FinnN
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Posts posted by FinnN
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Was reading the printed manual yesterday, and it says that commanders affect people in the same arm as them. Does this mean that a nearby commander affects all infantry and not just those in his squad?
Also it mentions a 'chance to hit at 1000m' - but I don't see this. Am I missing something or did this get removed?
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Finn
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Probably not new to some people, but came across this today:
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Finn
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As mentioned earlier, crew kills from non-penetrations are in the game. I've killed crew and had crew killed by HE shells, takes a few hits though. Possibly it's toned down a bit in some cases (I imagine there should be some deaf and panicked crew members out there that aren't), but I don't see what's happening in the game to be implausible.
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Finn
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Actually they don't quite have 0 impact - if you look at the penetration bar they'll go through light armour. Very rarely indeed I've had direct impacts from my artillery go through the roofs of light tanks too (Pz35/38s). For medium vehicles if the angle is right you'll sometimes get crew kills (I've had this happen to me a few times). I also wouldn't be surprised if some medium tanks had limited areas where armour was light enough for a big HE round to penetrate.
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Finn
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Arrived today here as well - still no e-mail about the download being available, not that it matters to me now of course.
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Finn
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You can't. Doesn't usually affect gameplay, but sometimes I find myself gunning down unarmed tank crews as quickly as possible as if you leave them be they distract your troops from more serious threats. Close Combat had this one fairly sensibly handled - surrendering troops stood there and (if I remember correctly) couldn't be directly, but you could still kill them if they got in the way of an explosion or fire directed elsewhere.
Nastiest one was one when I ran a tank across a group of infantry prone in a line firing at some of my infantry. Squashed them all but the last one, who made a run for it at the last moment before I gunned him down. So I agree, infantry sometimes seem a little too steel-balled.
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Finn
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Yes, I've had it happen occasionally - not often though as I try not to get too close to infantry as they're not too bad at immobilising vehicles with grenades. If you look at the tables in the ai folder you'll find modifiers for various types of units firing at other types. Haven't had a chance to have a close look yet, but at first glance crew members seem to be slightly more exposed than infantry so I guess if a sniper gets through a hole they're more likely to get hit.
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Finn
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I guess you know this already, but the greyed-out thing means that the man has been killed. They disappear after a while.
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Finn
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You were probably a bit lucky, in that scenario I took quite a few hits to the JT but you will go eventually under concentrated fire - and losing the tracks at the wrong moment could be as good as a kill too. In that scenario I used the JT to pick off the first wave of tanks at long range by nestling it between a building and some bushes, keeping a couple of Nashorns in reserve to cover the bridge from an ambush position finally flanking with reinforcements. I don't think there's any 100% impervious vehicle in the game - which is a good thing IMHO.
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Finn
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Have to agree, would much rather see things like Marders and other lightish vehicles. After reading more about WW2 tactics on the scale the game represents I'm seeing missing smoke as a bigger and bigger issue though for the types of terrain a typical ToW battle is fought over.
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Finn
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For some reason you don't get the absolute accuracy in all scenarios, but when it happens it's pretty obvious. I would guess it's a combination of factors, mostly skill - I do see it more often than not though.
One example of when it happened to me was during the Bulge battle in the German campaign. Basically you're attacking a line of interconnected ATGs and artillery, I think something like 14 or so in all. I'd knocked a hole in part of the line using artillery and tank fire where I could deploy my troops for a flank assault towards the left of the hill. Two squads had crawled into an assault position in front of an AT gun, whilst I arranged some tanks and assault guns just below the brow of the hill to the side of the AT gun, where the hill also shielded them from attack from the rest of the enemy artillery. The plan was to pin the guns with infantry and then knock them out with the tanks, if they turned to face the tanks then small arms fire would hopefully get them. The second time I tried this it worked out, but the first time I mistimed the tank movements and they took longer to get into a firing position than I expected leaving the infantry exposed with no support. Every single one was killed by a single HE round, in the snow it was easy to see this as the body in white stands out nicely against the shell-hole. Again not always, but a shell through the chest as Spartan mentions isn't unusual.
Now I've been reading the Osprey book about WWII company and battalion tactics and it has a small bit on ATGs. It's a little vague on detail, but it does say that ATGs stood little hope of withstanding an infantry assault and (in the British case, doesn't mention at all other nations) that the crew were to defend with a Bren gun when not covered by supporting infantry. To me that strongly implies that at close range small arms would be used.
I have no problem at all with them using HE at larger distances, and troops do indeed take wounds from nearby blasts - although only critical wounds seem to have much of an impact on their behaviour. I would rather that the accuracy of hits was reduced, but to offset the impact of wounds be increased. The way the game formulas seem to work is that the closer you get to something the easier it is to spot and get an accurate hit, now most of the time this makes sense but in one or two instances (tanks against infantry being another example) this model breaks down I think.
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Finn
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It's not so much the firing that is a problem, but the results and the accuracy. Now I don't know if it's possible, but I find it hard to imagine that a crew would be able to manhandle a gun into position, get the range and position perfectly right and pick off a single infantryman with a shell precisely at their feet or directly through the chest - and then repeat this 10 times.
With infantry headed directly at them I would have thought that cannister, which isn't in (?), or small arms would be more effective overall. Not exactly the most reliable source of information, but Close Combat did it that way, and seemed reasonable to me and matches what little I've read on the subject. I would expect heavy casualties in a frontal assault in open ground, but just the way they happen seems weird to me, not that I'm an expert or anything though.
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Finn
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Broadly I think it's accurate, although the closing bit about stationary signposts seems to me to be both speculative and (probably) incorrect as a patch has in fact been announced and imminent. The only bit which is factually incorrect in the rest of the review is the bit about buildings and entrenchments not showing any damage - they do eventually.
The bit which says "Gamers either must indulge in a click fest or simply look on and try to intervene at key points" is going to be mostly opinion, but I can say that trying to play it either way is a sure way to lose. The game requires a lot of micromanagement, but if you think that a flurry of clicking is going to win you're dead wrong - even if it seems that way initially (it did to me). Sit back and watch the AI do it all and you'll even more certainly get obliterated by the typically overwhelming AI forces (not AI intelligence in the stock campaign). To win you need a sure strategy and you need to keep cool - each time you swap targets your men take a few shots to get on target again.
The review also misses all the good parts of the game and is a more than a bit dismissive of some things - such as the multiple languages. Sneaking small groups of infantry around the map, setting up ambush positions for SPGs and so on, coordinating various actions and types of units are all really fun and challenging and despite being key to gameplay don't seem to get much of a mention.
Personally I think the bulk of the basic mechanics are there, and having had a look inside the game files they do indeed seem to be implemented - but the game needs some radical rebalancing, which results in confusion over LOS as indicated in the review. There are also some glaring ommissions - waypoints (fixed in the first patch apparently) and smoke (much bigger gap than enterable buildings IMHO, no smoke or grenade cannisters on tanks for defense against infantry and AT guns, no smoke shells for infantry assaults across open ground where you suspect (but don't know) the enemy are in broad daylight, etc).
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Finn
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Just post count I guess.
Seems like helmets and bodies are in the same file after all. All the humans seem to inherit the same skeleton file though (unsuprisingly) so if the meshes are moddable adding new troop types should be fairly easy.
I'm stunned by how much detail is in plain text in visibility.ini about how spotting works, unfortunately much of it in Russian. One interesting thing if I understand it correctly is that infantry get a 20% bonus against spotting from (I think) 25m of bushes, needing 50m for 100%. Looking at the formulae I think I can also see why tanks automatically spot units within a certain radius. I really think that a lot of this doesn't need to be hidden in the SFS files and it'd benefit the game a lot if people could tweak to their own satisfaction and the devs concentrated on engine issues.
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Finn
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I shall have a quick look at this this evening. I'm not sure the uniforms are modeled that differently in most cases - a lot of the detail appears to be textured on. I think headgear may be in a separate place too as officers basically are the same as troops in most cases (plus you can see heads sticking through French helmets sometimes) but with different headgear - if this is the case I'm sure combinations could be picked out from what's available. Will be interesting to check it out in any case.
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Finn
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Now, I've not looked at it personally yet, but it seems from the other thread that copying and reusing units might well be possible. This means that some nations could be expanded, for example:
</font>
- Polish get the Renault FT-17</font>
- Germans get the Char B1, maybe some of the soviet stuff?</font>
More interestingly though, I wonder if additional nations could be added? Finland comes to mind immediately. For the infantry I think there are some German infantry models with field caps, and German or Polish helmeted troops would fit too - with new textures of course. There's plenty of models for them in terms of British, French, German and Soviet tanks and guns too (again with new textures).
What about other nations? Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, etc? Any suggestions for copying units from nation to nation, or making new ones?
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Finn
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That's really exciting news - the thought of parallel folder structure did occur to me when Dr.Jones sent me the SFS extractor to look at, but the mods here said not to discuss extracting files so I didn't get around to taking a look.
Now, the question is - if someone wanted to make a new unit and share it, let's say a captured French Char B1 tank in German service (even the texture is already there in this case), it'd mean distributing either the model folder or the extraction tool. What's the official line on this?
I guess with textures it's an easier situation as someone could easily make some templates based on the original files, but without using them at all (I think I might actually do this) - but again it depends on the extraction tool to make these templates. Again, is this something that would be tolerated?
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Finn
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I've seen both sandbagged emplacements and emplacements with netting over the top during the campaign. Currently they can only be changed in the mission editor but there was talk of these and trenches being placed during setup looked at for a patch.
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Finn
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This has been discussed several times - both tanks and AT guns will usually do this, although not 100% of the time for some reason. You also get infantry shot directly through the chest.
Interestingly if you look at the results of a HE blast you'll find that the surrounding troops usually take wounds, but as troops don't change their visible behaviour that much when wounded you don't notice it that much. The basic mechanics all seem to be there - HE blast effects, troops diving when an explosion takes place, etc but the overall effect is quite unrealistic. I would have thought that against infantry at close range the gunners would swap to small arms instead of sniping away.
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Finn
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Once or twice I've noticed soldiers in the default selection with medals, so I guess it might be possible that veterans from previous battles get picked.
In general though I don't really feel too much like it's the same team going through a campaign. Beyond what's been mentioned already, I think it would add to this if you could see the medals on the small portraits in the pick screen. It'd make it easier to chop and change teams and make your veterans look a bit less generic. Not that AT teams or infantry last more than a couple of missions usually anyway due to the artillery and huge odds you often face...
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Finn
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During the German campaign I found the Sherman 76s to be the most dangerous opponents, but I suspect at least part of that was down to the terrain and numbers you face in the mission design.
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Finn
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Well being part Italian, Irish, English, Welsh (via Canada) and Swedish with a German girlfriend I guess I can be forgiven for having a pretty generic 'British' accent. People around here think I sound a bit southern English, but in southern England they think I sound like I'm from the North. Ho hum. That said the 'classic' Welsh accent is South Wales, so you won't find people here speaking like that.
Same sort of thing here regarding the UK - I'm in a predominantly Welsh speaking region and nationalists usually either win or do well in elections.
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Finn
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I'm in Waes and nothing here yet either, not that I need it mind you.
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Finn
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3/4 is probably an exaggeration but I see this often enough for it not to be a freak instance. Equally bad but more typically I find tanks/artillery against infantry plant HE shells directly at their position, picking them off one by one - even if spread out and on the move. You can see this especially clearly on snowy maps as the white clad bodies show up nicely against the brown crater.Originally posted by nonickch:...That's right, 3/4 of my soldiers die to tanks/at's from the bullet effect. Not by the explosion, but by the shell going through even while ducking and running (I've had more than once a prone soldier get the bullet effect and the HE round land like 10-15m behind him)...
On a related note, something I noticed over the weekend when playing the last German mission is that every time an explosion happened (not just nearby) the crew of my Jagdtiger would flash red. It only lasts an instant but they're clearly reacting. I wonder if this affect has been tuned right the way down so that crew members don't freeze constantly, but in turn infantry are fairly immune to suppression (they also flash red, but also recover immediately).
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Finn
HE rounds r made wrong?
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I believe I read that spalling is in the game, and it seems to be born out by my experience with crew casualties.
Have to agree with Jippo though, you can't 'know' something without some sort of evidence or reference - otherwise it's just an opinion (it might be right, but that's all it is).
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Finn