[Fundamental issues for CM2--what does it want to be?]

I don't understand the idea of a penalty for splitting squads. Why would you penalize someone for using appropriate tactics?

sorry if i misunderstand what you are asking (simulation or game ui or what), but here's one take.

in the real battlefield everything by default is isolated and fighting their own battle. the isolated elements do not know much if anything of each other -- they are preoccupied by their own battle.

in a typical WW2 firefight the largest natural unit is probably that of a team: the guys in the team are able to share information and make decisions as a group. this is because they are close enough to usually see one another (at least by popping their head up to observe for a while or by using battle sounds as a cue -- fighting in prepared positions would be different and the natural size of the unit would probably be closer to two men) and hear one another and thus share information (by yelling during pauses in explosions, gunfire and other noise -- here again suppressed or temporarily disabled men may be an exception in that they many not be able to hear or see anything even if it's literally 5 cm in front of their face). the information they share is the type of thinking that there's an enemy at some specific location, of someone about to throw a grenade, of someone reloading their weapon and so forth.

in order for a company to be something other than 20-50 of these kinds of groups of guys fighting their own separated small wars, there needs to be something extra added. adding that something is not automatical or easy, and often there was not much added and the end result was the typical SNAFU or FUBAR.

the first step is the squad leader. he has just about the number of men under his control so that he can see or know each man's general position in most situations. during a firefight he is trying to find out what his men are doing. who's shooting, where's the fire coming from and what is actually happening in very concrete level of things.

once he has somehow managed to get a vague clue of what is happening (both by observing and asking from the guys), he is trying to form an idea what he should do. for example where to position the MG and what sector to give it. where should teams or groups of guys move (on the scale of some individual meters -- for example take cover in a ditch or behind a wall or fire at some treeline).

once he has this idea he is trying to make the guys do what he wants. because everyone is shooting on both sides and there's lots of yelling and all kind of confusion, it usually means he needs to get right next to the men he wants to do something (for example to stop firing so that he can make sense of what is happening, or to get team A to fire at target X that was just spotted by or firing at team . this can be quite hard and it requires a lot of guts, as there are bullets flying, explosions going off, and the poor squad leader doesn't even really know what is actually happening.

in essence the squad leader is trying to combine the otherwise isolated teams into one entity that supports its individual elements and combines its firepower in order to have a maximum effect on the battlefield.

next up in the hierarchy is the infamous platoon leader. this poor fellow controls so many men that he can only see a small portion of them at any given typical moment in a firefight. this means he needs to go out and find out what everyone is doing and what is happening. this is tough stuff because usually he needs to move tens of meters just to get from one squad to another (remember that he needs to have his mouth next to a squad leader's ear, in order to pass a message, and vice versa).

it's also tough stuff because he doesn't have the privilegion of being allowed to just observe what is happening: he needs to tell the squads what they should do. after running from one squad to another a couple of times, after having stabilized the situation a bit, he has to form a theory of what is actually happening on the sector of his platoon. he is trying to estimate what kind of enemy he is facing (about a squad at that treeline, with a MG somewhere near those buildings, possibly another squad further to the left...), what the intentions of the enemy are, what's the status of his squads (2. squad is being suppressed by the MG fire) and what are the possible courses of action his platoon could take.

after this is done he needs to figure a plan. where to put possible reinforcing support arms so that they would have the maximum effect and what to do with each squad. it's a bit like what squad leader does to unite the teams into a bigger whole that supports its elements, but unlike squad leader the platoon leader can not see his whole unit from one location.

then after the has formed a plan he needs to tell each one of the different squads and/or sections what he wants them to do. this he accomplishes again by running around while taking fire from mostly unknown locations. this takes time. if he is slow the situation will change before his planned actions can be executed. if he is too fast or unlucky (or rather with normal luck) he gets wounded or killed at some point of the process.

again the basic idea with platoon leader is to somehow make the different squads fight one and the same battle. to combine their actions. to concentrate their fire. to make the whole platoon utilize well covered path found by A squad, to make the support sections start firing at specific moment as the squads assault across a field, and so forth.

then you have the company commander. he is mostly getting information from platoon leaders, because he can't usually observe the whole company sector from one single position. this is slow process. after he has formed some kind of idea what is happening, based on the reports and partly from his own observations and estimations, he is most likely going to focus on the actions on the sector he considers the most critical. because company sector is some hundereds of meters, there's no way he can just walk or run around from platoon to platoon. radios are cool if they can be used (there's LOS and there's not too much disturbance from terrain and combat actions).

thus he has to choose where he goes. where he goes he adds his experience and the support arms under his command. he makes the platoons work together and according to one plan. i simplify this because this post is already getting awfully long.

the point here is that by default nothing useful happens in the firefight. there's just chaos that gets the men nowhere (except perhaps to the state of even greater chaos). someone must gather information and issue orders. it doesn't happen automatically -- it requires lots of work and time. the higher the number of units (or men) someone needs to control, and the further away they are from one another, the slower and harder the process becomes.

"splitting squads" (it applies as much to platoons and companies), especially when the split elements are not kept connected in space, causes huge increase in the strife to control the firefight. it may cause the whole force to break apart, as the interval between information sharing and order passing becomes far too long to be used to guide actions in meaningful ways (orders always late, contradictory, arrive in wrong order and are nonsensical to the situation).

the fundamental point is that the challenge in the firefight is not to split off elements and send them into their own missions, but to combine the already, by default, separated elements into a one larger unified force that is able to combine and coordinate otherwise dispersed chaotic firepower and action.

if splitting squads (or platoons or companies) achieves the above then it's great. if it has the opposite effect and the decisions are solely based on the godlike knowledge the player has of the firefight and the gamey effects the player can achieve by unrealistic levels of micromanagement and coordination of microscopic elements, then it sucks if it's not properly penalized.

[Questions about Targeting]

Unfortunately, the new model of shot modelling leaves the engine in the same state of ignorance about chances of hitting and penetration as you. It's deterministic, rather than probablistic, modelling the trajectory of the shell with some slight random deviations. Whether the particular instance of modelling will or will not result in a hit, the engine doesn't have the information to determine, until it actually does it.

i wonder how AI make its decisions if the engine doesn't know hit or kill probabilities.

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

URC, I suspect you are confusing effective casualty radius and the density of fire rule-of-thumb to ensure neutralization of a position. Those are quite dissimilar things. It's not that puny.

i am aware of the difference between the two. the rules of thumb expect typical conditions in general sense (e.g. target troop concentrations).

the lethality area really is just that: 100% losses. it's not just neutralization.

the numbers do not make the 60mm or 81mm impact fuzed HE rounds puny at all. the 60mm has 140 square meter lethality area against standing men - everyone dies in two action spots as a result of a single 60mm round.

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

• in the open standing - losses between 80-100%
  
• in the open hiding - losses between 80-100%
  

in theory being prone should reduce the effects considerably, as these rounds are all impact fuzed and the 60mm is highly sensitive to soft ground effects.

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

But aye, there's the rub! Hiding isn't enough....

First of all, the AI does not cause its units to Hide (hunker down) in response to incoming fire, which in 1 player mode basically lets you blast them out of their holes using 81mm without needing direct hits. In WeGo mode, you must wait until the next Orders phase to Hide your units -- in the meantime they have to suck it up.

In addition, even if you do Hide your units from incoming, the TacAI will frequently self- cancel that order when enemy units are in the vicinity. In that case, your guys resume sitting upright in their holes in "fighting position", soaking up the shrapnel (unless they're Cowering).

That's why I suggested that a tweak that causes entrenched infantry to fight prone by default as opposed to "taking the knee" might largely address the problem without mucking about with the existing mortar ROF, accuracy or ballistics models, which seem well-thought out. I'd settle for them to Cower a lot more while being shelled, even if it meant they were shooting far less.

Again, the bottom line is that 81mm -- however much of a "buzz kill" it proved to be in forcing infantry attacks to go to ground -- should not exterminate dug-in infantry in concealment terrain with the rapidity and thoroughness it does in the game. If mortars truly had this kind of "Argus eye" (), frontline combat in both World Wars would have been very, very different.

yes, something like that. the 60mm round has 20-35 meter suppressive radius (i mean in reality, not in the game). combined with the 1 square foot killzone this makes 60mm round a suppressive weapon against enemy in foxholes.

btw 81mm has 5 square feet lethality area so we are still talking pretty much about direct hits against foxholes.

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

This is pretty amusing.

A half meter is about 20 inches.

Your statement means that someone one yard away is at more than 150% of effective range.

I suspect you misplaced at least one decimal point.

This type of statement is easy to make on the internet. So is the mistake.

It would be considerably harder to make five meters (more than TEN TIMES your claimed effective range) from an exploding light mortar round.

haha yes there's an error with my number. the official lethal area for 60mm grenade with impact fuze is still today 1 square feet against troops in open positions. i am sorry for enlarging the area to that with radius of 0.5 meters.

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

The 5cm's were retired by OKH after the front soldiers began to refuse to take them along, something rare in the German army of the time. These were the perennially underequipped guys who would take anything for more firepower. The complaint was that the 'Effect' (Auswirkung) of the bombs was less than if the mortar team were equipped with rifles.

5cm's were designed for semi-trench situations, in which you wanted to grenade an enemy position, which was out of reach. The expensive aiming equipment was meant to give the best pinpoint precision you could get given the nature of the weapon, and to increase precision it had very little range. This made for a weapon that was unimpressive at rifle ranges, and useless beyond.

fwiw this was the Finnish experience as well. they were considered totally worthless. in practice they were used only in static trench conditions, where the high angle effect could be utilized to annoy the enemy.

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

Not quite correct. The main effect mortar has, is shrapnel - concussion is a secondary effect IMHO. Even for handgrenades there are two different types - with and without shrapnel. Today some armies even use handgrenades where the major effect is shrapnel (or small bullets) as the only type of handgrenades.

so the effect does not mainly depend on the amount of TNT they carry, but on the number of shrapnels they "produce" and how far they project them to be lethal. As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread the M49A2 (HE for M2 60mm mortar) produces 200 shell fragments with an effective radius of 15m.

assuming there's no treeburst or similar, the effective radius is about 0.5 meters - a direct hit on the foxhole. other than that it's just suppression - forcing the guys take cover.

[US shortcommings and how did they win.]

The whole German strategy depended on being able to take on one opponent at a time and defeating him in a quick war.

what's the reasoning behind this idea?

Germans are still preparing for a long WW1 style war when they go for Western Europe in 1940. that they are able to finish the war so quickly is not the result of their strategy.

when they go for USSR in 1941 their strategic aim is to get the large material resources located in USSR in order to be able to fight the coming long war against US and UK.

the only short war aspect i see is the planning for the summer campaign against USSR. here they expect that they can defeat the Red Army in the European Russia - they are not aware of the Soviet capacity to mobilize reserves. nobody but Soviets were aware of that capacity. US military intelligence estimated that Germans would finish Soviets in 6 weeks (IIRC).

[WW2 mortars and artillery. Most important thing to "get right" in the CM2 series?]

my only issue is with the effects caused by light mortars, especially what comes to infantry in foxholes.

causing losses should be rare, requiring direct hits. light mortar grenades are of handgrenade class. their main effect is causing suppression and with close hits taking an individual soldier temporarily out of action (for a couple of minutes, not hours or days). light mortars are harassing weapons.

German 50mm mortar grenade has 0.28 lbs TNT. US 60mm has 0.34 lbs. 20% difference. a small or a big difference? well, a German mk.24 hand grenade has 0.36 lbs.

81mm mortar has 3.5 times the TNT, but it's still not the kind of killer against men in foxholes as the light mortars are in the game.

120mm has 5 times the TNT the 81mm has and is the first weapon which should have anywhere near the effects caused by lights mortars in the game.

historically causing the effects seen in the game, you should probably go for the 155mm HE, which has 44.5 times the TNT the 60mm has (15.13 lbs).

[What I think]

A feature that is much hated by many hardcore CMx1 fans, which is why it was VERY deliberately left out. Do a search of this Forum and you'll probably see the pro-movement delay camp is "outvoted" in every thread where this topic gets brought up.

well, you said command delays would be brought back with CMBN and you appeared to have a positive opinion about command delays. this change regarding command delays is somewhat surprising but naturally not something totally unheard of.

for what it's worth i don't recall seeing much opposition to the delays in those threads, but perhaps that's just blissfull senility on my part.

and yeah yeah, this is pretty useless discussion.

[What I think]

This board has always reminded me of the emperor with no clothes.

i think it's common amongst computer game boards, especially if sequals are quite different from the original games.

I remember people complaining about why driving down a twisty road should not add huge delay, but I hardly recall people demanding troops move immediately upon the ubermind thinking of it.

it's the same with many other things, but i think it's more productive just to let it pass.

Derek Smart ring any bells?

lol, i have thought about that many many times during the years, but i always thought it would be far too nasty remark to make.

[Where is the radio on the 3D-model of german soldier?]

German (various in Torn Fu and Feld Fu series) and US (SCR-300) back-pack "walkie-talkies" were quite similar and used in similar roles. both were for company-battalion communication (one per company). the heavier battalion-regiment sets were carried in jeeps and such.

Germans had SCR-536 style platoon-level smaller "handie-talkie" sets only for panzergrenadiers and similar. the German ones were "real" radios, while the US "handie-talkies" allowed only communication within a company.

CMBN style communications net could not be established with these radios. for example a platoon leader could not call-in artillery with the "handie-talkies" like they typically do in fiction. they also had serious limitations like LOS requirement etc, which isn't seen in CMBN.

all sides used flares etc.

[The London Riots...]

regarding relation of poverty to the riots:

A Liverpool University urban planning lecturer, Alex Singleton, analysed the Guardian's preliminary data by overlaying the addresses of defendants with the poverty indicators mapped by England's Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which breaks the country into small geographical areas.

He found that the majority of people who have appeared in court live in poor neighbourhoods, with 41% of suspects living in one of the top 10% of most deprived places in the country. The data also shows that 66% of neighbourhoods where the accused live got poorer between 2007 and 2010.

The findings are backed up by research carried out by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) published this week. The thinktank looked at the relationship between different indicators of poverty and deprivation and the boroughs where violence and looting took place.

Researchers found that in almost all of the worst-affected areas, youth unemployment and child poverty were significantly higher than the national average while education attainment was significantly lower.

"Child poverty rates in local authorities where riots flared are stubbornly high," it stated. "While poverty is no excuse for criminality, it places additional pressure on families not only to make ends meet but also to spend time together … The political debate is likely to rage on for some time but there is also an urgent need to understand what is happening in communities where violence flared."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/18/england-rioters-young-poor-unemployed

[17. SS-panzer Grenadier-Division]

I don't think this reflects only force on force mutual attrition of the armor, though it certainly does involve that. It also reflects pushing the vehicles, getting them lost where they are harder to recover, losing them in action against other allied arms (besides their armor I mean), etc.

that's very true and i was trying to address that by saying my simplistic playing with the OR numbers would not address German armor losses to AT and other non-armor arms.

Germans need to neutralize Allied armor and tank vs tank combat is one part of it. it seems that it's a part that wouldn't require much tweaking.

perhaps it's a bit obvious, but it's good to be methodological.

what would be needed next, is looking at other types of battles and finding what the actual failings were and what could be realistic and sound changes.

again it may be a bit obvious (lack of recon, overly aggressive methods etc etc), but it would be good to have some actual data about it.

Basically a carefully husbanded defensive employment of tanks seems to keep them alive much longer in every material respect, and the "half life" of a running tank seems to jump by a factor of 4 or more when it switches to defense.

yeah. it would be interesting to have a detailed study of it (correlations and causes). again, perhaps it's obvious (aggressive vs defensive etc) but would still be nice to have.

one way to explain it would be that German officers were unable to control such huge units as Panzer Divisions and Corps. it looks very much like early/mid Soviets with their big tank units. yet i think i have never seen this explored in any depth. it's just passed as aggressive use of armor.

Personally I think the Germans were "trained" in a Pavlovian sense to use armor in an overly aggressive tactical role by early to midwar experiences in Russia. I can find numerous major operations in which a couple of PDs thrown straight into an attack sector blunted an entire Front's offensive operations, and an equal number where forces on the same scale thrown in offensively on the flank of such an operation checkmated it, sometimes pocketing or destroying huge forces in the process. It was reaching those operational goals, stalls to enemy initiative and large scale destruction of his forces, both non-armor and armor, that they came to expect as normal consequences of "spending" the fresh strength of an up-to-TOE panzer division (or corps).

I think the Germans "institutionally" came to expect such results as the normal thing that could be accomplished by 1-2 PDs with reasonably topped-up AFV levels, tried the same against the western allies, and repeatedly got their heads handed to them. Not just in Normandy. That happened at Salerno, up to 4 times in Normandy on different scales, in the Lorraine, etc.

i can agree about that.

i have a paper somewhere that deals with some selected large armored offensives in West (1944-45) and compares various numbers and shows correlations. i have for some time intended to add numbers from various offensives from the East. the aim being the ability to see the relative force performance in various offensives, ignoring whether or not the offensive in question was considered a success or failure, and the ability to predict likely results in hypothetical offensives. this has of course been done to death in various papers already, but it might nonetheless be interesting especially as usually i have seen it done only on rather large scales.

The Germans thought that outcomes that actually hinged on Russian unpreparedness and lack of combined arms skills especially in their rifle formations, depended only on their own skills and on the essence of armor in modern combat. That is my read on why they spent their armor in offensive roles so often and so heavily, in the west.

that's quite possible and perhaps even likely.

[strange tank spotting behaviour]

URC - do you have any links to these studies?

unfortunately i don't seem to have any. it's been at least a couple of years since i looked into this. if i have bookmarks and documents, they are in some old harddrive in the closet.

but i did have two papers somewhat related to the subject. i was using them for estimating battlefield effects of illumination lamps in WW2. the main effect and purpose of the lamps is of course not that of aiding in target detection, but i was curious about the theoretical or practical effects on the ability of tanks to detect enemy tanks (yes, a most silly subject).

the papers are:

AN ANALYSIS OF TARGET ACQUISITION BEHAVIOR FOR OBSERVERS IN TANKS EQUIPPED WITH THERMAL OR OPTICAL SIGHTING SYSTEMS

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA162208

i had been trying to use it in determining "standard" abilities of non-thermal equippent tanks (WW2 tanks) to detect enemy tanks at night. it seems to contain some basic probabilities and times for detecting tanks at various conditions.

and

The Effects of Observer Location and Viewing Method on Target Detection with the 18-Inch Tank-Mounted Searchlight

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD445050&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

i had been trying to use it to determine how much the lamps could help in detecting tanks at night.

However I do nead to get time to run the tests under 1.01 to see if it has been tweaked.

did you run any tests?

[30 Aug 2011. WOOT]

Most vids are at close range just to show off the shooting and effects, I imagine, and because he is playing against easy AI, that won't pick him off with a rifle from 200 yards.

hopefully. i used to play RO and i liked the larger more open maps. however i hated the urban etc maps. i'm just wondering if this initial release is any good for me, or if i'm better off waiting 6 months to get good maps.

[strange tank spotting behaviour]

OK so it is realistic

i think it's very unrealistic. there's nothing in the scenario that prevents the tanks from spotting each other on second 1. some spottings lagging till around second 10 could be tolerable, but not being able to spot in the whole minute is ridiculous.

there are numerous field trials about this very subject and none of them show anything like this. buttoned tanks (without using thermals or similar), do routinely spot enemy tanks in 20 seconds in complex real world terrain and at considerable ranges.

like i said the trial data has some peculiarities and it may be that spotting suffer from some "optimisations" made to conserve CPU cycles.

My gut feeling from hundreds of CMAK battles is that the variability in spotting simply was either not there or not as great.

i haven't played CMAK so much, but CMBB does not have the variability. i used to hate the instant spotting, especially spotting of non-moving tanks in good ambush positions.

[30 Aug 2011. WOOT]

are there videos that show more open maps? in the videos that i have seen, the engagement ranges seem to be 1-30 meters, with most shooting taking place at around 1-10 meter ranges.

[Resistance and Liberation (realistic WWII shooter free mod)]

Less action oriented? Not sure what you mean. Bigger maps? There's a couple custom map that might fit that description but standard maps already run in the range of 60mb+

on a couple of the maps there was a lot of action in RO style. fast spawn + spawn almost in the middle of action = lots of shooting and dying. there was a nice map that left more room for tactics and coordination.

i didn't play much, so perhaps i got a bit wrong impression of the maps.

[17. SS-panzer Grenadier-Division]

URD wrote "anything starting with the break-out is not part of it -- so up to 20th August" - err, the breakout starts on 25 July, a full month earlier. Through 20 August includes the entire breakout, the entire Mortain counterattack, and closing the gap at Falaise. The only thing it excludes is the road march to the westwall against air.

lol yes, you are of course entirely correct about this.

As for the comments about Zetterling, yes he is completely hopeless on the subject, because he takes literally the timing of the QM corps dotting the i's in the returns for units that ceased to exist a month or more earlier. The proper way to account for the timing of AFV losses is - the moment a tank leaves "running" status and never thereafter returns to running status, is the moment it was actually lost. And whatever cause put it out of running status for the last time, is its actual cause of loss.

it's hard with the numbers for both sides.

By that simple standard, fewer than 300 German tanks of the 2200 sent to Normandy got out alive. Which puts the exchange ratio around 5 to 4 in armor, slight German favor. It was more than 2 to 1 against them in manpower, due to huge surrenders once the front gave way.

yeah, something like that.

June and July (taking British loss numbers at face value) are both 2:3, what comes to the turreted.

August would be something like 1400:1500, or 1:1 in practice (i'm probably causing too many German losses here).

the total ratio would be 5:6.

September would then be 2:7...

the alternative approach (containing September) gives end ratio somewhere around 2:3.4.

As for sburke's questions about what the Germans could have done differently, they didn't have to throw away their armor in reckless counterattacks that had no chance of operational success.

i did a silly thing and used generic OR numbers of France 1944 to toy with the above hypothesis. my main idea was to try to find out how much of a difference would less aggressive use of panzers have made in Normandy (ok in reality i did it just for fun, to test the OR numbers).

i used historical German panzer losses of June and July as base. then i halved it, to roughly get the number of panzers lost to enemy tanks (by OR studies results, but yes yes yes not very accurate). then i created a couple of formulas / algorithms based on a couple of OR studies on tank combat in 1944. i slightly adjusted average force sizes to get more workable numbers.

first i tried what kind of tank losses Allies should have suffered in Normandy, if Germans had attacked in 50% of tank engagements. surprisingly the results was that Allies suffered 7% less tanks in June and 17% less in July (in engagements with German tanks).

i was surprised that the result was so close to historical numbers. accidental probably, but who cares lol. if my OR based algorithm would create accurate results (it of course doesn't), it would mean that in June Germans attacked in slightly less than 50% of their tank vs tank engagements and in July a good number less.

then i altered the parameters so that Germans attacked only in 20% of the engagements. the algorithm still forced Germans to take their historical tank losses. the end result was that Allies lost 28% more tanks in June and 19% more in July (comparing to historical losses -- comparing to the first run of the algorithm the change is +39% and +40%).

based on that silly experiment, it would not have made much of a difference if the Germans had attacked only in 20% of the tank engagements. Allies would have lost only 53 extra tanks in June and 50 in July.

in the third run i made Germans attack only in 10% of the tank engagements (possibly impossibly low percentage). comparing to historical losses the Allied tank losses in tank engagements increased in June by 79 extra tanks (+42%) and in July by 83 tanks (+32%).

i also did a 4th run. this time i fixed the losses to historical Allied tank losses. this way i would see how many panzers Germans could save in tank vs tank engagements if they attacked only in 10% of the cases and Allied actions would be limited to their historical losses. in this scenario Germans saved 33 panzers in June and 35 in July, taking 71% and 76% of their historical losses in tank vs tank engagements.

not a big change, even if the percentages are quite high. it could be that Germans were more passive with their tanks in Normandy than usually considered or it could be that it's just hard for Germans to get very high tank kill ratios vs Allies (the OR numbers were based on Germans fighting Allies in 1944, and the kill ratio with my third experiment was 1:2.4).

of course my algorithm is far from perfect and there are a couple of parameters that i could adjust to tweak the results (simulating a bit different tactics). an important factor not really covered by the algorithm is the losses of German tanks to Allied AT guns & SPDTs -- of course almost totally related to German tank attacks.

if one would take the results of the silly experiments with face value, i think the conclusion would be that the only thing that really matters in Normandy is not to drive the German armor into the pocket and start withdrawing earlier. combat losses of tanks in tank engagements on both sides are more or less fixed. a more passive use of panzers might have prolonged the defensive battles by a couple of months.

These mistakes of overaggressive tactical use of armor threw away easily half of German tank strength in Normandy, when all added up.

i certainly agree, but i think someone should make a detailed look at the actions of some key PDs, collecting all the data. the absurdly stupid death rides may receive more attention than they perhaps should.

But pretending it was an efficiently conducted defense without screw ups is pretending. They could have fought the campaign *much* better than they did.

certainly true.

[strange tank spotting behaviour]

another thing to consider is the random number generator. math generators have tendancy to generate streaks of high's and low's. this could explain the single panther vs sherman oddity.

there are some strange things with the results of the test, but it's almost impossible to speculate about them because we only have those 50 runs. it could be that the game uses a more advanced system than just one single percentage (by which i mean that the percentage may change over time). there also may be a system which makes only a part of the units to spot at any given moment in time, and the system may select the active units somewhat randomly. there may also be some bugs.

[strange tank spotting behaviour]

nice conclusion... even as iam intended german college my math knowledge (especially probability calaculation) was never the best... so it is good to have someone here that is such a math crack...

but could you please explain to me how you get those hits per second results out of my hitting time results (Sherman: 1.6% Panther: 3.3% posted on page 2 from you) thanks in advance.

i by accident bounced on the Excel file i used in the calculations and realized i forgot to answer this question of yours (yes, i get the rhetorical nature of it).

i didn't make any real probability calculations, just very basic statistics.

basicly i took your spotting data from post number 6 and i calculated for each second (1-59) the number of tanks (separately for the two types) that had spotted during that second and the number of tanks that had still been spotting during that second.

so for example for Shermans on second 1 there are 50 tanks spotting and 2 of them spot. so 4% of the Shermans did spot the Panther during that second. or by stretching the meaning of the percentage, a single Sherman had 4% chance of spotting the Panther (with 6.79% margin of error lol). on the second number two there were 48 Shermans still spotting and 3 of them did spot (so 6.25% did spot, or a single Sherman had a 6.25% chance of spotting --- with a 8.39% margin of error).

the average for seconds 1-59 for Shermans was 1.78%. then i just calculated standard deviation for the whole bunch (2.41%) and confidence interval (0.61%). so again in other words, this crude method gives a single Sherman, during a single second, a 1.78% "chance of spotting" the Panther, while the margin of error is 0.31%. or in other words in similar 50 test runs in 95% of cases the average should be in between 1.17 and 2.40 percentages.

for Panthers it was 3.99% to spot Sherman (not 3.3 as i stated on the post -- i simply remembered the percentage wrong), with 0.75% margin of error. thus in 95% of cases of 50 test runs the percentage should be between 2.49 and 5.49.

so the Panther had 2.24 times greater chance for spotting per second. yet it was meaningless for the end results of your duels, due to the considerable variance, or randomness.

this is of course highly simplistic and contains fundamental errors (starting with the available data stopping at 59 seconds). so no, i didn't make any real probability calculations or such. just very simplistic basic statistics.

[Resistance and Liberation (realistic WWII shooter free mod)]

I've heard it compared to Darkest Hour but I never played it. It has no vehicles (at least officially). I played RO once upon a time and personally I don't think RO has anything on RnL but there's lots of arguments to be had there.

i played it a bit yesterday.

i think it's very close to RO. the biggest difference (together with not having vehicles of course) seemed to be that suppression effects are far more effective (yay!). in RnL suppressive fire has a real function (it does suppress the enemy when there's enough volume of fire). the morale system (as far as i understood it -- being close to squad / section leader adds suppression tolerance or something) and 3D voice chat also encourages team work even further. the voice chat also adds some nice tension to some situations (everyone becoming quiet when trying to sneak up on the enemy and similarly the ability to hear the enemy speak somewhere close).

it's still quite action oriented, but that's of course up to maps and players. it would be unfair to compare the battles to the battles on dedicated "clan" servers for mods like Invasion 44. hopefully in future there will be less action-oriented maps and battle types. perhaps there already are?

You can get TF 2 for free on steam... that would come with the engine. You can also get the Source engine for free.. not sure how. Either way you need steam if you don't already use it.

Correction someone just told me that when you download steam and right click on the tab it gives you an option to install Source SDK base 2007. Not sure if it works because I already have it.

i noticed that after running the installer the mod showed up on Steam. Steam then automatically recognized that it's a mod and that it requires the Source SDK 2007. Steam then automatically downloaded and installed the SDK. installation was a very smooth experience.

considering that the mod is a beta etc, the game/mod also run surprisingly well. there were only some very minor glitches.

i can fully recommend Resistance and Liberation to gamers who want realistic first person WW2 infantry combat. it's certainly worth trying.

[Resistance and Liberation (realistic WWII shooter free mod)]

how do you get hl2 engine for free?

how does the gameplay compare to RO or Arma WW2 mods?