A Canadian Cat

Well the idea behind having SOPs, as it has been discussed before, is as a guide for the AI to decide how it will react (with no orders from us) on its own. All units do that now but we have no influence on it. The idea that has been discussed previously is to allow us some control over how the AI decides what it will do (with no orders from us). Hunt, move etc are orders we gave. When people talk about SOPs the are talking about influencing the AI behaviour without orders. Any time we get into discussion around making units "work just the way I want them to"tm phrases like "it's easy", or "I'm only talking about this one unit" or "I'm only talking about this one situation" pop up. They make total sense in our heads. But the issue is that there are side effects, corner cases and other things to think about. It is much better to think about what a broadly applicable feature would look like. That's just my opinion.

Ah Nija'ed by @gunnersman. The thing to remember is the AI does not have a brain placing Target or Target Light commands all over the place. The AI only gets the "choice by the TacAI running the unit itself" option. BFC have stated before that the prefer to tweak that behaviour to be as close to optimal as possible and make the majority of us happy the majority of the time rather than a bunch of commands that we have to tweak. Of course having said that we have three kinds of target now. Who knows what they might do when they get around to a game UI over haul at some future date.

So specifically if you take the BMP-3 and tell it to target a truck it will most likely choose the 30mm. A wall, it will most likely use the 100mm An enemy tank it will probably choose to put an ATGM down range. But all this changes with range and what exactly it is targeting. What you do know for sure is Target light is MGs only. Target is anything it feels like.

That would do it. Also if you just put a way point on the opposite edge of a forest the vehicle might decide there is a better way around the forest instead. If the wooded area is smallish or has gaps for roads or juts clearings the the vehicle pathing might make a decision you don't like. To overcome that use several way points along the path you want the vehicle to take through the woods. But like @tyrspawn said that was not the case here.

LOL yeah the Tunguska eats Ravens for breakfast, lunch and dinner. No need to for it to eat crow

A better way to think of it is that subjected to sustained, effective artillery fire it can have a lasting effect on morale. It cannot just be any artillery fire near them it has to be scary for those guys and permanent effect is not quite right but it can be long lasting. However the most powerful effect is to pin the enemy soldiers - which means they feel that they cannot respond to the incoming fire. That effect does not last long after the artillery stops.

If you want you can try Whose Turn Is It? instead. It will work with a Mac - I know because it took me forever to get it to work right and finally actually got a crappy Mac to figure it out. The screen shots for setting up games are all PC (I could have sworn I did a better job of mixing it up) but the procedure is the same for a Mac: http://www.lesliesoftware.com/products/WhoseTurnIsIt/gettingstarted.html#setup

Excellent summary. All I have to add is for those buildings that I think are empty my usual clearing procedure is to have a team move floor to floor with 20s pauses on each floor and another team on the floor below them with off kilter pauses. That way the really only clear two floors a turn and someone is always near by not moving in case thing go south. This works pretty well in that buildings get cleared and if things do go sideways badness is limited to a single team and they have a covering team right there. +1 there this is excellent advice. A starting point might be to ask your self "do I really need to clear that occupied building right now"? Try to answer no

Oh yeah, cowering is not "I want to go home to mommy" its "crap that was close stay down". Perfectly OK and well motivated guys cower when the bullets start flying. At least that's how I look at it anyway.

LOL. I am right there with ya. I would love a custom point QB setting that let you enter the points you wanted form 0 to 100 000! OK Steve can pick a better number range that me I'll leave that up to him

Humm I strongly suspect this is a map edge issue and therefore an edge case (sorry could not resist). Keep your eye on it and see what happens at other times. Especially if the missiles hit the ground instead of heading for the aircraft. I have to admit I have not paid much attention to Stingers - I have few in a game I am playing right now so if they fire I'll watch them carefully. Right now they are [REDACTED] from the edge of the map so no edge case there.

Oh man bummer. Sorry but that made me laugh though - and then I felt bad.

Oh yeah, really good point. I have had bocage fighting sadness when the trees were at trunks only because I could not figure out why it was not working.

Which in this case would be some kind of Scouting stance that would favour observing over engaging and would favour reversing for cover it a threat appeared they could not deal with. As opposed to a standard combat stance that would favour engaging over observing and holding ground over withdrawing. And I am sure we could come up with a few more. In fact perhaps we should - on a new thread maybe since this one is specific to recon vehicles.

Sounds like it. Your troops (and crews) can end up broken or Rattled just because they got to hear over the radio net what happened to their comrades. Those soft factors definitely explain what you are seeing. Here is my suggestion (I have some experience herding broken troops:-): wait for the smoke to clear and move them back to those hull down positions but this time give them a target briefly command to some place close to the enemy tanks. If you cannot area target where they are try to target somewhere behind that would go through the enemy's location. What I find is that sometimes messed up troops do better if they have purpose and a 15s target order will be easily overridden if they spot the threat. And if they don't you might hit the enemy anyway. Also, expect them to get scared and run again too just keep giving them something to do. Or retreat - that's what they want to do anyway

What are you expecting? Way back when I, and others, made suggestions for the improvement in the way Warrior and Elite worked. There was debate and teeth gnashing on the forums but I never heard a peep from Steve. About a year and half later changes showed up - pretty damn close to what I had asked for. Excellent! It was a pleasant surprise. So go for it, ask for the cool things you want. Just keep your expectations of a feedback loop low. Here is the last time this was discussed - no sign of Steve or Phil in that thread either: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/102587-modelling-vehicles-motion/

I agree it would add to the feel of the game - and those SOPs could be part of the AI plans so there is not issue of giving more abilities to the player that the AI cannot take advantage of.

Whoa horsey SOPs are not a feature in the game at the moment. They can code the game to do what ever they like. Right now there is no code for SOP or stances. Well tanks do not Deploy and deploy is not an SOP or stance. What is this Attack command you speak of?

Well I did a dumb thing. My PzIV that was in a fold in the terrain made an attempt to flank the IS2s in the field beyond. It was looking good for few seconds but before he could get to his firing position BOOM. Rats I should have left him there - an unseen threat is way better than a burning wreck My [REDACTED] finally put down one of the T34s it was facing off against. Sadly its game of cat and mouse in the woods has resulted in smoke plume in the forest.

This! I have to say that I do not feel there is a difference in basic troop behaviour in CMBS. I'm not sure if you are seeing something you expect to see or you are seeing something that I am not - beats me.

LOL yep sorry can't help ya there.

No that is not it. Vehicles have free rein in the game for where their way points go. To get a tank to be able to fire through bocage you want to position the way point just at the burm of the bocage line. Then the vehicle should drive as far as it can and stop. There have been a few times where vehicles have not cooperated with me and I found that backing up and trying again slight to one side has fixed the problem. I think in one game I finally gave up and backed up and moved 15m down the road and tried there which worked. No idea why.

Check out the pinned resources for new players thread at the top of this forum for good links...

I do not think those are the same thing. The morale issue is there is a "quantum" effect of platoon level morale when one squad gets into big trouble and takes casualties: other squads that are out of contact are instantly effected and can drop a level in morale or even become shaken or panic too if they are already a mess. That is the issue that is known. I seriously doubt this is high on any list to fix but I don't speak for BFC so who knows. The teams in a squad not under fire getting pinned issue is not quite the same. The actual reaction to being shot it is tracked soldier by soldier so those that are not under fire should not be cowering. If it turns out that when a squad gets pinned as shown in the UI that state effects the behaviour of all soldiers that sounds like a bug. Someone would need to do some tests comparing the behaviour of a combined squad under fire separated by the assault command vs the behaviour of a squad that is split.

Well I guess I don't need to post now Look I get it too. Would love to have improvements with the way troops move too. But there are some are workarounds. Those are useful to know. If you are going to stop playing until these things are fixed you will have a less happy life Separating squads and micro managing is one workaround. Another is to use short movement orders. The bunching up and conga line stuff gets worse and worse the further the squad moves in one order leg. If you give them shorter movement legs the will stop at each way point and spread out a bit before starting the next move. So if you use three or four movement orders to cross 150m distance they will spend more time spread out than if you use one.