Pelican Pal

It’s been a while since I looked at the terrain but I also got the sense that Bahkmut wasn’t the optimal terrain to defend from. iirc it was in a depression and obviously being a destroyed city had significant cover and concealment opportunities.

The game has reduced HE effect to help out with some of the simulation problems. AFAIK this would be the first time Battlefront intentionally nerfed a weapons accuracy

Saw this Youtube short So tripod mounted in-game seem to be modeled correctly.

You've repeatedly bring out this wishy washy "well we don't know" despite. - DoD Mk19 gunnery qualification cards - video evidence - the clear discrepancy between vehicle and tripod mounted - service members pointing out issues with the weapon they used (assuming I'm reading Boche correctly) - Combat Mission itself having the weapon be more accurate historically The fact of the matter is that there is a clear problem with AGLs in CM. Another long running bug that was identified 5 years ago

Your argument falls apart when every vehicle mounted AGL fires like it’s been on a week long bender while every tripod mounted one fires with good accuracy. Like are you seriously arguing that a AGL mounted onto a many thousand lb vehicle is going to be less controllable than a man packed variant deployed on a tripod? You are going to be surprised by this but a RCWS isn't going to result in accuracy that would make a Brown Bess blush.

What we don't(?) have information on is exactly what kind of loss is being generated by artillery. Is it a irrecoverable loss or is it a vehicle that is beaten up and no one really wants to use it in combat right now? My suspicion is that its the latter. Vehicles that have been damaged in a variety of relatively minor ways that could operate in a fight but that the units wouldn't be excited to use. More broadly there has been a discounting of the impact artillery has on armor that the fighting in Ukraine has helped to reveal is a sort of bogus. They are fairly complex machines and chucking chunks of metal at a tank isn't good for them. Now tanks are obviously advantaged against artillery, but that has often turned into a "don't use artillery against tanks" which doesn't seem to hold water. Tanks are advantaged against artillery because they (1) cannot be pinned by artillery and (2) each artillery shell has fewer fragments of significant size to cause damage. So armor is able to maneuver away from/through artillery and this ability to avoid fire is key. Infantry and soft skinned vehicles cannot maneuver through artillery so if they are hit they become pinned and have to sustain the barrage. To get tanks to sustain the barrage you either need tanks that are static or the ability for the FO to adjust fire along the vehicles route of movement which is difficult (but apparently getting easier).

Did you confirm that the vehicle in question took no direct hits? people have a tendency to fast forward through the turns missing the outcomes of each individual shell. Which is part of why the bug has been with the titles for so long. this thread with the Capt has the same events. He initially didn’t see an issue because he was fast forwarding through the turn. And here is the original post the revealed the issue.

We’ve certainly seen a lot of vehicles that appear to be M-killed and killed outright by artillery but that could be anything from the vehicle ceasing to function to the crew saying “nope”. Did artillery kill the vehicle or did the crew have an issue that was exacerbated by arty causing them to abandon the vehicle? Especially in the context of Ukraine where a lot of dumb artillery seems drone spotted. So it’s clear that someone is watching you and they might be able to better direct dumb fire or bring in PGM for the kill if you sit around. The particular issue with CM being that near misses will only damage tracks. So APS, vehicle sights,ERA, smoke launchers, turret mounted HMGs, etc… all are invulnerable to fragments. The end result is that artillery does a bad job of doing chip damage that degrades the combat capability of the vehicles. also an additional quirk of this is that direct hits on ERA count as near misses.

Casualties of all kinds. I don't think Ukraine has 500 aircraft in total. Ukraine is rightly asking for F-16s now, and has been for a few months, as they appear to be looking towards their defense in a post-war environment. At least I suspect that by the time Ukraine could field F-16s the fighting will largely be over unless the war drags on for another 16 months. Retrofitting their existing Soviet stock to support western weaponry seems to be the battlefield expedient choice. But they did ask for A-10s the month after the invasion began and that timeline would probably give them enough time to have those flyable now. So really we're looking at post-war sustainable choice and a crisis unsustainable one. There is a difference between the vehicle being lost at a high rate and the vehicle being suicidal. Sherman tank losses were high, for example, but being a crewmen in one was anything but suicidal. So you need to look past equipment losses into crew losses.

I suspect its because it photographs well, flies slow, has a loud gun. Its a very visual aircraft that makes it easy to love. Taking one out in DCS (or even Warthunder) ought to pretty quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that its good in a modern environment. The only sustainable use I could possibly conceive is a brush fire war and while I can vaguely understand extending their lifespan during Iraq/Afghanistan I'm not entirely sure why they are in service today. The only particularly interesting thing about them is that the U.S. still, unfathomably, has 200+ in service. But while its a real POS Ukraine essentially has no means of regenerating its air arm outside of donations and from what I've seen they've been at maybe replacement levels of Soviet-era craft. There appears to have been a request for 100 A-10s in March of 2022. So theoretically Ukraine could have its ~100 existing Soviet-era aircraft + 100 A-10s ready for whatever summer offensive they appear to be cooking up. At this point they are no longer asking for A-10s and instead are requesting F-16s which is the right choice for May 2023 but these simple arguments about U.S. experience in the Gulf War aren't convincing when considering the A-10 in March of 2022. And yea these theoretical A-10s would get knocked out but so what? Its a war and you can treat the airframes as consumables. Ukraine is taking north of 500+casualties daily, they are using Cold War era kit on the front line, one of their prime infantry carrying vehicles is the M113! Edit: If anyone wants to continue this we can probably take it to another thread or PMs.

As @Kinophile said Ukraine has shown inventiveness with a lot of weapons systems so I wouldn't put it past them to figure out a way to make any additional aircraft work for them. But obviously, as Kinophile also said, this is a moot point given that they don't have them and aren't getting them. The point I was trying to make though was two-fold. 1: From what I can find A-10 loss rates are relatively high when doing low level ground attack, but pilot loss rates don't match airframe loss rates. 2: Ukraine is in a situation where they must stomach losses Western forces wouldn't so the fact that A-10s were pulled from ground attack roles by the U.S. doesn't necessarily map to how a country in Ukraine's position might use them. The conclusion being that the U.S. pulling them from ground attack just means that they aren't fit for that role within a U.S. context (limiting losses and looking towards fighting a U.S. peer enemy), but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be useful for Ukraine in its context.

@Millien My comments are all drawn from some old posts I have saved mostly from Steve commenting about a decade+ ago. So incidentally around the release time period of CM:BN and CM:BS. You can probably search for these sections in the forums to find the full threads. But they lead me to believe that there are preset heights of some kind although its possible I'm misinterpreting them or that the original comments were incorrect. LOS: LOF: Spotting:

What the argument turns on isn't sustainment but opportunity costs. Does Ukraine have spare pilots, is receiving these airframes going to deny them other more useful equipment from its Western partners? You are saying that the airframes cannot be used when they very much could assuming the opportunity cost was worth it. Sure Ukraine would lose them fairly quickly once employed but theoretically if Ukraine were to get like 100 A-10s and had 100 spare pilots to train on them there isn't anything saying they can't use them in combat for 14-28 days until they are used up. Perhaps supporting a major push to the Azov. What you seem to fundamentally not understand is that the airframe are a resource and you can use the resource up for some battlefield result. ----- ----- The sustainment argument is really core for any western equipment that Ukraine would potentially receive. - Does getting an item deny them other more useful resources from their western partners? - Do they have sufficient trained personnel, if not is there sufficient training capacity in friendly nations? - Do they have the logistics capacity to ship them to the front along with whatever is needed to keep them in the fight until they are consumed?

@Grey_Fox My overall point here is that contextually Ukraine is in a much different situation and has been shown repeatedly far more willing(and forced) to accept risks and losses that no Western military has since Vietnam. Your point seems to be that if losses are incurred then it can't be done which we've seen over the last year isn't true. No western military would have sustained the casualties taken by Ukraine to liberate a geographic area the size of Kherson it would be mind boggling, but Ukraine is in a position where it must take risks and losses. So applying experience from Coalition forces in wars of choice doesn't map neatly to the Ukrainian context.

I don't see how this follows. Just because you have high airframe losses doesn't mean you can't fly the mission. You just need to accept that you will lose a certain percentage of aircraft/pilots that are flying that mission. Ukraine has, for months, been fighting an attritional ground campaign that no Western military would even think about fighting. Yet despite mounting losses they continue to fight it. This bit from the linked article is useful in this context

While I do think the A-10 has developed a cult of personality around it. I'm not sure I would describe the A-10s as a death trap. Looking here and Desert Storm saw 20 A-10 casualties with 6 being lost and 14 being damaged. That is significantly more than any other airframe but as far as I can find only two pilots were actually killed in combat with 3 being captured. So while there are 20 airframe losses effective pilot losses amount to 25% of that. For any U.S. flown ship that is significant but Ukraine clearly is willing/must suffer higher loss rates. So, assuming they had the logistics tail (a very big assumption), flying a bunch of A-10s wouldn't necessarily be the worst even if airframe losses were high. Edit: The whole argument about Ukraine getting them is effectively moot since well.... they aren't getting any.

Calculating LOS on the fly would be immensely expensive for the game to do and the whole point of the look up table it to improve that so it can reasonably run on home computers circa 2010. The targeting tool being snappy is a happy accident of this system. You wouldn't build a look up table just for the targeting tool. Here is the loop as far as I can detail it: LOS: This is a look up table and it lets the game quickly calculate who can possibly see who. (So I think you were inadvertently correct in your post. CM doesn't calculate LOS from five heights but from a single height). Once LOS has been achieved it drops down into these next systems. Spotting: This seems to be a combination of dice roll and the ELOS system. Its drawn from the eyes/sensors but the eyes/sensors seem to be in predetermined spots on the AS height map. They don't seem to be truly dynamic. LOF: This is drawn directly from the gun barrel to the target which is also seems to use the ELOS system. For this particular issue there seems to be a secondary problem that a single individual cannot draw LOS from two points simultaneously.

There are specific forest tiles along with undergrowth and bush placeables. I'm fairly certain that trees by themselves don't confer any undergrowth abstraction. You need to combine them with a grown tile or other placeable.

Even if you reduced the spotting chance you ought to still have a smoother/closer to the average result with more rolls? That might mean that there are longer spotting times but you'd end up with fewer outliers which seems to be part of the complaint if I'm understanding it correctly. A player has an intuited expectation and occasionally they are getting a result outside of that. More rolls would do a better job of teaching players what to expect since the results would be more consistent. The game is handling both sides under the same rules so you aren't really advantaging anyone in this sequence. Well technically you would be advantaging units with poorer spotting but in the same way the game is currently advantaging units with better spotting. Someone is coming out ahead in an unrealistic fashion and its a compromise in either direction. You really can't properly model the fear of friendly fire without a lot of micro adjustments per scenario. Your force doing a night reconnaissance mission would likely have your models holding fire to avoid FF while a scenario where your force is the first line of defense against a prepared enemy assault would be far less worried about anyone coming at them from the enemy lines.

My thought would be that more checks would ameliorate some of the edge cases. If the game checked every 3 seconds you'd nearly triple the number of dice rolls and be less likely to suffer from a string of "bad rolls". Having watched a fair amount of footage from Ukraine what I've generally seen is that while spotting is very hard it seems generally easier to put fire down near the enemy than CM allows. CM generally requires a full spotting resolution before a model will fire unless the player interferes. It might be more accurate to have models firing at the ? before they know exactly what or where it is. You'd get less accurate fire but more fire.

The best improvement to the system would be an increase in spotting cycles. Right now its every 7 seconds(?) or every stance change. So a T-72 will attempt to spot an enemy tank 8 times per turn. 3.5 minutes is like 28 spotting attempts. If you were to cut the spotting cycle in half that 3.5 minutes would end up being like 1.75 minutes.

If I'm not mistaken this would apply to every game in CM but modern obviously suffers the most. I don't think any vehicle can go gun down in CM

IMO this is the key problem with CM not modelling artillery fragments against tanks. It results in a feast or famine situation where you either knock tanks out of the fight with direct hits or do nothing with near misses. Artillery gives you no degradation over time and a CM abstracts a lot of system knock outs into chip damage so not having any chip damage from arty really hurts anyone who goes heavy into it.

So here is probably the most pertinent post on the issue: There are some additional posts in the thread so I recommend you read it. but they key points seem to be: - Having multiple points of LOS generation (per crew member) is problematic - The game has issues with spotting routines when it comes to just sensors (i'd describe the CITV as a sensor) My guess is that the Brad and Stryker are just getting the hull down concealment bonus applied to them but there isn't a system for a turret down concealment bonus so you can't do that. FWIW this used to be pretty common knowledge, or at least I recall it being fairly well known about a decade ago. There aren't any vehicles (that I know of) that you can go turret down in.

I'm fairly sure Artkin is right. This stuff was discussed back in 2008/2009 pretty extensively and you could probably track down forum threads from that time period. Steve and Charles participated more in technical discussions so the few years around the CM:BN launch is a treasure trove. Now this is from my memory so I'll have to double check later if I can find the threads again but.... CM calculates LOS from 5 calculated heights. Essentially its a big look up table saying "From this action square what other squares can be seen and at what heights". So while spotting is done on the fly LOS drawing isn't. Those 5 height levels are: Prone Kneeling Standing/Small Vehicle Tall Vehicle Very Tall Vehicle Prone and Kneeling are only for infantry obviously while vehicles have access to the remaining three. So for an Abrams it would be Driver: Small vehicle Gunner, TC: tall vehicle And this means that the CITV can't spot from its Very Tall Vehicle slot and gets rolled into Tall Vehicle where the TC is. Since spotting is tied to a person and a person can't be within two different heights. A note for clarity. The content in blue is my working theory for what is going on here. So once you get to that I'm not 100%. I'm putting stuff together from some notes and memory.