Nothing is more cost efficient than support artillery.
Let's test that, shall we?
We'll test it using China's starting techs (without 1936 ART) and compare support ART to a couple of different things.
Support ART:
You get 17.5 SA for a cost of 42. That's 2.4 IC cost per SA. Requires tungsten, which Nat. China doesn't have a lot of, but Guangxi does.
How about INF with Tier 1 kits. (China starts with Tier 0, but even a cursory comparison of stats will show you how much more efficient Tier 1 kits are these days to Tier 0.)
100 Tier 1 Infantry Kits cost 50 (I don't know why the division designer thinks it should cost 43.) With an SA of 6, that's 8.33 IC per SA. It only gets worse if you use Tier 0, since Tier 0 kits have half the SA but have a cost of 0.43 per kit.
What about the cheapest LARM I can make with China's starting tech?
I gave this tank diesel to improve reliability since speed probably isn't anything we care about right now. Note that non-tracked suspension is not available to Nat. China at game start.
What does this tank look like in line and recon?
That's 8 SA and 144 cost for 18 IC per SA. Note that with the pitiful armor rating,
Tier 1 infantry kits can pierce this.
As recon:
Note that Nat. China does not start with any recon (and no support equipment), but let's give them the benefit of the doubt since we all know they will pick those techs up at some point.
That's 57.6 production cost for 3.2 SA. That's 18 cost per SA.
What about line ART?
That's 126 production cost for 27.5 SA. That's 4.5 production cost per SA.
What about support AA?
That's 80 cost for 1.8 SA for 44.44 cost per SA. Obviously, not a good choice for mowing down troops, but should pierce any AFVs Japan has in the field under AI control.
It certainly seems to me that support ART is a winner in terms of firepower for cost. Yes, you need tungsten. But the other options require other imports like oil or are just significantly worse. Line ART isn't bad in this context, either. It's not nearly as good as support ART, but it beats out low quality tanks and INF. Line ART has the width issue, but I'm guessing that in the context of this discussion, China isn't worried about fine tuning width during the first three years of the war. Just getting enough ART out into the field to have some divisions with a single line ART stacked with support ART might be a challenge.
I know this isn't a big surprise to a lot of players, but sometimes it helps to see it the context of actual units that you would be producing at a particular point in time. And we obviously didn't compare support ART to things like support RART since that's beyond the scope of this particular discussion.
Just for fun, I thought I'd look at LARM using the close support gun. China does not start with this tech and must research 1936 artillery for it.
We have to swap to gasoline since the tank is slower than 4 kph with diesel.
In a line battalion, it looks like this:
This costs 312 for 25 SA for 12.48 cost per SA. In SPART format, it looks like this:
SA is higher thanks to 1936 artillery techs boosting SPART.
That's 260 cost and 31.2 SA for 8.33 cost per SA. That is better than the machinegun light tanks, and it is comparable to an INF battalion with Tier 1 kits. But it doesn't cost tungsten like ART does. I'm not sure this is a good purchase, either, given the low armor values.
Note that these tank costs go up if you swap to heavy tanks for the armor value. But at that point, support ART looks even better in terms of just shooting people.
To sum up:
This is your enemy:
This is your enemy when you use support ART:
Any questions?
