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Wreck

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  1. More testing shows the second stepping happens between 714 and 718 meters. Like the stepping at ~320m, it is very noticeable and abrupt. I also had considered the idea that CM is modelling more propellant, but this should increase uprange/downrange dispersion, not angular. Or at least not very much. The tube is still pointed the same way. Anyway, that's what my intuition says.
  2. Per a request over at the wiki, I tested out the fall of shot from German 81mm mortars. The Test All men (FOs, crews for onboard and offboard 81mm mortars, and HQ units) are regular/fit/0. My firing range put two mortars in a channel, so that combined they would have 44 shots; when shooting at the centerline of their channel both mortars would be at exactly the same range. The testing method for onboard direct was very simple: aim at particular spot on the map. Fire until mortars are out of ammo. Take snapshot from above looking straight down, centered on targeted spot. You can eyeball the resulting snapshot to see the dispersion of the mortar shells. The only variable is the range. I also tested offboard since it was pretty easy. Results You can see the particular screenshots I made here: http://wreck0.imgur.com/all/ In particular, compare the one for 314m: http://imgur.com/cBZX4 ... to the one at 322m: http://imgur.com/nIqWv Here is what offboard looks like: http://imgur.com/x6dUc Summary of Results From 100m to 320m, onboard mortars (fired direct or indirect) have very tight shot patterns. You can see where their fearsome reputation comes from: 90% of the shells land on the targeted action spot. Contrary to my expectation, there appears to be no increase in dispersion due to range, as the range varies from 100 to 320m. At 320m, very suddenly the dispersion of shot for 81mm mortars appears to about triple. Most shots fall within the targeted action spot, or its immediate neighbors. I only tested up to 700m, and found no other breakpoints in performance. As with the shorter ranges, all ranges from 320-700m seem to have the same dispersion, although it is harder to tell in this case. Offboard mortars fired at any range have the same dispersion, which is even larger than that seen for onboard mortars at 320+.
  3. Regarding what happened to your halftracks: they all were plotted to go through the place where the wall had been. They can do this. Therefore, they all tried, but they all blocked each other. When this happens, the code makes them wait. So most of them waited. I am sure a few made it through. I am sure you thought your pauses were enough, but I expect they weren't; and problems with them cascade. CMBN makes it very hard to have forces in a column. This is a problem, yes, but at least once you know about it, it should not matter that much. Just don't expect lots of vehicles to squeeze through narrow gaps in a timely manner, and you will be fine.
  4. Another unit sees them. Not the bazooka team. You are seeing an effect of the new relative spotting. Just because a unit can see the area where a particular enemy is, doesn't mean it sees that enemy. Yes -- even against tanks. This is strange, and I think in a sense sometimes wrong. I've seen tanks drive up within a few meters of infantry before being spotted. On the other hand, what you did is also wrong. You, as a totally unrealistic omniscient eye-in-the-sky commander, told a bazooka team to move for no reason they knew of, to see an area they had no idea contained an enemy tank. CMx2 allows this, because it must, because the player controls all of his good-order units. But it doesn't have to reward this sort of ahistorical movement; one way to prevent it is to make spotting things for moving units hard, even though it seems like pretty much any infantry would be able to see any tank very quickly at bazooka ranges.
  5. They are 2048^2, although you can use whatever size you want. No matter what size you use, the texture gets scaled to 50x50m. I'd guess that BF did it this way to reduce repetition, as you suggest. On the downside, the fixed texture scaling means that it is impossible to make gridded terrain that lines up with the action spots. I'd much prefer it if the textures were alignable with the action spots so that an action-spot grid was possible. I wonder if this would be hard to change? Instead of scaling all textures to 50m, make them be 2.4414 cm/pixel. Thus the existing textures still map to 50x50 and nothing changes, but people who want a sensible grid can just cut their textures down to 1966x1966, which would map to 48x48.
  6. There is a pdf manual that comes with the demo. Mine is installed at: C:\Users\[I]wreck[/I]\Documents\Battlefront\Combat Mission Battle for Normandy\CMBN Game Manual.pdf I think that by default a link to it will be installed on your desktop. Unfortunately it has the same annoying sepia-tone and background images that the online manual has. Still, you can read it in acroread or whatever and zoom the pages up as large as you please. There is a better black and white pdf, but it comes with the purchased game. Oh: just so you don't feel alone, I also dislike the online version, for the same reasons you did.
  7. The mortar should be able to fire anywhere it can in range. The question is not about ability. The question is about the realism of firing on a spot for no reason. We know that WWII mortars did not, in fact, fire at random spots where the mortar team had zero reason to believe the enemy was. (They would have been out of ammo continually had they done that, there being an almost infinite number of places that they could see, where their enemies were not locaetd.) And yet, in CMBN, that is what they do. A unit spots an enemy; a mortar fires on the ?'s area, which it can see, even though it cannot see the enemy unit, or even a ?; and before it could have possibly communicated with the spotting unit. This is a problem.
  8. Erwin, StG44 ammo is found only in bunkers.
  9. I don't know how much ammo men carried in history. My rule of thumb is 1000 rounds for German squads (MG42s can use it), somewhat less for Americans. It does depend on the scenario. Usually with a longer scenario you need a bit more with some squads, but on the other hand walking a squad back to your vehicles (and/or moving one up) doesn't take that much time. In a pinch, you can send your assault team back for more ammo. Then you merge/split again, and most of the ammo stays with the machinegun. Ditto YankeeDog on SMG ammo -- take extra. As for rockets and launchers: it varies a lot. If the scenario seems to indicate a good chance for tanks or bunkers, I assign them. And panzerfausts I always take, since infantry do not waste them shooting at a distance. Since pixeltruppen are trigger-happy when it comes to bazookas (and panzershrecks), for those I tend to load up my teams with only a few rockets per tube. Then if they waste them, they can go back to the rear and reload.
  10. I agree with you on all of this. Here's what I don't get: unlike CMBO, CMBN has its difficulty level setting. This is already in the game. And in fact, the "Elite" difficulty level is redundant in that the only difference between it and "Warrior" is that it doesn't show the type of enemy units on their icons -- you can still see their type, but you have to click on them. So Elite causes slight extra micromanagement, but is otherwise the same as Warrior. Why not then add some new rules in Elite to make the game more realistically simulate men under fire? Then the people that want the more terminator-like pixeltruppen can play Warrior, and those wanting WWII type pixeltruppen can play Elite. This seems reasonable (and probably easy to implement). Although my take on the problem is that in addition to such "overall" sort of morale effects, men are still too mobile under fire. Hitting the dirt -- going prone and unmoving -- ought to be the first reaction of most infantry most of the time, even for pretty small volumes of fire.
  11. Tested some mixed minefields. They have about 10 AP mines, and 1 or 2 AT mines. Also tested soft vehicles (jeeps, trucks) on AP mines. Only a few mines would immobilize them -- 4 or so. AP mines never seem to hurt passengers on trucks. They did hurt some of the crew, but rarely. Hits on jeeps for both driver and passengers were pretty common. One cool thing is, the game is coded to have passengers take over from a driver who has died. Saw it happen. Since I had them, tried soft vehicles on AT mines. Ouch. All passengers and crew killed in jeeps. In trucks, about 75% of passengers and all crew killed.
  12. Some more test data. I tried Stuarts, M8s, and some M3A1s running over AP minefields. All of these turned out to have fewer hitpoints in their tracks/wheels (or mine explosions affect them more), and so to take fewer mines to immobilize. Stuarts have almost the same hitpoints as there are AP mines in a minefield -- in most cases, the last mine hit both neutralized the minefield and immobilized the Stuart. M8s and halftracks have even fewer hitpoints, and are immobilized by perhaps 10 or so AP mine explosions. In all cases, no crew were hurt, no vehicle was destroyed, knocked out, or abandoned. Basically, any armor at all seems to protect well enough against AP mines. I also tested AT mines. These minefields are either 2 or 3 mines. All hits caused immediate immobilization. Stuarts had no further effects (besides suppression); no crew hurt, no other systems affected, etc. M8s can be destroyed by AT mines, including killing and wounding the crew. Same for halftracks. AT mines can be detected and taped by engineers, but this does not seem to do very much. (more testing needed of this.)
  13. I ran a longer range test (200m or so) where each side had a hedge. Squads were split up into teams. Basically nothing happened -- some initial shooting with a few casualties, but then the sides stabilized into not shooting. The teams with binoculars could see the enemy, but they had SMGs and few rifles they plinked a bit with. Very few of the heavy weapons ended up in teams with binoculars: few on the American side, none of the Germans. Thus, even though the team w/ binocs was sitting right next to them and could see enemies, the LMG could not fire because all it had was ?s. poesel, I do wonder if facing is part of what causes the spotting problems. In that video you linked it looked like the Germans were facing somewhat off to the right of where the Americans were. I know that squads Face a particular action spot. It might help to carefully make sure that both sides are facing one of the action spots where the enemy is.
  14. Here's a contrary reading. The setup is similar. Teams, can see HQ, 80m distance, each side behind its own tall hedgerow. Here, the Germans win handily. Americans still seem to spot first, but this doesn't matter much because of the cover. I am guessing that the better penetration of the MG42 matters more. Or perhaps the ability to reload it while "down". The Germans seem to get disproportionate woundings. Edit: tried giving the Americans 100% squads. They still lose.
  15. poesel71, first off good work. I downloaded it and I took at look at #11. There is one small error you have: you forgot to make the Americans "Regular" experience; instead they have two veteran and one green squad. This may help their spotting slightly, but a quick test shows, not enough to change the outcome. My immediate reaction is, holy crap, two squads lying in the grass at 60m! This is very unlikely... but then I had to admit to myself that it still seemed like all the German SMGs should carry the day. Obviously they don't. The Americans do spot first and fire first, which snowballs rapidly. I changed the test to be more realistic, or at least, more like I play the game. I: * changed the map so that all units can see their platoon HQ (distant). The HQ itself is hiding behind a hedgerow, and so is immune to fire. * put a wall in for units to set up behind * split all squads Testing with with this setup does cut off the turn 1 surrenders. But the outcome is the same: Americans win handily. The Germans take significantly more casualties than the Americans. Even in the first minute, on scenario author test. I am not sure why this is -- probably just more lead downrange.
  16. Another thing I expect was happening here was your team was green, and/or had low motivation, and was not in contact with their HQ unit. Units like that tend to spend a lot of time cowering. The solution is not to send units that are not capable of independent action off on their own. Keep 'em with the leader. And don't expect any units cut off from command to fight as well as those with a decent commander.
  17. One more test of individual tanks to see how many AP mine hits it takes to immobilize them. Here are the numbers for 5 tanks: 25, 22, 22, 21, 24 So you can see that it takes quite many to do the trick. The average number of hits required was ~23.
  18. Here's another test I ran, using the same setup. This time I just ran one tank at a time, and carefully counted the explosions of mines as it ran back and forth over the same minefield for a few turns. Did it with three tanks; here are the results in terms of number of mines detonated per turn: turn tank# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 tank1 5 4 3 0 1 tank2 4 6 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 tank3 5 3 0 2 2 2 (note again that these turns have two passes over the minefield, so they can be compared to those in the first test only by doubling the turn#.) So we see that my earlier conjecture is correct. The minefields had, respectively, 13, 14, and 14 mines. Whether I missed an explosion in tank1, or the amounts vary, or perhaps sometimes you get duds -- I don't know. More testing would be required. However, it is fairly clear that chance to hit a mine is proportionate to #mines left in the field.
  19. The problem with this is that it is desirable to have the HQ unit forward with the men, to provide leadership. Another solution is to place a jeep with a radio near your mortars. Then they get the effect of the radio and you can call them from afar. (Why the HQ Support unit does not have the same effect is a good question.)
  20. Erwin, in the game, a minefield that is known and neutralized is shown with a green sign with a white X on it. The numbers above are how many minefields were neutralized (second column) per turns of running over them with tanks (first column). Thus, half of the minefields (9 of 18) were neutralized on the 10th turn. Since I observed mine hits per turn to decrease as the minefield was run over repeatedly, it is my guess that BF models each minefield N mines initially, where N decrease by 1 each time a mine is hit, and where the chance to hit a mine is proportionate to the # left in the field.
  21. Steiner, I didn't know that. They actually had FOs remote from the MGs, with radios I guess?
  22. I did some testing of how tanks interact with AP mines. Set up a single-action-spot wide minefield across a small flat field, then ran a company of M4A1 Sherman (mid)s across it. Back and forth, numerous times, with the same tank running over the same minefield once on each turn. Of immediate note is that all tanks buttoned up upon hitting a mine. All of the tanks took tread damage which increased with # mine hits, but none was immobilized. There were zero crew casualties (not even a wound) even after driving back and forth enough time to neutralize the field. Initially the average tank hit several mines each turn (that is, there were more than one explosion per minefield per turn). Later as the fields declined fewer hits happened and sometimes tanks would drive across a minefield without any mine pop at all. On the fifth time across, one of the minefields (out of 18 total) was neutralized. The number of neutralized fields (shown green w/ white X) then went as follows: 5 - 1 6 - 2 7 - 3 8 - 5 9 - 5 10 - 7 11 - 9 12 - 11 13 - 11 14 - 12 15 - 12 16 - 13 (here I started doing back-and-forth per turn) 18 - 14 20 - 17 22 - 18 No tank ever got immobilized. This suggests that immobilization from a single AP mine hit is not possible. Most of the tanks ended with their Track "hitpoints" in the red. At the end I took the worst-off tank and ran it over some fresh minefields -- another ~8 or so mine hits sufficed to immobilize it.
  23. Mounted weapons are never detachable. Any passenger unit can fire them. This is a good use small teams you have no better use for -- scout or AT teams, crews from killed vehicles, XO units, etc. The ammo that you find in various infantry carriers can be acquired by its crew or passengers. To know what type to acquire you have to look at the weapons the infantrymen have, and then know what caliber they require. For example M1 Garands take ".30cal M2" ammunition.
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