Vanir Ausf B
-
Posts
9,587 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
7
Posts posted by Vanir Ausf B
-
-
1 hour ago, Artkin said:
It sure does seem like something wacky is going on, and this exactly matches my previous experience. Neither side sees each other despite having good LOS:
There is some wackiness going on but it is due to the way foliage affects spotting. Judging from your screen shots I suspect LOS is being degraded by tree branches, despite appearances to the contrary and despite what the LOS line says.
In Combat Mission tree trunks are accurately represented visually but tree canopies are significantly abstracted. In my experience tree canopies are both less opaque and lower to the ground "under the hood" than their visual representation suggests.
This unintuitiveness is compounded by the target line lacking LOS context. When checking LOS with the target command the LOS line is binary -- you either have it or you don't. But under the hood LOS through trees is non-binary. Tree branches and leaves degrade LOS proportional to how much tree canopy the line passes through "under the hood". The target command line will show clear LOS up to a certain amount of degradation, then at some point will change to show LOS blocked even though spotting is still possible.
-
This doesn't affect the larger picture, but...
-
-
4 hours ago, dan/california said:
Edit: are the trying to saturate a Patriot battery?
It makes you wonder. They put some effort into this one.
-
-
16 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
crews doze off or any number of reasons
The TC had to piss, and no it could not wait.
-
26 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
Fu...k!!!! Sh...t!!! Damn!!! What a hell I just heard at 3:00 of night?! 22 loud explosions not far from of us! And about dozen distant boo-boom... Sh...t!!! Reportedly series of Kinzhals on Kyiv, also there were reports about Kalibrs launches. Well, I want to read good news at the morning
-
2 hours ago, Butschi said:
So, what do we see here? Well, first of all, I should have taken at least ten times the data or make make larger bins. I didn't have the patience for the former and doing the latter would mean that we don't see much of a distribution.
Back when I was doing this for beta testing I would not submit a result to BFC with less than n=300, but I don't have the patience for it anymore. There is a guy who wrote a program in Python to automate it and would do n=1000 but that's not a skill set I possess.
2 hours ago, Butschi said:So, as we've been discussing on page one or so, anecdotal evidence ("here look at this battle, spotting is broken!!!!") is meaningless. But also doing "experiments" is only as good as the experiment itself plus the evaluation afterwards. First of all, if you do experiments, control the variables! Eliminate everything you are not directly interested in. If you want to look at spotting, do it on a flat surface and make both opponents hold fire. Because, as I often see, if you measure time until first shot, or kill, you are skewing the spotting process.
Exactly right. I also make sure all spotters are looking at the same thing, i.e. rather than timing the test groups spotting each other I time them spotting an identical third group (I use T-72As as my "target" group in all tests). I also eliminate C2 information sharing by making every unit of the test group in a different battalion and spacing them by more than 32 meters from each other.
2 hours ago, Butschi said:
Anyway, from the raw data we see: time until partial contact can be any number, time to ID (which is what I call time to go from partial to full contact) is always a multiple of 7.
I've never noticed that before, but it would make sense given CM spotting cycles are in 7 second intervals, most of the time.
2 hours ago, Butschi said:I'm not sure if the long tails (what some call "outliers") are working as intended (although I find @The_Capt analogy with the barrel quite convincing) or if it is a model that is just designed to get the "center", the common situations, right, accepting that every now and then it produces something odd. But getting the tails of an exponentially decaying distribution right is brutally difficult - in fact, come to think of it, my whole PhD thesis was about modelling the tails of a similar distribution correctly.
BFC has never commented on the long right tails, but they are a consistent feature of the CM spotting model across titles. I mentioned earlier that I have seen results longer than 10 minutes at ranges up to 1000m in CMBN but they are very rare.
Thanks for running the tests! I would not have been surprised by an even larger M60 advantage given the thermal imager. I picked the RISE+ in my test as I felt that was more apples to apples vis-a-vis the T-72A.
-
-
-
2 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Not buying the mass argument in the least. Traditional military mass has gone to pieces completely in this war.
If I was going to draw a lesson on mass for this war it would be “less physical, more effective information, more AI, more synthetic”.
It's interesting to watch this debate play out in the UK.
________
In 2021 the defence secretary announced plans to reduce the number of tanks from 227 to 148 and shrink the army to 73,000 troops, its smallest size since the Napoleonic era.
The decision was made before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and proved controversial with Tory MPs. General Sir Patrick Sanders, the chief of the general staff, said that pursuing the cuts at a time of war in Europe would be “perverse”.
But with Nato allies including Poland, Germany and Finland increasing spending on their land armies, ministers believe that Britain is not under significant pressure to change course and can modernise the armed forces with investments elsewhere.
Senior figures in the MoD believe the war in Ukraine has exposed the vulnerability of tanks to shoulder-launched weapons such as Nlaws and Javelins, justifying the original decision in 2021 to upgrade only 148 Challenger 2s to Challenger 3s.
“We have too much infantry — a legacy of the counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need more artillery. The jury is out on whether you need main battle tanks,” a Whitehall source said.
There are 75,710 full-time and fully trained troops in the army, and Wallace has previously admitted that it is unable to deploy a war-fighting division. In a private meeting last autumn, the US commander of Nato forces in Europe warned that the British army was no longer regarded as a tier-one fighting force. Senior army figures have argued that planned cuts to the number of tanks and troops would be a mistake.
“The main lesson from Ukraine is you need mass,” one army source said. “The truth is we don’t have enough infantry and we don’t have enough artillery.” The source also said it was naive to think that the war in Ukraine justified the decision to cut tanks and suggested poor Russian tactics explained why the Kremlin had lost over half its operational fleet in Ukraine.
“If you’re being hit by Nlaws in an urban environment, your tank is probably in the wrong place,” the source said.
As part of the military overhaul the army is expected to field more assault groups armed with drones, reflecting the important role played by artillery spotters in Ukraine._______
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ben-wallace-resist-reverse-british-army-cuts-gd9pzd62j (paywalled)
-
6 hours ago, Artkin said:
I'm specifically talking about the 300% maximum difference.
I have explained why that is a contrived number. I'm done talking about it.
6 hours ago, Artkin said:You're the first person I've ever heard this from. In my experience they're utterly useless at all times in CMCW and CMBS. Once I had at least a full US battalion of vehicles in a massive blob approaching a shturm platoon. Both sides had clear LOS to each other but my shturm platoon was hidden in woods with grass tiles underneath. The shturms were completely incapable of spotting the massive blob of vehicles, but instead were picked off one by one. I don't usually play with thermals so I don't think there were any TTS on the US side. I think shturms are one of the weakest spotters in all of CM.
I understand the games are running the exact same engine, but there appears to be a problem with the CW soviet tanks specifically. It's come up a bunch of times, shturm too iirc.
Sturm-S vs M60 RISE+ @800 meters. Outliers not excluded.
-
Median
- M60: 29 seconds
- Sturm: 17.5 seconds
-
Average
- M60: 29.8 seconds
- Sturm: 25.5 seconds
Since you attach so much meaning to the single largest time, for the Sturm it was 88 seconds.
That's a 49.4% advantage in median spot time for the Sturm-S. WTF @The_Capt, how do you sleep at night?
-
Median
-
51 minutes ago, Artkin said:
So training and doctrine are not plausible reasons for the 300% difference in spotting at 800m between US and Soviet MBTs. The problem is the 300%.
Careful. You're comparing maximum outlier vs. maximum outlier to get that number, essentially cherry-picking the two most extreme numbers out of a 100 number data set. Using that to claim a "300% difference in spotting" is incredibly misleading. The typical difference is about 22%.
QuoteSteve already told us that there are 0 national modifiers.
Not all Soviet vehicles are worse at spotting than all US vehicles. For example the Shturm-S is very good at spotting, much better than a M60.
QuoteIf anything, it would be in your best interest to test this yourself considering this is your baby, and there have been multiple people complaining about abnormal spotting issues.
I am going to reiterate that the CM spotting model has worked this way in every CM game from Shock Force 1. There is nothing "abnormal" about the spotting in CMCW compared to other CM games.
-
1 hour ago, Artkin said:
It's been a while since I've really delved in CMCW - partly because I feel there are issues that need to be sorted and also from lack of fun time.
It isn't particular to T-64s or Cold War. I have done a lot more testing in CMBN and have seen very rare examples of tanks taking nearly 10 minutes to spot another tank at 1000 meters.
One of these days I may suggest to Battlefront that they tone down the variance a little, but I doubt it's going to change dramatically and I don't know if it should given the real variability of human behavior and performance.
-
I just ran a better test than the one I did a few years back, since that one was at 150 meters. This one is a more typical 800 meters. T-72A vs M60A1 RISE+. It unsurprisingly shows a larger difference in spotting, although not massively. The biggest difference was in the number and magnitude of outliers produced. A quirk of the CM spotting system is that it can produce huge outliers from time to time, which probably account for most of the "my tank is totally blind!" anecdotes. For example, the median spotting time for T-72 was 36.5 seconds but the single longest time recorded was 270 seconds. Because of that the average changes a lot depending on if you include outliers or exclude them, although the median doesn't change much.
n=50
Outliers excluded median
- M60: 27.5 seconds
- T-72: 34 seconds
Outliers excluded average
- M60: 26.9 seconds
- T-72: 39 seconds
Outliers included median
- M60: 29 seconds
- T-72: 36.5 seconds
Outliers included average
- M60: 29.8 seconds
- T-72: 53.7 seconds
What does this tell us? Nothing we didn't already know, frankly. But #1, and perhaps most importantly, CM spotting is highly variable and the result of any given encounter is usually a function of the situation combined with sheer dumb luck rather than the vehicle characteristics. For example, the fastest spot time for the T-72 was 8 seconds and the longest spot time for the M60 was 101 seconds. Second, while the difference in spotting ability in identical situations is around 21-23% most of the time the M60 is more consistent and therefore less likely to throw out an extreme result.
-
10 minutes ago, Artkin said:
An opinion about the issue? Nope.
I'll check out your posts when I get home. T-62 wasn't the subject of our conversation so I assume your test is what we call "useless".
Well, there is no reason to assume a T-62 has any better spotting than a T-72.
If you don't like my data, get your own. Otherwise, good luck with your rant.
-
I did share an opinion. You just didn't like it. Too bad.
Personal experience? Well, I have actually done some testing in the past. Nothing extensive, but enough to suggest that the differences in spotting between M60 and T-62 are in the 10-20% range, at least under the testing conditions...
... which would be reasonable given the real-world differences I have documented (albeit for T-72):
15 minutes ago, Artkin said:Good job.
Thank you. I agree
-
10 minutes ago, Artkin said:
Nobody here is being ridiculous so what's up with this?
Pages of claims about the spotting performance of various vehicles, but with no data backing it up. I wouldn't call it ridiculous but I would call it useless.
-
Perhaps there should be an option to disable the RNG and make all spotting checks 100% successful, LOS permitting. I would not use it but I suspect there is a vocal minority of users who would.
-
2 hours ago, photon said:
I wonder what platform the Ukranians will launch (are launching?) the Storm Shadow from? Have they adapted it to their Soviet platforms like the HARM?
SU-24, most likely. SU-27 is also possible but not MiG-29.
-
"The office of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, our country’s president, is in charge of the ultimate decision regarding the dates and directions [of the counter-offensive]. When people start talking, even people from respectable Western institutions, trust me: there are no people who know the full extent of our plans. Because the final plans have not yet been approved.
We have several options [for the counteroffensive]. They are all being considered. Decisions will be made depending on the circumstances that prevail at any given moment. There’s no need to expect, or not expect, anything.
We have already proven that we are an invincible nation, and we will definitely [win]. In no small part, thanks to the help of our partners.
-- Oleksii Danilov
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/secretary-national-security-council-zelenskyy-171659645.html
-
8 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:
We've discussed this earlier. Any sector the Russians pull reinforcements from practically invites secondary opportunistic Ukrainian offensives in those other sectors.
Yes. Obviously. But as you pointed out, those 9 brigades won't be everywhere at once. That's why it's going to be a contest of ISR and logistics.
-
7 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:
Where are they going to get the reinforcements from?
I presume from others sectors of the front not under attack. At least in theory. That's how these things work. Russia can't defend everywhere at once. But at the same time Ukraine can't attack everywhere at once.
-
46 minutes ago, sburke said:
so is he assuming the Russians will actually man all these lines? err.. with what? I mean we have done some analysis on these pages of the requirements to man a single line. Now we have to multiply that (or divide the person per km figures?) Call me skeptical.
Hey Skeptical,
I would ask him but I don't have a twitter account. I suspect most of these fortifications are unmanned or lightly manned. Many of the experts, or "experts" as the case may be, say it will come down to ISR and logistics, which is why some of them are predicting major breakthroughs. But they are guessing, like everyone else.
_______
Western partners have told him, he said, that they now need a “next example of a success because we need to show it to our people. … But I cannot tell you what the scale of this success would be. Ten kilometers, 30 kilometers, 100 kilometers, 200 kilometers?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/06/ukraine-counteroffensive-expectations-hype-russia/
Frustration with CMCW - Russian side
in Combat Mission Cold War
Posted
You have LOS, it's just that your spotting checks are being heavily penalized. If you wait long enough the units may spot each other. Even when the target line shows no LOS through trees units can sometimes spot each other. That's why you shouldn't trust trees to hide your units unless there is a LOT of foliage between you and the enemy.
At least that's what I think is most likely happening. The lack of 1 to 1 graphical representation of tree canopies make it difficult to know for certain how LOS is being affected in any situation.