Tux

That's the way to think of it; the TacAI needs rules to follow which will produce reasonable results more often than not. Your above suggestion is a good idea but what if the nearest position of non-panicking friendlies is 300m away across open ground? I suspect the resulting Panic behaviour from the truck driver as he attempts to churn through the mud on his journey to Safety would then be just as annoying as your example of reversing slowly into an exposed tree line. Our pixeltruppen are (fortunately) not actual beings with actual thoughts and, even if they were, they wouldn't 'know' everything we, as the player, knows about the battlefield. That means that having any given unit judge where the nearest cover is when taken under fire is a colossal problem to try and solve: Does the unit know, for sure, where the fire is coming from? How can it judge where is covered from that fire without running CPU-intensive LOS checks between the assumed source of incoming fire and every local action spot? How many action spots should it consider? All within 50m for infantry units, and 200m for vehicles? Then what if an enemy tank is "known" by the panicking unit to be idling in clear view 500m away from the resulting "good cover" solution? All of a sudden we have a player tearing their hair out again because their pixeltruppen did something 'stupid' when panicked. Or, you can not tear your hair out, take it on the chin and recognise that coding a human-level thought process into the TacAI is not going to happen any time soon and so the best solution is to work on improving your game so that your pixeltruppen (whether they are uber all-American too-cool-to-panic hero superhumans or otherwise) don't get into such bad trouble in the first place.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that you get a big, plain text notification next to the successful unit when you shoot down an enemy aircraft, in the same style as the "LASER WARNING" text. I had several of my troops fire Iglas at attacking helicopters in Holding The Line and wondered, like you, what effect they were having. All of a sudden the text "ENEMY AIRCRAFT DESTROYED" (or something similar) showed up next to one of my men! Since I couldn't give him another missile he just got to kneel there looking smug for the rest of the game and boy, did he milk it! Unfortunately the save game is long gone so I can't post a screenshot.

Yes, I know. Sorry, I should have made clear that they have a Javelin as well. In the screenshot the Javelin Operator (the guy without an AT-4) is choosing to arm himself with an M4 instead so the Jav is invisible... Probably makes perfect sense to him, given that he can't see any tanks. I've tried this but it hasn't worked, possibly because of the long aiming time required to use the Javelin. I've also tried leaving the team still, as suggested by jspec, but the tanks are "only" in view for 2-3 minutes and they didn't take a shot in that time.

Screenshot of one of my 'blind' teams: They see all of the advancing tanks if they so much as lift their heads but never actually fire their AT weapon because going prone breaks contact.

Yep, I am currently struggling to get three separate Javelin teams to fire at tanks 2000m away across the Valley of Death because they all have daffodils in their face. If I ask them to Hunt they get up, spot a tank and immediately hit the dirt again, losing the spot before they can get around to "aiming". Didn't troops occasionally get up on one knee to spot in CMBN? They don't seem to do that very much in BS and I am now on the fifth Valley of Death reload trying various combinations of orders, arcs and movements to get a Javelin team (who I have positioned in a wide open field with a dangerous lack of concealment, out of desperation) to fire a damned missile!

If you give them the order to Hunt to the Action Spot they already occupy then I think they will at least get up and shuffle about a bit, hopefully improving their spotting ability in the process (but also making themselves more likely to be spotted, unfortunately).

Matches my understanding, pretty much. Now that you mention it, I agree that "penetrator" is usually considered the correct term for the 'dart'.

Minor Quibble #1: It's only pronounced "say-boh" by Americans, similar to the way only (some) Americans say "eye-rack" for Iraq. Sabot is actually pronounced "sabbow" by everybody I know and by French people. Minor Quibble #2: The sabot is the 'shell' or casing which folds off in flight. As far as I know, the high-density penetrator is just called a dart.

Even more useful than anything I was hoping for, thanks! At night or in low-light conditions then I guess I just favour IR/night vision where possible. I had noticed that BMPs seem slow to spot when buttoned. I suppose they're already vulnerable enough in battle that the crew can't reasonably complain if I ask them to stick their head out of the top as well!

Would the same rule(s) of thumb be true when using other AFVs as well? For example, when using BMPs or Strykers, are their sensor suites still the way to go? Where is the 'line' in terms of vehicle classes which carry the right equivalent to justify keeping heads down?

Perfect. Thanks for the advice, guys.

Now that we're in the 21st Century, am I better off unbuttoning TCs in order to increase their awareness or leaving them locked up so they can use their fancy detection equipment? Presumably the latter in low-light conditions, at least? Is it different for US/UKR/RUS tanks? Thanks in advance for the help. Tux

Just thought I'd post this pic here, too. It shows an Igla-S being fired off at a nice, shallow angle as a turn ends. I heard a helicopter arrive last turn, so I'm pretty sure that's what it's being fired at. I'll be posting in Tech Help with regards to the mssing texture, btw.

I had no hit decals at all when I first ran the game. Closing and restarting the game brought them into view properly, though.

Just want to let contributors to this thread know that I am finding it all utterly fascinating. DAF and JasonC, you could sell the discussion which you are currently sharing!

Wouldn't any MG cause ridiculously high casualties in this scenario? I can't see how any measurable difference between designs would change the results here...

I once noticed a massive double explosion underneath one of my 120mm mortar barrages. Later on I asked my opponent what it was: Turns out I took out his last Sherman with a direct hit. I certainly would never bother trying to use mortars as an AT weapon though, except maybe as a very last resort.

Merlin. Merlin, Merlin, Merlin. If you want a sharper sound, then Packard-built Merlin. If you want sharp and a bit more grunt then indulge in a Griffon. For me, though, the smooth, rolling purr of a Rolls-Royce-built Merlin is beyond compare in terms of tear-to-the-eye beautiful. Only the US had the resources to spam so many competing prototype designs for every given aircraft role as they did, so even when the US forces made contentious choices they usually ended up with something very competitive, at the very least. As regards the Vengeance and its contemporaries, specifically, I always find it hard to get worked up about it when I know the A-1 was so close to wrapping up the piston-engined CAS role once and for all...

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/naca868-rollchart.jpg The NACA graph above agrees that the 190 tested hit ~160 deg/s at around 250mph but it's advantage was safe until >360mph when only the P-51B gains a small advantage, of the operational allied fighters tested. I would be interested to know how the roll-rate of a P-47N, with it's clipped wing, compares. I also seem to remember that the Tempest was none too shabby above 250mph. This is the last OT post from me though. Apologies to the OP.

Agreed mate. I didn't want to go too far off-topic but I'm actually of the opinion that the P-47 was the most useful single-engined aircraft available to the USAAF. The Mustang thrived in the high-altitude, long-range escort role against an already-almost-beaten Jagdwaffe and that has led a lot of people to underestimate the P-47's worth.

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/naca868-rollchart.jpg My memory failed me horribly on this one and I obviously resorted to anecdotal evidence I had read. P-47C roll-rate was good but unremarkable when compared to FW-190 (sub-type unspecified) or clipped-wing Spitfires. It only exceeded the rate achieved by normal Spits over ~280mph... I don't know whether P-47D, N, or M models improved on this. Back to the intertubes!

Out of interest, which period are you referring to, here, Jason? I would think this can only be 2nd TAF et al's campaign over Western Europe in the last year of the war? In that case, although I very much agree with your general point re: CAS effectiveness, this was often a case of interceptors being given CAS missions more-or-less because there was nothing else for them to do. Spitfires being sent out with single 250lb bombs slung underneath, just because they could fit one on and there wasn't a coherent Luftwaffe for them to fight, for example. My point is that, if this is the period you're referring to, there were a substantial number of particularly poorly-suited aircraft being used in ground attack roles at the time, which will at least partially skew the results in the defenders' favour if it is to be used as a reference for results achieved by more capable and specialised aircraft types. Agreed. When faced with multiple AAA defences I would very much like to see pilots in CM simply 'complete the mission' (i.e. drop/fire their primary ordnance at the chosen target) and then bugger off ASAP, rather than return for multiple strafing runs afterwards. This would make purchasing AAA guns a more interesting choice, I think, if they had a very good chance of prohibiting follow-up attacks and didn't just have to rely on actually destroying enemy aircraft to be worthwhile. I can't remember whether P-47s out-performed FW-190s in terms of roll-rate, but the Jug certainly wasn't an agile machine in any other dimension and so in that sense, yes, it was 'clumsy'. As I'm sure you know, though, well-trained Thunderbolt pilots wouldn't get dragged into a turning fight when they had superior altitude and dive performance to rely on in a 'vertical' battle, instead. Yup. Was that the same post in which the implicitly reliable 'eye-witness' refers to "Ju-97s" armed with "three 37mm cannons" and 'Pz VIs supporting the attack from dug-in positions'? The impression I got from that whole account is that it was a noisy and chaotic event but that the guy recounting it basically didn't know what was going on in any detail, which is unsurprising when one thinks about it.

To add to the above, threats spotted by anyone other than the TC would take slightly longer to react to as the crew member must, presumably, first inform the TC and allow him to decide on a reaction to their info?

Surely it must be possible to programme in delayed reactions (accounting for TC orders voiced, understood, executed) followed by 'accurate' or slightly-slower-than-apparent-on-YouTube rotation (pick your poison). Different experience levels could then be modelled easily enough as improved reaction time, while green crews might react more slowly but then try to rotate too fast, risking a thrown track. Then isn't that 'job done'? Why are we hung up on abstraction of a process which seems fairly straightforward? I'd honestly be interested to learn how I'm oversimplifying here (I'm pretty confident I am).

Thanks, Wicky. Sounds like a frontal impact almost anywhere would be enough to knock the radio out! And yes, Bletchley Geek and Fuser, it's the apparent proximity of the OT-34 TC's nose to his hatch which I was alluding to. Considering that CM models LOS from crewmembers explicitly I wonder whether it might be affecting his in-game performance - perhaps explaining his apparent reluctance to fire, at the moment?