Vanir Ausf B

One other thing. When mousing over the dead ground near the ford much of the area is identified by the tooltip text as "Reverse Slope - No Aim Point". This means that you have no LOS to the center of the action spot at that location, but do have LOS to the area above it at an undisclosed height (if you have no chance of LOS at all the tooltip says "No Line of Sight"). As with the house on the opposite bank, you can't area fire into these spots and won't see prone or crawling soldiers within them, but you may be able to spot and fire on troops walking or running through them (tall vehicles would almost certainly be in LOS). The bottom line is that the total area you will have LOS to is somewhat larger than what the color of the target line suggests.

LOS to the area right of the target line is blocked by the building directly in front of the house the machine gun team occupies. The labeled house to the left of the ford blocks LOS in that direction, so yes, that is a somewhat narrow field of fire as I would expect it to be. Between those two structures most of the ground is in LOS with the notable exception of the dead ground near the ford -- which is quite a substantial area -- and a narrow band of ground blocked by a tree I have marked on the screenshot. There are two houses fronting the ford on the other side of the stream that I have marked. Your machine gun has patchy LOS inside the "garden" area immediately surrounding these buildings due to intervening vegetation. You have good LOS to the house on the left. Unfortunately you cannot area fire on the house on the right because the center of the action spot it is on is out of LOS even though most of the rest of the building is in LOS. That is a much lamented game engine limitation. However, any infantry in that building that are kneeling or standing will likely be directly target-able once spotted for as long as they stay spotted.

Exactly. You really just want everyone stationary and not firing. The idea is to eliminate every variable other than the one you're testing. And you need large sample sizes because of the high variability of CM X2 spotting.

If you want to know what will happen if you drive T-34s towards stationary Nashorns then that test if fine. If you want to know WHY it happens it is worthless because you are testing multiple factors simultaneously with no means of separating out which factors are doing what. It could well be that what you are seeing is that stationary vs. movement status is a larger factor than the differences in vehicle spotting ability, and that you would get a similar result with almost any combination of vehicles (from my own testing I am reasonably certain that is the case). Also, you can't have the vehicles spotting each other because a T-34 and a Nashorn have different sizes and profiles and therefore are not the same difficulty to spot. Both vehicles types tested have to be spotting the same vehicle type (I use Panther A mids as my standard spotting target vehicle).

Must be Guy Sajer.

I think there may be issues with vehicles that have no cupola and optics optimized for long range shooting. They appear to be getting penalized for having no cupola but are not getting credit for the other optics. The Jagdpanther is horrible at long range spotting in CMBN but I have not had time to test anything else.

Not at what you are doing, i.e. looking for LOS to terrain. It is very good at moving men around to obtain or maintain LOS to an enemy unit that at least one member of the friendly has already spotted.

Good points, but a small clarification. In the case of crew-served weapon teams -- at least those which are capable of being deployed such as tripod-mounted MGs -- the Target tool shows LOS from the point of view of the gunner exclusively, so it should not be possible to get a grey line. Yes, the TacAI is very good at this. It would be nice of these routines were usable against terrain as well as enemy units.

Ammo dumps and supply platoons are not quite the same thing. Supply platoons are like ammo dumps for QBs and they are not in 3.0.

Ah, you originally said Supply Platoons. That's a little different.

Yep. I know...

You can't find them because they were not included in the CMBN 3.0 upgrade. Apparently TO&E changes were not part of the package. I am pushing to get them into the Battle Pack. We'll see...

Right. But the OP stated "as is the entire Battalion missing all motorized vehicles."

Ukraine has not thrown it's entire army into the fight. It has had to keep some of it in reserve to guard against an invasion from Crimea.

You mean... it's a true story? :eek:

Ukraine has very few of them.

At least one person from BFC has seen it. One more will see it very soon. However, I wouldn't place any bets on it getting changed.

3.0 on my machine:

It's not and it doesn't.

They have bundled all of the Shock Force modules together. I'm not sure why they don't toss in the base game, but even when purchased separately the total cost is $65. EDITED to add: CMBN already is offered in a "Big Bundle" that includes the base game + all modules (although the 3.0 upgrade is not included for some reason).

Expected first shot accuracy of the Nashorn's main cannon vs. tank-sized target.

I think this argument arises in large part from a disconnect between SMG effectiveness in-game and in reality. The subject of small arms ROF vs. accuracy has been debated recently in these fora and in the beta area (as you are already aware) and there seems to be a general consensus that CMx2 does not penalize the accuracy of automatic fire from unstabilized weapons as much as it should. One consequence of this is that while in reality an SMG would begin to lose it's advantage over a rifle at 50-100 meters, in-game it is able to maintain that advantage to 150-200 meters (depending on the particular SMG and rifle being compared). If SMGs performed more like they do in reality players would be less concerned about letting them lay in the dirt.

Did you? Starting a game and then cease firing wouldn't tell you anything. The only way to test this would be to cease fire a few seconds after an AI controlled unit had moved back into LOS of its HQ after being out of LOS. You would have to wait long enough -- probably at least 7 seconds -- to ensure the unit had completed at least one spot check, and the units would have to be far enough apart for the result to not be a gimme. Rinse, repeat a few dozen times to see if the result is always the same or if there is variation. It could be done, but it would be a pain in the ass and I doubt anyone has actually done it.

I have seen it as recently as the CMRT beta. AT gun crews seem to be particularly susceptible.

Well that would be almost impossible to test. And not worth the effort, as others have pointed out.