Vanir Ausf B

We know from what Steve has said that Charles declared everything right and proper after getting a ricochet penetration on the first shot of a test, an extraordinarily unlikely event. So it is entirely possible that he simply doesn't know how rare it is in the game. There is something wacky about hits on weak points in general, not just the Panther shot trap. Hull machine gun ports are hit extremely rarely or not at all while the main cannon gets hit too often. I'm going to do another thread about that soon. It will probably go nowhere like this one but we'll see.

Yes, but it appears that the reason the guns were "destroyed" in CM terms was fear of imminent crushing. Not that I am particularly worried about it not being possible in CM. But it did happen, and not everything tanks ran over were abandoned. Yakov Petrovich managed to accelerate the vehicle so well that it almost flew over the ditch and, landing with a hard jolt, we right off the bat struck an armored personnel carrier with the left edge of the front armor, sending it into the opposite ditch upside down. Pivoting, we started down the enemy column like a battering ram, smashing and overturning vehicles and equipment with our momentum, armor and mass. Seeing my tank destroyer coming, some of the drivers of the forward vehicles panicked and tried to turn away; others were turning around or unsuccessfully trying to overcome the roadside ditches to hide in the woods. The rest, having abandoned their vehicles, fled into the forest. However, the vehicles in the rear, unaware of what was happening in front of them, continued to roll forward, and vehicles began to collide. Finally, all movement stopped and complete chaos and panic engulfed the road. Even so, Yakov Petrovich kept shoving vehicles over and knocking them into the roadside ditches. The machine gunners fired long bursts from the forest at the remaining fascists, preventing them from slipping away into the woods. Machine gun bursts also caught those who were climbing out of crumpled vehicles. For a second I opened the hatch cover to see how Revutsky's vehicle was doing. All I could see was the rear of his tank destoyer, its exhaust pipes belching smoke. Having smashed into a truck towing a gun with one track, his self-propelled gun was continuing to move towards the next victim, briefly dragging the half-smashed truck with it. The nose of my vehicle rose again before abruptly dropping back onto the road, lifting open the hatch cover before slamming it closed again -- one more enemy vehicle was smashed. -- Panzer Destroyer

They were freshly abandoned. I think it would be quite unusual for any gun crew to stay with their gun as the tracks are rolling over them.

The report doesn't say. ... We had already burst into the artillery positions. My vehicle was rising and falling for the fifth time -- it meant that our Yakov Petrovich was crushing the fifth enemy gun beneath our tracks. Pyataev had crushed no fewer -- Ivan always acted boldly, to the point of recklessness in attacks. Of course, we had been lucky that the enemy had not a single tank or assault gun in Stulno. There had been no faustniki either. -- Vasiliy Krysov, Panzer Destroyer

The Tiger Kompanie was ordered to throw out the enemy who had penetrated into a woods, and then continue to advance. About 1215 hours, together with an Infanterie Battalion, the Tiger Kompanie started to attack. The thick forest caused extremely poor visibility (50 meters), and a narrow trail forced the Tiger Kompanie to advance in a single file. The Russian infantry fled their positions as soon as the Tigers appeared. The anti-tank guns, which were pulled forward into position by the opponent withing three-quarters of an hour after entering the woods, were quickly destroyed in spite of the difficulty in seeing the targets. Some of the anti-tank guns were destroyed by hits and some were rolled over. - Panzertruppen 2

That works both ways. The presence of tanks was a significant moral booster for friendly troops.

Unbuttoned tank commanders do have access to long range optics. They're called binoculars

Man, I wish I had come across that Charles quote much earlier in this discussion...

I did some testing today to see if there is anything already in the game that would help. Placing AT guns in trenches does make them more difficult to spot. Sandbag walls do not have the same effect.

No idea. You will probably need to post the save game file to get an answer. It could be a bug but there is no way to tell from a written description.

Yes, stance matters. Troops in a fetal position have very limited LOS.

If one of the units in question is a heavy weapons team, such as a heavy machine gun or mortar, then yes it could happen since for those types of units LOS is traced specifically from the gunner. For other types of line infantry, no, that should not be happening. But just because two units are in the same action spot doesn't mean that every soldier is in the exact same place.

He can't answer you.

I never had much issue with the camera controls but I have read many comments from people who have. They could help you out better than I, but the gist of what I have seen is that you get used to it and mapping the more commonly used functions to a mouse with lots of buttons is a big help. The more recent patch has significant performance optimizations that have increased frame rates on many if not most people's machines, particularly with large scenarios. But predicting how much difference that would make on your system is impossible. I play on a 4 year old laptop with a 1 MB graphics card and do well enough. You can PBEM anyone with just the base game as long as you are patched up to the latest version. You are just limited to playing scenarios that come with the base game and QBs with base game units.

I'm fairly sure that national differences in propellent are not modeled in the game. Everyone essentially uses "smokeless" powder. At least I certainly have seen no evidence in the game of the difficulties US 76mm tanks had in seeing their shot fall because of the smoke from their own guns, and the visual representation is greatly understated compared to real life.

There are no detailed stats of the sort there was in CMx1.

The OP is asking about the unit stats that were displayed at the bottom of the screen in the CMx1 QB screen so that people did not have to be TO&E experts to know what they where getting. There is nothing like that in-game and I do not know of any 3rd party docs, unfortunately. BFC has said they intend to redo the QB editor at some point to include some unit information but it's anyone's guess when that may happen. My guess is not anytime soon.

Awesome! Thank you.

Yes. I've done some reading and I think this is a consequence of a change made back in the CMSF days, v 1.20 perhaps. Prior to that, dust was apparently not subject to any spotting checks at all and was just always visible to everyone. That was rightly deemed unacceptable so the spotting of dust was then tied to the spotting of the unit that made it, which has it's own set of issues. Ideally dust would be subject to spotting on it's own, but I wonder if the engine is capable of that.

I did not keep track of "?" contacts (or whatever they are called in CMx2), but they were affected as well. In the case of large caliber guns such as Pak 40 the dust is so thick after about a turn of firing that it will completely block LOS for as long as it continues.

If you want to reduce the player's God-like ability without gimping legitimate tactics in the process you have to reduce or alter the information that gets to the player. One way to do that is fog of war. Specifically, I think that the location of the initial contact icon should be randomized. They were in the CMx1 games, dramatically so, and it has always puzzled my why they are located pretty much right at the unit's actual location in the new games. Even sound contacts are correctly located. It wouldn't be a big difference maker, but it wouldn't be insignificant either, IMO.

I don't understand what you're saying here. IF he is shooting at empty terrain, but you can't assume that area fire against unstopped enemy units will always hit empty terrain. The point is that under the present system if fire is hitting the AS your unit is in you may assume that unit has been spotted but that may not be a correct assumption, leading you to move or return fire when you would have been better served laying low. Under the proposed system area fire will never hit exclusively on one AS, thereby giving away the awareness level.

Unless you want to make the length also adjustable then there is no way to make it work. The problem isn't the number 6. The problem is that the number is arbitrary rather than determined by the terrain, as it realistically would be. The fact that you are dismissing speculative fires as irrelevant makes me think I am wasting my time here. Recon by fire is certainly not "fearful shooting into the air" are anything similar. Reconnaissance by fire does not mean firing blindly with the hopes of hitting something. It is a technique of firing into areas believed to contain enemy in order to provoke them into returning fire or fleeing, at which time they can be engaged using more precise methods. http://op-for.com/2007/07/recon_by_fire.html I'm somehow surprised that you thought I was referring to the TacAI. I was referring to the human player. This really is a waste of time. Although it varies in the details, this proposal is conceptually similar to others that have come before and it has no chance for the same reason they didn't. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=86106&page=28 http://ftp.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=86244

I would argue that the corner cases are actually the majority. What about rounded or irregularly shaped terrain features? What about linear features that are diagonal to the shooter? The proposed system only really works for terrain that is both linear and exactly parallel to the shooter. This only holds true if the area is equal to or larger than whatever generic spread length the units are forced to use, and also only if it is perpendicular to the direction of incoming fire. You wouldn't know that at all, unless you were to presume that area fire is only used in the above situation and never against suspect terrain in which nothing has been spotted. Also, because the length of spread is reduced when a contact marker is present the opposing player would know for sure whether or not the firing unit(s) had a contact marker.

For what it's worth, that matches up remarkably well with that archive footage of the SdKfz 7/2 I posted. It looked to be about at 90° turn, and going by the time stamp took about three and a half seconds, which works out to 26° per second.