Artillery Field Officer, using him and his abilities?

When googling "Artillery Field Officer" or "Joint Operations" very little CoH2 related appear, so I have to post here.

I thought that the Officer's artillery ability ("combined something...") became more useful as recharge time of the Panzerwerfer and Lefh 18 became worse but I often still find the artillery pieces ready to shoot when I need it, so in my last test game I had to be quite trigger happy if to exploit the Officer's artillery ability.

Furthermore the artillery ability seemed to work no matter how far I moved the Officer from the artillery pieces - they also seemed to shoot further than their normal maximum range. The Panzerwerfer also didn't move to stay in range of the target I think, but can people back this up? Also, how close does the Officer has to be to the artillery pieces?

On a great 6-8 players map the artillery pieces all shot every time I used the ability. Will try another test game where I place them in my base and use the artillery ability in the enemy base.

It was quite overwhelming to use the ability and see the combined fire power of 2 Panzerwerfers and 2 LeFH 18 artillery pieces land at one spot just after I used them individually elsewhere on the map - of course the rest of my army wasn't much.

Does anyone successfully use the Artillery Field Officer and/or the Joint Operations commander?

When googling "Artillery Field Officer" or "Joint Operations" very little CoH2 related appear, so I have to post here.

I thought that the Officer's artillery ability ("combined something...") became more useful as recharge time of the Panzerwerfer and Lefh 18 became worse but I often still find the artillery pieces ready to shoot when I need it, so in my last test game I had to be quite trigger happy if to exploit the Officer's artillery ability.

Furthermore the artillery ability seemed to work no matter how far I moved the Officer from the artillery pieces - they also seemed to shoot further than their normal maximum range. The Panzerwerfer also didn't move to stay in range of the target I think, but can people back this up? Also, how close does the Officer has to be to the artillery pieces?

On a great 6-8 players map the artillery pieces all shot every time I used the ability. Will try another test game where I place them in my base and use the artillery ability in the enemy base.

It was quite overwhelming to use the ability and see the combined fire power of 2 Panzerwerfers and 2 LeFH 18 artillery pieces land at one spot just after I used them individually elsewhere on the map - of course the rest of my army wasn't much.

Does anyone successfully use the Artillery Field Officer and/or the Joint Operations commander?

thx for the tip(facts i did not know) on coordinated barrage.

i like the artillery officer. his smoke is thick as hell and much easier to use than mortar smoke , thus making usage of smoke when attacking/retreating easy. i also like the focus fire although i do not know the exact buff it gives. but it seems to work. i think AO is the coolest unit in the game. i hope soviet has a unit like him.

i love pak 43, although while playing ppl who know how to play in 3v3+, they always seem to have bombing strike to counter it. LeFH 18 105mm is decent at least and with AO, it would shine more.

Huh, I didn't realise that co-ordinated barrage over-rides cooldown times. It does seem to have a good effect on the usual range though.

Is there any point in using that in 1v1 though? You can't build artillery with that doctrine and it's rare to go T4 in 1v1, so you're only really left with whatever mortars you have bombing the target.

im sure it has a limited range still, it just give you extra range on the unites.
try with mortar and panzerwefer, they should move closer yet still at bigger range than normal.

but i did not know about the barrage timer

It would be awesome if an arty officer came with arty...

? Joint Operations has Light Artillery Barrage. I thought that all knew about the recharge time override. Why else pay 80 Munitions?

I'll try to check again about the different ranges.

I like the officer, unfortunately his armor went from four to one making him no longer a tank of the ages.

Agreed, the squad is incredible fragile.

by someone on coh reedit:

The Officer has his uses. He is a sorely underused unit.


1.The unit is basically an unupgraded gren squad in terms of durability and firepower (not sure but i think the march deployment update nerfed his armor and dmg)

2.He has synergy with blobs of infantry. His Concentrated Fire ability increases the accuracy of all infantry around him by about 15%. The more units around the officer, the better. This is why he works well with osttruppen. The ability is great for lengthy medium-long range engagements, as your units will be simply more accurate than theirs.

3.The smoke barrage is fast and effective smoke cover. It provides a large area of smoke very quickly, faster than mortars and the smoke plane global ability.

4.BEST FEATURE imo is the coordinated barrage. Let me explain.




Say you have a single panzerwerfer and mortar. You are up against a big blob of soviet t2, meaning lots of stationary support weapon teams. You use your mortar barrage and your panzerwerfer barrage on two different targets. But wait, what about their 2 blobbed AT guns? You didn't see those before, and your barrages are on cooldown. You can't rush your tanks in...except you have an officer. The officer can approach the target and use coordinated barrage, which orders all indirect fire assets to barrage the marked area INDEPENDENT OF THEIR OWN COOLDOWNS. This allows you to threaten another area when everything else is on cooldown.


The officer thrives in games where you plan to incorporate a lot of indirect fire throughout the game (like on Rzev, Faceoff at Rostov, Semoskiy, or Lazur Factory) including mortars, panzerwerfers, and best of all, howitzers. The officer is even more relevant now that werfer cooldowns are much longer and howitzers have changed slightly. With one panzerwerfer you can fire twice as often using coordinated barrage in between cooldowns, and with two werfers you can have FOUR barrages when normally you could only fire two. This is HELL for any static position. Try the joint operations doctrine, build a single howitzer, and watch as it does the work of two howitzers using the officer's directions.This lets you get the most out of whatever indirect fire you have.


I like getting the officer in the osttruppen doctrine. I focus on a heavy t1, t2, and t4 army composition with many upgraded grens made possible with the fuel-> munitions conversion ability of the doctrine, a mortar or two (for coordinated barrage), paks and panzershreks to fend off vehicles while i skip to t4, and finally some panzerwerfers and panthers (werfers for barrage if needed, panthers for lategame armor as the doctrine has no call-in tanks). The doctrine works great vs heavy t2, and early osttruppen are useful meat shields vs soviet t1 as well. Fuel to munitions conversion means you can have all the weapon upgrades, bunkers, mines, abilities (like the officer's), and APOCALYPTIC GUSTAV ARTILLERY DEATH that you want.


So in summary, the officer's abilities synergize with certain army compositions and against particular enemy forces, particularly versus soviet t2 and any static infantry defenses. I find him most effective in Joint Operations and Osttruppen doctrines, with less




So here is a terrible terrible image explaining the range of the 80-muni ability the RT Officer has. Note that I used the RT Officers ability on the enemy base bunker, as indicated by the green line. The ability has a pretty great range to it too, so the officer can be fairly safe!









I think that concisely sums it up. From memory the mortars fired a full "barrage" of four shells. The spread SEEMED to be about as bad as a normal full-range mortar barrage.

When I moved up to do this test and called in the barrage, the mortars packed up and moved about 30m so they'd be in range, then started the barrage.

They also could barrage normally on their own just fine straight away afterwards.


Also when I finally got rocket artillery halftracks and used the Officer ability, they moved to about the same position as the mortars before firing, so perhaps it doesn't matter what the default range of a unit is? It was very cool, an Su-76 started attacking the rocket halftracks after they had fired for the Officer, so I retreated them and let off their normal barrage to minimum range and stomped that Little Bitch!

I didn't get a chance to test the artillery emplacement sadly.


Hope this slightly helps people, now the RT officer is looking really good, especially when you get a few artillery pieces! I can only imagine how badass this would be with a few captured 120mm mortars!





Follow up image - Here you can see there is a 10.5cm artillery piece in my base, with its barrage range in yellow.







Where the ping marker is is where I managed to call in a strike using an Artillery Officer. The mortar on the right of the map also managed to hit that spot without moving, which surprised me.


I do not know how much further out the 10.5cm would be able to hit, as I was only able to call one barrage via the Officer before the game ended.
So even with a few pieces of artillery, it seems a pretty finnicky way to bombard the enemy at range, where another commander would just call a bombing run or something.

by someone on coh reedit:

great info, thanks

Officer gives double range on your arty/rockets/mortars and bypasses the cool down. So you can normally fire your arty and then use the officer to fire it again. It also gives better accuracy. One of the best german units in the game.

Works great with nebelwerfers or howitzers.

The arty ability really only seems useful in the ostruppen doctrine, where you can spare the munis.

The officer has it's uses, which I love, but compared to a gren squad which can upgrade to an lmg most people will take the lmg gren over the officer, unless you're in a 2v2 or up, where blobs are key.

I find that after using the Coordinated Barrage, the artillery pieces are immediately ready again - there's the chance that it was their original cool down which finished while shooting in the Coordinated Barrage, but I don't think so.

To get most out of the 80 Munitions I'm using the Joint Operations Commander to have at least one LeFH18, though they're easy to take out. I'm looking forward to use the Concentrated Fire ability with Infantry AND tanks around him as tanks get a fire rate bonus.

Thank you for posting the info nigo.

The Officer has his uses. He is a sorely underused unit.


1.The unit is basically an unupgraded gren squad in terms of durability and firepower (not sure but i think the march deployment update nerfed his armor and dmg)

Someone knows how his Pistol compares to the standard rifle?

2.He has synergy with blobs of infantry. His Concentrated Fire ability increases the accuracy of all infantry around him by about 15%. The more units around the officer, the better. This is why he works well with osttruppen. The ability is great for lengthy medium-long range engagements, as your units will be simply more accurate than theirs.

This makes it sound like it has a better effect, if more units are affected. AKA: "For every unit affected, evry unit gets +5%." But thats not how it works. So basically it doesn't work especially well with Ostrtuppen. (And it works on tanks).

Big, fat +1 to that redditor. Great info. Even more reasons to love Joint Operations.

Given the LeFH win sauce right now I figured this would be time for a well deserved bump.

Big, fat +1 to that redditor. Great info. Even more reasons to love Joint Operations.

I wrote le reddit wall of text a while ago, and someone with actual work ethic got those nice images and ranges.

Im looking forward to using these docs vs any wannabe sim city brits, though we'll see if players initially gravitate toward aggressive or defensive Brit play.

Or maybe theyll just hold out till the eagles save the day like in lotr/hobbit movies?