gunnergoz

What Vanir is calling the glacis, Steve is calling the front upper deck, and the game is calling it the upper front hull. No wonder we are attacking in all directions...

Vanir - are you defining the glacis plate as the near-horizontal plate sandwiched between the plate with the driver's visor and hull MG on the one hand, and the lower front hull plate on the other? Just trying to clarify.

BTW, this is what the US Army was officially putting out in 1944; one of several charts from the Ordnance manual Terminal Ballistics Data Vol II, 1944. Not very specific, but at least based on real-world tests. And their comments:

Thanks for the insult. How I play is my business. Who are you to judge. I simply said I do not find the covered arc command useful. Go soak your head and get a grip.

Both the demo and the full game come with PDF manuals as part of the installation and you can find them in the directory in which you installed the demo or game.

SMG's are really handy when assaulting positions and buildings. I always try to have one or two men on an assault team armed that way if possible.

Hopefully, one of the forum members who is designing campaigns can answer your question. My advice: Don't give up. This game rewards patience and slow, methodical tactics. Scout out your movements beforehand so you don't get ambushed. Don't rush enemy positions without first suppressing them with any available firepower. Sure, heavy artillery is great if you have it, but most scenarios can be won with just the tools in hand. Play your first campaigns at the easiest settings until you get the hang of command and control of your forces. I just want to encourage you not to get disheartened. It is a challenging game and there is a lot to learn. Read as much as you can in these forums, for there is a lot of group wisdom in them.

Am I wrong in thinking that they need voice contact, not just eye contact? How else will they adjust fire - hand signals are too easily misunderstood or missed entirely. Edit: Nevermind. I was thinking of what I read earlier in the wartime Army manuals on the subject, which specified voice contact between spotter and firing mortar units. The game just wants a working C2 link. Many of those army manuals predate widespread use of handheld radios, by the way, but that's what most units trained on until mid-1944 when the radios started getting issued.

Except for short arcs to limit some units from firing (e.g. HQ's, mortars in LOS or bazooka teams I'm saving) I don't much even use the cover arc command any more. I find the Tac AI is more than capable of picking and choosing its targets most of the time and if I cobble it with my ideas of where it should be looking for targets, as often as not I miss a good target and/or my unit gets clobbered by someone outside of the arc it was told to ignore.

It does look like its hung up in that one tree, doesn't it? Ironwood? It has a grip on the Tiger it looks like. If your gridded terrain mod reflects the action spots underneath, it almost looks like the house is partly built upon a tree action spot. I wonder if the tank is hung up because it "thinks" it should be an open space. Are the trees planted individually on the landscape? Or are they part of the underlying terrain?

Looks like NTC with the Whale over on the left. Not that I've been there, just seen a lot of photos of it... Pretty stunning graphics if that is actually from the game and not something cooked up beforehand on a swarm of dedicated graphics machines. Funny that with all that air power buzzing overhead, they were still surprised by the enemy tank unit at their 2 o'clock. No drones zooming ahead of the armor? And what's with the 6-tank platoon? Just wondering.

I think that may be it. Poor tiger thinks he's surrounded so he's attacking in all directions!

8 minutes? Egad. Which CO was calling in the fire? Company commander, weapons platoon commander or what? With that sort of delay it sounds like that commander was several removes away from the mortars chain of command. Was this a QB by chance? The reason I ask is that most 81mm mortars belong to battalion. Logically, if there is no battalion FO dispatched to observe for them, the company commander in the field in command of all of your troops should have the shortest response time, since he would be directly in contact with battalion. (if you are running two or more companies, then you would have a battalion CO on scene, which should shorten response times even more I would think.) I've seen 6-8 minutes or more delay for things like ship gunfire support, but not for 81's. You'd think they belonged to an adjoining battalion or something...

Scouts also prove their worth in the excellent Devil's Descent campaign.

What sort of terrain are they covering to the "point needing recon?" If they have to crawl through a lot of exposed terrain, with little natural cover, the chances of their being spotted goes up. One more thing to consider...I don't think of it as "the point needing recon," I think of it as a "recon route" and every leg of that journey should be potentially a place where they can discover something new. So if you are fixated at a hedgerow 100 meters away, the route to that point is every bit as important to your intelligence gathering as is the end point. Clearly so, since your scouts are only halfway to the end point you've selected and they have already uncovered valuable intelligence - the enemy positions that kill them. Like Styikkypixie said, take your recon slow, in short hops. Crawling may also not be the way you want to go since it is so slow it places your troops at risk longer and gives the enemy more time to acquire sight of them. Try to find short hops with cover, and send your scouts there, wait a bit and then forward again as your main body moves up. I use the Hunt command for scouts since this stops them when they first notice the enemy. That alone may help them not walk into an ambush, because with any other order, including slow/crawl, they will try to keep moving even after they see the enemy, and if they see the enemy, there is also a chance the enemy sees them.

No the Pak75 version was later in the war. Your version is called SdKfz 234/3 with 75 mm L/24; 88 built 6/44-12/44. Google is your friend. And mine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SdKfz_234

And not the PaK 75 version? Or is that for later in the war? Edit - yep, produced 12/44 - 3/45. Neeeevermind.

All that drama and you didn't even have to pay union scale for your pixel-actors...

OK for sake of argument, lets say that your team gets to the hedge with their covered arc orders and sees an enemy tank which is not KO'd, and not within the cover arc but which, for whatever reason, you as player do not want them to target. Do you want the team to ignore this live target? Could ordinary soldiers have this sort of self-control and discipline? I (perhaps wrongly) envision them saying "That d@mn officer doesn't know what he's talking about" and going ahead and firing on the tank anyway. (See below for exception.) (Here, I have to assume, as I have all along, that the tank the OP mentioned as being KO'd was relatively close to where the AT team was deployed. If it was, then the team falling into reactive AI self-protection mode would make sense, to me at least. If on the other hand the KO'd tank was not in a distance that most soldiers would consider an immediate threat (lets say 100M) then I agree, there would be something quirky going on.) This still seems to me to be primarily an issue of what circumstances will trigger Tac AI reactive behavior, because that is what seems to be happening here with the Tac AI over ruling the cover arc command that the player issued. I want the AI to let the pixeltruppen react defensively should I give them a stupid or suicidal order - but that's me. OTOH, maybe there is, down the road, a way to "force" the troops to do as ordered no matter what the immediate threat to them may be - an extreme example of fanatical troops, perhaps. That might be worth coding so that players with such troops can give orders that other, more ordinary soldiers, would flat out ignore. It is an interesting conversation and topic, no matter which way you may fall out about it and I am enjoying myself...hopefully you all are too.

That would depend upon the size of the projectile wouldn't you think? Well, you can look at the 105mm data yourself and decide: Lots more fragments of shrapnel, but its still a big world to fill up if you keep expanding the range circles outwards. At 20M you have about a 1 in 5 chance that a particular square foot is going to catch a fragment, so it is definitely more lethal at at a longer distance from the point of impact than is the 75mm, which is logical. My understanding of how they did these tests was to detonate a shell remotely above the ground or at ground level, depending upon the predicted fuzing, and then came by later and recorded the fragment numbers, locations, weights and spray patterns. Here's one example of the shrapnel patterns from the same source:

Not only would I like this for mortars, I'd also like it for HMG's, firing directly of course...sort of a blend of the covered arc and area fire, except you are defining the area to be fired into.

Seems to me that relative spotting has everything to do with this since the AT team was not aware of the target being KO'd in the first place. If this was a borg spotting situation, they would not be seeing it as a threat if no one else did. I think we can agree to disagree if this is a problem or not. Clearly you do and probably there are many who would agree with you. I'm not saying I have the right answer, only that this fits with how I see the game should work. If they end up nerfing Tac AI because this sort of thing is seen as defective behavior then so be it - you and others will be happy about that while I'll feel like the game has lost some of its character. I do have issues with the covered arc not being specific enough and would like an infantry/armor/anything sort of choice to be available.

Steve, you just have to stop designing these pesky realistic games...

The crew is with the gun as long as the gun is not KO or bailed from. If you move the prime mover next to the gun, then select the gun and use the move command so it points at the prime mover with a down arrow, that directs the crew to hitch up the gun and then mount the prime mover. You do not have to load the crew separately or unload them separately, for game purposes they are part of the gun until killed or bailed from it. Think airplanes - pilot bails, aircraft lost. The ammo bearers do have to be loaded on the prime mover separately, however.

Well, the OP indicated that the AT team "just arrived at the bocage line" and he then gave them the cover arc command. Don't know if he was playing WEGO or what, but he says "the first thing they did was fire at the abandoned tank." That sounds like reactive Tac AI behavior to me. The team did not see the tank being hit, they assumed it was active. Had it been moving? No - but maybe it was in ambush mode. I think they performed logically for their role. Not sure what you think the unit is expected to do when the Tac AI perceives a threat. If you don't want a Tac AI, then maybe this is not the game for you. There's a limit to the intelligence and logic that can be programmed into these things, it seems to me. If the tank was way distant, I'd understand...that should not be perceived as an immediate threat and the cover arc command should work. But the game's relative spotting rules have made for all sort of situations like this that seem to be infuriating a lot of people. Anyway, we'll have to see if BFC weighs in on this and decides it is flukey behavior. Personally, I doubt they will.