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Buildings collapsing


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I have no combat IR military experience. 

I have been to southern Poland/Ukraine. Buildings there did not strike me as particularly delicate. 

In game  even large, concrete buildings collapse very quickly.  Now, wooden sheds, barns, farm houses -  yes,  they would come apart easily. But I've had 5 story hotel size structures disappear from a few minutes of 82mm mortars. Is this realistic? 

Wharvdrives the type of attributes for a building in-game? Is it selecting the building skin in the editor? Or are there specific types that are wooden v. Block/brick? 

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From what I have seen it depeds what you hit them with and the size of the building/contruction material used. Maybe an ordinary sized houuse micht collpse at leas partially after a few 120mm gun rounds, Your bigger buildings, sucj as he large apartment block multi story effects, I have not seen a 5 storey block collpse after a few minutes of mortar fire, Mybe you jus saw a lucky hit.I am not sure

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I've done tests to get a feel for how much ammo you need to bring down each building size, but I've never taken building material into account.  If I recall correctly it takes about 40-50 rounds of 155 for the 14 story and 20-30 for the 5 story.  Houses are around 4-6 rounds.

I tested 82mm Russian mortars on some 5 story buildings and I think it took over 100 direct hits to bring the building down, though if I recall the sheaf was so open it was tough to tell which rounds were achieving effects, the number of rounds that went into sinking those buildings could well be twice that number. 

In real life you'd avoid using mortars for most targets that have overhead cover, including hardened buildings.  If you had to engage buildings or bunkers with mortars, 120s with delay registered for destruction missions seems to work well against the shoddy construction you find in the ME.  The cumulative damage from sustained 81/82s might leave a building in ruins, but it wouldn't be very efficient, you'd be there all day, and there would probably be frames and walls etc that survive despite the unusally large volume of fire.  The occupants would have fled long before the building was gutted.  

We don't publish recommendation tables for targets like large apartment buildings (though we probably should), but 155s firing in volume really can reduce a building to rubble.  Larger buildings are obviously levelled more easily with rocket arty and the various mk-82/3/4 size JDAMs and GBUs.

I might test all this stuff again including building material this time and maybe I'll put a table together that shows the data.

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I guess it's more the mortar strikes that have me a little suspicious. 155/152mm seem to do realistic damage (despite their fart-like impact visuals...). 

To be accurate,  I'm not doubting the artillery effects themselves,  more the building resistance. It just seems,  to my uninformed,  unexperienced gut, that CMBS block and brick buildings collapse in toto too quickly. 

It's a niggle, to me. 

Niggle niggle niggle. 

Edited by kinophile
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22 hours ago, kinophile said:

I have no combat IR military experience. 

I have been to southern Poland/Ukraine. Buildings there did not strike me as particularly delicate. 

In game  even large, concrete buildings collapse very quickly.  Now, wooden sheds, barns, farm houses -  yes,  they would come apart easily. But I've had 5 story hotel size structures disappear from a few minutes of 82mm mortars. Is this realistic? 

Wharvdrives the type of attributes for a building in-game? Is it selecting the building skin in the editor? Or are there specific types that are wooden v. Block/brick? 

Skins are just skins, and can be swapped freely.  The strength of a building is determined by its 3D model.  There are of course some default skin correlations, e.g. barns tend to have wood construction skins and are generally a weaker building type, but a wood texture modular building is no weaker than one with brick or stone textures if both are the same size.

Edited by akd
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5 hours ago, akd said:

Skins are just skins, and can be swapped freely.  The strength of a building is determined by its 3D model.  There are of course some default skin correlations, e.g. barns tend to have wood construction skins and are generally a weaker building type, but a wood texture modular building is no weaker than one with brick or stone textures if both are the same size.

Huh...

Did not expect this. Always operated on the assumption that "stone" buildings offered better protection than "wood" ones. 

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Some interesting points in regard t what is happening "under the bonnet" Judging by personal observation a building like a wooden Russian hut in CMRT or a small Middle East house in CMSF require only a few rounds before they collapse.Larger buildings like a brick house or a stone church require more punishment.Those big apartment block type buildings are most impossible t destroy. A prolonged and heavy bombardment might eventually do it. However, such building  still takes visible battle damage. Beyond the above I really don't worry too much about it

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On ‎29‎-‎06‎-‎2016 at 5:02 PM, kinophile said:

You mean realtime within the game? 

There's already damage shown,  in game and as a choice of damage type to building skins in the scenario editor.  

 

Yes realtime. Like the standard decals, but with the black area being transparent to give the proper effect..

15 hours ago, TJT said:

Sounds like someone needs to do a bit more urban recon by fire... :P

In a way yes. I would like to be able to riddle a building with bullet and shell holes rather than just have the two-stage damage system that ends with the walls collapsing.

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On 6/22/2016 at 10:09 PM, akd said:

Skins are just skins, and can be swapped freely.  The strength of a building is determined by its 3D model.  There are of course some default skin correlations, e.g. barns tend to have wood construction skins and are generally a weaker building type, but a wood texture modular building is no weaker than one with brick or stone textures if both are the same size.

This is interesting.  For MOUT TACSOPs the location, height and strength (ability to stand up to incoming fire) are all important considerations.  Location and height are fairly straight forward however I have always been unsure of the strength of different buildings (with the exception of barns which I know are weak).  So, at least for modular buildings, it seems the size is the determining factor for strenfth.  By size do we mean just the footprint of the building or also the height?  

If we are talking about only the footprint, of a modular building: A medium, two story, wood modular is stronger than a small, three story, brick?

And maybe there is a different formula for the independent buildings?         

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/21/2016 at 11:58 PM, kinophile said:

<Snip> What drives the type of attributes for a building in-game? Is it selecting the building skin in the editor? Or are there specific types that are wooden v. Block/brick? 

Okay, I did some experimenting around with this.  I used US 75mm Sherman tanks and fired on the different building configurations (modular buildings and independent buildings (houses, churches, commercial, barns and other)) until they collapsed.  This is what I discovered.  

Generally the bigger the building the stronger it is.  The skin of the building does not matter.  A combination of a buildings height and footprint (total square footage) determines the strength of the building within the four categories listed below.     

Very Strong: Three biggest church structures.

Strong: Modular buildings and independent small church.  

Average: Independent houses, independent commercial, and independent other.  (CMBN & CMFB have an "other" category for buildings.) 

Weak: Barns     

A practical problem with this can be the proper identification of a building during a mission since some of the independent buildings are similar in appearance to modular buildings.  In addition I may look at suppression levels taken by an infantry team when inside the different structures.  

As always any additions or corrections or comments are welcomed.

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Skin matters only in the most general sense, across titles. I believe CMBS indi building (of a certain size) are considered of modern stick construction and so more porous to bullets. In CMFI and CMBN they're considered of stone constructions and tougher. CMRT might be somewhere in-between (perhaps). But there's no direct matching of texture to building. Modular buildings I don't know if their properties change across titles at all. I think a mid-size modular building has mid-size modular building properties regardless of the texture or the title.

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9 minutes ago, Bud Backer said:

I thought that skin mattered - that some buildings are brick or stone, and others wood...

I also thought that.  It may be due to the fact that the very strong buildings (three of the churches) are made from some type of masonry (I think in all the titles?) and the weakest buildings (barns) are mostly frame with some having masonry on the bottom.  We probably then applied this information to all the buildings.  In a 2 A/S spot modular building the wall of the floor you aim at will be destroyed in 4 to 5 hits from a 75mm.  Does not matter if the skin was frame or masonry.   

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I think the impression you guys have is because the stock skins for buildings match fairly well to its toughness.  Which give our brains the false sense that there is a causal link to how the buildings look and how strong they are (after all in RL that would be the case).  The stock skins for the barns look like you could force your way through a wall with the butt of your rifle - and they are easily destroyed and offer little protection. While the stock skins for the larger buildings, including churches, look very robust and they are not easily destroyed and offer pretty good protection.

Someone made skins for barns in CMBS that looked like concrete block.  I declined to install them just so my poor brain would not get confused :D .

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/13/2016 at 8:07 PM, Bud Backer said:

Perhaps I'm confusing this with (small arms) bullets? Or do they also show no differentiation in protection? I wonder...

Sorry it took awhile to get back to this one.  I ran some experiments using two of the same independent house structure in CMFB v1.01.  One structure I gave a frame skin and the other was masonry.  It was a two floor house.  I put one German tank hunter team on each floor and one behind each house, Veteran, Normal, Fit, 0.  I then had one US squad Target the ground floor of each house (same weapons and soft factors in each squad) from 280 meters.  I used the German tank hunter teams since they had MP40 SMGs which have a hard coded range limit of 200 meters.  This way they could not fire back.  I was afraid using fanatic troops with a small target arc would skew the suppression results.      

There was no discernible difference in the suppression / casualty rates of the troops inside the two, different skinned, houses.    

What did surprise me was how unaffected the teams behind the houses were.  The game showed a visual of many rounds/tracers going through the houses but the majority of the time the teams behind the houses showed one or no bars of suppression.  Only one time did a team behind a house take a casualty and that was behind the house with masonry (stone) skin.  

IMO I don't think the skin affects anything besides the looks of the building.  The size of the building affects how much incoming it can take before it collapses.  The next question is does the ability to withstand incoming longer before collapsing translate to better protection/less suppression for troops inside?  I'm starting to suspect the type of building has more to do with the protection provided to the troops from suppression & casualties than the size.  As in the Church vs barn example.

Even when a building collapses with troops inside I seem to remember the troops not being greatly affected..............    

Need more experiments but I have PBEMs waiting..........            

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19 hours ago, MOS:96B2P said:

<Snip> Even when a building collapses with troops inside I seem to remember the troops not being greatly affected..............   <Snip>

Okay, I stand corrected.  I put 7 OpFor on the third floor of a three story independent house and had tanks fire at the first floor until the house collapsed.  All 7 OpFor were KIA............... So much for my memory.   

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