Little glitches/observations/suggestions

[JoMac]

1 hour ago, Drifter Man said:

MP40 not only performs better than the MP44, but outdoes everything except MGs and sinper rifles, even at 150 m

Yeah, and I for one have an issue with SMG's in general as being a little over-moddled, especially at range.

The other issue is that MG's (especially HMG's) at short range (25-40 meters) should actually have far less effective firepower (which CM doesn't reflect) then SMG & Rifles, because these MG's should cower more often (self-suppression) due to not having that flexibility to maneuver their MG around at Close Range/Quarters in a Static Position, etc...This is one reason why I try and give all HMG's a Moral Class and or Less Motivation level then Rifle/SMGs Squads to help offset the overall effects.

Edited December 17, 2017 by JoMc67

[AlexUK]

Very impressive tests - thank you!

[Drifter Man]

I'm surprised by some of the results too.

2 hours ago, JoMc67 said:

MG's should cower more often (self-suppression) due to not having that flexibility to maneuver their MG around at Close Range/Quarters in a Static Position

If it was modeled in CM, my test probably wouldn't capture it as the target troops don't shoot back - the gunner doesn't get suppressed. Unless the effect you describe is suppression by their own fire?

I've never fired a gun in my life, not to mention a HMG (and hopefully never will), so it's hard to imagine what it is like.

8 minutes ago, AlexUK said:

Very impressive tests - thank you!

More to come!

[A Canadian Cat]

Interesting stuff @Drifter Man. Regarding pictures: the forum has a very small storage allotment for each member. Those of us that post a lot of pictures put them on other sites and share them here. Photobucket was the most popular until they decided to no longer offer any free service. I just started hosting images on my own domain. I am not sure what service most others are using.

[MOS:96B2P]

@Drifter Man thanks for the tables.  Interesting information.  After Photobuckets vandalism many of us have switched to imgur.  It is free and easy to use.    

[Drifter Man]

Long ago I also had a photobucket account... I didn't know they turned it into a paid service. Thanks for the tips, I've signed up to imgur. These are the pictures I wanted to post yesterday.

Important: 1) the HMG squad has two HMG teams 2) the Schiessbecher HE grenades are not considered (along with any explosive stuff in general)

https://imgur.com/h0IdOM7

https://imgur.com/wFU6BdQ

Hmmm... I don't see the option to embed a picture hosted elsewhere... any help here?

Edited December 17, 2017 by Drifter Man

[A Canadian Cat]

On the Imgur page right click on the image and either copy its url or open in a new tab and get it from the address bar or on mobile long click on the image and open it on its own tab, depending on context and browser, then paste it in the message body.

If the image appears while you edit it will work. If just the link appears then try something else.

 

[Drifter Man]

Yeah, I found a way that works. Thanks!

Edited December 18, 2017 by Drifter Man

[Oliver_88]

reckon its going to be embarrassing reading to see the results for an british rifle section, plummet once testing the 200 marker...

Edited December 18, 2017 by Oliver_88

[JoMac]

25 minutes ago, Oliver_88 said:

reckon its going to be embarrassing reading to see the results for an british rifle section, plummet once testing the 200 marker...

It will be ok in the end, thou....BF will soon enough give back the fighting chance that the CW deserves, at range :-) 

Edited December 18, 2017 by JoMc67

[Drifter Man]

I'm only doing 40 m and 150 m at the moment but already at 150 m the Bren fires single shots. It is about as effective as an MP40 or Sten at that distance (which is not bad actually) but far behind German LMGs. I haven't processed all results but British rifle section (1 Sten, 8 Lee-Enfield, 1 Bren) stands at 0.89 bodies per minute at 150 meters. It would take two sections to match the firepower of a Panzergrenadier squad...

Curious thing: I'm testing the Bren with a gunner and an assistant leader. In one of my initial setups the assistant leader decided to fire short bursts at that distance. He consumed about three times more ammo than the gunner but also had by about 50% better results. I wasn't able to make him or the gunner fire bursts in the final setup, so the results above are for single shots.

By the way, would anyone be willing to help me out with the tests? Do not volunteer too fast, it's tedious and time-consuming, you really need to have some spare time for this. It's okay if nobody does. The results are interesting though.

Edited December 18, 2017 by Drifter Man

[JoMac]

2 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

By the way, would anyone be willing to help me out with the tests? Do not volunteer too fast, it's tedious and time-consuming, you really need to have some spare time for this. It's okay if nobody does. The results are interesting though.

Well, will you look at the time...It's looks like I better be going or will be late :-)

Edited December 18, 2017 by JoMc67

[hank24]

Thank you DrifterMan for conducting this interesting test.

The results look really strange to me, as an ex Bundeswehr soldier and hunter I shot the Sten Gun of today, the MG3 which is nearly identical to the MG42, the 98K without scope and and with hunting scope. In Addition the G3 made by Heckler & Koch which is similar to the Sturmgewehr44 concerning production principles.

It should be no problem to hit an upper body (in foxhole) at 150 m with the first round for a trained shooter and well maintained gun with the 98K with or without scope, with the MG42 and with the Sturmgewehr 44. The Sten is another story, it is crudely built and has a very short barrel, so better used at short distances.

Therefore, some points are disturbing in my opinion:

• Gewehr43 double efficiency of an 98K? OK, more volume of fire, but I would expect less accuracy at 150m at such small target due to short barrel. Very loud, hard recoil, much fire at muzzle. Problem of all these short guns firing 8x57IS like the Carcano Carbine which I fired once - never again.
• A  4x scope increases the efficiency of an 98K approx. 8 times at 150 m? No, never. At that range, an iron sight is not that bad.
• An MP40 and Sten (!) have double efficiency compared to MP44? OK, the MP40 was a well made piece of machinery, but still a SMG with short barrel and 9mm ammo loosing a lot of speed and thereby precision at that distance.
• MG34/42 double efficiency at 150m when firing mounted on a tripod? No, that effect comes very much further down the range. We made a test with MG3 firing single shots at a target 1ft by 1ft at 600m by pulling each second cartrige out of the belt. No problem to hit this from bipod with iron sights. Phantastic machine.

Generally, I would expect the shorter, hi-cadence weapons to be more efficient at 40m compared to the longer, sinle loaders AND VICE-VERSA. A MG on a tripod is a weapon strictly for long range firing, it has a veeeery narrow field of fire and I personally would detach it from the tripod, when the enemy comes closer than 300m. At 40m you would suspend it on the middle pivot point for the bipod, allowing wide angle firing.

This theme has the potential for very long discussions, so I was reluctant at first to start that, but DrifterMan's findings were so much off from my expectations. Please remember, this is just my opinion.

Henning

Edited December 18, 2017 by hank24

[Drifter Man]

Yes, it's kind of turning into a weapons effects discussion thread - it wasn't my intention but here we go  I can't add much because I don't understand weapons well (that's why I started the tests anyway), but I do have a few notes about what I observe in CMBN.

8 hours ago, hank24 said:

It should be no problem to hit an upper body (in foxhole) at 150 m with the first round for a trained shooter and well maintained gun

In CMBN, at first the shooter is firing at the upper body in foxhole. The target troops soon get suppressed and start cowering, at which point their upper body is no longer visible. The shooter continues firing at the above-ground part of the foxhole directly (I understand that the CM foxhole is also an abstraction) and achieves a kill by hitting the soldier cowering in the foxhole.

When one of the target troops stands up again, I've observed the shooter tends to change target to him.

Weapons producing smaller volume of fire individually (rifles) may have and advantage in my setup because their targets don't get suppressed so much compared to MGs and SMGs - they keep their heads up.

8 hours ago, hank24 said:

A  4x scope increases the efficiency of an 98K approx. 8 times at 150 m? No, never. At that range, an iron sight is not that bad.

It may actually be better to compare with the "assistant" version of the scoped 98K, which is handled by a normal soldier (team leader) not specifically trained as marksman.

8 hours ago, hank24 said:

An MP40 and Sten (!) have double efficiency compared to MP44?

This is a most surprising result and I decided to do a re-run of the MP44 test along with the next (American) series, just to be sure.

Here's a link to the save files I used. Let me know if you have any suggestions about what I'm doing:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/t5znd9n5m581vef/AAAhMj3k0emlU05EMAD84CC9a?dl=0

There may be some "behind the scenes" factors I'm not able to account for. For instance, some "target troops" regularly decide to leave their foxholes under fire and become easy meat. When I relocate the weapon to another lane and fire at a different group of target troops, these don't do it. Technically, all target troops should be identical, US MG ammo bearers, regulars, fanatic, zero leadership modifier. But they still behave differently.

In the current run at 40 m, the first 10 tests show the Sten Mk II to be superior to Mk IV. I have no reason to think it should be so. Both SMG soldiers behave normally, only the guy with Mk II fires accurate bursts and the one with Mk IV keeps spraying around a lot. It may be because he is "cautious" - I had to use a sniper to kill his teammate. It may be because the Mk II is a squad leader and Mk IV is a platoon's executive officer. It may also be just statistics. This makes me think how many unknown factors may be behind the diagrams I've posted.

[Oliver_88]

1 hour ago, Drifter Man said:

In the current run at 40 m, the first 10 tests show the Sten Mk II to be superior to Mk IV. I have no reason to think it should be so. Both SMG soldiers behave normally, only the guy with Mk II fires accurate bursts and the one with Mk IV keeps spraying around a lot. It may be because he is "cautious" - I had to use a sniper to kill his teammate. It may be because the Mk II is a squad leader and Mk IV is a platoon's executive officer. It may also be just statistics. This makes me think how many unknown factors may be behind the diagrams I've posted.

I was curious and wondered about that fudging results in your setups description, so checked through Josey Wales thread about soft factors for anything relevant, only finding that "ok through to nervous are simple gradations and a nervous unit will not behave differently from an ok one".

Edited December 19, 2017 by Oliver_88

[Michael Emrys]

14 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

There may be some "behind the scenes" factors I'm not able to account for. For instance, some "target troops" regularly decide to leave their foxholes under fire and become easy meat. When I relocate the weapon to another lane and fire at a different group of target troops, these don't do it. Technically, all target troops should be identical, US MG ammo bearers, regulars, fanatic, zero leadership modifier. But they still behave differently.

In the current run at 40 m, the first 10 tests show the Sten Mk II to be superior to Mk IV. I have no reason to think it should be so. Both SMG soldiers behave normally, only the guy with Mk II fires accurate bursts and the one with Mk IV keeps spraying around a lot. It may be because he is "cautious" - I had to use a sniper to kill his teammate. It may be because the Mk II is a squad leader and Mk IV is a platoon's executive officer. It may also be just statistics. This makes me think how many unknown factors may be behind the diagrams I've posted.

There is a high degree of "randomization" built into CM with a wide range of possible outcomes and varied probabilities of occurring. A tested unit may exhibit a wide range of behaviors in just a few iterations of the test. Which is why, in order to get statistically convincing data you may need to run as many as a hundred iterations. The graph can change pretty dramatically with each additional run until you build up a pretty massive collection of iterations. With a hundred or more iterations, you can start to feel some legitimate confidence that you are reasonably close to true averages.

Michael

[Drifter Man]

20 hours ago, Oliver_88 said:

I was curious and wondered about that fudging results in your setups description, so checked through Josey Wales thread about soft factors for anything relevant, only finding that "ok through to nervous are simple gradations and a nervous unit will not behave differently from an ok one".

Thanks for checking this, I read it too, which gave me some confidence that OK vs cautious vs nervous shouldn't matter. But I think one can't be sure unless one works in Battlefront's team

7 hours ago, Michael Emrys said:

There is a high degree of "randomization" built into CM with a wide range of possible outcomes and varied probabilities of occurring. A tested unit may exhibit a wide range of behaviors in just a few iterations of the test. Which is why, in order to get statistically convincing data you may need to run as many as a hundred iterations. The graph can change pretty dramatically with each additional run until you build up a pretty massive collection of iterations. With a hundred or more iterations, you can start to feel some legitimate confidence that you are reasonably close to true averages.

That's right, and I'm quite aware of the randomness of the results as I see them coming one by one. My 50 tests are enough to get a rough idea but are not sufficient to allow fine comparisons between weapons in a similar category - like MP40 vs MP44.

I couldn't satisfactorily resolve the Sten problem. Apart from the sample size issue highlighted by Michael Emrys, the exact positioning of the target troops may also be affecting the results. And since in all 50 runs the firing unit faces the same target troops (but different from others), I may be introducing a systematic error here. I'm now trying to 1) redesign the test to fix this and 2) to automate the procedure so that I can gather more data faster.

[Drifter Man]

On the "original topic" though. Why are silhouettes of U.S. Navy ships used for British naval assets in Commonwealth Forces? I wish we could get something more... British. Like the bottom ones.

Again, not exactly a game-breaking problem  But odd, given that it took me about 30 minutes to make those silhouettes.

[Erwin]

2 hours ago, Drifter Man said:

not sufficient to allow fine comparisons between weapons in a similar category - like MP40 vs MP44.

Puzzling cos when I read books about German experiences with these weapons it sounded like the MP44 was greatly superior re range, accuracy, stopping power etc.   You'd think that this would be easily seen in the game.  Wasn't the Stg44 an effective assault weapon, while MP40 was a mere machine pistol?  Or, is the MP44 overrated by historians?

[weapon2010]

58 minutes ago, Drifter Man said:

On the "original topic" though. Why are silhouettes of U.S. Navy ships used for British naval assets in Commonwealth Forces? I wish we could get something more... British. Like the bottom ones.

Again, not exactly a game-breaking problem  But odd, given that it took me about 30 minutes to make those silhouettes.

 No not game breaking at all, infact I dindn't even notice it at all until you brought it up.But this is kind of the "catch 22 situation" that BF has put itself in.They give us great detail in many areas and we as customers with discriminating eyes love it and consume it.But the more they give us great detail, the more we want, and it will never be enough because the computer programing world is a finite place.But yes I agree, would be nice if those silhouettes were British.

[Erwin]

We do have mods for aircraft etc.  So should be "easy" enuff for a modder to do ships.  That is the magic of the CM series.  It's very moddable.

[Oliver_88]

Rather strangely I have not used the naval assets in Combat Mission yet, so not noticed that issue, and now that I am aware and seen those images you made I say gimme gimme gimme

Though on the subject of that catch 22 situation discriminating eyes that @weapon2010 mentions, was not aware that the Andrew had heavy cruisers with an 6 inch armament  and my moneys on your silhouette showing an Light Cruiser of the Crown Colony class, oh wait not so sure now maybe its London

Edited December 20, 2017 by Oliver_88

[Oliver_88]

Looks like in combat mission battle for normandy (at least when I explode the games files) that there are just the one image for destroyer, battleship, heavy cruiser and light cruiser, which means that;

1. You would need to install an silhouette pack for your preferred nation, when you play an different nation though you would see the same problem, Septic ships then looking more like the Andrew etc.
2. As there is just the one silhouette for battleships, again its rather similar issue, those 16 inch Nelson and 15 inch Queen Elizabeth classes are going to look strangely identical.

Maybe better off with some generic silhouette that does not attempt to represent any nations

Edited December 20, 2017 by Oliver_88

[Drifter Man]

5 hours ago, Erwin said:

Puzzling cos when I read books about German experiences with these weapons it sounded like the MP44 was greatly superior re range, accuracy, stopping power etc.   You'd think that this would be easily seen in the game.  Wasn't the Stg44 an effective assault weapon, while MP40 was a mere machine pistol?  Or, is the MP44 overrated by historians?

I *guess* it should be like you say, but I'm no expert. I decided to make the tests more accurate (and automated) to get better data. Before someone uses the data to claim that weapon XY is over/undermodelled, at least I want to be confident that my numbers are correct.

Edited December 20, 2017 by Drifter Man

[Drifter Man]

1 hour ago, Oliver_88 said:

Looks like in combat mission battle for normandy (at least when I explode the games files) that there are just the one image for destroyer, battleship, heavy cruiser and light cruiser, which means that;

1. You would need to install an silhouette pack for your preferred nation, when you play an different nation though you would see the same problem, Septic ships then looking more like the Andrew etc.
2. As there is just the one silhouette for battleships, again its rather similar issue, those 16 inch Nelson and 15 inch Queen Elizabeth classes are going to look strangely identical.

Maybe better off with some generic silhouette that does not attempt to represent any nations

I suspected it would be a problem of this nature. The 6in cruiser is probably being called heavy cruiser due to a similar limitation. I suppose Battlefront has been aware of these things but there always are more important things to work on. As has been pointed out, most people don't even notice, and naval artillery is not used often.

3 hours ago, Oliver_88 said:

my moneys on your silhouette showing an Light Cruiser of the Crown Colony class, oh wait not so sure now maybe its London

Keep your moneys on the Colony class  [Left to right: Hunt Type II, O-P class destroyer, Dido, Colony class, Nelson and R-class battleship]

Edited December 20, 2017 by Drifter Man