Dschugaschwili

Split squads won't regroup if one or both teams' morale is panic or worse or one or both teams have movement orders. There may be a third restriction to regrouping if both teams are in different buildings, but I'm not sure about that. Dschugaschwili

Try a Sturmtiger. If that doesn't do the trick, I'd guess that it's not possible indeed. Dschugaschwili

How many tubes does this one have?

That would be called a meteor shower, right? I always thought those can only be called down by high level wizards. Dschugaschwili

Nine mortars in one place? And your opponent didn't guess where they were located and drop some arty there after the first fire mission? Dschugaschwili

Use them for deception. A couple of empty foxholes around a terrain feature that you don't want to defend may draw some area fire from guns, mortars or arty and buy you some time while the enemy is trying to deal with your empty position. Ok, placing a single (L)MG there may be a good idea to create a sound contact in the area. Dschugaschwili

The link Joachim posted near the top of this thread ("PzIV tactics") contains a very detailled discussion of the topic at hand. Please read this thread first. Dschugaschwili

Concentrate your forces on one flank and ignore the other side of the map. And don't slow down too much. It's very easy to run out of time in this scenario. Dschugaschwili

I don't even see the molotov penetrating anything here... Dschugaschwili

The target tank being pushed away did not have any impact here. If your spotter targets a tank, but can't see the ground under it, the fire mission counts as blind. Always. Dschugaschwili

1. If there are any misses, you might be able to guess the direction the shots are coming from. Then you can either try area firing at suspected positions, try to get out of sight or rotate to get your thicker front armor into the direction of the gun. 2. Tanks spot quite badly when buttoned, small guns are hard to spot, especially at range and in woods. The more eyes you have, the better your chances of spotting the attacker. 3. Perhaps the gun had too many targets when the first platoon passed and didn't want to get into a 1-on-10 fight. Dschugaschwili

That sounds too simple to me. You can treat company and battalion HQs as equal, but since section HQs cannot command infantry squads they have to be issued to weapon teams, while the higher HQs can also command an infantry reserve or stay close to the squads to take over in case one of the platoon HQs is killed or a squad drops out of command for whatever reason. If you keep that in mind, you should do fine. Dschugaschwili

That's two different problems. I think that it is clear that expending more ammo should mean more firepower, so close range firepower tests will have to take that into account. The question of when to fire longer bursts would require a new test also, especially since I only wrote about a single incident in one game, and I have no idea if this behavior is the norm or not. Dschugaschwili

redwolf, did you have a look at the ammo counts of the firing squad? In an ongoing PBEM game I ambushed an enemy squad with an SMG heavy unit (fp > 300), and I noticed that the first burst did little damage and used one ammo point, while the second burst was more damaging but took three ammo points. Especially at close ranges you'll have to keep an eye on the ammo used per burst. Dschugaschwili

Now that's a bit harsh. Of course you won't accomplish something with every single FT you have, but the same is true for any other unit. If a scenario gives me some FT teams, I can usually get a good effect out of at least a third of them on the attack, and more than half of them on the defense. Everyone who doesn't believe that FTs can be very important should play "Winter Wonderland" on the CMBB CD as the Germans. Dschugaschwili

You're missing the following point: Adjusting the aim point towards vulnerable plates requires knowledge about which plates are vulnerable. As long as the type of the enemy tank is not identified, every gunner will aim center-of-mass to maximize the hit chance. Only if the gunner knows what the enemy tank actually is can he specifically aim at weak plates. So in your example the gunner will only start aiming at the turret once he has identified the enemy tank as a PzIV. On the other hand, being hull-down forces the enemy gunner to aim closer to the turret. In your example, if the enemy PzIV is hull-down your gunner would aim at its turret from the first shot on, even without knowing that it's in fact a PzIV. So he has a better chance of killing the hull-down PzIV because he is aiming at the weak plate earlier, although he doesn't know it yet at that time. So being hull-down can hurt you in real life. Dschugaschwili

Actually, one of my previous posts (the one with the code section) also proved this lower bound, and also that the expected hit probability must be somewhere between that lower bound and the hit probability against a hull-up tank, but the exact value is dependant on other accuracy constraints. Simply speaking, the lower your base accuracy against the full target, the closer you get to the lower bound determined by you. Having a high base accuracy will let your hit chance against the hull-down target rise up to close to the base accuracy. Dschugaschwili

Sergei: Edited the post. I didn't have to side-scroll even before it, but I hope it's better for you now. Pyewacket: Right. Although if you're talking about tank combat, a hit against a plate that you can't penetrate is little more than a miss. I doubt that CM uses a model this fine. I think that CM first determines if it's a hit, and then pick the plate that's hit on the basis of some fixed distribution. So I don't think that even an elite crew at 10m would always hit the upper hull of a hull-up target. But BFC has stated that guns in CM do indeed aim center-of-mass, which is probably the excuse for having a fixed distribution of hits against various plates. (By the way, I had your above thoughts before, only that in my case, it was a crack Firefly bouncing two shots off a Panther's upper hull before being destroyed. Afterwards I wondered if a green one would have had a better chance of hitting a vulnerable plate). Short answer: 1. If you're going against a gun that can not kill you anywhere, it's a matter of preference. Going hull-down increases the chance of turret hits, and because of that also the risk of gun hits, but it eliminated the risk of track hits. 2. If you're going against a gun that can kill you everywhere, you should go hull-down to reduce the risk of being hit in the first place. 3. If you're going against a gun that can kill you with turret hits only, you should not go hull-down because going hull-down increases the risk of being hit in the turret. Dschugaschwili

Sorry, I have to enclose a part of the message in a code block to get the greater than operators to work. There has been a lot of arguments about the hit probability against a hull-down tank in relation to the hit probability against a hull-up tank in this thread lately. The problem here is that first, we don't know how much of the frontal area of the tank is visible if it's hull-down, and second, even if we knew that the hit probability is highly dependant on the other factors contributing to the overall accuracy of the gun. Example 1: We're firing with an extremely accurate gun. So accurate that we not only have almost 100% hit chance, but almost all the shots strike the target within an area that's significantly smaller than the target. That means that we can make the target smaller without reducing our hit chance much. Or put it another way: we can put the target hull-down and still hit it with almost every shot, so our hit chance hardly went down at all. </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Example 2: We're firing with another gun. I'll assume that the shot pattern follows a normal distribution. We're firing at a square target with 1m sides and we're aiming at the center of it. For this argument, I'll split the target into four parts (~plates), each of which 25cm high, and I'll call them P1 to P4 from top to bottom. We want to fire against the fully visible target once, and we want to place the target hull-down later. I'll call the hit probability against a certain plate of the hull-up target hpu(Px), and against a plate of the hull-down target hpd(Px). All plates have equal shape, and against the full target we're aiming at the edge between P2 and P3, so (as I showed above) we get hpu(P2) > hpu(P1) and hpu(P3) > hpu(P4). (We also get hpu(P2) = hpu(P3) and hpu(P1) = hpu(P4), but we don't need that here.) Now let's put the target in a hull-down position in such a way that only the upper half is visible, so we have hpd(P3) = hpd(P4) = 0. Aiming center-of-mass now means aiming at the edge between P1 and P2. So in relation to the aim point, P1 is now in the position of P2 in the hull-up target, and P2 takes the place of P3. All else being equal, we will therefore get hpd(P1) = hpu(P2) and hpd(P2) = hpu(P3). We can now put the hit probabilities against the hull-up target (pu) and against the hull-down target (pd) into relation: pd = hpd(P1) + hpd(P2) + hpd(P3) + hpd(P4) = hpd(P1) + hpd(P2) + 0 + 0 = 0.5 * (hpd(P1) + hpd(P1) + hpd(P2) + hpd(P2)) = 0.5 * (hpu(P2) + hpu(P2) + hpu(P3) + hpu(P3)) > 0.5 * (hpu(P1) + hpu(P2) + hpu(P3) + hpu(P4)) * = 0.5 * pu * (because hpu(P2) > hpu(P1) and hpu(P3) > hpu(P4)) So we get pd > 0.5 * pu. And obviously also pd <= pu because hpu(P1) and hpu(P4) are non-negative. We can do the same calculation with different exposure percentages, but the result will always be that the chance to hit a hull-down target compared to the hit chance against a hull-up target will always be greater than the ratio between the visible areas, so all those people claiming half visible size equals half hit chance are plain wrong.</pre>

I was aware that a smaller turret will increase the effect of my model, but I didn't want to scare away potential readers by making it more complicated than necessary. Dschugaschwili

The ratio between the hit probabilities against a hull-up and a hull-down tank is highly dependant on the gun, range and crew experience. I suspect that the silhouette rating of a hull-down tank is reduced, so the chance to hit it is calculated against a smaller target. How much it is reduced is BFC's secret. But since the entire turret and a part of the upper hull remains visible, the probability of hitting a hull-down tank anywhere must be at least as high as the probability of hitting the turret of a hull-up tank. In fact, according to the model I outlined above, the chance to hit only the turret of a hull-down tank must already be higher than the chance to hit the turret of a hull-up tank. Dschugaschwili

In 2d the mathematical model is much more complicated and much harder to understand, mostly because the standard deviations are usually different for both dimensions and the shape of the target area is a problem, too. But the hit chance still goes down when you move the target away from the aim point in a straight line, so the model is still valid for our purposes. Dschugaschwili

I feared that somebody would ask me to come up with the mathematical model, so here we go: Assumptions: 1. The shot distribution is a normal distribution around the aim point (in other words, shaped like a bell curve). 2. I'll ignore shot spread left-to-right and only look at the spread in up-down direction. (This shouldn't be a problem since the different plates are located above each other) There's a certain problem with the analysis because there seems to be no closed formula for the integral of exp(-x^2), which would be needed to calculate the exact values. But no matter. What we want is the probability of hitting a plate with a certain size (height) that is located at a certain distance (center) from the aim point (zero). This would translate into the above integral from (center - 0.5*height) to (center + 0.5*height). As mentioned above, getting the exact values isn't really possible, but we can use a table with percentiles for the normal distribution that can be found in every statistics book to approximate. We just have to take the difference between the percentiles for two values that are (height) apart from each other to get the chance of hitting a spot between both edges. That's the hit chance against a plate with size (height). You can do a couple of example tries, and you'll see that the hit chance against a certain plate decreases the farther the center of the plate is from the mean value of the distribution (the aim point). When you look at a bell curve, you can see the reason for it (remember, the area under a part of the curve is your hit chance), but I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader. In gunnery terms, it's exactly what I wrote in my last post: the closer you place the aim point to the center of the target (or the closer you place the target to the aim point), the higher your chance of hitting it. Dschugaschwili PS: I'm quite busy right now, so replies from me can take some time.

IIRC the hit distribution for a hull-up tank was: 1/6 lower hull 1/2 upper hull 1/3 turret For a hull-down tank: 1/4 upper hull 3/4 turret My above statement about turret hits being more likely against hull-down tanks still stands. I could bore you with a mathematical model that shows this, but I will try to make it easier to understand. Common sense says that the chance to hit a certain target rises the closer to it you place your aim point (assuming that your sights are properly aligned). If we now define "target" as "PzIV turret" we immediately see that the chance of hitting it increases if you aim at a higher point of the tank (but no higher than the turret center), which is precisely what you do when the tank goes hull down and you're aiming at the center of the visible mass. Dschugaschwili

Most self-destructing Hummels are probably lost to shells hitting the edge of the house they're hiding behind, but you have a point here. Dschugaschwili