Quote: (pixelgeek @ 10 Oct. 2008, 18:20 )
Off table artillery changes the game dramatically as does smoke.
I am looking forward to Chaos Daemons coming out from walls of smoke :-)
So I take it that it doesn't handle smoke realistically/how it's actually used?  Pretty much every person I've talked to with military training says that smoke attracts fire.  Did in WW2, has for the last 50+ years.  Throw smoke down and people shoot into it.  When units actually throw smoke, they usually head in another direction and going through the area blocked by smoke is suicidal-- people are strafing it, shooting mortars/artillery into it and stuff like that.  I don't think I've seen a wargame yet (save for some very stodgy historical coldwar stuff) that doesn't treat smoke as some sort of invincible wall of LOS blocking.  Though I guess there's little in the way of options when you don't have rules to cover saturating an area with shooting.
Although, smoke is also used (the large artillery delivered kind) as a means of obscuring an area for later.  A pass that needs to be crossed further into the operation can have smoke put down to block it.  It attracts all sorts of fire and the enemy might try to get recon around behind it to spot for artillery, but once that dies down, armour and apcs/ifvs might gun balls to the wall across the area.  Though that's still considered an incredibly risky thing as one hidden spotter and artillery will fall.  And it's certainly something you can't do if you don't have air superiority as recon craft can totally ruin your day.
EDIT:  Another historical use of smoke was to blind a specific target.  For example, before sherman tanks were upgunned, their 75mm guns had a hard time with some targets.  So some tankers kept a smoke round in their main guns as their first shot.  If they shot at something, the smoke round would smack up against armour they couldn't penetrate anyway and blind it to everything.
Yet another use was to put up a quick screen on an already suppressed enemy before getting in really, really close.  The enemy in this case would already be surpressed but it was just extra insurance to stop any last resistance from finding a target.  But this is close and man to man.
Similarly, infantry have been recorded to throw smoke at a tank they were about to assault.
I don't think there's much to document any sort of effective use of setting up walls that block the enemy's ability to shoot you right away.  But putting it directly on the enemy or to misdirect where you might go is another matter.  Signally was also a common use of the stuff. As well as setting up a smoke screen to attract attention and to wait for the most opportune time to cross an area.
The other way it has been used is in massive quantities. Supposedly the Soviets made a smoke screen almost 30km/18 miles long during a river crossing (to hide exactly where they were crossing from defenders and the air).
Too many games make smoke plunk down and make everything behind it untargetable by direct fire weapons like it was a forcefield or something. Most others just abstract it's effects into the rules for assaulting in close. I think I've only seen 1 or 2 cold war era modern rules that use it in combination with area saturation fire and spotting rules. But that gets messy.
