A friendly unit is one owned by an ally, you can only move your units, it's called friendly because it is owned by a friend, but true, if you use the move command, this is the case, if you use the attack command, it will fire even if the province is unoccupied.

Is that only with aggressive mode and does only happen for a prov you are war with? When I drag a fire-at-will artillery around to different peace provs it never stops in artillery range. I currently on have one prov at war and it doesn't stop at range, but I don't know if the prov is occupied yet.

Now that you mention it, I had noticed something odd about that lately, so a quick test shows this:

Screenshot one: As suggested click on an artillery unit and drag to any number of province centers in the area. Most show just a normal path.




But at one city we get the following:







Note that is with my cursor exactly on Gartok, but it shows the path of the artillery stopping at range and attacking. So I suspect there is a force there.



I did have one enemy where I got a reveal all armies intel dump, and of course dragging the artillery path to revealed units showed the same red firing arc, as it would at any intel. So it would seem that artillery units have some intel that is not shared with the rest of us.



I tried this both with aggressive fire setting and fire at will. Now I can understand it working like that on aggressive as that is the purpose of aggressive fire to stop at range and attack. Fire at will setting will cause the artillery to stumble into the enemy unit instead, so it doesn't make sense to me to display the bombard at range arc.



I don't have any airbases in range to test out the theory on Gartok tonight, and to see if there are other forces along the way that were not revealed by the "omniscient" artillery.

I don't think you said what your status was with that country (war, peace, ?). Is it possibly the visible AB that it wants to shell? Did you try it on other provs with visible ABs? I believe that fire-at-will will behave like this when dragging if the enemy is visible, but need to verify.

I just verified that it doesn't mean there is a unit there. It seems like a glitch that occurs in some provs. It's not because the AB or anything in particular I can decipher. Below, the first image it happening when no intel is present. In the second, I move the patrol over the prov, there is nothing there but it still happens. Here I am at war with France and artillery is fire-at-will. This is also happening to one other prov where a tank is clear view range of point. Of all the French provs here this is only happening for Bayonne and La Rochelle.

I've also found a number of provs in countries at peace where this occurs.