Is there any benefit or change from having more than one artillery station at one settlement?

more shots in a barrage yes

When you get with 1/2 a dozen sups, a few deathclaws and then some raiders, I think you'll answer your own question.

Multiple artillery adds to the duration of the bombardment, AFAIK it does not add to the strength of the barrage.

Thanks everyone for your responses. I did some testing and I think I'll stick with one. Even with just 2, the bombing raid lasted for almost 5 minutes. My apologies for making a thread before testing (bad form).

do you have to lay down smoke if you add artillery to a settlement?

even a whole army and a few houndred deathclaws wouldnt change anything since the bombardement is so slow and enemies target you in case some of them receive damage by these bombs, they'll charge at you and leave the area which is covered by bombs.


Then you have 2 options keep running around in the targeted area and hope the bombs will miss you and hit the enemy or completely forget about the bombs and kill the raider/deathclaw/brahmin army the standart way.


So in theory there is a profit from having several settlements with it but tbh ingame there is almost no way possible to profit from it.

I don't quite understand the question, so forgive me if my answer does not apply, but once you build artillery and assign a settler to it, that settlement will rain death where you thrown the smoke grenade.

I believe that the range is also a factor.
Well after I beat the game, I decided to do some MM questline and have 1 artillery setup over at the castle.
I was somewhere over by the Boston Mayoral Bunker and decided to use an artillery signal grenade on a group of deathclaws and supermutants that were battling. Nothing happened. Was this a glitch for me, or is it that they can't see the signal smoke and/or don't have the range to reach across the entire map?

Range is indeed a factor. I believe the range of each artillery battery/settlement is just over 5 squares of the map.

In this case just switch to the radio station from the minutemen, they will tell you something like "sorry general, you're out of range". Or they confirm the signal and start shooting.

I thought range might be a reason to have artillery in multiple locations.

TBH, I am not a huge fan of the MM quests. I have only the one at the castle, and definitely don't want to tune in on the radio and receive more quests which I am not ever going to do. Heh, at least I didn't sell them out to the gunners.

I believe it's about 5 shots per artillery piece (I'm on survival mode- dunno' if it scales to difficulty). Enemies treat your smoke grenade as an attack- even if you're sneaking, they see it and will start to respond before the first artillery shell lands, and enemies will move once the shells start landing. Some move towards the strike and die, some away and towards you. It's the reverse-application of real-life- Artillery in-game is really best used against a point-target like a building- it will often kill anyone inside, rather than enemies in the open.

If it's questionable whether you're in artillery range, turn on Freedom Radio just after you throw the smoke grenade, and turn it off immediately after the strike or even after the first shell lands to avoid getting another radiant mission from the radio. The fire mission seems to cancel out the quests while it's active.