Bullethead

The radio car was part of the normal armored car patrol. The radio car had that big "bed frame" antenna on it and was thus capable of talking over long distances and reporting what the patrol found to HQ in the rear. The typical patrol was like 2 ACs with guns and 1 with a radio. Check out Panzer Aces 2 from Franz Kurowski (Fedorowicz Publishing) for the career of a rather successful AC driver. The guy in question, being the patrol leader, usually rode in a radio car.

Panzer76 said: I noticed in CMBO that there was a problem with the LOS tool not agreeing with the targeting tool. Try this sometime (you can use a tank or squad, it doesn't have to be an FO): </font> Start with the LOS tool and move it so it shows you have an LOS on the very last pixel just before you hit some piece of cover. </font>Let go of the mouse, to make sure you don't move it while clicking. </font>While you still have an LOS, and not touching the mouse at all, hit the T key to switch from LOS mode to targeting mode, and watch what happens to the LOS/target line. </font>In some cases, you start with a blue LOS line but then the target line will be orange/black for a blocked LOS. Then you hit the L key to go back into LOS mode and the line is blue again. All this while not touching the mouse at all. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to pin down the circumstances in which this happens, but it does happen. Fortunately, this is only a problem for direct fire weapons, not FOs. Arty shells rarely land exactly where you click, thanks to the impact pattern of about 200m E-W by 40m N-S. So my advice to avoid this problem is to move the mouse a few pixels closer to the FO and further from the cover. Hell, even being 1 full tile off on an E-W line with the target really doesn't make much difference in the number of shells hitting near the enemy unit in question. There does seem to be a tendency for scatter to happen to the NW more than any other direction. I have no idea why.

I said: I just tried this test myself using my test scenario on page 3 of that thread linked above. So I was doing this with a 105mm FO with a 3-minute base delay. He completed his move before the 1st spotting round fell and the FFE was bang on target, even after I'd changed the target location. So I added a 6-tube 81mm FO with a 2-minute delay and tried it again. This time, the spotting rounds fell while the FO was moving the FFE started that same turn. It was bang on target. And it followed my green-line "adjustments", always hitting directly where I was aiming, until the FO ran out of ammo. So, 2 things to learn from this: 1. All my theories about moving an FO in my last post are incorrect. Apparently moving an FO has no effect on his accuracy. 2. I can only assume that you must have inadvertently clicked your target line on a non-LOS location, thus getting scattered FFE. In my test, this is impossible due to the layout of the map, but in your case obviously you were shooting right at the edge of your LOS, so it would have been possible for you. Scattered FFE seems incapable of correction, so the only thing to do is start over from scratch where you're sure you have an LOS (and wait 1 turn before attempting this).

Panzer76 said: FOs can't talk while moving. Wire FOs have to string out more wire, radio FOs have to tear down and then reassemble their rather bulky WW2 radios. So when you moved your FO while leaving his target line in place, you converted it into blind fire. It was like the FO got killed or suppressed while the spotting process was happening--communications for fire control was interrupted. This is why it scattered to begin with. I believe what's happening here is that once an FO has FFE going, all new target orders for that FO are treated as "adjustments" of that FFE, until the FFE is stopped. Thus, once you have scattered FFE, as long as you keep shooting every turn, you're still working with that same "blind" target. Try a simple test. Repeat all the above steps of picking a target in LOS and moving the FO while leaving the target in place. When the FFE comes and it's scattered as a result, delete the FO's target and wait 1 turn, then issue a new target. I bet that solves the problem. In CMBO, FOs could talk while moving but they can't now, so don't try it any more . Also, in CMBO, if the FO was killed or suppressed at any point, the whole fire mission came to a sudden end. This is not the case in CMBO, which keeps things going in an attempt to simulate what happens in real life. Problem is, CMBO got it wrong IMHO. This is mostly because the CM engine doesn't follow real life in having the FO/player specify the number of rounds of FFE in advance. So it has to somehow fudge things. You're looking at the result.

Some movement orders and freaked behaviors make the moving unit pretty much oblivious to its surroundings.

tracer said: This was certainly true in the Gulf War. One day we got the word we were going so we put our vehicles and gear on a boat. Then we sat around wondering how we could do any training without our stuff for the month or so it took the boats to cross the ocean, then we flew over to meet it. Naturally, our stuff was just as we'd last seen it, with the Euro-style green/black/brown camo, plus all the peacetime reflectors and stuff. So one of our 1st tasks in-country was applying warpaint. Naturally, with all the troops then flooding the theater, there was a shortage of tan paint and painting equipment, so we stole as much as we could from others, thinned the paint to cover all our stuff, and improvised tools we didn't have. We had about 24 hours to do the job before we went to the front, but because of the sniper threat we did it all at night without any lights save those provided by nature. This was before the rains came and the oil wells burned so the moon and stars could still be seen. The net results were extremely crude but effective enough. The vehicles looked tan even up close, but up close you could see ALL KINDS of imperfections. These were as follows: </font> The thin paint let the outlines of the underlying camo pattern show through. This was because everywhere 2 camo colors met, there was some overlap so the camo paint there was thicker and darker. So there were these dark tannish-grayish wavy lines all over the vehicles, about 3" wide, tracing the green/black/brown pattern.</font>We didn't have stencils and such so we just masked over the unit's tactical markings and vehicle serial numbers. So these markings were still in black on irregular rectangles of the underlying Euro camo pattern.</font>We didn't want to replace or remove the reflectors so we put duct tape over them and then painted over that. The tape patches were quite evident, even though painted tan.</font>We didn't bother masking the tires and windshields (which we laid down anyway) so these items had substantial (as in about 8" wide) areas of overspray on them. And surprisingly, this overspray on the tires lasted the whole war and however many hundreds of miles we drove during it.</font>Towards the end of the night, some of our paint stations were running low on paint so didn't paint over the brown spots in the Euro camo. But they weren't too careful with the edges so the tan overlapped the brown by up to 1 foot, in a sort of jagged pattern from arms swinging in varying distances from different directions. The edges of the overlap weren't sharp, however, but faded out as overspray.</font>OTOH, some stations had some extra paint (theirs was thinned more so the Euro camo on their vehicles was even more evident, some of the green and black showing through). In these, guys painted their flak jackets and/or helmets because only a few guys in my unit had gotten desert camo covers for them before supply ran out. A few guys also tanned their black M16s. </font>At the same time, we filled the beds and floors of all our trucks and hummers with 2 layers of sandbags, removed their roofs and laid the windshields down, and took the front doors off the hummers. The sandbags oozed, rotted, and accumlated stains over the next few months, solidifying into a cement-like block that took forever to remove when it was time to go home. A couple weeks later when the shooting started and "friendly fire" incidents started happening, 2 measures were taken. First, we cut up day-glo orange air marker panels and duct-taped bits of varying size on top of the vehicles to deter over-zealous aircraft. Then, when ground forces started scoring "own goals", we had to paint black chevrons on front, rear, and sides. All we had for this was canned spraypaint we stole from the Seabees. Some guys did a minimal job, a single freehand, wavy, light pass, making the 2 legs of the ^ uneven so it look like hasty graphitti. I guess they were afraid of ruining the desert camo effect too much, but it kinda looked like the Arabic numbers on enemy vehicles.... Others used the whole can, making fairly straight, even, wide, and dark bands, plus added personal markings like the ace of spades. The army had their chevrons professionally stenciled somehow, but they also had food and extra socks and all the comforts of home, so that's only to be expected. OK, so then things started getting interesting over there. Wear and tear accumulated at an incredible rate as machines were pushed to war needs as opposed to peacetime pampering under the sadistic rule of the motorpool's mastersergeant. Every bearing leaked oil or grease, which oozings quickly built up coral-like encrustations of sand. Plus we were burning Jet-A instead of diesel so soot accumulation was immediate and intense, like black spray paint everywhere the exhaust gases touched. The rains started and the desert dust became this horrible adobe mud that somehow solidified even under continuous rain. Shell splinters made holes and nicks here and there. And then all the oil wells burned and the smoke mixed into (and maybe caused) the constant rain, and it left this nasty black scum on all the upper surfaces and running down the sides in long drips. You could still see the tan paint through this stuff, it was kinda transparent. So basically, we started off with everything having a half-ass paintjob, but with some variation due to different amounts of available paint. Same for personal equipment--no real uniformity except in having the same basic constraints in the painting process. Then within a week or 2 everything was FILTHY just from soot, dirt, and leaks attracting crud. Recognition symbols were added on top of the early layers of filth, and then the whole was covered with more mud/dirt and that oil smoke gunk. At various times, enemy fire made its mark. By the time the war "ended" 2 months after the process began, our vehicles looked like they'd not only been through a war, but had then been left for dead on the battlefield for several years. Looking at them, you'd have been amazed any of them would still crank. Obviously, the oil smoke thing was kinda unique to my war. But I think the rest of it would have been pretty much the norm in WW2

I think it looks like a realistic light coating of dust and road grime. Good job. Just my personal preference, but I like my tanks FILTHY! Not only that, but also looking in need of fresh paint, a valve job, and new bearing seals throughout, plus a few battle scars and some obscene graphitti scrawled by bitter and disillusioned soldiers (NOTE: In a real life combat zone, all this would take maybe a week to accumulate at most.) So feel free to knock yourself out on all aspects of weathering. The more battered, dirty, and war-weary the tank looks, the better I like it.

Very nice, especially the roadwheels. I'd noticed Kwazy'd left them still looking like scanned photos of the hunk of plastic still sitting on my desk (at least until my nephew comes for another visit and we blow it up like we did the T26 and T38 )

JonS said: Yup, another sore point with me. In real life, the guns of a battery are usually all in a straight or staggered line more or less parallel to the FEBA. With 4 guns per battery and 50m or so between guns, you've got about 200m between the end guns, which is rather wider than the left-right scatter inherent in any gun over multiple shots. Thus, getting all the guns to hit the same point, which means making their oval impact patterns to all correspond as they do in CM (see that screenshot of mine on page 3) requires figuring the firing data for each gun individually. So what normally happens is that each gun fires straight ahead using the same data. Thus, instead of the type of pattern we have now for a whole battery, what we should normally get is multiple copies of that pattern laid side-by-side, with the gun spacing in the battery between the centers of the ovals for each gun. There would be rounds landing up to 100m long and short for each gun, but most of the shells would be toward the center of the pattern, and this area of concentrated fire would form a line parallel to the front. Which is WAY more useful against area targets like grunts in line of battle than what we have now. What we have now is only useful for killing bunkers and similar point targets. So what I would like to see is a pattern like the above. It would be of about the same overall size (when you count all the outliers) as the current "target wide" pattern, but would have a concentrated zone running N-S through the middle, whereas the "target wide" pattern is an even distribution. This is what I would have as the normal pattern. If you wanted to shoot what CM currently has, this would be called "target tight" or some such, and would have an increased delay time due to the extra calculations needed to pull it off.

Treeburst155 said: Yup, the manual is wrong on this score. But FWIW, so is the game itself. In real life, when the FO doesn't have an LOS, he can do one of 2 things: </font> Blow off adjusting spotting rounds entirely, just shoot the FFE right now, accept whatever scatter he gets, and hope for the best; or</font>Depending on why he has no LOS, use one of several standard methods for working with spotting rounds when there's no normal LOS to them (these vary considerably in complexity, certainty, and time required), take more time than normal spotting, but eventually get the rounds on target. </font>CMBB has the worst of both worlds in this regard. When the FO is blind, there are no spotting rounds, yet the delay time is increased as if one of the blind spotting methods was being employed. I submitted at the time that it should be one way or the other. If no spotting rounds, then the FFE should start immediately, like on a TRP. OTOH, if the delay is increased, then there should be more spotting rounds than normal, and they should probably be smoke (or even airbursts) instead of HE. (edit: AND the FFE should be on target, too--that's the whole purpose of the spotting procedure) Oh well [ November 05, 2002, 08:23 PM: Message edited by: Bullethead ]

JonS said: JonS, I'm surprised at you!! The type of fire you describe is called a "creeping barrage". The use of the adjective indicates that there exist stationary barrages, which in fact is the original and to this day still they most common type. CMBB has this non-creeping type, which is just called a "barrage"

Dschugaschwili said: Not recently. But I have in the past, and their accuracy was exactly the same as with wire FOs. I don't feel like doing it again, which is why I made my test scenario available on page 3 of this thread. Go get it and try for yourself

Much improved. Thanks for doing this so fast. I think you've got the painting of camo down. It's a keeper now, unless you decide to weather it

Michael emrys said: Yes, this can be done. It appears that foxholes are like vehicles and have a "passenger" capacity. So like your typical tank can carry 1 squad or 2 teams or small HQs, so some craters can also fit multiple units. But it seems they have to both be small units. Still, the idea that some unit can jump in a hole and toss out another is kinda silly, especially if the evicted unit is something heavy like an ATG.

Barrages and shots at TRPs have no spotting rounds. Spotting rounds come at about 1/2 and 1/4 the remaining delay time, regardless of what the total delay time is. So like if you adjust FFE and the delay is 12 seconds, you get a spotting round after 6 seconds and another after 9 seconds, then the FFE continues. Of course, it's pretty silly having to use ANY spotting rounds for a mere 100m shift, and having them that close together makes them useless. But apparently CM's arty system can't do without them.

Panzer Leader said: Actually, nothing. The only enemy unit on the map is safely sequestered in a level-0 hole in a corner surrounded by level-19 mountains. Thanks. I think the moire' pattern of the target lines is cool

OK, I still don't believe anybody who says that it is possible to miss the target if the FO has an LOS. I haven't seen anything in 7 months to make me think so, and I just ran some tests to look for this and saw nothing of the sort. The Test: A full friggin' 50 German 105mm wire FOs, regulars, on a mountain at my arty range aiming at bullseyes drawn on the ground. Each FO had 100 rounds. </font> Waited until turn 2 before doing anything because all turn 1 shots are barrages and barrages are known never to miss.</font>Group selected all 50 FOs and gave them a target order at the center of a bullseye. Resulted in all 50 FOs targeting the same point. All FOs had LOS.</font>Hit GO and then fast-forwarded through all the movies, until the FOs all ran out of ammo. Watched this from view 8 looking for impacts off target.</font>Saw no misses at all. Repeated test 3 more times. Still saw no misses. All 50 FOs always hit right on the point of aim in each of the 4 runs. </font>IOW, not once in 400 chances did an FO with an LOS miss the target. The impact pattern always looked just like this (edit NOTE: the full target is 400m wide): If any of you doubters still want to run the same test, I've also uploaded my arty test range scenario, complete with all 50 FOs lined up and your choice of bullseyes to shoot at. You might find the scenario useful for other tests. You can put guys on the hill with an LOS, you can put guys behind the hill to fire blind, you can use TRPs or not, and you can hide FOs in the cover provided and test the killing power of arty on various targets. Arty Test Scenario [ November 04, 2002, 11:47 PM: Message edited by: Bullethead ]

Here is a rare photo of a pair of the little-known T-70UFO. And people dismiss the T-70 as useless This pair of T-70UFOs is about to begin a nap-of-the-earth hop over the ridge to their front.

Silvio Manuel said: To each his own. However, THTs seem inherently stealthy and less likely to be seen and draw fire than normal grunts. I believe this is the main reason for their relatively high cost per man, considering they often don't have anything that regular squads don't have. Then look at these prices (June 1943, regular German infantry). Recon platoon = 88, THT = 11, Sharpshooter = 22. If you wanted to buy some grunts just for scouting, the THT seems the best bang for the buck. Stealthy, 2 guys instead of 1, and so cheap you can get 8 of them for the price of a recon platoon, which only gives you a max of 7 scouts. The absolute point cost isn't the only factor to consider anyway. The main benefit of scouting with THTs is that you don't cripple one of your squads. I mean, if you use 1/2squads, the scouting 1/2squad often gets hosed, and the effect is that one of your full squads got hosed because it's only got 1/2 its men left anyway. And a full squad is way more effective in an infantry firefight than a 1/2squad. There isn't any way around the borg spotting. However, I don't think using THTs for scouting is legit because that wasn't their intended role. Further, systematic scouting of the map is beyond the scope of a CM battle--that would already have been done in real life. So I think putting 1/2squads or sharpshooters (often used as scouts) just a bit ahead of the main body, as ambush protection, is about the most you should do.

The most beautiful tank in CM is the one that was causing you a bunch of trouble, but is now nicely enveloped in flames

The realworld method above is correct (although there are other ways of doing it). The game's system, however, is a bit different than you describe. The fundamental problem with the game's arty system is that the FO unit can't really see the spotting rounds, so doesn't actually make any corrections. The spotting rounds are just decoration, effectively, and the FO is just a launch platform for bunch of shells that go where they are destined to go without any input from the FO unit. When you target your FO on some point and hit the GO button, everything about how that arty shoot will work out is calculated by the game and becomes set in stone unless something happens to the FO at the wrong time. The game determines how long it will take for the FFE to arrive and where it will land. It does the same with spotting rounds, which arrive at set intervals as the timer is counting down.

Treeburst155 said: I have been shooting a lot of CMBB arty both in games and in tests since April and I have never had my FFE land off-target when my FO had an LOS to the target point. For that matter, I have never had blind fire at a TRP or a blind barrage scatter, either. The only times I have seen scatter is when all the following conditions are met: it isn't a barrage, there isn't a TRP, and the FO doesn't have an LOS. When my "finished" copy of the game finally arrived, I saw on page 133 of the manual that it says FFE can land off-target even if the FO has an LOS, but I don't believe this is true. There is certainly no basis in the real world for this to happen, it goes against the discussions we had on this subject back in the beta, and I've never seen it happen in 7 months of playing the game. So why are folks saying this is happening? Well, it could be there really is a very small chance of way off-target fire even with an LOS and so far I've just been lucky enough never to see it. But I suspect it's more likely that the FO really didn't have an LOS in the cases cited. This is something you have to be really careful about. Many times in battles, you must try to get the FO's target line really close to the edge of a piece of cover, or snake it through a 1-pixel gap between 2 buildings, or whatever. Just moving the mouse a couple of pixels in the target area can make all the difference between having an LOS or not. It's always very easy to accidentally move the mouse a pixel or 2 as you click the button, that's just the nature of using a mouse. But in these tight situations, this movement can block your LOS without you realizing it. This is because the line changes from blue (has an LOS) to yellow (area fire) as you click, and you might not see it flash black (no LOS) in between. So you think you've got an LOS but really you don't, and so the fire scatters. Never having had this situation arise, I can't tell you . I just never fire blind (unless I have a TRP or am doing a barrage) so I never have to deal with scatter at all. At least not yet .

Dschugaschwili said: [QB]Bullethead, are you sure that advance and assault are slower than move? I was under the impression that squads are equally fast under those three commands.

When you have FFE going on, you can shift it's mean point of impact up to 100m per turn and incur a minimal time delay, provided you have an LOS to the new target point. You click on the FO and issue the target (or target wide, or smoke) order and stretch the target line to the desired point. If meet the required conditions for "adjusting" fire (within 100m of the current target, LOS to new target), the target line will be lime green. If the target line is blue, you have an LOS but the shift is over 100m, so you'll get the full normal delay time. And if the target line is black, you have no LOS so you have an increased delay time AND the certainty that the fire will scatter off target. NOTE: That's all I'm going to say on this subject. I do not wish to discuss the complete inadequacy of mere 100m shifts, the problems of not being able to see shellbursts over low ground cover, nor the whole ball of confusion caused by calling moving ongoing FFE "adjusting fire".

Sigurd said: OK, but MtC doesn't really fit in with the above. FAST, MOVE, ADVANCE, ASSAULT, and HUMAN WAVE are all combat-related. Either you're moving stuff around to gain an advantageous position while you have the chance, or you're closing with the enemy to kill him. MtC does neither, so it isn't really amenable to the same sort of format I used before. Furthermore, IMHO MtC has a legitimate use only in very limited circumstances. Otherwise, it's only useful for those who habitually rely on "gamey recon" and exploit Borg Spotting. Therefore, I don't understand why BTS put it in the game. Like the manual says, MtC has the troops moving slowly carefully, exploiting the available cover. When they spot an enemy, or when they receive fire, they stop moving and will likely shoot. Thus, MtC is different from regular MOVE in terms of attitude (the troops are expecting contact) and effect when meeting the enemy (MtC troops stop, MOVEing troops keep going). I also think MtC is slower and quieter than MOVE. Stopping on contact can cause problems if it leaves you in open ground in daylight. So you should NEVER use MtC to cross open ground of any sort. OTOH, at night, in the woods, or in thick fog, where you don't see the enemy until you're already in grenade range, it's often best just to blaze away and hope for the best. Continuing to move in these situations reduces your firepower and increases your vulnerability to what is already the max firepower the enemy can put out. So MtC is an improvement over CMBO's options in these low-viz situations. HOWEVER, when you combine MtC with another new CMBB feature, tank-hunter teams, you have a recipe for gamey recon. Tank-hunter teams see way more use as scouts than as AT weapons, at least for the attacker. I mean, look at all the incentives. Probably the defending AFVs are on the far side of grunt defensive lines so it's highly unlikely that the THTs will ever get into effective range. And THTs used as scouts only risk 2 men instead of 4-5, and you don't have to split any squads. Finally, with the MtC command, maybe the scouts won't die afterall, while the player reaps the benefits of the Borg Spotting.