Wreck
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Posts posted by Wreck
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The changes that you made (pictures are in another thread) are good, and should be commended. In particular mortars now have a decidedly elliptical shot pattern, as they ought.With mortars in particular, a) actual trained mortarmen, some with combat experience, seem to agree in general with how mortars work in CM and
our data is based on actual... data. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong if you disagree, just that it would take a statistically significant set of tests to indicate that our system is fundamentally incorrect or in need of "massive" changes.And I have no problem with what mortarmen tell you, namely, that on the range they could drop a shell in a pickle barrel at X range. This, presumably, is what any "data" you have is based on.
But let me point out another, broad datum: light mortars were considered light infantry support weapons -- not the primary platoon weapon. The infantry evidently did not find them super effective. And yet, in CMBN, they are very effective. We know that historically light mortars were not used as players can and do use them -- and to great effect. They were typically not fired direct, but indirect. There must have been some reason for this.
IMO, the problem is semiborg sighting. The problem is not the accuracy of the mortar per se. It is that accuracy in combination with the ability of the player to order mortar teams to directly fire at spots where they have little or no reason to suspect they ought to fire. I don't see how I could produce any "statistically significant set of tests to indicate that [the] system is fundamentally incorrect" -- it is just common sense that men would not fire at nothing.
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I assume that "DR" means "Germans" for us English-speaking types? ("Deusche Reich"?)
The scatter here looks much better. In particular the much higher scatter uprange/downrange is welcome. I would like to see what it is at very short ranges, though, like 100-200m. (The accuracy breakpoint I found was 320m.) It is these very low ranges where the CMBN mortars really break the game-as-simulation.
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Good summary by YankeeDog there.
I played CMBO a lot (very little CMBB). And I would add that IMO the campaigns there were pretty much an afterthought and pretty broken. They tended both to largeness and to snowballing, not a good mix. The CMBN campaigns, by contrast, are lots of fun.
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I think they should have modeled unarmed CC and used whatever animations were at hand. Then we would get whiners complaining about the animation mismatch, but at least the fundaments would be there.
That said, if you are pushing unarmed pixeltruppen into CC, then:
(1) You are probably using them wrong.
(2) You are acting in a very ahistorical fashion.
As such, it is a very understandable lacuna.
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So you confirmed that buddy aid currently does not get any ammo? Zero? Or is it just rare?
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You may also have seen the "double minefield" bug, which I reported in this thread:
http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=101734
I don't know whether BFC noticed or not; I assume they read everything here and so did.
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Not directly (outside of the HQ unit itself, where taking the casualty will obviously cause morale damage). However, casualties in an HQ unit will often knock down its leadership bonus, and that will be bad for morale. I do not think bad leaders affect morale negatively, but they fail to affect it positively.If the LT is killed but platoon sgt and radioman survive does this effect morale?I also would like to know if having a -2 leader HQ in control is better than being alone. My hunch is that leadership is always better or at least equal; perhaps -2 is a leader that adds nothing. But I don't know.
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2) i have a mortar setup, and in comm with Plt HQ/radio. the Plt HQ can see the target..and am using small arms on the target... but when i attempt to call for indirect, i get a "No LOS" message!? why?
3) why when an 81mm is down to 1 smoke round won't it fire? or if its because its a smoke round, why not allow the call for a smoke round?
2) indirect must go via the artillery interface. It's not like CMBO, if that is what you are used to.
3) that is a known bug.
1) just the way things are. You can plot a waypoint using any other unit and check LOS from it.
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It looks like you are getting the same "tight" fall of shells that I got up to 320m. I expect that if you try longer ranges you'll see a very similar pattern.To get better statistics I put some 81mm US mortars to the test range. Distance is 400 yards, regular, no wind. ...This looks quite different from what Wreck has. Any ideas why?
I was testing German 81mm. Possibly US mortars are modeled as having slightly better aiming. Only other possibility I can think of is, are you sure all your crews and leaders had leadership 0? (That's what I used.) If you have some +1 or +2 leadership it might account for this.
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The top/bottom distance is 6 action spots or 48m. Those two obvious piece of wall you see are "+" shapes (they make it easy to see where the target action spot is). The bits you see are each 4m long, so the distance between their ends is 40m.
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Of course you can't crawl the map. And that is as it should be. Do you think that most WW2 minefields were detected without loss? You seem to find them unfun -- I don't agree.
As for marked minefields: they are very safe, but not 100%, if you go slow. Go fast and it's still fairly safe, but there is a decent chance of being hit. Again this strikes me as realistic. It's a minefield, for goodness sake!
There are two things I would like to see changed about CMBN minefields. One is that a unit crossing a known but unmarked minefield should typically crawl across in single file. All men but the first should therefore treat it as a marked field. (Indeed, any other unit which sees should also treat it as marked, but this requires state.)
Second is driving a tank across a field should create a safe route. In CMBN terms, it should be marked. You walk in the tank treadmarks.
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This is already the case. Engineers usually, though not always, find mines before being hit by them, if they crawl. This is realistic. Just because you're engineer does not mean you can walk across a minefield.18. Engineers can locate mines "safely" (ie: not by being blown up by them) -
You need to keep ammo bearers within about 16m or so -- 2 action spots. This is done on a per man basis, so if you are near the edge of range only some of the bearers' ammo gets shown with the main unit. Of course they don't need to be anywhere near until the main unit has used up its ammo.
You see wildly fluctuating levels of ammo because each unit which can share is sharing with others, and each is showing the total ammo it has available to it. So, for example, if you are American with a weapons platoon, and you move the 3 60mm together, you'll see levels from 32 to 96 for each mortar. If the three mortars are really close, you'll see each one reporting the 96 rounds they have collectively.
HQ units are in charge. The support staff is basically useless, although if the HQ unit is completely eliminated it can take over as HQ.
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Here is a snapshot of the map from above, showing the touch objectives. The terrain is a bit hard to see, but it is fairly flat with bocage-lined roads.
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This was promising-looking scenario. The briefing was clear enough as to what I was supposed to do, but very vague in terms of what the enemy was. However, from the scenario graphic (the smallest size), and out-of-game info (that it was supposed to be fun to play, and thus balanced), I rapidly guessed several things:
- the American would have a similar size force to mine (a platoon)
- the American would start on the north side of the map, probably the corner, just as I started in the south
A quick map walk revealed that I would probably get to the objectives in the southern half of the map, but not those in the north. But it also showed the key terrain feature to be the north/south road, with its hedgerows on both sides.
Accordingly, I moved out rapidly across the south towards the Cafe, with scout teams out front in case I was wrong and would be ambushed. However I was right, at least about the Americans starting in the north. (Not sure about the corner.) My teams rapidly moved across the map and took up positions at the hedgerows to see the key gaps from the farm area south. I sent a scout team out and quickly touched the South Orchard objective (getting the touch and also verifying that they were touch objectives, which seemed probable from the "patrol", but not certain). This team then turned around and got back behind our hedgerow.
My guess was that the American would send out similar teams to get touches, and that I could gun them down. I also felt it likely that I could sneak a few kills by shooting at open areas which I could see that the American would cross while getting to and touching the Farm objectives. Both of these guesses were correct. The American sent a scout team across the East Field which was killed by one squad there. He then attempted to move forces into the Farm, as I shot at them in the road just east of the farmhouse. (Didn't get anyone, but in retrospect had profound psychological effect on my opponent.)
About this time I started cautiously pushing up the road, on both sides of its western hedgerow up towards the dogleg, since I could see that there was nowhere that could see these areas that I could not see. Controlling the dogleg would enable me to control the road via fire. My forces got a contact that the Americans had similarly sent to the dogleg, and achieved fire superiority via area fire.
In the final turn's action, the American tried pushing a squad south just west from the road. (This may have been an attempt to relieve the pressure on the besieged team next to the road.) This was disastrous as I had two squads' MG teams there, who shot up the squad, apparently breaking it after 4 casualties. Meanwhile, my other guys took down the team at the dogleg. I did take a casualty from Americans in the North Orchard as a scout team ran across the East Field to touch the objective and then to look down the dogleg.
Anyway, these losses, combined with the TacAI not acting exactly the way he thought it should, broke the will of the enemy commander. He then went all sour grapes, complaining publicly with spoilers for all to read, and surrendered, even though his force still had fight. The game thus ended without much having happened. Even with the surrender, it was "only" a Major victory for me, not total, because the Americans still had touched half of the objectives.
- the American would have a similar size force to mine (a platoon)
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Answers to both of your questions are at the wiki:
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Because that's the way they implemented it. Command and control flows only via HQ units, and radios are not shared by units. Vehicles do share their radio, so if you have a jeep w/radio, put it near the mortars and you are good.
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I meant the "area fire" order in CMBN -- that is, direct fire on an action spot. The artillery interface is always area fire in a sense, and that I do not propose to change, beyond making it much faster to call mortars when you have a voice link. (They should have no more than a 1 minute delay.)If you read JasonC's post above, it says "Mortars are area fire weapons ". If mortars are too accurate and used like sniper rifles, I don't think the way to fix this is by banning the real use mode. -
c3k: FM 6-30 can be found online easily. Here is a pdf on the Marine's site.
Here is a quote from page 1-5:
The traditional forward observer, equipped with a map, compass, and binoculars, can expect a mean target location error of about 500 meters. This is not enough for reliable first-round FFE or target suppression; it is no better than it was in World War II.More googling shows that a better source would be FM 6-40, which was published in 1939. (6-30 was published in 1991.) Here is a pdf of FM 6-40.
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I suspect that BFC are using firing range data. And also the sort of verbal testimony about firing ranges that inevitably come up in these threads: on the firing range, you can supposedly drop a mortar shell in a barrel. We find very different performance implied.
Although I think off-map indirect fire is probably a bit too accurate, I don't find it terribly unrealistic. What I do find unrealistic is the "sniper mortar". Direct fired mortars are deadly in CMBN, I think less based on their accuracy, than the fact that they are supercharged by the semi-borg sighting model. Regular infantry can do the same trick (to fire on areas where they see nothing themselves, not even a '?'-contact), but such fire rarely does that much. Also it is much more reasonable for a squad to expend 1 turn of fire on "nothing", when it has ammo to fire for 30 turns or whatever. Light mortars firing on areas they have no reason to fire at are much more problematic, because they chuck HE, with area effect. And also, that they will be expending 1/6 to 1/4 of their ammo load on "nothing".
The problem could be addressed simply, by disallowing area fire by mortars. I recognize several problems with the proposal, but it would be less of a distortion of reality than sniper mortars.
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Holes are holes. It does not matter how a hole came to be. The point of making it is your own tactical mobility. If you made a hole with a rhino you don't need to make another, unless the enemy can fire on your hole and you can find a better place.
Use engineers to make holes if the field is covered by AT so that using a rhino is too risky.
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is it fairly simple to figure out how to update the times of the scenarios?
Yes.
Start scenario editor.
"Load". Select the scenario you want to change.
select "Data" button.
change "Length of Battle" -- it's an option menu
"Save".
our data is based on actual... data. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong if you disagree, just that it would take a statistically significant set of tests to indicate that our system is fundamentally incorrect or in need of "massive" changes.
CW 81mm mortar dispersion
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
Hmm, Steiner makes a legalistic quibble. Given a choice between the actual reality of human affairs, and a hypothetical emanation of "international law", I would pick the reality every time. Perhaps Nazi Germany still does exist in some entirely abstract way, but I admit that whatever way this is is lost on me. It sure appears to me that the Nazi regime was conquered and militarily occupied, their human organization dismantled with extreme prejudice including the killing of most of the leaders, and a new organization constructed in its place, which was built fresh using none of the men from the former organization. And their descendants are now officially taught to revile them, their government formula, and all its works. This is about as total a defeat as I can imagine.
More testing, less kvetching. Hey if I had CW I'd be testing instead of wasting my time arguing about angels dancing on heads of pins. So what about that 200m test?