Ammo Leveling?

[weapon2010]

Will this feature ever make it in?

 

3. Vehicle Ammo Leveling. This is a common frontline technique of evening out ammo supply between vehicles in order to keep as many vehicles in the fight as possible. Sometimes an entire platoon was withdrawn and leveled with another, other times it was just vehicles within the same platoon after one or two wound up firing off a lot of ammo. Like real life, however, this is kinda tricky to pull off under combat conditions. Vehicles must be parked VERY close to each other and left unbuttoned for quite a few minutes before leveling can take place. In other words, vehicles performing leveling are sitting ducks. For short games this probably isn't a very useful feature, but for you guys playing longer scenarios it's bound to be quite handy.

[c3k]

Hmm. Are you sure this ISN'T in?

Edited to add: okay, it is not. I just ran a test. 5 Shermans in a platoon. Highly motivated veterans. Two of them shot off everything. Main guns round, .50s, .30s, and smoke. I put one Sherman next to one empty Sherman and two Shermans next to the other empty Sherman. After more than an hour, not a single round of anything got shared... Selfish gits.

Edited December 16, 2016 by c3k

[Michael Emrys]

1 hour ago, c3k said:

Selfish gits.

"We might need it....You never can tell."

Michael

[weapon2010]

im positive it isn't in the game

[Myles Keogh]

Ammo sharing between tanks was supposed to be a feature included in the 3.0 upgrade, but Battlefront admitted they couldn't get it to work properly so it got scrapped.

Obviously, it's a feature they know players would like, but so far it's eluded their abilities to code it into the game.

[c3k]

12 hours ago, weapon2010 said:

im positive it isn't in the game

LOL...and that's what I stated 6 hours previous to your post in my (edited) post.

Edited December 17, 2016 by c3k

[sburke]

20 hours ago, c3k said:

Hmm. Are you sure this ISN'T in?

Edited to add: okay, it is not. I just ran a test. 5 Shermans in a platoon. Highly motivated veterans. Two of them shot off everything. Main guns round, .50s, .30s, and smoke. I put one Sherman next to one empty Sherman and two Shermans next to the other empty Sherman. After more than an hour, not a single round of anything got shared... Selfish gits.

why would you share ammo with 2 morons who just wasted all theirs?  See the game simulates rationale decision making by commanders who realize some nit is wasting a precious resource!  Amazing!

[MikeyD]

If distant memory serves (and it probably doesn't) one issue with the attempted 'ammo sharing' in the Betas was it would sometimes turn into 'ammo poaching'. It wasn't easy to have it work only when you wanted it to and not when you didn't. 'Stuff' occasionally gets tried out in the Betas that never sees the light of day. Sometimes they can get the behavior 3/4 the way to where they want it, sometimes just halfway. Sometimes it works as planned but there's a cascade of unintended consequences that were unforeseen. At this point the coding is rather like the game Jenga. You insert or take away the wrong little interlocking piece and the whole thing can collapse.

[Migo441]

I can see the complications of implementing this.  Unlike small arms ammo which can be shared in seconds by tossing a bandolier, a belt, or a few clips from one team to another, transferring main gun rounds would be more a more prolonged process and require non-trivial movement and exposure outside the tanks by crews.  

Of course, I'm not telling you guys anything you haven't already thought of, but I'm wondering how people think it should work if it were implemented?  Would it be enough to be in proximity to another tank with ammo disparities and both tanks unbuttoned?  What about suppression meters?  There's a danger in making it "too easy" in a game that prides itself on realism.  Also a danger in auto-sharing occurring when the player doesn't want it, e.g., a Green tank "inadvertently" taking a Veteran tank's ammo.

Should the crews have to dismount?

[Erwin]

Have always hoped that CM would eventually have a new ACQUIRE system so that adjacent units (not under fire) could swap ammo under the player's control.  There would be a time delay while nothing else could be ordered until the swap/resupply was complete.

[Michael Emrys]

6 hours ago, Migo441 said:

I can see the complications of implementing this.  Unlike small arms ammo which can be shared in seconds by tossing a bandolier, a belt, or a few clips from one team to another, transferring main gun rounds would be more a more prolonged process and require non-trivial movement and exposure outside the tanks by crews.  

Of course, I'm not telling you guys anything you haven't already thought of, but I'm wondering how people think it should work if it were implemented?  Would it be enough to be in proximity to another tank with ammo disparities and both tanks unbuttoned?  What about suppression meters?  There's a danger in making it "too easy" in a game that prides itself on realism.  Also a danger in auto-sharing occurring when the player doesn't want it, e.g., a Green tank "inadvertently" taking a Veteran tank's ammo.

Should the crews have to dismount?

I think Erwin is on the right track. Tanks or other vehicles should be closely parked and not under fire. The player would then select the vehicles that are to be involved and then click on a button that says something like "Leveling". The crews would pop out of their vehicles and maybe move back and forth between them. At the end of the process (and the player should have the option to abort at any stage), leveling would be complete and the crews would return to their vehicles. There might even be an option of the player specifying how many rounds are to be exchanged.

Okay, so that's my ideal of how it would function. I have no way of guessing how closely it could be approached in practice. Might have to be something to be put on hold until v4 or even x3.

Michael

[Erwin]

Ideally, this system should be made to work for infantry units as well as vehicles. 

[c3k]

Yes, but infantry units (in the same platoon?) actually do share ammo in-game. In CMBS, Javelin teams (for example) can acquire new missiles from adjacent vehicles without having to go through the whole "board, acquire, disembark" routine. Pretty friggin' cool. There's a lot in the game which isn't annotated in the manuals and is not noticed until you get to a very granular level.

[Sailor Malan2]

This is somewhat similar to the "why arent my infantrymen changing mag/reloading when it is quiet rather than waiting until they run out?" debate elsewhere. Unless you are on a huge map, with the front line well forward and your tank on the back edge, you are never 'pit of combat in RL terms on a CM map. Tanks would need to be a mile or more behind the line, largered, and confident about their security against infiltration before they start lugging shells around outside the tank... A more likely CM type response to this situation would be to exit the map to the rear, and reappear an hour or two later.

It all seems logical when looked at as a game, but not as a RL simulation.

[JoMac]

Actually, I'm glad that Vehicles don't Acquire/Share Ammo between each other during a Scenario.

I remember Inf 'Ammo Acquire' making it into v3.0, and always thought things like this should take place before or after a Scenario (or between Scenarios in a Campaign)...We have Ammo Sharing between Inf Units during a Scenario and that's acceptable enough :-/

I think this is one of those times that BF shouldn't have listened to Customers Requests.

Joe 

Edited January 2, 2017 by JoMc67