Wrath of Dagon

The situation is a bit unclear on the coax, some online sources say it had a 7.62 mm DT, which would make sense to get range on a tank destroyer. You can also see a hole on the left on the mantlet which seems like it's for a coax. Each SU also carries 710 rounds of 7.62 mm x 25, which however is wrong for DT since it's pistol ammo, why it would need that many pistol rounds is a mystery. The decals are also a bit ambiguous, two mantlets do have impacts close to the gun with a small hole besides them, meaning may be partial penetration? The other only has an impact far away on front hull. The knocked out one I don't see any impacts at all. Btw, I meant that weapon controls on all were completely undamaged, perhaps that was unclear.

Pretty fragile mantlet then. I don't believe it was penetrated since no one in the crew was injured or even suppressed in 3 cases. Also I noticed coax machine gun was out in every case as well, so even useless against infantry. Btw, weapon controls whatever that means are at 100% in all 4 cases.

I'm playing Rites of Spring CMFR as Soviets against AI (latest update). Half way through battle 4 of my SU-100's have damaged guns. It's hard to believe the gun mantlet would be designed to deflect the shell into the gun! Something seems to be wrong with the model, perhaps the gun mantlet is convex instead of concave. Also one of the SU-100's was knocked out immediately, perhaps a lucky shot, but another one was abandoned by the crew and the Panzer IV pumped round after round into it but never destroyed it, seems like the armor in incredibly good (the gun was damaged of course).

Thanks, that's an excellent idea.

So I'm probably wasting my time since developers don't seem to read this, and also I've already asked for this and was told I'm playing the game wrong, but I have more information now. At issue is area firing on a machine gun or ATG another unit has spotted, lets assume the player is using a tank. Once you click on the tank you don't see the target any more, so area firing on the target is a long and tedious process, you have to target as best you can, click near the target so you see it which shows where approximately it is relative to the target line, go back to the tank and click on it, go back to the target and adjust the target line as best you can, click near the target again and so on. I don't see what else you can do, since a tank often will not see a machine gun at all, and by the time he spots an ATG it'll be destroyed since ATG will almost always spot him first. Supposedly this is realistic since it hinders Borg spotting. But in fact when Soviet tanks supported infantry, once the infantry spotted a target, they would either fire a flare or tracer rounds at it, to indicate the target to the tank. Even if the tank didn't spot it at that point, it would still area fire on the indicated spot. They had to do something like that, or their tank support would be useless, in other words they behaved exactly as a player would. It's not necessary to show the target to the tank since he shouldn't be able to direct target unless spotted himself, but the base of the target could be shown to help area target. Also the tank should get a spotting bonus once the target has been spotted by another unit.

Another thing, why is there no move to contact anymore? Doesn't make sense they keep moving after coming under fire or seeing an enemy. Hunt doesn't work well for this, it's too slow, they get tired too quickly, and they stop if they hear a shot a mile away.

It would be nice if we finally got topographic overlay option. It's quite hard to distinguish gradual elevations right now. Also, why do the crews of knocked out guns still have the gun icon? That's very confusing, they should have the regular crew icon just like knocked out vehicle crews.

Would be best to provide an option for unencoded save import/export. Then people could mess around with it, try different stuff. No one's going to be motivated if there's nothing to try out.

What I do is unpause it, give an order, then immediately pause again, almost the same thing.

No, that's not everything there is to relative spotting. You may know where the enemy is, but your unit still doesn't. So he can't fire on his own, and you can't give him a direct fire order, only an area fire. That's one reason I prefer we-go. During the turn, it's an actual simulation. During the command phase it's not, and can not be, no matter how you slice it the player is still an omniscient commander that doesn't exist in the real world.

@Baneman That's what I mean by "break" the UI. There's really no reason not to show the same thing with the unit selected and with nothing selected, except have the un-spotted icons greyed out. Yes, there are ways of getting around that, but they're a pain, that's all. Btw, the training mode does other things in addition to removing relative spotting, even if I wanted to remove relative spotting.

But the issue is not relative spotting itself. It's fine as a game mechanic, it's bad when used to break the UI. I wouldn't have a problem with not being able to area fire in certain situations, but if it can't be implemented as a game mechanic, it shouldn't be in the UI either. Because it just doesn't make sense. I have to restrain myself from area firing on something the mortar can see, but I'm expected to move an HQ to see that target so he can then call in indirect fire from that same mortar? Or else how am I supposed to deal with that gun? Just send tanks suicidally at it until I lose them all or knock out the gun? It's the logical inconsistency and the user unfriendliness of this feature that's galling, not the underlying game mechanic or the attempt at greater realism.

But you don't just tell him to stop. You send him to a specific location based on your higher knowledge of where the enemy is located. It's the whole point of the game. Edit: Besides, you shouldn't be able to tell him anything if he's out of communication.

Yes, everyone would do #2 (because it's a game, not reality), therefore it's silly to try to break the UI to make it more annoying to do #2, which everyone will do anyway. But neither is the game a perfect simulation of the real world. Things like time compression, lack of liason, prior knowledge etc, means that those things all get abstracted into the player's decisions instead of being explicitly simulated. The realism vs gameplay tradeoff is a fundamental issue for this kind of game, but making me LARP the behavior of my units depending on their in-game knowledge is not the solution. The whole point is to locate the enemy units then delploy reserves to destroy them, the way you do that in game will of necessity diverge from reality. Breaking the UI to make using an otherwise supported and reasonable game mechanic more annoying isn't a solution either. No, it's not a different beast, that's my point. Logically there's no difference between moving using knowledge you don't have and targeting using knowledge you don't have. In fact, you're probably moving him so he can target something he doesn't know about yet.

@user38 That's what I meant by "other situations", but couldn't recall the specifics, thanks.

Another related problem is how the F12 key works. It selects the previously selected unit, but it also messes up the camera by rotating it to face the selected unit instead of leaving it in place. If it wasn't for that, you could simply find the desired location by deselecting, then reselect the targeting unit with F12 and target the spot. It's also a problem in other situations when you want to give a target or move order. Btw, I'm still flabbergasted at the logic expressed in this thread. Apparently, if one of my units spots an ATG, I should just blithely drive my tank right into it because the tank has no way of knowing the ATG is there!

@stikkypixie Because the units won't fire by themselves or be able to use direct fire, that makes a big difference. In real life, if a tank sees an ATG and reverses, would he try to take it out by himself, or send a crew member to the nearest mortar to try to take the ATG out? What would be the more realistic outcome in the game? Edit: If a tank sees and ATG and you then send an infantry squad to flank the ATG and try to take it out, is that also gamey? How do you recon? How exactly are you supposed to play this game if you have to constantly think about what each unit knows and only have him act on this knowledge? I bet no one actually plays it like that.

So you're supposed to area fire on suspected enemy locations, but not area fire on known enemy locations? That makes no sense whatsoever. Sorry, this is still a game, so tying your own hands makes no sense. The rationalization in this case is either the mortar team heard the gun or saw the muzzle flash, or a runner was sent from a spotting unit to the mortar to request area fire.

Sounds like demo early next week. Yeay!

So can we have an estimated date for the demo release?

Yes, please release the manual as a pdf, I don't have time to read it on the computer.

My theory is that Modern Warfare just isn't as much fun. Plus there's way too much building clearing. I want tank battles dammit!

That was seriously considered, but finally rejected due to the expected political fallout with their allies. Plus a lot of the Germans still believed they could win (a German offensive had never been halted except in depth), and they did come pretty close, another reason being they did not have a completely accurate picture of the strength of the Soviet forces, like not knowing about the existence of the Steppe front.

So is the armor quality modeled as in the picture above or not? You can have as accurate formulas as any but if the model they're applied to is wrong it won't do squat.

The distinction is important, since they pretty much lost in 1943. The later crazy actions can be explained as acts of desperation by someone who wasn't terrilby stable to start with.