Bulletpoint

Soldiers in the open often survive getting shot, because they have a bonus from terrain. I have a savegame that shows a soldier getting about 10 bullets straight through his body at close range, without any damage. But the halftrack gunners seem to get no cover bonus from their halftracks. And they are unable to duck down behind the cover like soldiers in the open can do behind walls and hedgerows.

If halftracks were always left behind before closing with the enemy in real life, BattleFront could have saved themselves a lot of time by not modeling them in the game. It's a bit sad to see all those vehicles just sitting around the starting line, wasting CPU cycles for nothing. Their included ammo could be automatically distributed among the squads.

The lesson is ... always be careful when you take beer from Germans.

It just seems to me they do it much less now than they used to.. so it's either been tweaked or I suffer from wishful thinking. Or maybe I just suffer from Murphy's law in that when I want to use it to my own advantage, my schrek teams refuse to fire, instead whipping out a pistol.

It can't target it directly by the target command, it needs to go through a spotter and the fire support menu.

I really recommend reporting any bugs you guys find directly to Battlefront through their official help desk. They do respond and it's the best way to make sure it gets to their attention. One of the bugs I reported was just fixed in the 3.12 patch. I long shied away from reporting bugs through the help desk because I thought it would be a lot of trouble, but it's really not that hard once you sit down and dig up your old help desk password. The more people reporting a particular bug, the bigger chance it will get fixed. Always remember to add a save game with the bug report if you can.

Not complaining at all, just interested in knowing more to see how it should affect my tactics

So basically it has nothing to do with HE then? If terrain cover values were generally increased against bullets, that could have big effects on gameplay...

Yeah but I'm talking about how it works in the game. Actually just tonight I destroyed an M8 with fire from a MG42, firing from the side at about 100m range. The crew bailed out after about 30 seconds when the commander was killed, then I kept shooting for a couple of minutes before it caught fire. I'm still on v3.11

I'm surprised by this. Shouldn't rocky terrain cause more casualties from high explosives? As all the rocks and pebbles would be thrown out like shrapnel?

Is that when shooting at the side, and does it say "Penetration"? Because the bug I reported was the crew inside the vehicle getting hit when shot from the front, with the commander unbuttoned.

Seems like they fixed the bug I reported about the M8 scout car - very happy to see that

The Eastern Front Bunny

Heck, aim for the medals

Trying to answer my own question, I found this. Not sure if it's reliable, but it says the grenade would self-arm after 3 metres of flight, so could be shot out through foliage but would detonate on impact afterwards. http://www.bergflak.com/psammo.html

It used to be quite deadly against infantry in the game at least. If this is realistic I can't say. But I know it's been discussed before. I wonder if a panzerschreck would even explode on impact with the ground, or if the fuze is only designed to detonate on impact against metal plate?

I think the voices for the German troops are decent enough (I'm not a native German speaker), but the voices of the fire support radio chatter is quite low audio quality, and the guys on the radio sound like kids - maybe intentional, as the soldiers were often young, but then I guess that would also go for the US side?

Perhaps the guy on the right is a family-friendly ornithologist who just spotted a pair of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit They are found in Italy too

Have fun. I've been playing for more than two years now, and I'm still learning...

Who knows, it's possible that I could be wrong about my observations or it might have been a tweak in the 3.11 patch that wasn't mentioned in the change log..

The game has a lot of rough edges, but the gameplay is unmatched by any other wargame that I know of.

Maybe they just tweaked the AI's decision to use it or not then. Several times I saw them pack away the rocket launcher to fire a pistol instead. which came as a surprise to me, as I had assumed I could do a rocket ambush and then withdraw before the suppression wore off..

Wouldn't carrying around a scavenged panzerschreck or panzerfaust make you a likely target for friendly fire?

Might it also depend on the cover of the infantry? I tried to ambush infantry in hedgerows with a schreck team, and they used their rifle and pistol instead. Later, my opponent fired some bazooka rounds into a house that I had vacated, so seems like area fire in some circumstances fires rockets - maybe because it was against a building? Which would make great sense..

I've noticed lately that bazookas and panzerschrecks don't seem to get fired against infantry any more. There was some discussion about this, a while ago, with some people being annoyed that their AT-weapons were being wasted against infantry. Well, it seems they don't fire them against infantry any more, at least not in my latest two games. I think they still fire them when given a direct target order, but the time of having to remember to give each AT-team a short covered arc just to prevent them from wasting rockets sems to be over...? If so, thumbs up BattleFront