Small arms casualties - tank crews

[Edon]

I made a quick test in CMRT to the stug roof mg behavior. A flat map with a single buttoned stug (mid) and 4 soviet maxims in trenches. Range is 260m and the mgs are placed in front right and left of the stug (little less than 45 angle).

First I gave no orders and nothing  interesting happened. The stug took some time to detect the maxims and then opened up with main gun.  

Then I decided to wake the stug with some movement. I gave lateral quick order to two teams from left to right and vice versa. Two maxims are going stay in trenches. 

Now the stug spots the moving teams and engage. I noticed that if the traverse of stug's main gun runs out due the enemy movement, loader will use mg.  And then at these ranges he'll take a bullet the from maxims in the trenches. I ran the test around ten times and two times in a single turn the stug lost both loader and commander to the maxims. A couple of times the stug managed to kill the running teams but most of the time it did lose the both crew members in a few turns. This was a very quick test and it would be interesting to test different ranges for example.       

The decision to use stug's mg seems to be logical as it seems to happen when the main gun traverse reach its limits. But I feel that the range to open up with the mg when buttoned could be looked at. A very gamey plan to kill a stug would be running a scout team laterally and then take it out with small arms fire.  
  

Edited April 3, 2016 by Edon

[Champagne]

This stug crew suicidal behavior is very frustrating and unrealistic, IMHO, and, I will not play any scenario that includes Stugs until the problem is fixed.

[A Canadian Cat]

10 hours ago, Champagne said:

This stug crew suicidal behavior is very frustrating and unrealistic, IMHO, and, I will not play any scenario that includes Stugs until the problem is fixed.

Well then no Stugs for you because so far it is not looking like there is anything to fix.  It is one of those things where that MG is what the Stug has to defend against close in infantry and you have to open the hatch to operate it.  So if they changed it it would have undesired consequences of allowing infantry to close assault the Stug more easily and people would start saying "This Stug not defending themselves when infantry get close is very frustrating and unrealistic, IMHO, and, I will not play any scenario that includes Stugs until the problem is fixed."

The best thing you can do is have your Stugs operate in support of your infantry behind their screen.  Then 1) you stugs will spend more time further back and 2) the enemy will get fewer / no side shots on the MG gunner. As and added bonus you will be happier and less frustrated.  I hope

As an aside story when this was first brought (months ago in another thread) up I literally though the OP was imagining things.  Stugs are one of my favourite vehicles - I use them frequently.  Sure I lost TC and other crew members but it was so rare I never considered it for closer attention.  It actually took another thread some weeks later for me to finally get what the problem really was.  Note I still don't loose Stug crew at a measurable higher rate than Panther TCs or Sherman TCs.  And you can all experience the same goodness by tweaking your tactics.

[Bulletpoint]

20 minutes ago, IanL said:

Well then no Stugs for you because so far it is not looking like there is anything to fix.  It is one of those things where that MG is what the Stug has to defend against close in infantry and you have to open the hatch to operate it.

If the infantry is 260 metres away, wouldn't the best defense simply be to stay inside the tank?

[Andrew H.]

I think it is highly unrealistic for *good order* crewmen to be regularly fed through the open loader's slot like bullets in a magazine when they have been ordered to stay buttoned and they know infantry is nearby. 

 

It was not much of an issue in CMRT or BN or FI because it was easy enough to keep vehicles back.

But it will be an issue in close terrain, whether in the bulge or the the Hürtgen forest, and it's going to lead to unrealistic results.  The allies didn't defeat the StuG by shooting the crewmen as they sequentially popped up to operate the loader's MG.  

[Champagne]

OK then no Stugs for me in any scenario including PBeM. 

Are there any Stug variants that don't behave in this manner?

 We can use the scenario editor and edit out all of the offending Stugs.

[snarre]

late variant stug have remote control mg on roof, sou all early and mid version dosent have remote control mg 

Edited April 6, 2016 by snarre

[Anthony P.]

I must say that I think I'd rather prefer not having them try to defend against assaulting infantry with anything but 75mm HE. It's not terribly viable to have the entire SPG knocked out by infantry small arms just because you had it pointed in a rough 90° from infantry over two hundred meters distant.

[JoMac]

2 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

If the infantry is 260 metres away, wouldn't the best defense simply be to stay inside the tank?

Yeap, and your absolutely right...

Now, if your supporting your Inf with the Stug or similar at those ranges, then giving the 'Unbutton' Order to fire the MG would be a viable option.

Unfortunately, these issues with the Stug and similar will be here for awhile...I figured if it hasn't been fixed by now...Then 

 

Edited April 6, 2016 by JoMc67

[Edon]

Decided to make a new little test because why not. CMBN 3.12 this time.

This time range is 360 (closest squad)-400 (farthest squad) metres and US infantry platoon without bazookas are against a stug (all reg, 0/0). Infantry is spaced along 400 meter wide flat map. 3 scout teams are detached and ordered run laterally. Stug is again buttoned and no orders given but driven back at 360m when reversing after loader dies . And here are the results for 10 runs:

Run 1: Turn 5 loader and commander died

Run 2 Turn 6 loader died. Scout teams died, end of the run, commander survived

Run 3: Turn 4 loader died, turn 6 commander died

Run 4: Turn 3 loader died, turn 7 commander died

Run 5: Turn 4 loader died, turn 9 commander died

Run 6: Turn 11 loader died, Turn 16 run out of HE, end of the run, commander survived

Run 7: Turn 7 loader died, turn 9 commander died

Run 8: Turn 5 loader died, turn 10 commander died

Run 9: Turn 5 loader died, turn 6 commander died

Run 10: Turn 5 loader died turn 6 commander died  

Even at around 400 metres stug is eventually knocked out of combat (loses ability to fire after 2 crew losses) by small arms fire. I can understand loader popping out and firing at the enemy close range. But at 350-400m despite player given buttoned order? 

Edited April 6, 2016 by Edon

[JoMac]

Andrew H...Now, where have I seen your Avatar from.

Hmmm, Oh yeah, 'ALL STAR BLAZERS' ...I remember it well as a kid. 

[Andrew H.]

1 hour ago, JoMc67 said:

Andrew H...Now, where have I seen your Avatar from.

Hmmm, Oh yeah, 'ALL STAR BLAZERS' ...I remember it well as a kid. 

Interesting...but not quite: 

 

 

[Champagne]

6 hours ago, Edon said:

Decided to make a new little test because why not. CMBN 3.12 this time.

This time range is 360 (closest squad)-400 (farthest squad) metres and US infantry platoon without bazookas are against a stug (all reg, 0/0). Infantry is spaced along 400 meter wide flat map. 3 scout teams are detached and ordered run laterally. Stug is again buttoned and no orders given but driven back at 360m when reversing after loader dies . And here are the results for 10 runs:

Run 1: Turn 5 loader and commander died

Run 2 Turn 6 loader died. Scout teams died, end of the run, commander survived

Run 3: Turn 4 loader died, turn 6 commander died

Run 4: Turn 3 loader died, turn 7 commander died

Run 5: Turn 4 loader died, turn 9 commander died

Run 6: Turn 11 loader died, Turn 16 run out of HE, end of the run, commander survived

Run 7: Turn 7 loader died, turn 9 commander died

Run 8: Turn 5 loader died, turn 10 commander died

Run 9: Turn 5 loader died, turn 6 commander died

Run 10: Turn 5 loader died turn 6 commander died  

Even at around 400 metres stug is eventually knocked out of combat (loses ability to fire after 2 crew losses) by small arms fire. I can understand loader popping out and firing at the enemy close range. But at 350-400m despite player given buttoned order? 

Thank you very much for the test, Edon. IMHO, your test proves the complete absurdity of the way that CMx models the StuG. Ten out of ten times, a crewmember pops up and is killed by small arms fire.  In 8 of 10 cases, the StuG's crew displays suicidal behavior and pops up in sequence, all to be shot in the head thus knocking the StuG out. I challenge anybody to show us a historical case of this happening at this frequency. If it can be proven that the game models it correctly I will ban myself from posting for six months.

Edited April 7, 2016 by Champagne

[ChrisND]

We are looking into it, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

[JoMac]

3 hours ago, ChrisND said:

We are looking into it, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Umm, I'm sure you guys have been looking into this since CMBN, but no changes since then.

 

[Champagne]

I really thought that they solved this problem! It must be a very difficult issue to address. That's the logical reason why the issue persists.

Great game notwithstanding. I already pre ordered.

[A Canadian Cat]

12 hours ago, ChrisND said:

We are looking into it, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Well look at that - I stand corrected (from a post I made in another thread).

 

8 hours ago, JoMc67 said:

Umm, I'm sure you guys have been looking into this since CMBN, but no changes since then.

Sigh, is that really necessary.  Shakes head

[Battlefront.com]

10 hours ago, JoMc67 said:

Umm, I'm sure you guys have been looking into this since CMBN, but no changes since then.

 

Yup, you have us pegged!  We never actually look into anything and we never actually fix anything.  Man, and I thought we had you all fooled.

Seriously, if this were a problem before it would have been fixed ages ago since the same behavior is in CMBN, CMFI, and CMRT.  To the best of my knowledge there's been no significant outcry about the current behavior (there's always some grumbling about EVERY TacAI decision, so that's normal) until CMFB.  So yes, now that there is a significant grumble we are looking into it.

This is not the first situation where a TacAI behavior has been generally acceptable for a long time and then suddenly runs into problems due to the specifics of the game.  In this case my guess is it's a combo of StuGs being far more common (a reflection of historical fact) and the specifics of the terrain/weather.  That and the fact that US Squads are damned lethal at 250-400m range compared to Soviet Squads due to the Garand and larger squad size.

Combat Mission is nothing more than a collection of variables that must be balanced together, in context, for things to work correctly.  It shouldn't surprise anybody that from time to time things get out of balance when major changes are made.  Testers catch almost all of them, but they have lots of other responsibilities other than this and so from time to time something will slip through that becomes rather apparent once the pool of players expands dramatically.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

On the plus side, this TacAI behavior shows how well the game simulates reality.  Think about it...

The Germans initially had no roof top shield for the StuG's MG early in the war when the vehicles were mostly being used as intended (support vehicles).  This worked OK because at the time they didn't need to defend themselves.  Then things changed where the StuGs started to be used more in an infantry support role at times when the infantry was stretched thinner and against better opposition.  To respond to this the Germans added a shield to the gun position, indicating that they discovered the crews had to use the MGs and were too exposed.  And what happened around this time period of the war?  The Germans started adding remote MGs.  Now, why do you suppose they did that?  Because conditions had changed even more and the StuG crews had more need to use their MGs and were likely getting picked off far more than before.

What this says to me is the TacAI's incentives to use the MG are correct, but the conditions have changed to make it unwise.  Just like in the real war.  If we change the TacAI to stay buttoned then that means they aren't using their MGs when they probably ought to.  That, in turn, is likely going to raise other problems for the StuGs, though with the benefit of not having as many crew casualties.

Pretty slick IMHO.

Steve

[Rokko]

To be fair - the issue has been around for more than a year.

I remember explicitely mentioning it in the briefing of my CMRT Right Hook at Sopockinie scenario to caution players not to get their StuGs to close to anything that can shoot back.

[Battlefront.com]

48 minutes ago, Rokko said:

To be fair - the issue has been around for more than a year.

As I said, you can not find me one TacAI behavior that doesn't have someone voicing a complaint, concern, or suggestion for change.  Because of that we tend to ignore more-or-less one off, marginally important, or situational specific complaints because if we didn't we'd never get anything else done.  Instead we look for ones, like this, that spark a significant conversation backed up by attempts to quantify what the problem is/isn't.  Now that this issue has risen to that level... we're now looking into it.

This is how we've handled things since 1999 and it's a system that, while not perfect, works pretty well.  Hindsight is always 20/20 and generally speaking anything we fix today probably was mentioned by someone before.  Probably more than once. 

Steve

[SgtHatred]

It would be nice if vehicle crew could suffer suppression in a way that would prevent them from unbuttoning, because sometimes they do some very dangerous things.

For example, this stryker reload.

 

 

[sttp]

For me, it's not so much that the infantry accuracy vs. tank commanders (or halftrack gunners or whatever) is unbelievable when compared to reality. It has more to do with the in-game disparity between 1) infantry accuracy when targeting those vehicle crew members, vs. 2) infantry accuracy when targeting everything else. The difference is so large that it's always a little jarring to see it happen, and it does take away from the immersion a little bit.

I'll paste in a video example. In it, 3 tanks go from buttoned to unbuttoned in the beginning of the turn. This results is 3 dead tank commanders within 4 seconds. There's enemy infantry within 200 meters of all of the tanks, sure, but this tank commander=bullet magnet game behavior can definitely be very frustrating. On the other hand, and in fairness to BFC, I've read the user complaints from before the issue was tweaked, and it sounds like people were just as frustrated with that situation.

 

 

[Battlefront.com]

Yup, getting the right balance between crew safety and maintaining vehicle capabilities has been a challenge since CMBO days.  Unfortunately this is one of those behaviors that is extremely sensitive to a variety of specific conditions.  What works great 90% of the time might wind up being very bad for 10%.  Players will focus on the 10% instead of the 90%, which is understandable.  The question is if the 10% is what one would expect in the real world.  The problem is if we try to reduce the 10% we start to negatively affect the 90%.  In this situation, if we had crews be more conservative people would complain less about crews being picked off but more critical that their vehicles didn't do things like maintain the capability to shoot at stuff.

There's no perfect answer to this. However, we are always willing to look at vehicle specific situation where it appears the balance is significantly out of whack.

Steve

[MikeyD]

This thread could be filed under 'be careful what you ask for because you may get it'. Like Strykers that don't reload and Stugs that don't fire their mgs.