Vanir Ausf B

That may be true, at least in the WW2 era. I could be wrong, but as far as I know hearing protection was not issued to artilleymen either. I have no personal experience but I would bet that standing next to a 155mm all day can't be good for the ears. And I cannot accept that the proper real world usage of AT rockets in urban environments involved running out into the middle of the street to fire them.

I'm going to move him up so he has LOS and retest.

It's the exact same except for a few modifications. 1) There is a TRP. 2) The FO is off the bocage so he doesn't have LOS to the target. 3) The fire missions are point targets instead of area targets. 4) The test is run in Iron mode instead of Scenario Author Test. This is actually a earlier version of the same test I sent you. When I began that testing I noticed that the fire was coming in off target so often that getting good results would be difficult. So I removed the TRP, moved the FO up to the bocage and saw accuracy improve immensely.

Another odd thing I noticed in my test is that the mortars would sometimes seem to walk the rounds in towards the TRP. You can see this if you have a mortar selected as the line will show where they are currently firing. This is odd. Neither the mortar crews nor the FO have LOS to the TRP. They are just firing at a coordinate on a map so they would not know if they were on target and would have no means of adjusting.

I don't know if this is an example of the behavior mentioned in this thread, but I do have an example of indirect mortar fire on a TRP landing off target. I have 3 60mm mortar crews firing on a TRP, point target maximum/short. The fire has been called in by an FO. All units are Elite/+2. The rounds land off target more often than not. Interestingly they seem to land off target by the same distance, 120-130 meters.

WHY YES, I THINK WE ARE! There is no evidence that firing a PF or Bazooka from an average sized room is dangerous to anyone not standing behind the weapon. Justifying its use is trivially easy to do. Much more difficult is justifying the blanket ban on it use from buildings, which even BFC has admitted is unrealistically restrictive.

Given that crew served weapons currently deploy instantly I suspect this could be a bug.

It sounds like he was just lucky the turret didn't get hit.

Depends. The front of the turret or the front of the hull? Is the 17 pdr firing APCBC or APDS ammo? The turret can be penetrated by either ammo type to ranges over 1000m, and probably over 2000m. APCBC will normally not penetrate the upper hull at any range, but APDS should be able to out past 1000m

Same here. And to make it worse, when I do finally get around to playing a scenario it may be 6 months later, at which point I don't remember if it was downloaded or if it came with the game.

For Windows, CM it is limited to 4 GB on 64 bit OS or 2 GB on 32 bit OS without the Large Address Aware switch set (the Mac version of CM is a 64 bit executable so this does not apply to it). If you have 4 GB of system RAM your OS will be using some of that so having at least 6 GB of RAM would be beneficial. As for VRAM, I don't know if going from 1 GB to 2 GB will make any difference. Phil would be the guy to ask. It may if the 2 GB card has enough memory bandwidth. Strangely enough you can buy video cards with 4 GB of VRAM that run slower than the same card w/2 GB because they are bandwidth starved.

This is how I see it. I would be in favor of a hard cap at 100m if programming a context sensitive AI routine is too hard.

This is from the CMBN 1.01 Readme: So yeah, the issue has been raised. But "less likely" must mean they reduced the frequency from 100% of the time to 90% of the time because I still see SMGs fire at targets up to at least 200m.

That is a thread title I would have to click on.

Fine. But the point stands that the game should not assume unsplit squads, if that is indeed that case. ... I see. Given the more pinpoint machine gun accuracy vs. vehicles I think you are likely correct.

What if it's a team rather than a whole squad? Nobody keeps their squads un-split.

I don't see the point in more testing. The ballistics model appears to be working fine. As previously mentioned, there is a strong argument in favor of a small increase in Pz IV front armor to represent real world variation but these variations were common in German AFVs. My test with buttoned tanks shows that when vehicle optics are the only means of spotting, the Pz IV dominates. The anecdotal evidence I have seen suggests that the Allied tanker's primary issue with Pz IV at long range isn't a lack of ability to destroy them, it was the difficulty in seeing them. There are several reasons why. 1) Moving vehicles are easier to spot than stationary ones, and in the ETO it was the Allies who were on the attack the large majority of the time. In CM Germans are as likely to be on the move as the Allies. 2) Tank optics. This is modeled in CM with regard to spotting although it doesn't seem to have any effect on accuracy as it probably should. 3) Binoculars. Testing shows that Shermans can greatly reduce the German advantage in optics by remaining unbuttoned. That's fine, but the German advantage in optics was not limited to vehicles. They also had better binoculars. I don't think this is modeled in CM. 4) German use of "smokeless" powder. This is not modeled in CM. "Due to the type of powder a Jerry tank uses, they can fire at you and are difficult to pick up because there is so little smoke or muzzle flash. When we fire our 76mm there is so much smoke and muzzle flash that you can hardly observe your burst, except at long ranges." -- Cpl. Everette J. Harris, Gunner

Needless to say I think your approach is completely wrong and will end up going nowhere. However... If you think that your testing has demonstrated a problem tell us what the problem is exactly and what needs to be changed.

If you are going to design or play a large armor heavy scenario or QB I can understand the utility of testing the way noob is. But I agree that in a more typical combined arms CM game armor engagements tend to play out as a series of 1v1 or 2v1 encounters over the course of the game rather than all the tanks on each side opening fire on each other at the same time.

That introduces a snowball effect without telling us anything we can't learn from isolated lanes. At times I have used the type of test you refer to when testing large groups of infantry in order to generate huge sample sizes, but when the number of units are small enough be make it practical I prefer isolated lanes.

Exactly the same as the previous tests I posted further up on this page, except that the IV Hs are swapped out for Js.

Pz IV J vs. M4a1 @ 1500m. Unbuttoned. Pz IV Tanks lost: ....... 55 Tanks retreated: 11 Total: .............. 66 Sherman Tanks lost: ....... 59 Tanks retreated: 36 Total: .............. 95

I have completed 2 tests. The setup is 10 Pz IV h late vs. 10 Sherman M4a1 mid on 10 isolate lanes. Range 1500m. I ran each test 20 times on Iron difficulty hotseat. Each iteration was let run for 3 turns and then I cease-fired. First test: all tanks buttoned Pz IV H Tanks lost: ....... 28 Tanks retreated: 6 Total: .............. 34 Sherman M4a1 Tanks lost: ....... 62 Tanks retreated: 45 Total: .............. 107 Second test: all tanks unbuttoned Pz IV H Tanks lost: ....... 68 Tanks retreated: 8 Total: .............. 76 Sherman M4a1 Tanks lost: ....... 64 Tanks retreated: 27 Total: .............. 91 The much larger number of Shermans counted as retreated instead of destroyed is most likely due to its ability to pop smoke, which the Pz IV lacks.

That is not a phenomenon unique to the Pz IV. I'm running my own tests, and at 1500m I see occasional top hull penetrations of the Sherman too. Also, at this range the large majority of hits on the Pz IV driver plate and lower hull do not penetrate. Most lethal penetrations are through the turret.

That's what I was sayin'. All Kettler had to do was look at his own link.