Artillery won't help much in the jungle, we either need to assert our air superiority or work on direct combat ground units like our armour or infantry.
Trees get in the way? Those trees will be exploded and add to the shrapnel fragments, creating an airburst effect. Admittedly this might be balanced out by other trees in the way. But when I was in the army, our artillery drill was to get off the track, yes, but not because the vegetation provided better cover from artillery. It was because artillery was generally pre-targeted in killboxes that usually extended along roads to kill convoys, and to get out of sight of aerial observation.
Anyway, another reason why artillery is also stated to be less effective in jungle is due to mobility issues. Which Nuke's proposal solves by being truck mounted and thus able to travel on the same roads that our trucks have been moving through already, at greater speed.
Not hubris, simply they don't actually plan to take and hold it. They just want a buffer between us and their homeland.
@Azzurro: yes, they designed a carrier this turn.
But our fighter isn't a reactive move: it was planned last turn and it is meant to be what the haast never was, learning our lessons from that design failure ( kind of. it is still a great plane). We rely a lot on air superiority, but until we get a better craft we are on the edge of losing it.
Rocket artillery is nice, but I don't see it as a big priority, although I really like it.
Hmmm, if so the Cannalans really misjudged the importance of resources. Or simply the importance of denying said resources to us. I supposed that could be true, given that they already had progress in the other two lanes though.
Again, we still have air superiority. I know it's hypocritical, but I would rather wait till we actually lose it to design a new fighter, especially with our new emphasis on pushing the Jungle.
Honestly, I was completely surprised by the new Cannalan carrier, because I was thinking they should go for a ground design/revision to secure the Jungle. Hubris?
Well, we've seen how it helped them gain a foothold on Mt. Konstantin. But yeah, if they'd gone for the knockout punch in the Jungle we could be facing them in the desert this turn.
I would argue that taking the entire plains and Mt Konstantin island would not be as damaging to us as losing the desert oil would be, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.