Vanir Ausf B

They haven't even released 3.0 yet and you're already playing 4.0? :eek:

I say nay! Or was it ni?

The Soviets captured over 150,000 Germans during Bagration and paraded them through Moscow. I think we should be able to parade prisoners to taunt our opponents.

Yep, it's a virus. The most common symptom of infection is a compulsive urge to play one more turn.

Wow, that Kolmogorov-Smirnov site has a calculator! My job just got easier. Ken, you need to click on that link.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. ****. The more I think about that Panther spotting the more it bothers me. I know it's a small-ish data set, and I know the Sherman 76 is a better than average allied tank, but that just seems wrong. I can tell already that as soon as I drink a cup of coffee I'm going to have to do something about it, and I can't even cheat by testing them against each other because of vehicle size differences. ****

At this point I NEED to be smoking something. I posted the Panther data set because it is the most extreme example, but it is actually not a-typical of spotting data sets in that it is not a normal distribution, and I think you are on to something with the Poisson reference. In all of the data sets the large majority of data points lying more than one standard deviation from the mean are on the same end of the distribution curve. So you have a cluster of data points on one end of the curve with a very gradual decrease in frequency. In a typical group of 10 spotting tanks with a mean spotting time of 120 seconds you see about 3 enemy tanks spotted in the first minute, 3 more in the second minute, 3 more in the 3rd and 4th minutes, and then one crew that takes 8 or 9 minutes to spot anything. That the Panther tank appears to be somewhat of a dog in the spotting contest when it should be the star of the show is disturbing, but I'm too burnt out on this at the moment to chase it down.

Yes, that is what I am referring to. But as for the sound contacts that give a visual icon, those are also accurately located unless it has been changed very recently. I have tested moving vehicles in hotseat mode to confirm this.

Do tanks still get stuck in the aiming/firing loop when shooting over marginal cover, or was that fixed?

From the locked thread. I'm not sure I can provide a definitive answer. Here are my test results. All tests done at 1200 meters. All tanks buttoned and in the open. 10 tanks per side per test run. Each test run 10 times (except Sherman vs Sherman which was run 50 times), so 100 iterations per side per test. Sherman 76 vs Sherman 76 Average spot time: 106.1 seconds. Standard deviation = 100.5 M4A3w Sherman 76 vs Panzer IV H late Sherman average spotting time: 123.5 seconds. Standard deviation = 105 Pz IV average spotting time: 119.4 seconds. Standard deviation = 117.6 M4A3w Sherman 76 vs Panther A late Sherman average spotting time: 111.5 seconds. Std dev = 107.4 Panther average spotting time: 139.1 seconds. Std dev = 138.5 If I tally the number of "wins" by comparing which tank spotted the other first in each test run we get: Sherman 76 wins: 49 Panzer IV wins: 51 Sherman 76 wins: 58 Panther wins: 42 I would not put too much faith in those numbers given the huge standard deviation. Also, the Sherman 76 has a 6x gunners sight which is better than the 3x sight on the Sherman 75 and most other Allied tanks. Then again, the Panzer IV gunners sight is only 2.5x :confused: The sight on the Panther can be switched between 2.5x and 5x. But I do think there is enough here to conclude that whatever German optics advantage there may be in the game is too small to be tactically significant. For anyone who's interested, this is the raw data from the Panther test. Spotting times in seconds. 261 297 40 93 84 162 19 92 250 366 29 27 10 74 329 38 411 148 85 26 380 76 125 98 30 624 77 216 91 15 32 133 342 74 374 29 37 104 28 115 43 5 48 24 27 26 2 122 50 20 484 101 313 13 279 53 152 101 466 54 146 54 36 188 179 444 1 115 60 116 91 93 212 56 244 200 147 217 323 44 123 71 666 60 80 233 276 35 19 76 33 18 96 153 80 72 281 6 27 317

Nope. I just tested a couple of Pak 40s firing in hotseat mode. You can locate them to within a few action spots from the sound alone pretty easily.

Not sure what sort of baseline you are looking for, but here is a save file (2.12 of course) that demonstrates the problem in several different ways. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zfvho3ef2hyxg7b/That%20lying%20LOS%20tool.bts

Sorry, Ken. This is probably a lot less fun than what you were doing One other thing you may want to look at is the "hull down" and "partial hull down" text on the LOS tool. It seems to lie sometimes, as AKD and myself noted earlier in the thread.

Yes, all my tests were with tanks buttoned.

This is certainly the crux of the matter, but there is one other factor: how much more difficult should a hull down tank be to spot. It's not entirely clear if it makes any difference in the game presently. My testing suggests a small difference in spotting times vs. fully hull down tanks, but it is so small (about 16%) it may be statistical noise. Common sense says a hull down tank should be harder to spot, but whether it should be 10% harder or 50% I don't know.

If I were sane I would have never started. It's been twenty years :eek: since I took statistics and I have inconveniently forgotten how to calculate confidence intervals. So now I run tests until the percentages stop moving around. Then I run a few more, post them on the forum and dare anyone to prove me wrong

Yes, I know But I have some sympathy for his position since he is not entirely incorrect, even if his tests are insufficient to prove it. As far as I can ascertain he has made basically 3 assertions: 1) The Panzer IV is at a significant spotting disadvantage vs. the Sherman. I am in the process of testing this. Early results suggest it is probably not true. 2) Hull down tanks are no more difficult to hit than tanks in the open. This is not even remotely true. 3) Hull down tanks are at a significant spotting disadvantage vs. tanks in the open. This actually is true. As you have probably noticed, there is a whole separate thread on this although it seems to have spilled over into this one.

One related issue that I don't think has been mentioned is how you can locate the position of unspotted units by their firing sound. I would really like to see some random variation in sound location for unspotted units.

In my experience, keeping squads and teams in contact with their platoon HQ is already important to their success simply because of the faster recovery from suppression and moral damage. The problem is really what purpose do company and battalion HQs have in the game. The are ostensibly there to relay spotting information between platoons and between companies, but it has been my impression that his information filters through the system too slowly and unreliably for it to be of much use. In most cases by the time the information travels from one squad up to the company HQ and then back down to another squad the enemy unit will have already been spotted anyways or moved. So in practice, company and battalion HQs mosty function as backup platoon HQs in case the LT steps on a landmine. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, or even if there is one that doesn't cause problems. Most of the time I just don't worry about it.

I don't think your tests are worthless. But there are a few issues with them. 1) The whole turning the turret backwards thing. I know that was suggested to you, but there are less convoluted ways of determining the effects of removing the driver and radio operator from the spotting equation. And I've already done that anyways. 2) Your sample sizes are rather small. 3) Using tank damage as a means of measuring hull down effectiveness is problematic since you are introducing a factor that is not directly related to hull down status. It is better to factor out variability in damage per hit by assuming every hit destroys the tank and then only counting the first shot fired. As someone who has done this sort of thing a time or two before I can tell you that it is unusual for everyone to simultaneously nod their heads in agreement with you, even when you have a strong case. Good data and persistence will usually win out in the end. But sometimes you just have to accept that BFC's priorities are not your priorities (see recent Panther shot trap thread for an example). And sometimes the wheels of change turn at a glacial pace. The issue of AT rockets fired from buildings was hotly debated for close to 2 years before any change was made. Again, persistence is key. You'll never get anywhere if you throw your hands up every time a beta tester poops on your spreadsheet.

Test results suggest it is not advanced enough. The problem can be reduced to the difference in two variables: spotting ability reduction caused by LOS obstruction while hull down vs. concealment bonus for hull down tanks. The former is much larger than the latter, about 67% vs. 16% according to my test results (there appears to be no concealment bonus at all for being partially hull down). I will let others with personal experience in the matter debate exactly where those numbers should be, but they need to be much closer together. Do that and the problem is solved. There does not appear to be any issue with hit probability related to hull down. My testing has been fairly limited on this, but it shows a reduction of first shot hit percentage of more than 50% on hull down or even mostly hull down tanks at 800 meters.

I don't see much point in more testing of hull down status. From my testing in the other thread I think we have a good basic idea of how hull down affects both spotting and hit probability in the game as well as the practical implications. There is an endless list of variables you could jigger this way or that, different vehicles with different optics, buttoned/unbuttoned, range, crew experience level, ect. and if someone wants to see how those affect things that's great. Logically, I would not expect any of those to fundamentally change the dynamic as I have presented it, but bugs are often found by not assuming everything is working logically. 1000 iterations per test is far more than necessary, IMO. I did 63 per side initially, which is what I posted. I went back last night and did 45 more per side. After adding in the new results the averages hardly budged, going from 84.5 to 83.2 for the hull down tanks and from 57.4 to 57.7 for the tanks in the open. I will do a few more spotting tests tonight regarding how optics and vehicle size affects spotting.

No one is moving in these tests.

Yep Although to be fair, I tested at 800 meters. Variation increases with range.

To illustrate what I mean I just ran another quick cover test on full hull down (grey target line) tanks. Hits: 18 Misses: 36 About the same as the "mostly" hull down tanks with a blue target line. Slightly worse, actually, but that is probably random variation.