional level but even down to Battalion level the Divisional commander can have influence on how it is used.
With every request for fire is sent a description of the target.
These fire missions are monitored by higher level Fire Direction Centers and the request for fire can easily be upgraded, or rarely down graded by higher echelons.
So taking more control of the artillery in game as the On Map Boss is not as far from being "realistic" as you might think, in my opinion.
If you remember we had a discussion on attaching artillery to the attacking formations on the matrix forum a while back where I explained that it just doesn't work properly.
The last thing posted on that thread was me asking if Dave wanted to support the feature but he didn't reply so I figured he didn't.
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3286717&mpage=3
If you remember in his tutorial video, he advocates using the artillery manually to conduct a preparatory bombardment during an attack.
I imagine that to try to code this sort of behavior into the AI would be extremely complex and in most cases still not meet the end users requirements.