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7 hours ago, General Jack Ripper said:

This is a prime example of where to pass out extra ammo before a scenario begins.

Agreed and I've tended to do that with them. The few extra bombs for each platoons mortar does not go far though. In some ways acquiring from the carrier/anti-tank sections vehicles before the scenario begins makes that situation worse. But it's easier than requiring to send the mortar to those vehicles (or vice versa) to resupply and juggling through the mount/acquire/dismount or dismount/mount/acquire/dismount/mount.

The ammo is also meant to be intended for the carrier/anti-tank sections own mortar, but as those sections cannot obtain their mortar from the vehicle through acquire (because bug) the ammo is up for grabs to the rifle companies at the moment. Maybe once the LMG can provide more than single shots at range the burden that I place upon on the 2 inch mortar might subside somewhat and the platoons then cease to deplete their 2 inch ammo so quick, not sure though as it's an brilliant piece of kit to use.

So yes again to answer that question I've ran out of ammo with some weapons.

7 hours ago, General Jack Ripper said:

I never even knew that was a thing. Then again, I barely play Commonwealth forces due to my utter disdain for Canadians.

It's just the same feature that exists with ammo bearer teams. Just works between vehicles and infantry also. It's not specific to the 2 inch mortar or commonwealth either.

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This is the part in the manual that I believe describes it.

Quote

Ammo Sharing

Besides the Acquire command, soldiers on the battlefield are also capable of auto- matically sharing ammunition to some extent with those around them. Soldiers can automatically share ammo with other nearby infantry units that belong to their formation, as well as with nearby vehicles (provided that the vehicles carry anything to share). So it is not always necessary to embark on a vehicle to access stored ammunition, although it still gives the player more direct control than auto-sharing.

The automatic ammo sharing feature is most useful for heavy weapon teams. Heavy weapons will draw their ammo first from ammo bearer teams before using their own carried ammo. Moving (or keeping) the latter close to the heavy weapon will ensure ammo resupply without the player having to specifically order it.

Special Ammo Dump units can placed on the map in place of transport vehicles in certain scenarios. These immobile units act as stores of ammunition that nearby units can draw ammunition from, following the same guidelines are ammo sharing between other units.

 

Edited by Oliver_88
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13 hours ago, sburke said:
On 8/27/2018 at 9:05 AM, Bulletpoint said:

About the acquire command, I often find it a lot of click-work when using armoured infantry - each squad must be told to pick up 1000 bullets for the MG, 200 for the SMG, maybe some extra for the MP44, a Panzerfaust or Bazooka.. the next squad. And next squad.

Especially with larger scenarios several times, it would be nice to have some kind of "grab ammo and dismount all" option. Or it could be built into the  existing "dismount" button. So if you pressed that during setup, they would grab ammo, but if you manually moved the squad out of its halftrack, they would leave the ammo behind. Something like that.

But what would they acquire?  Expounding on your idea if I get your overall perspective is you’d have some kind of drop down. Select what you want and then close with dismount. Is that what you ate thinking?  I do like the idea of selecting from a list kind of showing 2 panels. One of what is in vehicle and the other what my squad has and being able to move stuff in either direction. Then once I have moved everything I want close and dismount. 

 

Just like we can select a bunch of squads and then give them all a move order at the same time, maybe they could just make it so that we can select several squads at the same time, and then go through the acquire process once, but all squads grab the same ammo selections from their individual vehicle. That would be a nice, simple solution. Cuts the amount of clicks by about two thirds and still gives control of who gets what, when needed.

 

Example:

1. Platoon is mounted in halftracks or trucks.

2. Player doubleclicks squad, the whole platoon is highlighted.

3. Player clicks "acquire" and sees a list of all the ammo in all the relevant vehicles. Then selects 1000 rounds of rifle ammo

4. All squads selected grab 1000 rounds if available. The ammo menu stays open.

5. Player clicks acquire Panzerfaust 60, then 100

6. The relevant squads pick up their PZF 60 and 100

7. Player clicks acquire Panzerscreck, then 8 rockets.

8. Squad 1 and 2 grab that weapon. Squad 3 doesn't have any available. Squad 1 for some reason has 10 rockets available. Takes 8 rockets, leaving 2 in the halftrack. Squad 2 only has 6 available in their halftrack, so they take them all.

 

A couple of issues with my idea:

  • Player has to de-select HQ team and other small teams first, or they will also try to get 1000 rounds of rifle ammo.
  • What to do when two teams/squads are in the same vehicle? Both will try to get 1000 rounds. If not enough are available, they will share equally.
  • Two teams in one vehicle, only one bazooka. Who gets it? Random. If it matters, in those cases, the player can still allocate manually.
Edited by Bulletpoint
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9 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

 

Just like we can select a bunch of squads and then give them all a move order at the same time, maybe they could just make it so that we can select several squads at the same time, and then go through the acquire process once, but all squads grab the same ammo selections from their individual vehicle. That would be a nice, simple solution. Cuts the amount of clicks by about two thirds and still gives control of who gets what, when needed.

Just for the sake of critical thinking: how to populate the select menu with all the arrays of available items? There is zero guarantee that even two of the selected vehicles have the same ammo stored up/left. It would surely be helpful during setup phase if one could, for example, give all infantry squads an extra AT-4/RPG-18 and RPG squads 2 extra AT rpg's. At least, that's what I normally do for all my squads (IF!) I expect them to come into contact with armoured vehicles and or tanks. It all depends though, loading everything up has risks of itself as the units carrying the ammo might become casualties, etc etc.

Anyway I do agree that ammo loading can be a bit tedious, especially with large games. The challenge in this lies in mitigating the 'wet van behoud van ellende' or literally translated 'the law of conservation of misery'. The interesting part is how to get rid of the tedious effect of hundreds of mouse clicks without taking away the finegrained control. I actually do like the option to load up ammo as I desire, it's just that sometimes I desire to acquire so many items over a battalion that the process gets tedious. And what I do might not be up to someone else's idea's of proper ammo distribution.

Another thing is the amount of actions needed to restock a squad in WEGO. The acquire command can't be 'chained' like waypoints can, so one has to babysit the troops entering, acquiring and dismounting the vehicle on a per turn command basis. The easy solution is to just play RT :-).

Free thinking: they maybe could make a function that automatically restocks all weapons in a squad with the ammo available in the ammo container/vehicle available to the 'normal' loadout quantity. And or make that function available as a 'move' command which lets the designated unit mount a vehicle, ammo up and dismount in a certain timeframe. Another idea could be to just make the acquire command available when troops are really close to vehicles. I'm pretty sure that this subject has been discussed at lengths before, although it is still interesting to philosophize about.

Edit: over the period of years playing CMx2 I have generally moved towards acquiring in a 'just in time' / LEAN fashion. If I expect armoured contact, I will load up extra AT rounds. Since I like to play with and against combined arms forces that tends to happen a lot (forgetting to load up those Javs can be painful!!). But I generally don't load up on other ammo during setup anymore, I do focus on factoring general logistics/supply capabilities into the way I deploy into battle / tactics . The whole tedious part becomes much less tedious if you just roll with what you got and only (re)load when necessary or opportune. Works for me and probably also leads to better tactics.

Edited by Lethaface
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18 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

Just for the sake of critical thinking: how to populate the select menu with all the arrays of available items? There is zero guarantee that even two of the selected vehicles have the same ammo stored up/left.

Yeah, I suspect that the previous suggestion would actually make things less clear and more frustrating.

 

18 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

Free thinking: they maybe could make a function that automatically restocks all weapons in a squad with the ammo available in the ammo container/vehicle available to the 'normal' loadout quantity. And or make that function available as a 'move' command which lets the designated unit mount a vehicle, ammo up and dismount in a certain timeframe. Another idea could be to just make the acquire command available when troops are really close to vehicles. I'm pretty sure that this subject has been discussed at lengths before, although it is still interesting to philosophize about.

Those are some cool ideas. Instead of a full bullet by bullet count you could choose form "top up to normal", "extra load", "max load" (to restore standard allotments or load up some more to a reasonable max), "max AT" (to just get the infantry AT weapons). Having the actual results based on what team is involved - so mortar ammo bearers would be the ones that pickup any mortar rounds. Being able to do it from next to a vehicle would be nice (some animation would to extra cool). But there should be a delay to perform the task. Right now the delay is only a minute or less because of embark disembark on separate turns. IRL it would take some non trivial amount of time. It would be nice if the time varied based on the request, so a "top up to normal" would be faster that "load to the max".

 

18 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

Edit: over the period of years playing CMx2 I have generally moved towards acquiring in a 'just in time' / LEAN fashion. If I expect armoured contact, I will load up extra AT rounds. Since I like to play with and against combined arms forces that tends to happen a lot (forgetting to load up those Javs can be painful!!). But I generally don't load up on other ammo during setup anymore, I do focus on factoring general logistics/supply capabilities into the way I deploy into battle / tactics . The whole tedious part becomes much less tedious if you just roll with what you got and only (re)load when necessary or opportune. Works for me and probably also leads to better tactics.

Yep, same here. My bold - totally agree.

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4 minutes ago, IanL said:

Yep, same here. My bold - totally agree.

I have been making this mistake since 2008 orso. Good to know I'm not alone out there. 😊
The Russian FLIR capabilities coupled with the ainet 125mm HE round featured in CMBS do tend to capitalize those mistakes more seriously compared to CMSF.

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On ‎8‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 9:36 PM, sburke said:

Not sure what you mean here. Could you provide an example?  

Say I have  Jav team that just fired off their last round.  I want them to get more.  I also have the A team from that same squad that I want to go grab more 5.56 ammo.some 40 mm and a couple AT 4s.  How would you see that working differently than the current set up?  My impression is you want a single string command set - go to this location, pick up. - select options available from that source.  So they go, hop in, grab the items.  Is that close?

 

On ‎8‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 2:25 AM, Erwin said:

"So they go, hop in, grab the items."

Except in game terms there should be no need to "hop in" in order to ACQUIRE other than eye candy (unless one wants the unit(s) to actually embark for transport elsewhere).

ACQUIRE to and from adjacent units is what we're talking about.  This would eliminate the wasted time and irritation of clicking in order to split units, embark units, disembark units and have them recombine... merely in order to resupply a number of units simultaneously.  

 

 

Indeed sburke in essence your impressions correct but excluding the "hop in hop out" as Erwin states. Here's the example (using units I am more familiar with though) about the manner in which I envision acquiring from vehicles could work compared to the current system. Do not take the distances/terrain/times shown in the screenshots as gospel of course. Also to note that acquire could continue to work in the exact same manner as current system with regards to units that are inside the vehicles already. This is instead concerning acquiring from vehicles when the units are not inside them already.

So in this example I have an five man pioneer section that I have rotated out from the front and need to obtain them more ammo from an carrier before sending them to the front again. The carriers are from an carrier section and have their crews mounted in them, so there are just four passenger seats remaining. Pictures might paint a thousand words about how I envision a alternate system, maybe a million words in the case of my unintelligent writings. ;)

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Using the current system, to restock the same section from the carriers at any point after the scenario begins the user would need over separate order phases to;

  1. Order to disembark the carrier section from the carrier.
  2. Order to embark the pioneer section to the carrier.
  3. Order to acquire the ammo. Order to disembark the pioneer section from the carrier.
  4. Order to embark the carrier section to the carrier again.

So in another example I have on the frontlines an rifle section and light mortar team from an platoon. I cannot rotate either out into the rear at the moment but need to obtain some more PIAT projectiles and small arms ammo for the section from one carrier. I also need to obtain some bombs for the mortar from another carrier, but am content for these to be shared with the mortar team rather than obtained by them. As I cannot rotate everyone out at the moment I decide to obtain the ammo using an detachment from the section.

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Using the current system, to restock them from the two carriers in the same manner the user would need over separate order phases to;

  1. Create the section detachment. Order to embark the section detachment to the first carrier.
  2. Order to acquire the ammo. Order to disembark the section detachment from the first carrier.
  3. Order to embark the section detachment to the second carrier.
  4. Order to acquire the ammo. Order to disembark (and recombine) the section detachment from the second carrier.

Another example being having multiple units (pioneer section and some rifle section again) and needing to resupply them from the same carrier at the same time. They have both already been rotated out from the front so moving the entire sections to the resupply should be alright.

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Using the current system, to restock both from the carrier in the same manner the user would need over separate order phases to;

  1. Order to disembark the carrier section from the carrier.
  2. Order to embark the pioneer section to the carrier.
  3. Order to acquire the ammo. Order to disembark the pioneer section from the carrier.
  4. Create the section detachment. Order to embark the section detachment to the carrier.
  5. Order to acquire the ammo. Order to disembark (and recombine) the section detachment from the carrier.
  6. Order to embark the carrier section to the carrier again.

So yeah the main difference would be that there would not be any need for units to actually have to embark the vehicles in order to acquire some ammo from them. So no having to disembark any other already mounted units/crew just to enable the resupply. So no having to create/recombine any detachments units just to enable the resupply (you could continue to use detachments but that would be an tactical choice rather than an requirement). Units no matter their size should be able to supply from any vehicle no matter the number of passenger seats that vehicle has. Also as your not embarking the resupplying can be chained with various other commands even another resupply at another vehicle etc.

Another difference would be in the time it takes to supply your units. Rather than being based upon how many full turns are required to embark and disembark and etc into various vehicles. The time taken would instead be being based upon what items you are actually trying to obtain from them. For example obtaining 2000 x 0.303 MKVII, 500 x 0.45 ACP, 9 x PIAT HEAT would no longer take the same time as obtaining just 5 x PIAT HEAT. Has anyone else also had the situation where the embarking unit are mid-embark at the end of the turn and are therefore required to wait another turn for them to be fully embarked before acquiring?

Hopefully that describes to you what I mean. Something like this would instead mean that it's just the "which vehicles and what ammunition to acquire" that we would need to micro manage over upon during an single orders phase (as it should be). The rest we entrust to the units to carry out over the next various turns until the tasks complete. But within current system as well as micro managing the "which vehicles and what ammunition to acquire" we also are required to micro manage and baby the units each separate turn through embarking, acquiring, disembarking etc. And it's that last past that I reckon no-one feels the need to want to micro manage over.

Edited by Oliver_88
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14 hours ago, Lethaface said:
23 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

 

Just like we can select a bunch of squads and then give them all a move order at the same time, maybe they could just make it so that we can select several squads at the same time, and then go through the acquire process once, but all squads grab the same ammo selections from their individual vehicle. 

 

Just for the sake of critical thinking: how to populate the select menu with all the arrays of available items? There is zero guarantee that even two of the selected vehicles have the same ammo stored up/left.

 

23 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

3. Player clicks "acquire" and sees a list of all the ammo in all the relevant vehicles.

If there's a squad who doesn't have a bazooka available in their truck, then too bad. That squad doesn't get it. The others do.

It's a bit like when you select a platoon and order them to move 'fast', but one of the squads is exhausted. Then that squad can't move fast; it gets a 'move' order instead. The rest of the platoon moves fast.

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9 hours ago, HerrTom said:

@Oliver_88 I like it.  I would nitpick (as I like to do) that it should be in the ADMIN section :D but other than that you've got a solid system.  What would you have happen if you order two teams to take 5 PIATs from a carrier that only has 5 itself?

To nit-pick back :P in the images I put the "supply" in the move section because it's something that creates an movement path. There's nothing movement based in the admin section just commands to create detachments and combine etc. But I understand the rational behind the nit-pick. And yeah I would think any non-instantaneous acquire feature would need to track what's been already requested from vehicles and subtract that from the acquire list. Or just first come first serve like with embarking anyway.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The tension between Real-Time and Turn-based will likely continue to exist as long as Tac-AI is primarily reactive. 

- Turn-Based probably gives you the best experience when you are wearing the hat of a mid/high level position. A Company or Battalion commander. You have an orders delay without being able to micro the individual men. However, turn-based is easily the worst for wearing the hat of an individual unit. People have mentioned shoot & scoot, and that is an obvious example of where turn-based fails. Especially in a modern setting where an RPG team will quickly be killed if they don't move.

- Real-time while giving you a better unit level hat gives you a more unrealistic and worse mid/high level hat. There is often too much to do and it also gives you the ability to game the system a bit more when interacting with multiple units.

- My personal favorite is real-time w. multiple pre-determined pauses/command timings.

Its essentially a house rule where depending on the units scale and breadth of the order I have a timer before I can give it.

Individual/local scope is whenever. This covers any sort of order that a Squad Leader or lower could reasonably give. Platoon scope. These I limit to every 20 seconds. These are orders that a Platoon Leader could reasonably give. Company Scope is at 40 seconds and Battalion is at 60 seconds.

It takes some rules setting for myself and can only be done solo but it provides interesting gameplay outside the norm.

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WEGO with variable player set time duration would be interesting.  One of the biggest challenges of WEGO is the pathing system.  eg: When one is in heavy combat it is frustrating to see troops ignore the door you want them to enter by and go someplace else and get shot.  This sort of event is the primary reason I save and replay a turn as it's the AI's or game engine's fault rather than my tactics.  If one could set a turn to (say) ten to twenty seconds it could be helpful.  But, that would have to be possible in the middle of a game. There are many situations (eg moving long distances in safety) where a more than one minute turn would be an ok time interval.

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9 hours ago, Erwin said:

WEGO with variable player set time duration would be interesting.  One of the biggest challenges of WEGO is the pathing system.  eg: When one is in heavy combat it is frustrating to see troops ignore the door you want them to enter by and go someplace else and get shot.  This sort of event is the primary reason I save and replay a turn as it's the AI's or game engine's fault rather than my tactics.  If one could set a turn to (say) ten to twenty seconds it could be helpful.  But, that would have to be possible in the middle of a game. There are many situations (eg moving long distances in safety) where a more than one minute turn would be an ok time interval.

+1. Can't much argue with that as a player. As a historian—albeit an amateur one—I do have a problem with the player having better control of his subordinates than any RL officer could hope to have.

Michael

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Agreed.  In interest of full disclosure, am speaking completely from POV of a wargame player seeking verisimilitude and the illusion that am a brilliant CO rather than RL accuracy (which is often boring).  

CM system has many abstractions in order to offer the micromanagement experience.  In an ideal game of this nature one would issue "big" commands to a Platoon CO (or maybe squad leader) like "Take that building!" and the AI would mount a credible assault.  

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13 hours ago, Erwin said:

Agreed.  In interest of full disclosure, am speaking completely from POV of a wargame player seeking verisimilitude and the illusion that am a brilliant CO rather than RL accuracy (which is often boring).  

CM system has many abstractions in order to offer the micromanagement experience.  In an ideal game of this nature one would issue "big" commands to a Platoon CO (or maybe squad leader) like "Take that building!" and the AI would mount a credible assault.

[My bold]

Yep. That would be very, very nice to have. Unfortunately AI design has not reached that level for home computers yet despite noble efforts by programmers like Charles. Maybe some day, but probably not before I'm too old to care any more.

Michael

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On ‎9‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 1:45 PM, Pelican Pal said:

- My personal favorite is real-time w. multiple pre-determined pauses/command timings.

Yes, as it stands now, a Player can Pause and unrealistically react an infinite number of times, and so a 15 or 30 secs Auto-Pause increments (to give Orders) at least breaks down how many times a player can Strategically react...

This will at least have both RT & WEGO Play-out roughly the same and not as as two completely different games.

Edited by JoMc67
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7 hours ago, JoMc67 said:

Yes, as it stands now, a Player can Pause and unrealistically react an infinite number of times, and so a 15 or 30 secs Auto-Pause increments (to give Orders) at least breaks down how many times a player can Strategically react...

Sounds to me like all you are doing is keeping WEGO but shortening the turns. Am I missing something?

Michael

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10 hours ago, Michael Emrys said:

Maybe some day, but probably not before I'm too old to care any more.

I predict that in the next decade, scientists and doctors will discover that the secret to keeping one's mind active thru extreme old age is playing complex wargames like CM.  At that time, we here will have new careers as counselors and consultants as to how to select and effectively play these medically approved (and payed for by insurance) therapeutic aids.  Our collections of cardboard wargames stored in our garages will be worth millions!  

 

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1 minute ago, DougPhresh said:

the current assault which seems to resemble the CM1 advance.

CM2 is better in this regard.  In CM2 each team of a squad will attack separately but coordinated towards the end waypoint.  However, as one gets more experienced one tends to split a squad manually and order each team separately.  

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2 hours ago, Michael Emrys said:

Sounds to me like all you are doing is keeping WEGO but shortening the turns. Am I missing something?

Michael

Actually, I like how WEGO is played now (Orders at beginning of turn with 1x Minute of Action)...However, I like to see the Real-Time System have Auto-Pauses every 15 or 30 secs (giving/changing orders), so that WEGO & RT play out roughly the same after 60 secs of Action.

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Can we stop wielding the 'unrealistic stick' at the RT mode of play because pauses are allowed? Neither of the play modes are realistic yet I very infrequently see posts hitting WEGO with the 'unrealistic stick' for having three phase turns or the ability to endlessly replay turns from every angle, pausing the replay when a round strikes and then rewinding and pausing to follow the tracer back to the point of origin.

It is a game not real combat.

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