Line Artillery vs. Support Artillery

[Silent]

What's the difference between using line artillery vs. support artillery?

[Kernest]

There are quite a few differences as far as stats ar concerned, but perhaps the most important is that Line artillery takes up combat width. There's also one particular land doctrine tree that affects either Line or Support artillery.

[Baldrick]

Also, Line Artillery is about twice as many guns, meaning twice the firepower and twice the supply consumption, so both have their pros and cons.

Another thing is that line artillery has a max speed of 4 km/h, while support goes as fast as the slowest line regiment, so you don't want to put line artillery in your motorized or mechanized regiments.

[BoydofZINJ]

Support items like Recon Companies, Artillery Companies, Hospitals, etc... do not increase the combat width of Divisions. Which means, if you are at 20 width, you can add Artillery Companies to increase the damage but not the width of the unit. However, an infantry unit is 2 width and an artillery unit is 3 combat width (not a support company).

A few other things to keep in mind:
Line Artillery can not paradropped; while Support Artillery can be.

Line Artillery is slow... and will slow fast units (since the slowest unit in the division determins the speed of the overall division). While Support Artillery does not.

My rule of thumb is this: I love Support Companies better and as a result, I will often just use support artillery over line artillery. Likewise, the doctrine: Superior Firepower. Superior Firepower has a branch dedicated to line artillery and a different branch dedicated to support artillery. Since line artillery will NOT be used in ALL my divisions (i.e. a Fast tank division with no line artillery can travel 12+ kph (it can have support - since support artillery does not effect speed); however, with line artillery it slows light tanks to about 4kph.