Triumvir
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Posts posted by Triumvir
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Sitxx, I don't necessarily mean bringing down individual shots per gun, but rather being able to target individual locations per gun. So that for example (damn this non-fixed width font! BTS, do somefink!)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <-- treeline
oo
o o <-- Platoon adv. two up
x x x x x x <-- 6 gun barrage
I could do the above. Or, better yet,
| T | | T |
| x | | |
| | | |
| T | | T |
| | | x |
| x | vs |xxx|
| I | | x |
| | | |
| I | | I |
| x | | |
| | | |
I can call fire down upon a convoy on a road.
All this can be done by modelling a centre point and a CEP.
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I respectfully disagree with your observation suggestion. The real fix for this is to model artillery with a fixed centre point for dispersion. By doing that, you will solve the problem of arbitrarily scattered rounds.
I think that the way to handle unobserved fire is to have it come down at normal speed (since that's how it'll be processed anyway), but apply a significant dispersion factor to the centre point and for any further adjustments. This is more realistic, because the characteristics of the gun do not change whether the FO can see his target or not.
In fact, in one exercise, our FO couldn't see the fall of shot and called a halt to firing. When we went to find out where the rounds landed, they had landed with perfect precision 2km out of the target range, right among a herd of cows. There was no difference in the dispersion of the rounds, unfortunately for the cows.
I'd also like to see CM II incorporate individual gun fire for FOs. This'd let us put proper blocking and box barrages on targets; if I want to shell a road lengthwise, I should bloody well be able to.
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I don't know about that; there's always some depression inherent in guns. My 155mm could depress to about -4 degrees. And yes, that sucker is _really_ long; it's barely 100mm shorter than the 52 calibres I worked with. The muzzle velocity doesn't seem that high, though; 880m/s
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I never understand why people complain that Jason's posts are too long; they're hardly a one page document.
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Hmm.. a Stinger has an effective range of 6km (pushing it) and the Avenger has a range of about 2km. Compare that against a SA-8 or SA-11 with ranges of 10 to 20 respectively.
I know about the Patriot, but that's more a theatre defence system than a battlefield protection system; there isn't the same comprehensive ADA coverage from low-level to high-level in the US army as there is in others.
Not to mention that there's one Stinger platoon for a battalion, against one SA-7 in each section for a Russian-pattern infantry section.
Of course, this is because there's no need for comprehensive ADA -- that's what the USAF is for. But if the USAF is ever stripped away, I'd rather take the low-flying SU-25 against Stingers/Avengers, thankyouveddymuch. Up against Rapiers or HUMRAAMS... I'd rethink.
But the fact that AAMs are re-used as SAMs speaks volumes.
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Interesting; I seem to remember Hastings talking about Sturmoviks hitting US ground troops in _The Korean War_ but I may have misremembered. I know about the Russian intervention, and still am surprised at the kill ratios.
Speaking of incorrect information, I've had the profound displeasure of running across an author -- not a historian -- called James Lucas. You've probably skimmed some of his stuff, but never buy it -- I never thought I'd actually see a Nazi hagiographer being sold at a mainstream bookstore.
What can you say about someone who says that 2SS Das Reich arrived at the Normandy battleground "after minor delays?" Excuse me, Mr Lucas, but did you mean "after minor delays including setting fire to and shooting 642 men, women and children at Oradour-sur-Glane?"
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In fairness to the French and British, given that doctrine allowed for AT guns and tanks to be distributed among infantry, training infantry in close assault probably didn't seem as important as it should have. The Germans had more direct experience from WWI of being overrun by armour than either, and trained accordingly.
It's like the US Army; there is basically no ADA (no puns!) in the US Army because that function has been fulfilled by the USAF since 1945. If stuck under enemy air superiority, US troops could be pretty severly mauled, as they were in the opening stages of the Korean War.
If you don't anticipate ever having to use something, eventually your practice with it will wither away.
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Playing any kind of German troops in the early war _will_ be interesting, whether Soviet or Allied. Working around the cardboard armour of the PzIIs, IIIs and IVs will undoubtedly make all our uberstompinRedAlert players scream 'BTS, fix yer game or somefink!"
If the Soviets get to buy _1_ elite KV-1 in 1941, I guarantee you that KV1 will feel _exactly_ like an elite KT feels in 1945. 1 shot, 1 kill for him; n shots, 0 kills for the Germans.
It'll be interesting having to play "Allied" tactics with German troops.
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I would happily join in on either side but until the verdammnt creditors stop picking over the broken remains of my ex-DSL provider I'm out of the loop...
I'll post my availability when (if!) I get home Internet access again...
See what happens when you decide that 56k modems are unnecessary and have no more slots on your motherboard?
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I had an eyeopening experience yesterday playing an operation which will go unnamed (cos I'm at work and can't remember the name...) In the very first battle my orders were to secure a bridge with a platoon of FJs.
Among my platoon was a single crack sharpshooter, for whom I didn't really have any use. So I sent him off on a lone mission to guard a ford north of the bridge, not expecting any serious attempt to cross the ford.
About 15 turns into the game, an allied squad which my platoon had injured wandered towards the ford, obviously trying to take it.
At 150m, the sharpshooter opens up. Boom! first round kill. The green squad instantly goes to ground in a marsh and stays pinned there.
For the next three to four turns, for every two shots my sharpshooter took, the squad took one casualty, until it was eliminated. 12 shots for 8 casualties!
I'll never again underestimate sharpshooters -- 1 squad for no losses is an ungodly exchange rate.
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Hey, Panther, that was a great game last night. I packed straight up and went to sleep once we were done. Your Daimlers gave me fits throughout the game.... 8) And I thought that my FJs would keep you safely away from my victory flag.
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Oh yes, calculations account for bore wear, wind conditions at 6km up, terrain features between the target, batch of charge, batch of shell, and a whole crapload of other things that happen as routine when firing.
As for drop shorts, I don't think you can talk to any medium artillery gunner who hasn't slaughtered a bunch of poor hapless animals because of bad direction. I know one guy in the Finnish artillery whose battery dropped an entire prep on a reindeer herd. A tame reindeer herd. I've had the same thing happen to cow herds.
Imagine how much damage 155mm rounds do to your troops in CM -- then realise that cows can't run or take cover.
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Except that in arbitration, there'll always be the temptation to slip back into real war, because nothing seems to settle (note the seems) things more permanently than killing someone.
Force is the final option, and usually a very inefficient option.
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As for why the calculations are so much faster, consider this little gedankenexperiment.
Let's say that an 81mm has 5000m range, and a 105mm has 15000m range. We'll next say that the effective range is about 50% of the full range in a 180 degree arc in front of the piece. So that gives us a total covered area of about 20 sqkm for the 81s and 180sqkm for the 105s.
Processing where to aim in the 20 sqkm will be much faster than in the 180 sqkm because of the smaller area covered. And if you position the pieces further back (as just about anyone will do) the amount of map shuffling just grows bigger and bigger.
Next, 81mm teams rarely if ever bother dealing with the more complex things in firing such as bore wear and weather. Because artillery rounds travel so high up, weather conditions have a considerable effect on their trajectory; a small headwind on the ground can turn into a pretty damn big one 6km up. And bore wear is pretty silly to talk about on a mortar since mortars are smoothbores; but for artillery pieces, the barrels must be checked for wear because that affects the rifling and hence the fall of shot.
Not to mention the elevation calculations etc that don't need to be done on a mortar, because the FO can simply call in the corrections within seconds; at 15km, an artillery round takes about 20~30 seconds before it reaches its target.
In short, guns need much more care in aiming than mortars and CM adequately (generously, even) reflects that.
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I've worked with mortars and with gun/howitzers and I think I can safely say that mortars will always be more responsive than howitzers. Reasons:
1) Mortars have shorter ranges. This limits the amount of calculations necessary to lay them, as the maps necessary should always be at hand for the gunnery unit.
2) Mortars are slaved to the battalion HQ, not a divisional arty HQ. Divisional artillery usually devotes one battery to one battalion -- not to one platoon. And even with a dedicated FO, the FDC must process requests in order of priority, not in order of receipt.
3) Mortars are much faster to lay on target than guns. It may take up to a minute to relay a gun to a target at the other end of its firing arc -- not to mention possibly more if you have to change the embedding of the gun -- against up to 30 seconds for a mortar (of course, a good FDC will make sure that such targets are serviced by other batteries...)
4) Mortars are much faster to fire than guns. No one _ever_, unless they're phenomenally stupid, chambers an artillery round in preparation for fire. After even twenty rounds, the barrel gets hot, and leaving a charge inside the breech risks a misfire. With a mortar, firing consists of stripping the charges from the tail and dropping it down a tube. With a gun, you need to load the round, load the charge (if it's semi-fixed, as most anything bigger than 105mm will be) then load the primer before closing the breech and firing.
All the above factors add up and an extra minute is not that much more to pay for heavy artillery fire. It's actually a little more responsive than I'd believe (not that I'm complaining).
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Look, there it goes!
The magical whoosh bird!
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155in artillery is THE way to kill anything that CM can model... (if you can hit it!)
Talk about long reload times....
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Mattias,
A hipshot requires absolutely no hitech gadgetry apart from good maps and surveying equipment. WWII artillery units would have the exact same capability, though slightly slowed because surveying equipment etc would have been heavier.
Mortars are very very low tech and a hip shot is really the same thing as a normal deployment, except accelerated. Really accelerated -- no camouflage, no MG nests, etc.
An SP sIG, though, would probably have used some kind of direct fire method. As far as I understand, German IGs were low velocity flat trajectory weapons for direct fire in support of the infantry. They were used much like the French 75s -- fire over sights at infantry that's too far away to return fire with small arms. That's how I've used them in CM games; plunked on a hill 600m behind my main lines (and so 800-1000m behind of advancing infantry) and raining HE on defenders. The same tactics should hold for the Grille etc.
That shouldn't hold for Wespes/Hummels, though, since they were field howitzers (FHs), which are low to mid velocity and medium trajectory weapons.
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When I was in SP mortars, one of the things we constantly practiced was hipshots. This means pulling off the line of march, setting up the mortars, recording position and centre of arc with first round out of the barrel within two minutes. I can say with certainty that you can do all this within one minute of the APC stopping; laying a mortar takes less than thirty seconds. Even when I switched to towed 155s, we were held to the same two minute standard.
Does this mean that there should be on-map indirect fire in CM? Almost certainly not.
There are a lot of prerequisites for indirect fire. You need the firing tables that tell you what combination of elevation and charge will give you a given range. You need a good idea of the range and direction. All this information is compiled by the BCP/FDC and distributed to the guns.
In CM there's no equivalent of a battery command post or a fire direction centre, apart from forward observers. An individual gun/mortar crew typically will have neither maps of the area good enough to plot fire nor equipment to survey their position and gauge the range.
Most importantly, you need some way to spot where your rounds are going, else you are wasting your ammo. Without someone to adjust your fall of shot, or without really precise maps and surveys, indirect artillery is useless. If I guesstimate the distance to a village behind a ridge at 1000m, but it's really 1200m, all the rounds I'm firing will fall 200m short -- and may as well be fired directly into the ridge.
CM, like real life, models indirect fire as being a finger from heaven on insect-like crunchies. That's because artillery rounds are expensive and wasting them on terrain not populated by enemies is frowned on.
Semi-indirect fire for mortars exists where the mortar crew ranges by observing the fall of their shot. That's currently modeled in CM. It's really direct fire, except that mortar trajectory is so arcing that it has to be indirectly aimed.
All of the above applies to all artillery pieces, even 51mm and 60mm mortars. The only difference there is that as calibre diminishes, the command process grows simple enough that the crew can be the FDC, crew and spotter all rolled into one.
Proper onboard indirect fire is already modeled by letting infantry pieces fire at out-of-LOS targets when they're under command of a HQ that has those targets in LOS. The HQ acts as spotter and FDC. This doesn't happen for vehicle based pieces because they are unaffected by command.
Basically, onboard indirect fire is already well handled for infantry weapons. To make them work for all weapons, vehicles must be able to respond to command.
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While I'd love to have that M1 Tank Platoon feel again (and Close Combat handled this reasonably well; I always had regrets seeing a valiant leutnant with an Iron Cross 1st Class get suddenly spread across the countryside by an MG) I don't think it's feasible with CM.
To have any kind of fidelity to the CM spirit, you'd have to choose your units at the start of the campaign, _and never upgrade them yourself_. You might have attachments to your core on occasion, but you would never have your core change a la SP, with a Tiger here and a Pzkw I there and twenty sniper units suddenly turning into crack engineers (heh heh.)
No, you'd get a choice of what kind of scale you'd want, and then have your units be assigned to you. Replacements would never exceed ten percent of your establishment, unless you lose over fifty percent of your men, in which case, all your units would be taken away and fresh ones be given to you.
That should stop the current grind-your-men-down-to-the-bone-to-capture-that-flag-cause-what-the-****-they-don't-mean-anything-anyway style of play.
There'll be a twenty percent chance (all numbers derived from careful and decisive rear extraction) of losing up to half your men every turn for cross-attachment. Every ten battles, there'll be one where you're grossly outnumbered (3-1) and expected to conduct a fighting retreat. This'll probably be the source of the fifty percent losses, and will separate the grogs from the quakers.
Ideally, you should track every man, and allow some to be promoted and dispersed among squads. This would allow you to have a cadre-type organization so that in each reorganization, you could assign veterans to the squads, which would let you do what the Germans did later in the war, as a boost to morale.
Would this be faithful? Not very, but passably. Would it be fun? Almost certainly not; the bookkeeping you'd have to do would take quite a bit of fun out of the game (unless you're a dedicated grog, in which case your answer doesn't apply to most CM players) and the feeling of losing all that you'd struggled so hard to build in one sudden swipe would probably turn off most players (did I mention limited number of saves in the middle of a game, so that you don't have that NO! Feldwebel Steiner is dead! I must restart! momen?) but would be as faithful to the spirit of CM as the rest of CM is.
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The only real way of handling decorations/medals over a campaign would be to track each individual man in your battlegroup, something that would almost certainly require a completely new game.
I think the best use of medals/decorations ever shown was that given by the first M1 Tank Platoon, where you got allotments of promotions or medals depending on your performance in the previous game, then parceled them out to your crew for performance increases.
I'll never forget the twinge of pain I got when I saw that one of my tanks, with a crew that had survived nine missions without a scratch and had become my best unit, suddenly get hit in the side by a T-72 for a catastrophic kill.
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I'm using Detonator 6.66 (I assume that's the version; it's 5.12.01.0666) and I've always been using a Geforce, not a TNT2. It's still Win2K and though it's better than before, I'd like a game where all the text gets displayed.
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Hmm... I have my new monitor now (20 inch ex-Sun!) and and happily back in CM. BUT!! When I force FSAA, CM won't load the 3D graphics! I get an unhandled exception error then a segfault. If I turn of FSAA, then I get the flicker, but at least I can read text...
and after two or three battles, I get another unhandled exception.
Any ideas? Do you want me to give you the error codes, given that they aren't the same each time (though the situation is very reproducible?)
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Charl, I'll happily take you on! Mmmm... Cape Cabernets... and Chenin Blancs too.
Progressive artillery spread
in Combat Mission Archive #3 (2001)
Posted
Personally, for the engine rewrite, there are a carpload of things I'd love to see. Revised artillery is nice, but :
I'd like some way to rearrange personnel between units; to overstrength/understrength squads based on need; to arbitrarily split off scouts into units of one man, if need be. Then artillery batteries can actually defend themselves if attacked.
I'd like to see crews armed with personal weapons, and _gigantic_ losses involved with using them as impromptu infantrymen. I'd also like to be able to dismount crews from weapons, so that they can wait out counterbattery fire ala SU practice.
I'd like variable cost weapons, so that you don't get the optimising munchkins who go Ah, 600 pts -- 1 of this, 1 of that, 1 of this again. Not as in rarity, but genuinely variable, fluctuating with a mean and SD just so that you can remove tailor-made Kampfgruppe. This is hard because unit cost is correlated with effectiveness, but can be overcome by making crew/man ability fluctuate along with price.
Pursuant to the above, I'd like impromptu shortages of weapons. Playing and winning with the hand that someone else dealt you is a mark of skill.
I'd like impromptu entrenching; you can dig a shellscrape in 5 minutes if you're really motivated and not too fussy about shaping the scrape.
I'd like a sub-command view, so that you could command a company in, say, a battalion attack, the other forces being drawn up and handled by the computer so that you can't do map-edge creeping.
I'd like access to the unit parameters, to be able to decode and modify ORBATS like you could with Steel Panther MOBs and KOBs.
I'd like weather shifts during battle; snow doesn't always fall for 30 continuous minutes.
I'd like indirect fire available for onboard artillery at _all_ points, not just those in LOS (yes, I know that this can be fixed by relative spotting.) and reregistration of artillery upon movement. For instance, when you move an 81mm, magically by the next turn it's registered and in position, no matter whether you change path halfway across the move.
I'd like variable-cover terrain, so that not all scattered trees or woods are equal for cover or concealment.
There are so many things I'd _like_.
I'll settle for better artillery for now, thanks. 8)