undead reindeer cavalry

sorry if i misunderstand what you are asking (simulation or game ui or what), but here's one take. in the real battlefield everything by default is isolated and fighting their own battle. the isolated elements do not know much if anything of each other -- they are preoccupied by their own battle. in a typical WW2 firefight the largest natural unit is probably that of a team: the guys in the team are able to share information and make decisions as a group. this is because they are close enough to usually see one another (at least by popping their head up to observe for a while or by using battle sounds as a cue -- fighting in prepared positions would be different and the natural size of the unit would probably be closer to two men) and hear one another and thus share information (by yelling during pauses in explosions, gunfire and other noise -- here again suppressed or temporarily disabled men may be an exception in that they many not be able to hear or see anything even if it's literally 5 cm in front of their face). the information they share is the type of thinking that there's an enemy at some specific location, of someone about to throw a grenade, of someone reloading their weapon and so forth. in order for a company to be something other than 20-50 of these kinds of groups of guys fighting their own separated small wars, there needs to be something extra added. adding that something is not automatical or easy, and often there was not much added and the end result was the typical SNAFU or FUBAR. the first step is the squad leader. he has just about the number of men under his control so that he can see or know each man's general position in most situations. during a firefight he is trying to find out what his men are doing. who's shooting, where's the fire coming from and what is actually happening in very concrete level of things. once he has somehow managed to get a vague clue of what is happening (both by observing and asking from the guys), he is trying to form an idea what he should do. for example where to position the MG and what sector to give it. where should teams or groups of guys move (on the scale of some individual meters -- for example take cover in a ditch or behind a wall or fire at some treeline). once he has this idea he is trying to make the guys do what he wants. because everyone is shooting on both sides and there's lots of yelling and all kind of confusion, it usually means he needs to get right next to the men he wants to do something (for example to stop firing so that he can make sense of what is happening, or to get team A to fire at target X that was just spotted by or firing at team . this can be quite hard and it requires a lot of guts, as there are bullets flying, explosions going off, and the poor squad leader doesn't even really know what is actually happening. in essence the squad leader is trying to combine the otherwise isolated teams into one entity that supports its individual elements and combines its firepower in order to have a maximum effect on the battlefield. next up in the hierarchy is the infamous platoon leader. this poor fellow controls so many men that he can only see a small portion of them at any given typical moment in a firefight. this means he needs to go out and find out what everyone is doing and what is happening. this is tough stuff because usually he needs to move tens of meters just to get from one squad to another (remember that he needs to have his mouth next to a squad leader's ear, in order to pass a message, and vice versa). it's also tough stuff because he doesn't have the privilegion of being allowed to just observe what is happening: he needs to tell the squads what they should do. after running from one squad to another a couple of times, after having stabilized the situation a bit, he has to form a theory of what is actually happening on the sector of his platoon. he is trying to estimate what kind of enemy he is facing (about a squad at that treeline, with a MG somewhere near those buildings, possibly another squad further to the left...), what the intentions of the enemy are, what's the status of his squads (2. squad is being suppressed by the MG fire) and what are the possible courses of action his platoon could take. after this is done he needs to figure a plan. where to put possible reinforcing support arms so that they would have the maximum effect and what to do with each squad. it's a bit like what squad leader does to unite the teams into a bigger whole that supports its elements, but unlike squad leader the platoon leader can not see his whole unit from one location. then after the has formed a plan he needs to tell each one of the different squads and/or sections what he wants them to do. this he accomplishes again by running around while taking fire from mostly unknown locations. this takes time. if he is slow the situation will change before his planned actions can be executed. if he is too fast or unlucky (or rather with normal luck) he gets wounded or killed at some point of the process. again the basic idea with platoon leader is to somehow make the different squads fight one and the same battle. to combine their actions. to concentrate their fire. to make the whole platoon utilize well covered path found by A squad, to make the support sections start firing at specific moment as the squads assault across a field, and so forth. then you have the company commander. he is mostly getting information from platoon leaders, because he can't usually observe the whole company sector from one single position. this is slow process. after he has formed some kind of idea what is happening, based on the reports and partly from his own observations and estimations, he is most likely going to focus on the actions on the sector he considers the most critical. because company sector is some hundereds of meters, there's no way he can just walk or run around from platoon to platoon. radios are cool if they can be used (there's LOS and there's not too much disturbance from terrain and combat actions). thus he has to choose where he goes. where he goes he adds his experience and the support arms under his command. he makes the platoons work together and according to one plan. i simplify this because this post is already getting awfully long. the point here is that by default nothing useful happens in the firefight. there's just chaos that gets the men nowhere (except perhaps to the state of even greater chaos). someone must gather information and issue orders. it doesn't happen automatically -- it requires lots of work and time. the higher the number of units (or men) someone needs to control, and the further away they are from one another, the slower and harder the process becomes. "splitting squads" (it applies as much to platoons and companies), especially when the split elements are not kept connected in space, causes huge increase in the strife to control the firefight. it may cause the whole force to break apart, as the interval between information sharing and order passing becomes far too long to be used to guide actions in meaningful ways (orders always late, contradictory, arrive in wrong order and are nonsensical to the situation). the fundamental point is that the challenge in the firefight is not to split off elements and send them into their own missions, but to combine the already, by default, separated elements into a one larger unified force that is able to combine and coordinate otherwise dispersed chaotic firepower and action. if splitting squads (or platoons or companies) achieves the above then it's great. if it has the opposite effect and the decisions are solely based on the godlike knowledge the player has of the firefight and the gamey effects the player can achieve by unrealistic levels of micromanagement and coordination of microscopic elements, then it sucks if it's not properly penalized.

i wonder how AI make its decisions if the engine doesn't know hit or kill probabilities.

i am aware of the difference between the two. the rules of thumb expect typical conditions in general sense (e.g. target troop concentrations). the lethality area really is just that: 100% losses. it's not just neutralization. the numbers do not make the 60mm or 81mm impact fuzed HE rounds puny at all. the 60mm has 140 square meter lethality area against standing men - everyone dies in two action spots as a result of a single 60mm round.

in theory being prone should reduce the effects considerably, as these rounds are all impact fuzed and the 60mm is highly sensitive to soft ground effects.

yes, something like that. the 60mm round has 20-35 meter suppressive radius (i mean in reality, not in the game). combined with the 1 square foot killzone this makes 60mm round a suppressive weapon against enemy in foxholes. btw 81mm has 5 square feet lethality area so we are still talking pretty much about direct hits against foxholes.

haha yes there's an error with my number. the official lethal area for 60mm grenade with impact fuze is still today 1 square feet against troops in open positions. i am sorry for enlarging the area to that with radius of 0.5 meters.

fwiw this was the Finnish experience as well. they were considered totally worthless. in practice they were used only in static trench conditions, where the high angle effect could be utilized to annoy the enemy.

assuming there's no treeburst or similar, the effective radius is about 0.5 meters - a direct hit on the foxhole. other than that it's just suppression - forcing the guys take cover.

what's the reasoning behind this idea? Germans are still preparing for a long WW1 style war when they go for Western Europe in 1940. that they are able to finish the war so quickly is not the result of their strategy. when they go for USSR in 1941 their strategic aim is to get the large material resources located in USSR in order to be able to fight the coming long war against US and UK. the only short war aspect i see is the planning for the summer campaign against USSR. here they expect that they can defeat the Red Army in the European Russia - they are not aware of the Soviet capacity to mobilize reserves. nobody but Soviets were aware of that capacity. US military intelligence estimated that Germans would finish Soviets in 6 weeks (IIRC).

my only issue is with the effects caused by light mortars, especially what comes to infantry in foxholes. causing losses should be rare, requiring direct hits. light mortar grenades are of handgrenade class. their main effect is causing suppression and with close hits taking an individual soldier temporarily out of action (for a couple of minutes, not hours or days). light mortars are harassing weapons. German 50mm mortar grenade has 0.28 lbs TNT. US 60mm has 0.34 lbs. 20% difference. a small or a big difference? well, a German mk.24 hand grenade has 0.36 lbs. 81mm mortar has 3.5 times the TNT, but it's still not the kind of killer against men in foxholes as the light mortars are in the game. 120mm has 5 times the TNT the 81mm has and is the first weapon which should have anywhere near the effects caused by lights mortars in the game. historically causing the effects seen in the game, you should probably go for the 155mm HE, which has 44.5 times the TNT the 60mm has (15.13 lbs).

well, you said command delays would be brought back with CMBN and you appeared to have a positive opinion about command delays. this change regarding command delays is somewhat surprising but naturally not something totally unheard of. for what it's worth i don't recall seeing much opposition to the delays in those threads, but perhaps that's just blissfull senility on my part. and yeah yeah, this is pretty useless discussion.

i think it's common amongst computer game boards, especially if sequals are quite different from the original games. it's the same with many other things, but i think it's more productive just to let it pass. lol, i have thought about that many many times during the years, but i always thought it would be far too nasty remark to make.

German (various in Torn Fu and Feld Fu series) and US (SCR-300) back-pack "walkie-talkies" were quite similar and used in similar roles. both were for company-battalion communication (one per company). the heavier battalion-regiment sets were carried in jeeps and such. Germans had SCR-536 style platoon-level smaller "handie-talkie" sets only for panzergrenadiers and similar. the German ones were "real" radios, while the US "handie-talkies" allowed only communication within a company. CMBN style communications net could not be established with these radios. for example a platoon leader could not call-in artillery with the "handie-talkies" like they typically do in fiction. they also had serious limitations like LOS requirement etc, which isn't seen in CMBN. all sides used flares etc.

regarding relation of poverty to the riots: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/18/england-rioters-young-poor-unemployed

that's very true and i was trying to address that by saying my simplistic playing with the OR numbers would not address German armor losses to AT and other non-armor arms. Germans need to neutralize Allied armor and tank vs tank combat is one part of it. it seems that it's a part that wouldn't require much tweaking. perhaps it's a bit obvious, but it's good to be methodological. what would be needed next, is looking at other types of battles and finding what the actual failings were and what could be realistic and sound changes. again it may be a bit obvious (lack of recon, overly aggressive methods etc etc), but it would be good to have some actual data about it. yeah. it would be interesting to have a detailed study of it (correlations and causes). again, perhaps it's obvious (aggressive vs defensive etc) but would still be nice to have. one way to explain it would be that German officers were unable to control such huge units as Panzer Divisions and Corps. it looks very much like early/mid Soviets with their big tank units. yet i think i have never seen this explored in any depth. it's just passed as aggressive use of armor. i can agree about that. i have a paper somewhere that deals with some selected large armored offensives in West (1944-45) and compares various numbers and shows correlations. i have for some time intended to add numbers from various offensives from the East. the aim being the ability to see the relative force performance in various offensives, ignoring whether or not the offensive in question was considered a success or failure, and the ability to predict likely results in hypothetical offensives. this has of course been done to death in various papers already, but it might nonetheless be interesting especially as usually i have seen it done only on rather large scales. that's quite possible and perhaps even likely.

unfortunately i don't seem to have any. it's been at least a couple of years since i looked into this. if i have bookmarks and documents, they are in some old harddrive in the closet. but i did have two papers somewhat related to the subject. i was using them for estimating battlefield effects of illumination lamps in WW2. the main effect and purpose of the lamps is of course not that of aiding in target detection, but i was curious about the theoretical or practical effects on the ability of tanks to detect enemy tanks (yes, a most silly subject). the papers are: AN ANALYSIS OF TARGET ACQUISITION BEHAVIOR FOR OBSERVERS IN TANKS EQUIPPED WITH THERMAL OR OPTICAL SIGHTING SYSTEMS http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA162208 i had been trying to use it in determining "standard" abilities of non-thermal equippent tanks (WW2 tanks) to detect enemy tanks at night. it seems to contain some basic probabilities and times for detecting tanks at various conditions. and The Effects of Observer Location and Viewing Method on Target Detection with the 18-Inch Tank-Mounted Searchlight http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD445050&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf i had been trying to use it to determine how much the lamps could help in detecting tanks at night. did you run any tests?

hopefully. i used to play RO and i liked the larger more open maps. however i hated the urban etc maps. i'm just wondering if this initial release is any good for me, or if i'm better off waiting 6 months to get good maps.

i think it's very unrealistic. there's nothing in the scenario that prevents the tanks from spotting each other on second 1. some spottings lagging till around second 10 could be tolerable, but not being able to spot in the whole minute is ridiculous. there are numerous field trials about this very subject and none of them show anything like this. buttoned tanks (without using thermals or similar), do routinely spot enemy tanks in 20 seconds in complex real world terrain and at considerable ranges. like i said the trial data has some peculiarities and it may be that spotting suffer from some "optimisations" made to conserve CPU cycles. i haven't played CMAK so much, but CMBB does not have the variability. i used to hate the instant spotting, especially spotting of non-moving tanks in good ambush positions.

are there videos that show more open maps? in the videos that i have seen, the engagement ranges seem to be 1-30 meters, with most shooting taking place at around 1-10 meter ranges.

on a couple of the maps there was a lot of action in RO style. fast spawn + spawn almost in the middle of action = lots of shooting and dying. there was a nice map that left more room for tactics and coordination. i didn't play much, so perhaps i got a bit wrong impression of the maps.

lol yes, you are of course entirely correct about this. it's hard with the numbers for both sides. yeah, something like that. June and July (taking British loss numbers at face value) are both 2:3, what comes to the turreted. August would be something like 1400:1500, or 1:1 in practice (i'm probably causing too many German losses here). the total ratio would be 5:6. September would then be 2:7... the alternative approach (containing September) gives end ratio somewhere around 2:3.4. i did a silly thing and used generic OR numbers of France 1944 to toy with the above hypothesis. my main idea was to try to find out how much of a difference would less aggressive use of panzers have made in Normandy (ok in reality i did it just for fun, to test the OR numbers). i used historical German panzer losses of June and July as base. then i halved it, to roughly get the number of panzers lost to enemy tanks (by OR studies results, but yes yes yes not very accurate). then i created a couple of formulas / algorithms based on a couple of OR studies on tank combat in 1944. i slightly adjusted average force sizes to get more workable numbers. first i tried what kind of tank losses Allies should have suffered in Normandy, if Germans had attacked in 50% of tank engagements. surprisingly the results was that Allies suffered 7% less tanks in June and 17% less in July (in engagements with German tanks). i was surprised that the result was so close to historical numbers. accidental probably, but who cares lol. if my OR based algorithm would create accurate results (it of course doesn't), it would mean that in June Germans attacked in slightly less than 50% of their tank vs tank engagements and in July a good number less. then i altered the parameters so that Germans attacked only in 20% of the engagements. the algorithm still forced Germans to take their historical tank losses. the end result was that Allies lost 28% more tanks in June and 19% more in July (comparing to historical losses -- comparing to the first run of the algorithm the change is +39% and +40%). based on that silly experiment, it would not have made much of a difference if the Germans had attacked only in 20% of the tank engagements. Allies would have lost only 53 extra tanks in June and 50 in July. in the third run i made Germans attack only in 10% of the tank engagements (possibly impossibly low percentage). comparing to historical losses the Allied tank losses in tank engagements increased in June by 79 extra tanks (+42%) and in July by 83 tanks (+32%). i also did a 4th run. this time i fixed the losses to historical Allied tank losses. this way i would see how many panzers Germans could save in tank vs tank engagements if they attacked only in 10% of the cases and Allied actions would be limited to their historical losses. in this scenario Germans saved 33 panzers in June and 35 in July, taking 71% and 76% of their historical losses in tank vs tank engagements. not a big change, even if the percentages are quite high. it could be that Germans were more passive with their tanks in Normandy than usually considered or it could be that it's just hard for Germans to get very high tank kill ratios vs Allies (the OR numbers were based on Germans fighting Allies in 1944, and the kill ratio with my third experiment was 1:2.4). of course my algorithm is far from perfect and there are a couple of parameters that i could adjust to tweak the results (simulating a bit different tactics). an important factor not really covered by the algorithm is the losses of German tanks to Allied AT guns & SPDTs -- of course almost totally related to German tank attacks. if one would take the results of the silly experiments with face value, i think the conclusion would be that the only thing that really matters in Normandy is not to drive the German armor into the pocket and start withdrawing earlier. combat losses of tanks in tank engagements on both sides are more or less fixed. a more passive use of panzers might have prolonged the defensive battles by a couple of months. i certainly agree, but i think someone should make a detailed look at the actions of some key PDs, collecting all the data. the absurdly stupid death rides may receive more attention than they perhaps should. certainly true.

there are some strange things with the results of the test, but it's almost impossible to speculate about them because we only have those 50 runs. it could be that the game uses a more advanced system than just one single percentage (by which i mean that the percentage may change over time). there also may be a system which makes only a part of the units to spot at any given moment in time, and the system may select the active units somewhat randomly. there may also be some bugs.

i by accident bounced on the Excel file i used in the calculations and realized i forgot to answer this question of yours (yes, i get the rhetorical nature of it). i didn't make any real probability calculations, just very basic statistics. basicly i took your spotting data from post number 6 and i calculated for each second (1-59) the number of tanks (separately for the two types) that had spotted during that second and the number of tanks that had still been spotting during that second. so for example for Shermans on second 1 there are 50 tanks spotting and 2 of them spot. so 4% of the Shermans did spot the Panther during that second. or by stretching the meaning of the percentage, a single Sherman had 4% chance of spotting the Panther (with 6.79% margin of error lol). on the second number two there were 48 Shermans still spotting and 3 of them did spot (so 6.25% did spot, or a single Sherman had a 6.25% chance of spotting --- with a 8.39% margin of error). the average for seconds 1-59 for Shermans was 1.78%. then i just calculated standard deviation for the whole bunch (2.41%) and confidence interval (0.61%). so again in other words, this crude method gives a single Sherman, during a single second, a 1.78% "chance of spotting" the Panther, while the margin of error is 0.31%. or in other words in similar 50 test runs in 95% of cases the average should be in between 1.17 and 2.40 percentages. for Panthers it was 3.99% to spot Sherman (not 3.3 as i stated on the post -- i simply remembered the percentage wrong), with 0.75% margin of error. thus in 95% of cases of 50 test runs the percentage should be between 2.49 and 5.49. so the Panther had 2.24 times greater chance for spotting per second. yet it was meaningless for the end results of your duels, due to the considerable variance, or randomness. this is of course highly simplistic and contains fundamental errors (starting with the available data stopping at 59 seconds). so no, i didn't make any real probability calculations or such. just very simplistic basic statistics.

i played it a bit yesterday. i think it's very close to RO. the biggest difference (together with not having vehicles of course) seemed to be that suppression effects are far more effective (yay!). in RnL suppressive fire has a real function (it does suppress the enemy when there's enough volume of fire). the morale system (as far as i understood it -- being close to squad / section leader adds suppression tolerance or something) and 3D voice chat also encourages team work even further. the voice chat also adds some nice tension to some situations (everyone becoming quiet when trying to sneak up on the enemy and similarly the ability to hear the enemy speak somewhere close). it's still quite action oriented, but that's of course up to maps and players. it would be unfair to compare the battles to the battles on dedicated "clan" servers for mods like Invasion 44. hopefully in future there will be less action-oriented maps and battle types. perhaps there already are? i noticed that after running the installer the mod showed up on Steam. Steam then automatically recognized that it's a mod and that it requires the Source SDK 2007. Steam then automatically downloaded and installed the SDK. installation was a very smooth experience. considering that the mod is a beta etc, the game/mod also run surprisingly well. there were only some very minor glitches. i can fully recommend Resistance and Liberation to gamers who want realistic first person WW2 infantry combat. it's certainly worth trying.

how do you get hl2 engine for free? how does the gameplay compare to RO or Arma WW2 mods?