Wishlist: Targetting tool and placement for crew served weapons

[Joachim]

Problem:

Setting up as the defender in dense terrain is a PITA.

2 reasons:

a) Checking LOS

HMGs or ATGs have one powerful, important weapon. It does not matter if some rifleman in the crew has LOS. Imagine an ATG setting up to control a road, firing straight along that road. You can either put it into the middle of the road - works fine with CMBN while setting up, but not during play.

So you put it a bit towards the side of the road. Wanting to place it so it barely is into the road and half of the incoming will hit the house or hedge 10m ahead of the gun. Of course it gets a trench. I'd even spend 2 of those to fortify the sweet spot.

Now you get a grey line to where you want to hit. But does that mean some rifleman has LOS? Or all but 1 riflemen? If the whole crew has LOS the target line turns blue - but then all of the crew are exposed and will die fast. Eyeball mk1 is the only help to judge whehter the important weapon has LOS.. But it sucks to evaluate 3D situations on a 2D screen.

And then we have the next problem:

Exact placement for guns or HMGs.

Placing the gun exactly on a given point does not work. Some AI tries to evaluate cover and then spreads the crew. It shifts the crew around depending on facing. But some crewmen should be more equal than others.

Cause if some crewman has good LOS to the intended field of fire it should be the crewman which operates the important weapon.

And: If a crewman gets good cover, it should be the one operating the important weapon.

Same problem for squads: It is pretty annoying to have a 5-men squad in foxholes. Well. 3 of them. Guess who has the worst cover? Guess which weapon has the worst LOS? Splitting up works - but if the squad joins again some idiots will start to crawl away from the perfectly placed squad LMG position covering the break in the bocage.

Solutions:

1) Tweak the "placing AI" to take care of covered arcs, not just considering cover - issuing CAs doesn't influence beyond facing right now. That's the complex solution

2) Place HMGs or guns on the selected pixel, not somewhere in the selected tile. Maybe even do that for the important wpn in a squad. That should be easy. If you also want to keep the current system - use the shortcut for "normal movement" to place as is, and the shortcut for "slow movement" to manually place the weapon in the exact spot. If that spot is in bad cover, the operator can still crawl away, indicating that he has his own mind.