"The Great War reserve artillery fire question." Topic

I recently was fortunate to win one of these boxes in a competition in MW mag and we played our first game last Sunday. Apart from one or two minor mistakes we made which I notice on re-reading the rulebook again and have noted, I have one question for nayone else who has played the game. Reserve artillery, does it fire independantly based on how many HQ tokens you have available to expend each turn, or does it follow the command cards where you issue orders and it counts as a unit for whichever sector you play a command card for and decide to battle in? I'm presuming it's entirely independent and the command cards just cover the units on the board, but just wanted to be absolutely clear about this for my own peace of mind. Overall it is a very enjoyable game, easily picked up after half an hour and very playable. Germans were winning 5-3 in the first scenario when we had to draw stumps.

You use command cards to activate it in whichever sector it applies to and then spend HQ tokens up to the number on the artillery marker, getting one dice per token

Ah so we did do it wrong after all. We were using it without command cards willy nilly.
My opponent was wondering if hits were cumulative as well? I know you can't target a unit with more than one of your own units simultaneously apart from machine guns, but he wondered if hits from artillery for instance are kept on a unit and added to hits from rifle, machine gun or mortar fire? Flags for instance, where you might roll two as hits on a unit from artillery fire, and then get another flag if firing and hitting the same target with rifle fire in the same turn. If the target is in a trench you ignore the first two flags from arty fire, but would the one from rifle fire in the same game turn count as a valid hit?

I'm pretty sure that each attack is separate, so the effects of multiple attacks are not cumulative, For example, a unit in a trench shot at by two enemy units will use the trench's protection against both of them and negate one hit and one retreat from each (assuming that's what the effect says – don't have the rules to hand).

Two hits if the die have the soldier figure showing, two flags if they are showing if the target unit is in a trench, but I understand what you say.That was what we thought, my opponent speculated that it might be cumulative once the scores reached 5-3 in my favour!! Funny how many times we start going over the rules looking for crumbs of comfort when ever defeat stares us in the face lol.

Generally in the CnC games, combat is resolved a unit at a time and the effect of e.g. flags is not cumulative. Exceptions are the bonuses from tactics cards and specific rules such as Combined Arms in the Napoleonic version.

Cover effects are therefore resolved per attack as well, not per target.

And retreat results from the first attack can cause the defender move out of range (or increase the range) before the next attacker might be able to fire. This is why you must carefully consider your battle sequence.

Thanks for the replies. I've played the second scenario in the book solo to see what the terrain did to the game and using the dice properly this time and resolving combat as each occured. It was a very satisfactory game, 6-5 narrow win to the Hun again. I presume that if two opposing units are in adjacent hexes but those hexes aren't in the sector that you play an order card for them they ignore each other and don't automatically fight at close quarters simply because they are next to each other, having to await orders in order to do so?