domfluff

I've been messing around with the following setup for an uncon group, which seems to be working out quite well: 1x 1 man HQ 1x 5 man LMG 1x 4 man LMG 1x 5 man RPG 1x 3 man SVD The 3 man sniper team makes for decent platoon scouts. Three men is the minimum, and you really want this to be as small as possible, to maximise stealth. In urban terrain, I've had good results with an SVD team, even on Conscript experience levels, since the ranges are so close. RPGs are game-changing weapons, and tremendously levelling - there's a good argument that the RPG-7 is one of the most important weapons of the twentieth century. They don't come in less that 5 man combatant teams, so 5 men it is. The group needs at least one. The RPG has a major issue in that it'll suppress the team when fired indoors, and with low quality troops that can be devastating - either the team immediately loses any fire superiority it's gained, or it'll actually panic and run away. Two LMG teams allows for a degree of bounding between them - they're flexible enough to get the base of fire down quickly, and don't have the RPG issue. Two of them are much more effective than one. The downside to this approach is C2 - it takes longer to spread the spotting information to four units than two, so a comparatively large group will be worse at sharing information. There's a good argument for splitting this into an "LMG Group", an "SVD Group", etc., but that's making the C2 situation worse. The above works with transport options. Taxis carry 4 and Pickups carry 9, so the above can be neatly carried by two pickups. Attaching a Technical to the above is a strong option - Technicals are mostly useful as flank security, rather than as an assault element. Ideally from keyhole positions, or performing the "isolation" role in a building assault, since they can get around a flank easier. the anti-aircraft Technical *might* be okay leading an attack, if you can do it with sufficient surprise, but I wouldn't bet on it. This kind of thing I mean: the Technical is moved so as not to exposed to the target building directly, but instead can prevent movement to or from, allowing the assaulting teams to suppress and move in:

You can stop when you get to Berlin, comrade.

I'm not sure they'd let me play Combat Mission though.

The house rule I've been playing with is: ""Units cannot area fire into a location where they do not have a contact marker, unless *no* unit has a contact marker in that location"." The point being that speculative fire is fine, but if you know something is there (and the firing unit does not) then it's cheating. I've been mulling over nixing pre-battle bombardments entirely. TRPs are fine, and can do the same job.

Interestingly, they seem to have lost that ability by Black Sea. Perhaps they realised that they weren't using the dismounted teams? Strykers were pretty new by CMSF, so their doctrine would have been (and presumably still is) in flux.

Actually, that's not quite right - the Battalion mortar squad has the 81mm when dismounted, and the Company mortars have 60mm when dismounted. Both obviously have 120mm when mounted. Presumably that's entirely to do with intended engagement ranges/set up times, etc.

Yeah, that's doctrinal. If you notice, at different organisational levels they disembark with 60mm, 81mm or 120mm, depending on where the carrier is from.

That would be my assumption - as with the Roadblock example, it looks as though the team is making what it considers to be a sensible move to cover, which ends up being suicidal along the way. Also, it's worth pointing out that the AI avoidance behaviour in 4.01 is significantly better than in 4.0.

Mostly I've just made clearly labelled forum posts: "(BUG) King Tiger crewed exclusively by Canadians" Or something similar. I believe there's a beta testing forum/bug reporting section, where these are actually picked up.

Yup. The advantages the assault command has over replicating it manually are speed and ease - with the tools available, you can't easily replicate precisely the bounding movement that Assault gives you. The downside is that the order commits the whole squad, and doesn't allow for finer control - if the move turns out to be a bad idea, you'll risk losing everyone. As said, it's typically worse than splitting manually, but I do think there are edge cases where it's appropriate. One technique that is nice with Assault are setting Target commands at the beginning and at the final waypoint - this will direct the stationary element to area-fire, whilst the moving element shifts, and will swap roles when appropriate - even if this is a longer command, with multiple bounds.

There was an old thread from CMSF 1 where a T-72 was left unscathed, when the Javelin hit the commander's machine gun...

Impossible to really tell much from that video, but there are a few reasons why that happens. It's not even necessarily wrong. If you give them a facing order towards the top of the frame, I bet they'll move inside and to the windows.

Sometimes with bad patching you end up with rifle squads named things like "Wooden bunker" or Bradleys being "Panzergrenadier HQ". That kind of thing. That's not a problem at this end.

The T-62 doesn't really match up to US equipment in CMSF - obviously it's overmatched by the Abrams, but it's also often overmatched by the Bradley, which is more of a problem. The T-72 Turms-T is in a significantly better position, but the best counter is really ATGMs on foot. The main thing is that the Syrians don't have a chance frontally - spreading the units out allows for flank shots, and disperses the return fire. It also makes C2 more difficult, especially for ATGM teams, but that's the trade-off you have to make.

In Real Life, as in Combat Mission - if the tank was disabled somewhere useless, then it'll be useless. If it's where it needs to be, then it's not a mission kill. Abrams with APS are a nightmare to kill. Something that compounds the issue is that most of the "antitank" labelled air assets that the Russians have will rely on ATGMs, that Trophy will usually shoot down. The most reliable tools the Russians have are MBT main guns, which *can* kill them frontally, but will only reliably do so from the sides, and anything that can volley-fire ATGMs, like the BMP-2M and Khrizantema. Even then, you're going to have better results with the tank main gun. I'm not going to speculate as to whether these are over-modelled or not, since I can't do anything about that, but you do have tools that will kill them.

The SBCT Sniper squad has three loadout choices - "M107", "M110" and "Mixed". One is a true sniper rifle, one is the .50 cal anti-materiel rifle, and presumably Mixed means one of each. Scenario Editor screen - I've chosen three of the same squad, and given them different AI groups to label them. So A1 is "M107", A2 is "M110" and A3 is "Mixed". "M107" squad has two M107s. "M110" squad has one M107 and one M110 "Mixed" Squad has two M107's I know Sniper squad TO&E is a bit vague, but I assume that "Mixed" should be one of each, and "M110" should be 2x M110?

Oh quite, but I'm a lot less restricted, and free to speculate wildly I think it's clear that this is not problem with bocage tiles themselves, since it doesn't occur on the flat test map. I suspect the bocage gap tiles are illustrating the problem more immediately than anything else, but other circumstances could cause this. I do not believe this is a question of player technique. Certainly putting units in the tiles adjacent to bocage gaps is a bad idea, but the punishment for that shouldn't be the pixeltruppen committing suicide. This isn't as simple as putting waypoints to select the correct entry point to a building - this evasion behaviour is out of player control. Certainly "don't put them next to gaps" is good advice in general, and that's the immediate player-fix, but it's still unexpected, unpredictable and uncontrolled behaviour, which you really don't want. I also don't believe it's a problem with the Roadblock map as such (or any other map with a similar situation) - more that the AI behaviour is interpreting the situation, and choosing that depression in Roadblock as the best available spot to retreat to. I do therefore believe we've shown that it's a consequence of the Engine 4 HE avoidance changes. It's worth pointing out that this behaviour is significantly better than it was in 4.00, but it looks like there are still tweaks that can be made in 4.01. Without knowing how the AI is set up (again, I'm free to speculate wildly here, since I'm just a punter), this may be a question of messing with weighting, and giving greater priority to action squares which are closer to the friendly map edge. I also don't imagine that's a simple thing to "just" change, since any AI changes will have knock-on effects. If the exact same behaviour occurred but resulted in the squad retreating backwards, I don't think anyone would notice this as a problem. It's that they're moving forwards, and specifically in the case of bocage gaps that means exposing the entire squad to fire, rather than one third of it, with disastrous results. I think that the bocage is just bringing attention to the AI limitations in a not-elegant way.

That kind of thing is still my expectation here. It doesn't mean that it's not a behaviour that needs tweaking in some manner, but it's a normally-reasonable response to stimuli, which produces unreasonable results in an edge case (or even a few edge cases).

Having reloaded that save a few times, it's definitely the HE avoidance behaviour that's triggering it (which wasn't unexpected). The unit doesn't always start moving immediately, but it will when it starts taking HE. Not necessarily straight away, but within a couple of turns.

Zip file here, containing two saves. One before the behaviour (005), and one immediately after (006). The only user-action taken was a pair of quick moves to the above action spot (I have that save as well if you'd like it, but I don't imagine it's needed). https://uploadfiles.io/pnl1430q The trigger seems to be the HE fire from the AT guns, which isn't surprising, and the retreat direction matches the screenshots above. Some of the AI plans move the AT gun positions, so the squad doesn't come under the same amount of HE fire in all tests. I have seen a little variety in that - mostly they head to exactly the spot they're moving in save 006 (and in the previous shot), but sometimes they've headed to one square closer in the same direction. Start of 006 looks like this: That waypoint has been generated entirely by the squad, after taking HE fire from the opposite AT gun.

Okay, will recreate, and get a save on the turn before they start running, since I've just run through the same thing again and got the same result. The exact move to get into the situation was:

Will give this a poke, but it's worth pointing out that whenever I made a movement order similar to the above - with the central squad action spot on the bocage gap - they behaved reasonably (staying in place, or sometimes retreating). The way to reliably recreate the suicidal forwards-evading behaviour was to place the order one square to the left of where you have it in the picture above. That way, the rightmost action spot of the squad is in front of the bocage gap, rather than the central square.That's what produces the forwards-running behaviour.

Action Spot. The point being that you can only fire on a given square when either the firing unit knows there is something there, or that none of your units know something is there. If someone on your side has that information, the ones without that information can't use it. It's a rough abstraction, but it's not much more of an abstraction than the default one.

Oh, these are beautiful.

So, that seems logical, but (taking my very broad guess as true for the moment) it might depend on geometry, the way that movement orders are handled from units that cover three spots, and exactly how the LOS tool sees bocage gaps. If you imagine that the bocage gap is empty space, then it might just be that there's a shorter path to one of the three action spots the unit has to take up, rather than the fairly large arc that LOS could be traced through the gap. Might be extremely tricky to pin down without proper debugging tools though, and I'm certainly not confident that's the solution, but it seems like a fairly likely one to me - fundamentally, the AI sees this as a safer spot than the one that it's in, and dies on the way to it. It's interesting that in your example it's the same setup though - one space to the left of a bocage gap, with fire coming from 11 o'clock or so.