I will point out he has +10 offensive genius, 2 (+30) units and a +20 artillery. You're picking a long-range fight with an enemy that has more artillery than we have, while relying on some hits being high enough to attrition his army before he gets close. If he rolls, say, 2 defensive geniuses he uses for screening, long-term attrition wouldn't work out. He also isn't obligated to have infantry in front of his own artillery, a mobile cavalry screen that intercepts our cavalry is also possible nor obligated to keep his infantry in medium range during the bombardment. Your picking a fighting style that is both munition intensive, drawn out while nailing our own infantry to the lower corner of the map. If we're unlucky and roll consistently below average, this plan doesn't work due to the tight margins for inflicting damage. Bad luck can hamper any plan, but yours is particularly reliant on very, very tight damage margins being possible and nothing unexpected happening.
Look, I usually find your input very valuable, but I dont understand why you consistently have the effects of sample size turned around. A large sample size means that luck gets less relevant. If you flip four coins, you can have outliers where you have 4 heads. If you flip 70 coins, you will have variance, but your result will be somewhere around the middle, because large occurances average out.
Additionally, I dont see how my plan is somehow extra suspectible to sudden bouts of bad luck. In your plan, if von Trotha rolls an instakill he kills our Horse Artillery. That is possible in mine for the Trotha charge too, but the artillery crawl forward doesnt hae that risk - even if an enemy instakills one of our regiments, they dont have the units to exploit it, both because they arent in position and because they are already weakened from the crawl forward.
Concerning the Artillery: von Trothas best Artillery hits at +30. That means he hits our weakest unit for -30 per turn. On the other hand, our weakest artilleries, the elven artilleries hit his units, who are forced to stand in open plains for -10 per turn.
So, in addittion to having already weakened them in their crawl forward, we are also stronger in shooting them ourselves.
What happens if he doesnt actually screen his artillery? The artillery dies of course. We feign an charge against their cavalry, their cavalry charges our cavalry, our artillery shoots their charging cavalry, repeat until the cavalry is dead, then charge the artillery.
If he rolls 2 defensive geniuses for screening, we shoot all the other units that arent defensive geniuses, i dont see how thats a big obstacle.
I do not understand where there are tight margins for damage, I do not care where the damage is distributed or how it rolls, i only care about damaging him so much that he cannot screen his artillery, causing him to lose.
Let me try one last time to explain why i think spending munitions are a good thing.
Each spent munition is a precious point of XP for our artillery, whose level is extremely strong. Let us assume that we "waste" 50 points of Munition during a battle, getting our artilleries 50 extra points of XP. 50 XP is enough for everyone to upgrade except for elite level, but elite level also gets the trait, so is worth more than a normal level. This means that we would have spent 50 munitions to upgrade our artillery by one.
I consider that absolutely worth it - thats like 75 extra casualties done by that artillery every battle in the future, it allows stuff that requires high level artillery, as we see here each +10 can completely shift how a unit can be used and it gets them quicker to the coveted elite status, where they get their extra trait.
Where you say that something wastes ammunition and that is bad, I see a unit wasting ammunitions, racking up xp and think thats good
I don't really see, to be honest. Our artillery makes the center a complete killzone, while the hills hide us from the center on Von Trotha's side of the map. His infantry is inferior to ours, and the hilly terrain prevents him from focusing his artilley efficiently on the front.
I think that to do what you are proposing, he would have to conectrate all his forces either east or west, which would leave nothing preventing us from counter-attacking.
He can focus his troops on the west, where he can support over the Kirschenwald while we cannot hit his charging units because the artillery is blocked by hills
