Vanir Ausf B

I did some testing a couple weeks ago that showed that the shooter deliberately spreads area fire over the entire action spot, but only that one action spot. There is some leakage around the edges, depending on weapon dispersion, but the vast majority goes into one AS. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why a shooter may want to concentrate fire into a specific AS. Lets say your unit is facing a line of bocage that you want to suppress so you can advance a squad, but only one corner of the bocage has LOS to the ground you will be advancing over. There is no reason why the fire support unit should be forced to spread fire outside that area. Or maybe the area you want to suppress is more than 1 AS wide but you have several units available to provide fire. These situations are not rare. It also risks making recon by fire less effective. The point of recon by fire is to make the enemy think they have been spotted, thereby inducing them to reveal themselves by either return fire or moving. If area fire is always a linear spread of some arbitrarily set length then it will be readily apparent if incoming fire is aimed or area, thereby telegraphing if the unit has been spotted or not. Yes, but it was desired as an option, and one with adjustable parameters. No one would want mortar fire that is always linear. Well, at least I don't

No, even then, except in the case of buildings. Look at his picture worth a thousand words on page 2.

Of course it is. It's about forbidding the concentration of area fire into a single action spot.

You have missed something badly. Individual soldiers within units using Quick move will semi-randomly pause to fire at spotted enemy units within effective weapon range. Although in my experience this is far more likely to result in the quick moving soldier getting hit than whatever he's shooting at so maybe conscripts should be made more likely to do it.

I don't know much about these weapons, but since the traverse was hand-cranked the limiting factor would presumably be the right arm of a soldier. But I did find a video that may be suggestive, in particular between the 39 and 47 second marks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcI0kuARYSk

I wasn't aware I had said there were two.

It would be. One common mistake people make is forgetting to apply the 1.11 patch before the 2.0 upgrade.

I think any across the board reduction in area fire effectiveness would be a bad idea.

I don't know what you mean by "in addition to that". There is nothing in addition to that. Here, I dug up an old explanation. It seems Charles didn't think shot trap penetrations were so vanishingly rare. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=172749&postcount=36

+1 I predict many forum threads, followed by many adjustments in patches.

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No, I'm only pointing out that it isn't logically consistent. Buildings are just man-made terrain. In reality area fire onto a suspected enemy position would be defined by the physical properties of the position as it relates to where your own units are or will be. A generic spread is not realistic. For example, if there is a copse 2 action spots wide surrounded by a grass field you would logically hit those 2 spots, not those 2 spots plus 4 more in the open field to each side. My opinion on the "God's eye" problem is the same as BFC's : that there is no solution and the best thing to do is just roll with it.

I see what you mean now. It's an interesting idea, and I am in favor of having the option to spread area fire over a linear distance. But it seems contradictory to allow point area fire on a building in which there has been no enemy contact, but not allowing it on any other terrain feature.

Endymion did and responded to it on the previous page.

Good find. I have often wondered what the reaction would be if BFC ever modeled the tendency for spontaneous combustion among German heavy vehicles, lol. BTW, you don't need to keep purposely breaking your links. BFC doesn't care about linking to sites like this.

It will be interesting to see is how BFC chooses to model Soviet indirect fire inflexibility. In most cases on-call support should be limited to on-map assets that have direct LOS to the spotter, with higher level fires limited to pre-planned barrages only. CMBB fudged this by allowing everything to be on-call, just with longer response times.

As far as I am aware there is no unit spotting power. Rather, spotting is calculated at the individual soldier level. Although soldiers do have some 360° awareness, they are always considered to be looking specifically in the direction they are facing. That is why having the Covered Arc command act as a "stare harder" command would be redundant. Soldiers are always staring hard in whatever direction they happen to be facing unless they are hiding or suppressed. The Covered Arc just gets them all staring in the same direction, as well as defining engagement parameters. At least that is my understanding from reading many BFC posts over the years.

That is very well argued, John, but you just repeated what I already said the game does, except you used about 10 times more words.

I'll take properly functioning fog over fire or decals.

Those were not bayonets. They were light sabers.

After watching that video a 2nd time I have to wonder if perhaps the artillery lethality was dialed way down to make that video. That or those tank riders are incredibly tough. Or just lucky.

BFC has said it does not. It just makes all the troops look in the same direction, which can help spotting in that direction through sheer volume of eyeballs pointed that way, but there is no bonus or modifier.

It appears that the beta version of the game that was used for the vehicle screenshots in the manual had the "Bad" and "Poor" symbols switched around. It's that way for all the vehicles, not just the Stug. The ratings in the game are correct.

Possibly opportunity cost. The number of people who create this content and their time are finite resources. People making campaigns for a CMBN or CMFI campaign pack means fewer people working on campaigns for the East Front and modern warfare games. Unless they have extra time available so they can do both at once, but we don't know if that is the case. No doubt I can hear it now: "What? No new units? BFC is charging me money for stuff I could just download from the Repository for free or make myself? WAAA!!! "

I'm no historian, but I don't think there is a whole lot of overlap with regards to vehicles and other units currently in the games and what would be seen in those campaigns. For example, the French Army of 1940 would have to be created almost entirely from scratch.