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Marking Mines?


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How do you mark mines?  I am playing the first TF Thunder mission and put my engineers in the suspected mine filed and the Mark Mines button stayed grayed out the whole time.  Now a stryker just hit a mine, killed everyone, and panicked the engineers.  What do I have to do to get them to look for mines?  I had them in position for almost 10 minutes without moving or getting shot at.

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And the Mark Mines move order is only available when the engineers have actually detected mines.  That is, the move menu is not a magic mine detector in itself.

Sometimes engineers have to sit in place for three or more minutes before adjacent mines are even detected (and thus available to be marked).

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1 hour ago, rogue189 said:

What do I have to do to get them to look for mines?  I had them in position for almost 10 minutes without moving or getting shot at.

This is my SOP: 

First I split my engineers into two fire teams. Then I have one engineer team Slow (crawl) through an area where I think there are mines.  This generally works well and the red mine signs will appear.  Then I have the second team follow behind the first (also on Slow) and Mark the mines causing the signs to change from red to off white / yellow. 

The downside is if I'm wrong about the location I can end up with exhausted engineers.  

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I never expected the mark mine button to be a magic mine detector.  Rather, I believed that if I moved my engineers to a suspected mine field, I could get them in position then click mark mines. My expectation was that they would spend the next minute or two looking for mines.

I did notice that my group did detect one mine, but there was nothing I could do about it.  It made me assume they only mark mines and not disarm them.  But I also noticed that the engineers don't always detect mines in their location.  I had a squad in one position of the suspected minefield for about 3 or 4 minutes.  No mine detected, so I moved on.  BOOM!  My stryker found a mine right where the engineers had just left.  Is this a game mechanic?  A bug?  or did I do something wrong?

Edited by rogue189
grammar
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3 hours ago, rogue189 said:

I never expected the mark mine button to be a magic mine detector.  Rather, I believed that if I moved my engineers to a suspected mine field, I could get them in position then click mark mines. My expectation was that they would spend the next minute or two looking for mines.

I did notice that my group did detect one mine, but there was nothing I could do about it.  It made me assume they only mark mines and not disarm them.  But I also noticed that the engineers don't always detect mines in their location.  I had a squad in one position of the suspected minefield for about 3 or 4 minutes.  No mine detected, so I moved on.  BOOM!  My stryker found a mine right where the engineers had just left.  Is this a game mechanic?  A bug?  or did I do something wrong?

Probably fortunes of war rather than a bug - mark mines is pretty hit and miss which is similar to the RL process.

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The engineers, in the game, can only locate (red flag) and mark mines (yellow flag). Mines can only be removed by destruction (green flag), I've been told that, in game, the arty shells of 150mm and up are the only way to remove (destroy) them.

I did some sandbox testing with different variant's in locating, marking and destroying mines.

The Engineer ,elite, fanatic and +2 leaders worked the best, they crawled all day long through my saturated minefields and not one of them set off any mines as they wormed their way through them. When a mine was located it took less then a single wego turn to mark the red flags to yellow.

(Crack, Veteran, Regular and Green troops took longer times to find them and even longer times to mark them. Crack troops longer than elite troops, veteran troops longer than crack troops, etc....etc...)

 Also, not one of my Elite troops set off any mines going into and out of a mine field, as long as they were crawling, even a normal walk command leaving the marked field didn't set off any known mines, however, giving them the quick command some of them would step on a marked mine.

(Just as above, the lesser troops set off mines no matter how careful they were trying to navigate around them, they also found less mines than their next higher rank)

In all my testing not even the best of the best found every mine I placed, there was always one or two unknown mines left behind at the games end. Trust me, when, I say, the mines were not located because no troops were anywhere near them, hell, those mines had been squirmed across so many times I still find it hard to believe they weren't found, or ,worse yet, set off.

Also, Artillery barrages of 82mm mortars, 120mm mortars, 105mm field guns never turned those yellow flags to green, even the direct strike precision ammo failed to destroy them.              (I used the Red Sea Sand box along with the SF2 sand box looking for conformity amongst the two era related games that use the same 4.0 game engine)

However, when using the 155mm field guns, I started seeing the yellow flags of marked mines turn into the green flags of cleared mines. Now..., don't get your hopes up thinking your heavy based arty will clear out a mined choke point, in my simulation, I used a field of 11 anti-personnel mines, 2 rows of 4 mines and 1 row of 3 mines, side by side, in the shape of a small square. I then used a battery of 6 155mm field guns, with a fully stocked ammo supply, to pummel the dense area.

With all that firepower, I put into that small patch of land, only, 2 of the 11 plots, of yellow flag marked mines, turned into 2 plots of, green flag, cleared mines.

I, also, think the quality of your troops and the vehicle's drivers determine the final outcome to, find, mark and navigate, safely, through, or, skirt around, the mine field, once it has been properly identified by your engineers.

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Its is odd that marking a mine doesn't guarantee safe passage of infantry or vehicles over the mine.  Yes I understand marking a mine doesn't make it safe, but the limitations of the game mechanics can make close quarter maneuvering difficult.  It would be nice if there were MICLIC systems available in the game that could more reliably clear a path through mine fields.

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After years of playing the game I finally gave 'mark mines' a proper test a couple months back. Had my engineers crawl through an area where I knew mines existed. They found them, they marked them, and they neutralized them without anybody blowing up. A word of warning, though. Engineers don't spot mine IEDs. Or at least they didn't during the test. I don't know if that got changes.

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That's strange. I lost one stryker to AT mine in TF Thunder Mission 1, but I already marked three tiles(I didn't bother myself to mark the one one on the left side of the road).  Red Warning is already yellow though. Plus, I used "move" order. 

Edited by melm
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They try, but under battlefield conditions (and over the course of a few minutes rather than an hour) it's probably easy to miss some threats.

I feel sure that I once did a test where I ran vehicles over marked and unmarked AT mines.  Vehicles with a "slow" move order did notably better through marked AT mines, although it's still possible to lose them.

I also seem to recall that mines can have an effect on adjacent tiles, so clearing a one-tile lane isn't good enough if there is a line of mined tiles.

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I managed to get all my vechicles through. Used methods described to find minefields then move vechicles through single file adjacent the berm past the marked minefield using the move command in short increments to make sure they stayed on course.

Once past the minefield the danger was Strykers retreating into a minefield. Seems like they see something they don’t like and will retreat. Some retreated past marked minefields but didn’t hit any.

The M1’s after spending a turn or 2 on the berm spotting and killing tanks and bunkers were the first through past the berm. I then used a Stryker MGS on the berm to provide overwatch.

There are some potential surprises I won’t mention that need handling after that it’s just comes down to slaughtering the remaining Syrian forces.

Out of all the modern CMs this one is my favorite 

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6 hours ago, melm said:

That's strange. I lost one stryker to AT mine in TF Thunder Mission 1, but I already marked three tiles(I didn't bother myself to mark the one one on the left side of the road).  Red Warning is already yellow though. Plus, I used "move" order. 

Marking mines only helps infantry to navigate the marked minefield.  Marking mines does nothing for vehicles. 

 

39 minutes ago, Sandokan said:

if engineers clear an area with AT mines shouldn't they create a safe path large enough for a vehicle?

Yes.  But except in some of the WW2 titles (with flail vehicles) engineers don't clear mines.  Engineers don't neutralize mines @MikeyD.  They Mark mines as the command in the user interface reads.  The mines are marked so a carefully moving troop can step around them on his way across the minefield.  If he is not careful and tries to Fast or Quick across the marked minefield his chances of stepping where he should not is increased.  Of course vehicles are not agile enough to step (drive) around the marked mines in a minefield.  

So, outside of some desperate situation, do not intentionally drive vehicles into marked or unmarked minefields.   

IEDs are a different topic and can't be Marked in any case.  

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2 hours ago, IanL said:

Marking mines does little or nothing for vehicles. How could it? If I drive through an 8x8 area with multiple mines how can I possibly avoid hitting one? A single soldier would be able to but not a vehicle.

Agreed - having struck a mine in a vehicle while transiting a cleared and well marked lane while crossing the Iraqi border in 1991, this is easily done.

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15 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

having struck a mine in a vehicle while transiting a cleared and well marked lane while crossing the Iraqi border in 1991, this is easily done.

:o  Wow.  Glad you are okay, my friend.  You've just had a blast in many parts of the world............... Thank you for your service. 

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@MOS:96B2P

It was an AP mine and I was commanding an FV-432 variant so no dramas but the point remains valid - that lane was as cleared as cleared gets but there were still mines there. The point is not how lucky I am but player expectation regarding mines. So getting back to the 'Mark Mines' command and how it works and is it bugged - I don't think so.

Edited by Combatintman
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1 minute ago, MOS:96B2P said:

+1  Very cool.   Your RL story is more interesting than the game mechanics :).  

As a very good friend of mine who I went on my first tour to Afghanistan with said in reply to the question posed by a group of ladies we met in a pub in London while doing some of our pre-deployment briefings 'Afghanistan - wow! What will you be doing there?':

'Mostly sitting'

As it turned out he was right so I'm not sure all of the RL stuff is that interesting.

Although going back to the mine strike episode, that was about an hour after we crossed the border.  Prior to crossing the lane, we got issued a set of verbal orders regarding going through the lane and after that, mounted up and prepared to move. The vehicle two behind mine popped off its smoke dischargers as we were mounting up and the net came alive with 'who did that'. Needless to say it was operator error and nobody had reloads for them. Luckily it wasn't a fatal mistake for any of us.

Again, it goes back to player expectation - as veterans, we both know that soldiers do dumb sh1t.

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6 hours ago, Sandokan said:

I'm not knowledgeable about clearing mines in RL, so I could be wrong but, if engineers clear an area with AT mines shouldn't they create a safe path large enough for a vehicle?

I believe in real life when a possible mine field has been located the engineers are summoned in to scout out the size of it by marking off the entire perimeter, then they'd lightly fence it off as best they can, depending, on how hot the zone is, the colder the action the more time they have to fence it off and put up all those warning signs we had to memorize in advanced infantry training, Mines, NBC, Gas, un-exploded ordinance, etc... the clearing of mines would happen when the action was no where near it.

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I´d like to clear up a thing about spotting mines.

I did some testing in CMBN a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure if there are any differences regarding  the game mechanics of mine behaviour between SF and BN. But what I learned was this:
Some people in the forums have said that engineers will detect mines if sitting long enough in the action spot next to the mines. This is not so: My test engineers did not spot a single mine in an adjacent action square - no matter how long I let them stay there and no matter how experienced they where. They only spotted the mines once they moved into the actual action squares containing the mines.   

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