Slitherine

The more I play this game, the more important artillery seems.

Artillery and Strat bombers are both useful for offense -- removing entrenchments and suppressing units.

However, Artillery, in contrast to strat bombers, is far more important for defensive fire, where an artillery unit is behind a defending unit. In many cases, AI units simply won't attack because they are afraid of the defensive fire. And even if they do attack, the suppression from the defensive bombardment may eliminate or reduce casualties.

The defending unit still needs to be in the right terrain (i.e. tank in clear, infantry in close terrain), but if they are in the right terrain and backed by artillery, the AI will often decline to attack.

Artillery does seem to attract attention by enemy aircraft, so fighters and/or aa guns should be positioned near the artillery if possible.

This is why I like to have at least 40% of my ground forces as artillery.
As Germans, the Stug is one my favourite units to support frontline offensives.

When I first started playing I used to run 1:2:1 Infantry:Tank:Artillery ratio, but these days I've reduced my core to 2-3 Engineers/Pioneers.
And sometimes I don't even bring them since it's much simpler to pound a city to rubble with concentrated Strategic and Artillery bombardment.

Interesting ratio. I used to be heavy with Tanks and ran a 2:1 ratio between tanks/infantry and artillery. My latest run through the DLC's has me being very heavy with infantry, and keeping the same tank/infantry ratio to artillery.

Just finished the West Coast scenario of the Basic game to get a decisive victory. Would have been impossible w/o loads of artillery. I would use 6-7 at a time to take on horrendously entrenched units in order to force surrenders. This is the only way I know to finish this one on time.

That's a good point about having plenty of artillery (and preferably a strat bomber or two) to reduce entrenchment and get enough suppression to force a surrender. It can be the only way to wipe out some of the more powerful units in a single turn and the prestige bonus can be quite a nice benefit, especially if a powerful unit surrenders at close to full strength. In some of the earlier DLCs and early stages of AC I have at times based my detailed tactics on trying to maximise surrenders.

There's a quirk in the system that can give very generous rewards for forcing surrender of units with low base strength. I caught a Churchill at about 7/1 strength in one of the AK scenarios and got around 1400 prestige. At that point, I'd have been happy with 50 or 100, so it was a most welcome gift, quite apart from opening up the gap I needed to start my planned breakthrough.