Infantry Don't Bennfit From Low Walls

[Agua]

Yeah, if hiding men behind the wall suffer no casualties absent rifle grenades, then its exposure. If the prone soldiers were closer, and I'm assuming here that more of their body would be exposed to fire at closer range, there should be a marked difference.

[Pak40]

Vanir,

Can you do 1 more test: Use the same situation as in your original post EXCEPT hide the units behind the walls. possibly give them small target arcs to prevent them from firing. Have the units in the open fire or area fire if they can't see the units behind the walls.

I'm just curious to see if the units that hide behind the wall are sustaining injuries at an unrealistic rate. Technically the injury rate should be a lot less than what you had before. I know that even in hide mode a man will pop his head up every now and then, but for the most part all the men should be safe behind the stone wall.

[cool breeze]

AHHHHG my post didnt go AGAIN!!!!!!! PHwwww ......... Dang it!

OK the super short version.

problems with test, more tests needed to verify problem.

problem 1: Fanatic motivation makes them cower much less than realistic compositions would cower. cowering is much worse for guy in open cause cowerers for him get more and more scared and eat bullets while the cowerers behind the wall recover in relative safety.

Problem 2: Way to packed. they look like sardines. Where are the big guns just killing everything? again not realistic to my non grog eyes. this makes it a bad test because the guys at the wall are like double-ly over packed compared to the ones lying down. so missed bullets and especially rifle grenades (which have an easier target, the wall) will do exceptional damage to the guys behind the wall.

Problem 3: shouldn't soldiers fighting from a wall with high powered rifles have to expose a similar amount of themselves to aim and fire well vs. troops lying prone facing right at the enemy? seems like about the head neck and shoulders exposed for both. Plus the wall isn't made for him to fight from so he may have to expose some extra to maintain a good firing posture, using a high powered gun and all. Ok so facing head on they may actually have to expose about as much of themselves as each other in order to aim and fire. But shouldn't the prone guys be a bit more accurate because of stance? Seems like the straight up fight might be tipping their way. But what if everybody was spread out more like real life? Well then there would be lots of flank shooting opportunities. Now all of a sudden the wall is much better than the open cause they lying down guys are a big target from the side, while the crouching guys are a little smaller from the side. Add this to points 1 and 2 and I think youll see walls working a lot better in normal situations than they did in this test.

At the title of the thread and at silly stiener14 for sorta blaming us CMSF players for this "problem"

The walls help infantry a lot by letting you hide behind them. You can assault along them and be safe because your guys keep popping up and disappearing too fast to get hit. You can crawl behind them and move invisibly. you can just hide there. you can move easily when you take fire. Us CMSF players know about how cover doesnt keep you truly safe when your being shot at. We didnt say they didnt work in CMSF because we use them successfully on the regular. You just gotta move your dudes when they are taking too much fire, just like always if you can, which you can with walls.

[Rex J.]

I have done a little more. If the men hide behind the wall and each of the three platoons fire at a singly point on the waal there was a total of 6 casualties. 3 at ech aim point. The third platoon were firing light and caused no casualties. Therefore my belief is it was the rifle grenades that did the damage.

The test ran for three minutes and the damage occurred in the first minute, after that the two platoons with target orders were out of rifle grenades. It is quite possible if I had spread the fire out equally along the line the casualties may have been lighter.

That corresponds with what I found in a similar test:

I set up a test map with squads hiding in buildings, and platoons outside firing at the buildings from 30m to 80m ranges. Using just rifle and LMG fire (both German and US) there were no causalities among the 20 test squads (10 each German and US).

When I ran the test again using the regular target command (as opposed to target light) and the platoons started using their rifle grenades and bazookas and panzerfausts, well that was just a bloodbath.

So the buildings seem to provide perfect cover to prone soldiers from light arms fire, but not much from even light explosions.

I also ran a rather small test comparing the effect of troops in the open to those behind sandbag walls (as well as in foxholes, trenches, and medium and large shell holes). Based on limited observation it seemed the sandbag walls were beyond suicidal for troops.

If what was posted up thread about most of the casualties behind the wall being from rifle grenades is the case, then most of this discussion is pointless. Being behind a wall may in fact be excellent cover from incoming bullets, but no cover at all from fragments of grenades exploding on the same side of the wall. And since, as has been noted, the soldiers behind the wall are in a more upright position, their vulnerability to such fragments is actually increased.

Michael

True, but in my test, all the explosions were on the opposite side of the wall (outside the building) and the damage was still severe.

My guess would be that part of the reason for higher casualties for troops behind the wall is that it's easier to hit a wall with a rifle grenade than to land one among troops in the open.

[Steiner14]

AHHHHG my post didnt go AGAIN!!!!!!! PHwwww ......... Dang it!

Doesn't matter, wasn't worth it anyway.

[cool breeze]

Oh and C3k had the perfect test.

And stiener14 is 14 and never says anything that helps anybody at all.

[ASL Veteran]

Oddly enough I had my doubts about walls as cover and ran a similar test several months ago (before the release - so yeah we were looking at it). I had one leg US infantry platoon behind a wall and one leg US infantry platoon in the open 100 meters away. Each squad was set into a separate lane so that it would be just one squad vs one squad (separated by tall walls to prevent cross over fire because I didn't want two squads ganging up on one squad). I also did not modify the morale and used the default motivation level. My results were just the opposite of what you got. The squads behind the stone wall took almost no casualties and the squads out in the open were annihilated.

I think the main thing about our results is that you set the motivation to the maximum and I did not. I think if you alter your motivation level to regular or low for both sides you will get a much different result. The troops out in the open will cower much more because they are in a lower cover state than the squads behind the wall.

[cool breeze]

Honestly the test seemed so bad to me I wondered if it had been build for that special result. Thanks for straightening things out ASL veteran.

[Vanir Ausf B]

problem 1: Fanatic motivation makes them cower much less than realistic compositions would cower. cowering is much worse for guy in open cause cowerers for him get more and more scared and eat bullets while the cowerers behind the wall recover in relative safety.

I will try re-running it with lower motivation.

Problem 2: Way to packed. they look like sardines. Where are the big guns just killing everything? again not realistic to my non grog eyes. this makes it a bad test because the guys at the wall are like double-ly over packed compared to the ones lying down. so missed bullets and especially rifle grenades (which have an easier target, the wall) will do exceptional damage to the guys behind the wall.

Not true. Unit density is exactly the same for both sides.

Problem 3: shouldn't soldiers fighting from a wall with high powered rifles have to expose a similar amount of themselves to aim and fire well vs. troops lying prone facing right at the enemy? seems like about the head neck and shoulders exposed for both. Plus the wall isn't made for him to fight from so he may have to expose some extra to maintain a good firing posture, using a high powered gun and all. Ok so facing head on they may actually have to expose about as much of themselves as each other in order to aim and fire. But shouldn't the prone guys be a bit more accurate because of stance?

I would be curious to know what real world infantry train to do in firefight: lay down in the open or get behind cover. I'd be surprised if it wasn't the latter.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Honestly the test seemed so bad to me I wondered if it had been build for that special result.

[Michael Emrys]

Although I did not keep track, I am certain rifle grenades could not have accounted for more than a small fraction of the casualties in my test.

Can you explain how that certainty arises?

Michael

[Vanir Ausf B]

By playing the game? Rifle grenades do not cause many casualties. The are weak and inaccurate.

[cool breeze]

@ Vanir, answering from last to first.

Sorry Vanir I didnt really mean to suggest that you rigged it on purpose, I hadn't even thought about who had made the test. That the test mighta been made to show the desired result was just a stupid though that flashed through my head.

Sure the soldiers would prefer the wall, it gives them somewhere to hide, in real life they can intelligently know when to be up and when to hide when to move. But that doesnt mean that the game isnt doing a good simulation of what you are asking for. If you set this up in real life just like in the game, but all the soldiers are insane fanatics told to fight as hard as they can or die trying, and not duck unless they are being pathetic sissies cause they werent ordered to duck or move, it might well play out just like your test. and no matter how fanatical the troops I think some are gonna duck when they have the wall, while the guys lying down have no where to duck. if they weren't fanatic they just poop pants and stop fighting (cause this fire is intense enough to make even fanatics want to duck) but they are fanatic so they just keep fighting. The guys at the wall are brave as hell and barely duck (not as much as they prolly should) but they still do duck anyway. when they duck they lose their targets and aim. The prone guys arnt Fing around like that they are just aiming and firing and reloading. What a soldier wants is not always what is good for him or for his team in the battle being fought.

The unit density looks different. The guys at the wall are all shoulder to shoulder on the wall, the guys lying down are somewhat spread out. It seems like they might even have 2 or more action spots spread in distance from enemies but I cant tell.

And finally thanks a lot for taking the time to test this in the first place and then to try again to make the testing more complete. i suggest you also try dramatically reducing the unit density. I think the walls work kinda like buildings in that when your all spread out they offer good protection but as density increases they start being liability. You might have to blow down the whole house just to injure the one guy hiding in it but if you pack that same house full of men one big HMG burst or a single HE round might have a hard time NOT killing anybody. Plus the more spread out it is the more vulnerable the prone guys are cause of the flanking.

Oh and in CMSF grenade launchers rocked as in murdertown, and in RL arn't the ww2 rifle grenades much more powerful than their 40mm modern grenade launcher counterpart? I dont know cause I havent played CMBN much yet but it seems like those rifle grenades would be do a lot of damage. No?

[Broadsword56]

Kneeling and firing over the top of a low stone wall might have worked at Bunker Hill or Gettysburg, but it would have been a dumb thing for a trained infantryman to do in WWII.

This is how the basic 1940 infantry manual FM-100 taught soldiers to use cover:

Sticking even just a head above a wall "skylights" it and gets you shot. Soldiers were trained so stay low and go prone to take quick peeks around the side of cover (like the tree and rock example above), down where the ground and/or foliage clutter would make them less visible and they'd still have the cover protecting all but their head/shoulders.

Now, I realize that the action spots in CMBN make it very difficult to use corners of buildings or ends of walls for cover. Things are too abstacted at the individual soldier level to make that peeking tactic work properly. And maybe kneeling in CMBN exposes more of their bodies than in real life. But that doesn't mean it's smart to have your pixeltroopen kneel behind a wall and blast away at the enemy.

Testing a bad tactic and then saying it's the game's fault that the troops die isn't really fair to the game or its designers.

If it's the wall cover effect against bullets you want to test, a fairer method IMHO would be to make the target troops move on "slow" so they crawl and then stay low behind the wall, then have the firing troops shoot them on "target light" so rifle grenades aren't used. I'd expect the target troops would get suppressed, but as long as they don't stick their heads up, they shouldn't get hit.

[Vanir Ausf B]

The soldiers at the wall are closer together depth wise because that's just the way the TacAI stacks them at walls. There is no way to spread them out except lengthwise along the wall, but then you run into the issue of flanking fire as one company will have a longer line than the other.

The reason I made them all fanatic is because I wanted to test whether behind the wall or in the open is a more advantageous firing position, not hiding position. But I will test them with normal motivation and report back.

I may try a run of tests with all the units on target light commands to the units directly across from them to try to factor out rifle grenades. To keep track of rifle grenade casualties separately would increase the time required to run the tests by orders of magnitude unless I dramatically decreased the number of units or number iterations.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Kneeling and firing over the top of a low stone wall might have worked at Bunker Hill or Gettysburg, but it would have been a dumb thing for a trained infantryman to do in WWII.

This is how the basic 1940 infantry manual FM-100 taught soldiers to use cover:

Apples to oranges. I'm not testing guys behind a wall vs. guys prone in cover. It's guys behind a wall vs. guys with no cover.

Testing a bad tactic and then saying it's the game's fault that the troops die isn't really fair to the game or its designers.

Completely missing the point isn't fair to me. The question isn't is whether shooting from behind a wall is be best possible tactic, but if it is a better alternative to no cover.

[IRUNSAMOK]

My guys like to stand behind the wire fences too. It dosn't work out too well for them so I avoid fences like the plague.

[Gpig]

Keep up the good work, Vanir. I appreciate you testing this.

Cheers,

Gpig

[Vanir Ausf B]

I'll have the results of the normal motivation test up soon. However there is an odd TacAI behavior that is taking place that is affecting the results. Units in the open that panic and run are invariably running towards the enemy instead of away. This is obviously adding to their casualties. I don't know if this is because both sides are US. I did make setup zones on both side of the map. Or maybe it's because the wall is the only cover on the map?

[Steiner14]

If exposure plays a role for hit probability, then there seem to be two factors that produce unrealistical high exposure for units in trenches, foxholes or behind walls:

1. The rifle is held unnecessary far away from the height of the eyes, which brings the head up too much (~8- 10 cm too much)

2. The soldiers expose themselfes more above the wall as would be necessary to get the rifle shooting (>10 cm). I guess in foxholes and trenches numbers will not be better.

That makes roughly an additional exposure of ~18 cm compared to the silhuette in RL.

That's a HUGE difference and i would not be surprised, if that could be reduced, that the efficiency of low walls, foxholes and trenches would dramatically rise (if for the engine visual exposure plays any role for hit probability).

For better comparison with the low silhuette in RL see attachment:

[cool breeze]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Broadsword56

Kneeling and firing over the top of a low stone wall might have worked at Bunker Hill or Gettysburg, but it would have been a dumb thing for a trained infantryman to do in WWII.

This is how the basic 1940 infantry manual FM-100 taught soldiers to use cover:

Apples to oranges. I'm not testing guys behind a wall vs. guys prone in cover. It's guys behind a wall vs. guys with no cover.

Quote:

Testing a bad tactic and then saying it's the game's fault that the troops die isn't really fair to the game or its designers.

Completely missing the point isn't fair to me. The question isn't is whether shooting from behind a wall is be best possible tactic, but if it is a better alternative to no cover.

__________________

the test you wanted trys to get rid of all the main advantages of the wall. The wall give you great cover while your hiding behind it. Its also a bit better to be crouching behind it while being shot at from multiple directions than it is to be lying in the open while shot at from multiple directions (now this is a guess only, based on how a prone soldier is a much bigger target from the side than a crouching guy behind a wall is from the side). One of the big advantages is not that its way better to be staying up crouching behind a wall while you trade shots with a guy 100 meters away who is lying down and pointing right at you than it is to be that guy. Similar amounts of your body are exposed without cover but the guy lying down is gonna be aiming better on average. So why are you having them only shoot straight across? I think most people find that being shot at from multiple angles and shooting at stuff from multiple angles in more the norm in these battles than everybody doin like you want with your new targeting light straight across plan. Can we try the test with a wider map and or less men plus having guys with no rifle grenades instead of using target light orders?

And I dont think broadswords point was that prone in cover was better than behind a wall in the open, I think it was that the army didn't consider low walls to be among proper cover to be using to fight. His point was that your test was about a Gettysberg style battle using ww2 weapons with 2 companies of troops that were most probably more fanatical (and definitely mindless) than any 2 US companies.... isn't lying in the open a more ww2 era tactic than putting a whole company shoulder to shoulder at a wall to fight some dudes 100 meters away?

[LongLeftFlank]

Great work, Vanir.

It also makes me curious whether infantry prone behind bocage embankments are better off than those behind the walls. Must test that sometime....

[Vanir Ausf B]

Quote:

the test you wanted trys to get rid of all the main advantages of the wall. The wall give you great cover while your hiding behind it. Its also a bit better to be crouching behind it while being shot at from multiple directions than it is to be lying in the open while shot at from multiple directions (now this is a guess only, based on how a prone soldier is a much bigger target from the side than a crouching guy behind a wall is from the side). One of the big advantages is not that its way better to be staying up crouching behind a wall while you trade shots with a guy 100 meters away who is lying down and pointing right at you than it is to be that guy. Similar amounts of your body are exposed without cover but the guy lying down is gonna be aiming better on average. So why are you having them only shoot straight across? I think most people find that being shot at from multiple angles and shooting at stuff from multiple angles in more the norm in these battles than everybody doin like you want with your new targeting light straight across plan. Can we try the test with a wider map and or less men plus having guys with no rifle grenades instead of using target light orders?

They are not only shooting "straight across". That is not remotely true. I have been letting the TacAI choose it's own targets and there is quite a lot of cross firing at oblique angles.

If anyone knows how to remove the rifle grenade I'd like to know. I did not see any option for it. I could try lowering their ammo supply level, but that would take away bullets as well.

And I dont think broadswords point was that prone in cover was better than behind a wall in the open, I think it was that the army didn't consider low walls to be among proper cover to be using to fight. His point was that your test was about a Gettysberg style battle using ww2 weapons with 2 companies of troops that were most probably more fanatical (and definitely mindless) than any 2 US companies.... isn't lying in the open a more ww2 era tactic than putting a whole company shoulder to shoulder at a wall to fight some dudes 100 meters away?

That diagram Broadsword posted didn't mention low walls at all.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Results for test with normal motivation. The test was otherwise identical to the fanatical test except I ran 20 iterations instead of 40 (I do not have endless amounts of time to do this).

[U]BEHIND WALL[/U]


KILLED:  532

WOUNDED: 748

TOTAL:   1280

AVERAGE: 64/TEST, 62.8% casualties


[U]IN THE OPEN[/U]


KILLED:  525

WOUNDED: 554

TOTAL:   1079

AVERAGE: 54/TEST, 52.9% casualties

As I noted a few posts up, units in the open routed towards the guys shooting at them. Guys behind the wall ran away from the fight. Despite that the numbers are nearly identical to the test with fanatics.

[Broadsword56]

As I noted a few posts up, units in the open routed towards the guys shooting at them. Guys behind the wall ran away from the fight. Despite that the numbers are nearly identical to the test with fanatics.

Maybe they were running toward the enemy because they wanted to surrender (?)