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Kaunitz

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Kaunitz last won the day on November 10 2018

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  1. I concur with RockinHarry. It does make a difference. From my impressions, hit registry is indeed somehow linked to the actual models, and the animation changes where the model is. This doesn't help if you don't get any aiming point at all, as it commonly happens on flatter maps. Then the only means to fire your MG in a direction is to use a very close target area spot, which leads to very high ammo consumption and incredible spread of burts (for each fire action, the MG targets a random point in the action square. If the action square is very close, the angle of dispersion is huge...). Also, firing at point in front of the target may sometimes results in a bad (too high) trajectory. The trajectory runs roughly from the muzzle to a random point in the target square at about knee-height. If the target point is slightly "above" your muzzle height (as it often happens because you need to see the ground to spot it), and your gun is firing knee-height at a target point, the shots often go high. ---- And yes, there are also many maps that are marvellous and more realistically scaled. I appreciate that and it is by no means meant as a reproach to all the people who put their heart into designing maps. The problem is most severe for older quickbattle maps. I also have the impression that it's sometimes meant to give infantry a better chance against armor.
  2. The problem of infantry protection has already been mentioned. The benefit of fortifications is puny. It's a pity that fortifications are so neglected. Also, Pixelsoldiers tend to be too brave. They often continue to run under fire (default reaction of most move orders) and they also tend to kneel while under fire (I use an animation mod by ROckinharry (?) so that my men stay prone more often and survive much better). And Pixelsoldiers they don't make the best use of cover (which is understandable, as this must be a highly complicated issue to tackle). I'd also like to point out that I often get the impression that infantry often seems to move somewhat unflexibly and slowly - almost as if stuck in some jelly. But then again, this is balanced out by the bad shooting skills of many pixelsoldiers. ------------------- Another point which has not been mentioned in this thread yet is map design. While I understand that many other players don't share my opinion, I'm still convinced that the map design is one of the main culprits for the exagerated casualty rate in CM. Of course not all maps are the same and many maps are well researched and realistically scaled. But the big bunch of sandbox quickbattle maps are anything but realistic. Their landscapes resemble tabletop miniature landscapes. In general, the footprint of most terrain features (a forest, a field, a hill,...) is too small and there are too many terrain features in too little space. Exaggerated example: On a 1x1km CM map, you can often find 2 hills, 5 woods, 2 villages. In reality, such a space would comprise half a hill (sloping gently, not cutting LOS!), a village and perhaps a part of a forest. The main consequence of "too many small terrain features in too little space" is that lines of sight/fire are cut much too frequently. This in turn reduces the range at which combat typically takes place. For a combat mission player, a 200m LOF feels like a luxurious "long range". In reality, it's still well within rifle range and all too common! Now, if the combat distance is "too" short, it's no surprise that casualty rates are high. The attacker often has to move into what amounts to an ambush by the defender. Often, there is not a single position from which you could bring your support weapons like hMGs to bear on the enemy from a reasonable distance (outside rifle range! at a range at which you're not immediately spotted and shot dead and thus have time to set up!). On many maps, there is no way for the attacker to establish a "soft" contact and build up fire to suppress a position. Most contact in Combat Mission games is hard contact at point blank range. Hills are particularly critical, because going prone doesn't reduce your exposure that much when fired at from above at short range. On gentler, flatter slopes, things are different. --------------- Another issue is that weapons who are supposed to be very good at suppression often can't be used effectively. The main victims are machine gun teams. Not only are they handicapped by map design (as mentioned above), but also the way that area fire works makes their use very unreliable and fiddly. You need to have LOS onto the GROUND in your target-area spot. Needless to say that it is often impossible for a MG team that lies prone to see any spot on the ground. You're not allowed to fire in a "direction" if you cannot see a spot on the ground. Thus MGs are often unable to fire - reverse slope targets everywhere, no line of fire! Also, you can't fire through bushes. The only way around this is to have an elevated position. Another issue for MGs is that the game does not allow them to target more than 1 action spot (a front of 8m) in a single turn. If firing from a proper distance, the gun would hardly need to be traversed to cover an area much larger than a single action spot. There are reasons why MGs in Combat Mission are extremely underwhelming and don't have the suppressive effect they should have. Less suppression = more casualties.
  3. Last game a trooper of mine fired 4 RPG7-shots into a tree right in front of him. The tank was 20-25m away... I'm also a bit disappointed about how easily tanks seem to be allowed to manoeuver (and turn their turret/gun) in woods. It would be great if more map designers made use of small patches of heavy wood (impassable to tanks, afaik?) to make tank movement more complicated and less predictable in woods. Tank manoeuverablity in dense forest is one of my main gripes. As LongLeftFlank also mentioned, very few CM map feature the thickets at the edges of woods (a gently rising canopy, so to speak), which would cut LOS into the wood. Of course this would also depend on the type of wood - there are many woods without that typical thicket. Most woods on quick battle maps are way too small. As a result, these woods can be traversed very fast, they can be easily saturated by artillery fire, and defending them doesn't take a lot of troops.
  4. Interesting stuff, holoween! Indeed in larger battles I think that some fortifications can be more worthwhile in terms of cost/effectivenes due the relation between point budget/mapsize. May I ask how the battle went/why it did take longer for your opponent to clear the position? Was the opponent unable to hit or were his hits less effective in taking your pixeltruppen out? I wonder if part of the perceived protection might have been due to the very flat terrain (hitting close to the target requires more accuracy in this case)? Did he have no artillery? You say it was more difficult to scout out? Aren't foxholes spotted very easily?
  5. Hm. Never thought of it this way. I find it a bit strange if "more tolerance for casualties" benefits the defender rather than the attacker. So a better name for the assault missions should be "search and destroy". In my opinion assault missions should feature a big separate point budget for the defender to buy field fortifications. Unless you put them into a separate budget, noone is ever going to buy them because they're ridicolously overprized. Would you rather buy 2 squares of barbed wire or a full squad? Field fortifications are supposed to funnel the enemy into killzones, not to be more expensive than the troops that constitute your killzones! Also, field fortifications are still underpowered (CM:BS doesn't even feature "bunkers" - so you get no overhead protection whatsoever for infantry positions in the title which has plenty of airburst HE ammo....for me this is a major issue that totally messes up the balance. No wonder everyone is astonished by the "lethality" of the modern titles...)
  6. What often drives me nuts is that you cannot area-target reverse slope spots (exception: mortars). This basically means that your line of sight (onto the ground!) is identical with your line of fire, which sometimes leads to rather ridicolous problems: For example, I cannot order my heavy MG to spray some bushes. I can only order the MG to target the ground in front of the bushes, but I cannot fire at the bushes themselves. For this reason alone, vehicle-mounted MGs are often more usefull as they are better at "spotting the ground" because of the elevated position of the MG. But then again, the fire from mounted MGs is often not as effective (depending on the distance, the angle between the ground and the trajectory of the shots is bigger, so the bullets don't graze that well/travel that far - the effect of the fire is extremely limited to a very tight spot). Generally speaking, I think that MGs have a lot of problems in the current engine. Effective fire is very hard to achieve because of the LOS=LOF issue described above, because of map design (very steep elevations, lots of cover --> very few opportunities for effective long range and/or grazing fire), because players have no influence on the spread (only 1 spot targeted per round/minute) and on the rate of fire (which depends entirely on the range) and because combat mission pixeltruppen tend to be rather unimpressed by fire (unless it kills). To a lesser degree though, these problems affect all small calibre fire. It's very hard to direct fire in a way in which it is effective (sweeping/covering ground effectively). It would also be nice if MGs were more trigger happy. If they see a single enemy soldier who drops to the ground, they should continue to fire at the spot where he went down and the surroundings. Exclusively firing on sight defeats the purpose. PS. Example of grazing fire in CM: https://youtu.be/KrY135AV6tg
  7. Okay so it seems that point 1 is not true for most QB maps. For probes/attacks/assaults, the location of objectives and the deployment zones are identical. So the only difference between the battle types is the difference in the point budget and the allocation of victory points to terrain objectives and casualties, as described in the v.4 manual, pp. 27, 119. To me it seems as if the more you go towards assault, the easier it will be for the attacker. The attacker gets more points and more tolerance for losses (and some info on enemy positions). The defender gets ... nothing? Players could agree on using progressively shorter time limits for attacks and assaults though.
  8. That only works in PBEM if both players have a gentlemens' agreement and trust each other.
  9. Infantry guns are almost useless in Combat Mission because most of maps are too small/too hilly and crowded with terrain. For Normandy, that's okay, but for the other titles, I think it's a big problem. You rarely get LOS beyond ca. 250m. This is too close for comfort even for heavy MGs, let alone an infantry gun. Most reasonable "support positions" would be somewhere behind the attacker's deployment zone off map on a hill/ridge (which would also allow some spotting and help get rid of the CM scouting claustrophobia).
  10. In case you didn't know: John Tiller's Panzer Campaigns Series inclues a "Sealion" game. These are usually very well researched games that come with designer notes if you're interested in the conflict. Oddly, this one seems to be missing the "planning map" (a huge hex-map file): http://www.johntillersoftware.com/PanzerCampaigns/Sealion40.html
  11. Thanks a lot, that's very usefull! The follow-up question we could try to answer concern the differences between the different types of quickbattles, apart from the point budgets. I will try to investigate the differences, but maybe someone already knows more than I? As far as I know, the more you lean towards "assault", the deeper in the defender's deployment zone the terrain objectives ought to be / the further the defender's deployment zone reaches? the less weight casualties should have compared to the terrain objectives for determining victory (in an assault only, the attacker gets some information/contact markers on the defenders' positions)
  12. This. I think one of the more interesting points in the "tanks op?" thread was the question whether the coordination between tanks and infantry is too easy in CM. And I'm still of the opinion that it is. Mind you, this is not neccessarily about borg-spotting (letting tanks area-fire at targets that they can't even know about), but also about reaction by movement. If I spot a Panzershreck team with my infantry over there, I can let my tanks stop/reverse very quickly. Tanks can react to things they shouldn't be aware of. An interesting but purely hypothetical "solution" would be to increase reaction intervals for tanks, so that - for example - you could only give new orders to a tank every 3 minutes, not every single minute. Also, I still think that the lack of proper defensive works in Combat Mission increases the tanks' power against infantry. On the other hand, quickbattle-map-design tends to make tanks more vulnerable to infantry (and also to other tanks). Most quickbattle-maps are extremely compartmentalized, which means that tanks are too close for comfort most of the time. (It also means that heavy MGs aren't even remotely as usefull as they should be, but that's another issue)
  13. Most Combat Mission scenarios are pitched assaults (without any recon info for the attacker...*sigh*) on maps with relatively short lines of sight. Also, both sides usually have at least some (anti) tank capabilities. These are big handicaps for Stummels (and other non-armored infantry support assets). I suppose that Stummels would be much more usefull in those types of engagements that cannot be translated into Combat Mission scenarios that well/easily: asymmetrical delaying/rearguard actions. E.g. the enemy - let's suppose it's an infantry battalion - is on the retreat because tank formations have broken through his main line of resistance in some other sector of the front. In order to secure his retreat, he leaves behind small detachments (most likely MG nests) in strongpoints/villages along his path of retreat. It's rather unlikely that anti tank guns are part of such detachments. Now, your task is just to "work" your way through the enemy delaying efforts: push through minefields and road blocks, clear the villages. This is WWII day to day business. Such scenarios would be rather frustrating and dull to play. Most of the time, the enemy would just fire from a distance, forcing you to deploy from marching column to battle formation (which takes time) and once you enter the village, the enemy is already gone. I suppose that Stummels would be quite usefull in these situations (knocking out enemy nests of resistance "on the fly").
  14. I'd like to volunteer as the stay behind man, yes, please! Interesting video! Thanks for sharing.
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