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Wreck

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Everything posted by Wreck

  1. Real MGs could not fire indirect as such; they are kinetic energy weapons and thus require direct fire. However, real MGs did fire at things the weapon's operator was too far from to see well or at all -- there would be an observer standing nearby with binoculars observing the fall of shot. And at long ranges, the "line" of fire had sufficient arc that it was at theoretically possible to fire indirectly, assuming that the observer could get sufficient height to see where the bullets were going. I am not aware of any actual instances of this, but I am sure it must have happened. In any case, in CMBN there is no indirect fire for MGs. They can shoot only at targets or areas they can see. However, it is true that MGs (like all direct fire) can affect places the MG cannot see, by firing somewhere in front of it that the MG can see. Bullets which don't hit anything keep going until they do, or they leave the field of play. If there's men near a bullet zipping by, regardless of whether or not the MG sees them, they may be suppressed or (if an enemy) even hit and wounded or killed.
  2. Yes. (this sentence intentionally left blank)
  3. They are not boolean. As they get weaker the signs change colors. Or so I've read. You cannot affect them with small-caliber artillery, just large (150mm+). http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Mine I do not know if large artillery can partially clear a minefield.
  4. http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Hedgehog
  5. To the OP: generally you don't need to use indirect fire for mortars. Indirect is generally inferior to direct, certainly against the AI, often even against a human. They fire direct much more quickly, not requiring spotting rounds after the first two.
  6. Nik has it right. Higher level HQ units can give C2 to any unit that is subordinate to them. This happens automatically whenever the unit cannot see or hear its platoon HQ, if the unit is close to the higher level HQ. See the C2 article at the wiki for more: http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Command_and_control
  7. I think mortars are dramatically more powerful in CM than they should be. The reason is the LOS model. It's not borg anymore, but from the realism POV the problem of the player knowing all is still there. Call it semiborg. Your units are taking fire. You see a ? -- what can it be but a team, at least 4-5 juicy bugs including a MG42 bug -- worth eating. So, without the mortar or its HQ or indeed any unit except one having seen anything, the mortar opens fire on the exact action spot containing the enemy unit. 1-2 minutes later -- no enemy unit. There's two ways to fix I can see. The simpler is to disallow direct firing any mortar on any spot unless the mortar itself at least knows of a ? there. The player can still mortar such a spot, but only via the indirect fire interface, including minutes of delay, spotting, etc. This is a step in the right direction, but of course it would be still be eminently abusable vs the AI unless the AI were smartened up some to displace a little when it sees spotting rounds near. Still, introducing several minutes of delay into the loop would at least prevent the human steamrolling across the map until the mortars run dry. The more complicated fix would be to allow direct area fire anywhere, but to degrade its accuracy proportionate to the contact level in the target area. Even if you tell a crew, "mortar that treeline", there's no reason why they should pour all fire into one tiny area. So: instead of firing at one action spot, spread fire among, say, each of the 21 closest action spots (a fat cross like in Civ4), or even further out. In the absence of any contacts, weight all such spots equally. When there is a ? in any of them (? from the POV of the mortar), weight it more heavily according to how recent it is. When there is a known unit, weight it very heavily.
  8. As Sergei said: you want scouts out ahead of the main body of the men, as enemy detection. Recon with live bait. Whatever unit is ahead of the rest is often wiped out to the man in an ambush. It's better to lose a scout team of 2 men with rifles, than to lose an assault team of 4-5 men w/ 1-2 SMGs. Usually I move scouts 50m or so in front of the assault team. The "weapons" team (the rest) follows the assault team, or it there is a target in range, finds a position to lay down fire. I usually do not rejoin scouts to either other unit. Scouts and the assault team can work together to find and exploit grenade-range attacks. You don't want them merged because you still want scouts to do the riskiest moves. Only if I am going to engage in some long-ranged attrition would I merge up, and even then only to get a better leader modifier.
  9. It's a solution for experienced human players. It does nothing for the average newbie, who does not read the forums. And of course the AI is like a rank illiterate newbie. Smarter TacAI settings will help everyone. Even people like us who can set ACAs for each of 10-20 bazookas in a larger scenario, but who don't want to have to do that just to get them not to be so stupid.
  10. Let's not get sidetracked. The original poster's point is, in my experience, valid. CMBN units tend to be somewhat trigger happy with bazookas and panzerfausts. In particular, they use them in area fire, which strikes me as something that you rarely want, and also which could be easily turned off (rule: no rockets used when area firing). I don't think there is a general problem -- if you let units pick their own targets, then they will take low probability shots on vehicles (arguable), but they don't waste them on infantry very much. This is yet another thing that makes squads a bad idea. If your squad has rockets and you think the enemy has armor or bunkers, or you just don't know, then it is best to split off the AT team so you don't waste the rockets accidentally.
  11. I have been playing the Road to Montebourg campaign. There is a mission in it in which there is prepared defense which has some mines. There is one particular minefield which I could not clear. This made me curious so I replicated the problem in a test scenario. It seems that sometimes when you add mines to a scenario they all get added at the edge of the map. (Don't know what circumstances -- sometimes they don't.) If you add enough mines, there are not enough map-edge action spots for all the mines. Then they start stacking (2 or more minefields in one action spot), which you cannot otherwise do. When there are stacked minefields, there are several problems that one can run into. First, stacked minefields are unmarkable. Even when all have been found, engineers can mark one of the minefields, but not the other(s). Second, about half the time when they find the first of two stacked minefields, engineers cannot mark the action spot -- I am guessing they don't know of the markable field. Third, when 2+ fields are known in an action spot, and one has been cleared, the mark mines command is still available. You can plot it, but it completes immediately and does not work. It just wastes a turn.
  12. Actually I like bocage, as the American attacker anyway. I get the awesome 60mm mortar, and the poor Germans do not. But even as the German attacker, bocage offers plenty of safe lines of advance. You just have to find them or create them. Open country gives me the willies, even more than it did in CMBO. At least in CMBO you could get cover in woods (even scattered trees), the occasional small building, rough, etc. There's almost no cover at all in CMBO, other than that from elevation-blocking LOS.
  13. ASL Vet: someone ported your nice little bit above to the wiki ( http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Tactics_for_Defenders ). I will take it down if you do not want your work to be used under the CC-BY-SA "free" license.
  14. I also have hit control-Z hopefully... but speaking as a programmer, the chances of this being an "easy" fix are sadly zero.
  15. You can move Quick for very long distances without getting too tired. A kilometer or more, I would guess. It is the optimal speed for most moves. You almost never need Fast. It is also not much faster than Quick, but much much more tiring. There is data on speeds at the wiki: http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Speed . Fast is just 20% faster than Quick. Unfortunately, there is no data on tiringness as yet, so I can't quantify that. There is only one real reason to use Fast: it is to make sure your infantry do not stop and shoot at something when completely exposed and standing. (They will do this more the slower they go.) That they get there a little bit faster is a bonus, but not that consequential.
  16. Having just tested Shermans M3A1 (mids) for the bogging thing, I can tell you with certainty that they go Fast (forward) about twice as fast as reverse. I don't know if that is true for other tanks. I have no knowledge as to whether a Sherman could do ~15mph in reverse, or not. However, what is unrealistic here to my mind is less that they can do that speed, which seems quite reasonable, but that they can do it and maintain a perfectly straight line, for two kilometers. That's a hell of a driver. OTOH, is this really something worth expending effort on? The speed thing, maybe. The straight lines? I don't know. Scenario designers should be responsible here. I am sure they can allow exit if they want. They can also just design deep enough setup zones as to make bombarding them in the hunt for trucks unprofitable.
  17. You can also blast barbed wire. See http://combatmission.wikia.com/wiki/Barbed_wire
  18. One issue here is bogging rate as versus immobilization rate. I did some tests with Shermans (mids), using Lt Bull's earlier posted setup. Put 10 dirt roads perpendicular across the middle of the run, the rest of it (2km) being just grassXT. Then I ran my 20 Shermans across it back and forth (reverse), two times. So total distance of about 8km, half in reverse. There were 5 bogging incidents in the grass, but only one turned into immobilization. There were 4 bogging incidents on the borders of a road (which is impressive when you consider that there were 240 action spots worth of grass and just 10 of roads). Of these 3 turned into immobilization. So the "conversion rate" appears to be very high -- 75%. (By comparison the conversion rate for the grass that I saw was 20%; the rate that Lt Bull saw in mud with many data points was 10%.) I do not have a strong opinion on whether in terms of simulation accuracy bogging when part on/part off should be common. (I tend to think not, but some decent arguments have been advanced here...) I do think that it is a bad thing as a game-mechanic, since as others have pointed out it is very difficult to keep tanks exactly on the roads, and yet they have a driver who should be doing that if it is so important. Also, I would add that the way in which CM is forced to model roads -- fitting them into a square grid -- makes it much harder to be that tank driver on any roads except those straight roads exactly aligned to the grid. But even if we allow that bogging on roadsides might have been common, immobilization is different. I find it hard to accept that a vehicle, tracked or not, that is half on the road would not be able to get unbogged. The rate of conversion that I saw is about 10 times too high.
  19. I did a bit of testing using an adaptation of Lt Bull's setup. To Bull: you ought to go in there and make all the tanks have identical crews. I used 0 leadership, normal motivation, high fitness. I paved every square on Bull's map, and put mud underneath (it appears on the edges of the roads). Then I ran tanks back and forth on the roads. This did nothing -- never even one bog. As one would expect. Then I tried having the tanks drive a slight diagonal, so they started on the edge and diagonal across to the next road by the end. No effect except some slowing. Finally I hand maneuvered some tanks to drive perpendicular to the roads. Again, nothing bad. Anyway, at least for paved roads, there does not appear to be any effect of sliding off. Because of the mud, one would think if there was anything about the terrain underneath that it would cause at least some bogging. But it didn't. Perhaps things are different for dirt roads.
  20. It's a good idea, but if I had to prioritize I would much prefer BF to distinguish vehicle from men than sound from vision. Usually one can tell which contacts are sounds from vision anyway, simply by the location of the contact. (Having all four would be great.)
  21. Sure. But the thing is engines sound different than infantry. If the tanks are sitting still with their engines off shouting at one another, maybe they'd be mistaken for infantry. But not if they are roaring down a road.
  22. You cannot target individual action spots or levels in a building. So far as I know, your fire strikes the whole building. (Presumably only parts of it your unit sees? Dunno.) If multiple levels, it is spread across them. In area fire it never matters whether you see anyone, just whether you have line of fire on them. (It would be nice if, when area firing, your men happen to see an enemy unit near enough to where they are firing they would target it while they see it then return to area fire when it ducks. But I don't think they do this.) Also I think that ricochets and perhaps splintering can cause wounds, although I am not sure about the latter. So you don't even have to be able to hit a man directly. Could use some testing, though. You can certainly suppress enemies and break them without ever seeing them. I've done this fairly often. (If close enough, your men can hear a ? flee out the back.) Buildings in CMBN are not really the place to be, against a human. At least not the smaller buildings. It is usually easy and prudent to hose down every building with a few hundred rounds of MG fire if there is more than a small suspicion that the enemy is occupying it.
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