A note on Artillery movement

Regarding the Artillery move recipe, a client just asked for clarification on Artillery. "Will the artillery constantly move not shoot?"

No.

Before a unit can move it needs to determine where to move to.

So if you drew a chip that indicates a particular artillery, yes it will move if it cannot hit something.

Beginner human players may be fearful of losing the unit and hold on to artillery positions on defended hexes, but the bot priority is local, greedy. Which as a whole (on battlemap level), makes it exhibit organic, semi-intelligent behavior.

So yes, if there is nothing to shoot it will continue to move toward something it can shoot at.
You can use this to "lure the unit away" from a VP at the sacrifice of (probably) the targeted unit.

=

Artillery without a target to attack, determines a target to move.

What follows may sound complicated, but really in practice is usually immediately obvious. So please don’t feel intimidated. 

I see step 8 was a continuation of step 7, which was a continuation of step 6. Perhaps that was your question? I’ll fix that in a future update.

step 6 written out follows below. I assume that x > y format, what to consider first, is clear?

Step 6 of below image “human artillery” means:

it will always move to nearest human player artillery unit. Nearest in the sense of length of path to reach. As before, they must have a shortest path to reach. Inaccessible units are ignored. (you can use this to trick the bot, and you should!)

If shortest paths to different artillery are equal (equidistant), “most battle dice” will determine which it will crawl to. This means that it tries to avoid getting into a terrain disadvantage.

“Least unit” means: If 2+ artillery units are equidistant and it’s not clear which gives the best spot to attack them, our artillery unit will single out a unit that’s most dead, because it might give the bot a VP for killing a human unit.

“Units on VP tokens” means that in previous case if both artillery units are healthy it will start pelting down the unit occupying a hex with a VP token (medal) on it. I should have indented the text, it’s now step 7 but is just a continuation of step 6.

Step 7 “tank” means that if the previous clause was not conclusive it says “screw it, let’s get into position to hit the nearest tank” (most battle dice preferred).

If the human lost all tanks, it will get into position to pelt down nearest infantry (most battle dice preferred).

“7. Flee penalty” means priority to units that must respect the “flag” (flee) die. Reason is that in certain cases such a unit gets destroyed, granting a VP, as per normal Memoir’44 rules.

Line 8 is a continuation of line 7.

(I shortened these bottom steps because they almost never occur, I had written them out but it would needlessly make the recipe too long. Clearly you can consider if there are no enemy artillery, a similar recipe for the remaining tanks would apply, but I didn't want to make the bot too smart, part of the fun is that the opponent sometimes makes mistakes, it should not feel like playing chess against the usual autist.)

* this also leaves several opportunities for special forces to reach their goal more or less unharmed, but I leave the specifics as an exercise to the reader :-)