The Commander Series Forum

I'm a little confused, having gone through the BKC-II rulebook, as to how Assets work. Do you have to buy an artillery piece and then assets, or or just the Assets given in the army lists?

You have to buy an artillery piece to use assets. Think of an asset as a stockpile of shells ready to be used. There is usually a limitation on the number of assets you can buy per artillery piece so you might have to buy more than one artillery unit if you want to have a high number of assets.

So if you only buy an artillery piece, it's completely useless? Or are assets solely for scheduled fire missions?

Also, which artillery pieces are deployed on-table and which are deployed off-table?

An 'Artillery Support Unit' is deployed on-table and an 'Artillery Unit' off-table.

Asets are only for scheduled support. Requested artillery support needs an FAO on-board. If your list doesn't have an FAO or scouts with an FAO capacity, you are limited to scheduled only.

An artillery unit (off-board as stu mentions) can only fire when it receives a command by an FAO (there are certain country specific exceptions). If you add an asset, the artillery can fire once as scheduled fire and it does not need an FAO to do so. The artillery cannot fire under orders from an FAO on the same turn it is performing a scheduled fire. Basically, it is spending its entire turn doing the scheduled fire so it cannot do the FAO fire mission.

You can think of a failed FAO roll as not always a failure in communications between the observer and the artillery. Sometimes it could be that the battery says "Sorry, we used all the shells we had in our last fire mission. We're waiting for more to arrive."