domfluff

US platoon organisation depends on armoured or leg infantry - the former has a 60mm mortar and two MG teams per platoon, whereas the latter has a seperate weapons platoon, with the mortars and MG's combined into one. Organisationally, this means that the armoured infantry is already "pre-split" - the assets are already doled out to the platoon. In both cases, the mortars teams do not have radios, so you will need a unit to be within C2 that has a radio, to use them indirectly. That means that I'll usually keep them close to the platoon (or company, if I'm using the leg organisation as a combined weapons platoon, but often out of Line of Sight, until needed. By way of example (indirect role, US Armoured platoon): Scenario is something like a deliberate attack on a barn, containing an enemy MG. There isn't sufficient cover to get the platoon in place first, so the intent would be to suppress the barn with mortar fire as cover to bring up the MGs, and then progress into the assault. HQ in an armoured platoon is a full squad. This has been split to create a four man HW platoon, with radio operator. This would have a short covered arc to hold fire, and would Slow move to crest the hill. HQ unit will have binoculars, and a radio, so spotting contacts can be reported up to the Company HQ. Rest of the platoon is out of line of sight behind the camera, set up to provide some security if things go horribly wrong. View from the HQ unit - the barn is in sight, and the 60mm mortar is within close visual and audio contact. Call-in time for this is something like 5 minutes.

I general, I think it's useful to think of Platoons as individual units, with varying tools and options, potentially with attached assets. Platoons can generally achieve one objective ("take that hill") at a time. If they run into difficulty, you can abandon the attack, or halt it and bring in a second or third platoon (a company attack). There's a couple of reasons for doing this, but one is that it achieve economy of force - anything you do runs the risk of taking casualties, so minimising the area in contact is the best way to control the tempo of the engagement, and how much risk you're choosing to take on. This means the US 60mm platoon mortars are a platoon asset, and are supposed to be part of how they'll achieve that objective - their actual use may depend on the situation, and the ability to maintain C2 links. US 60mm do not have smoke rounds, so they're a suppression tool. That means that if you're using them to gain fire superiority in a firefight, you may well want to use them in a direct-lay mode, risking the mortar team to enemy fire for the sake of speed. If instead you're using them to prepare an attack or deny an area of ground, then indirect might be the better choice - keeping the valuable asset safe, and controlling rate of fire.

Speaking of, found a leaked screenshot from CMFI Rome to Victory

Oh quite - this is absolutely working as designed and correct, but it highlights how complex analysing the issues can be - if I hadn't been very careful in noting that the unit had no idea where the enemy was, as a player what you'd see was: Unit walks towards a building, units hidden in the building open fire, sending them to ground. As the volume of fire builds up, they choose to bug out, and rather than run away, they decide to run directly *towards* the the same building the fire is coming from, losing a man in the process. From the godlike perspective of the player, this action makes no sense. From the specific perspective of some confused pixeltruppen, it was a costly mistake, but a more than plausible one.

I had a frustrating - but explicable - case earlier today in CMRT. A team came under SMG fire from a nearby building, but they did not gain a spotting contact (I could see where the fire was coming from, and overwatching units *did* gain a contact icon, but the specific team under fire did not). The team then ran for the nearest cover, which was the building that the fire was coming from. They ended up charging into the SMG fire, losing a man in the process. I don't think this is an example of bad AI at all - just something that's an unfortunate consequence of the excessive information that we gain as commanders in Combat Mission - it's "clearly" the wrong course of action, but "seek cover when under fire from an unknown source" was an understandable decision to make in the moment.

I think it makes sense that you're not affecting Wire IEDs or mines with ECM - fundamentally you're doing things like (and including) flooding the radio frequencies with noise. Wire IED's are just basic wired circuits, and IED mines are presumably contact-sensitive, so neither should be jammable.

Steve has said that this behaviour has been fixed elsewhere on the board.

They're unreliable, but tremendously powerful - very much a distuptive technology. To add to the above - VBIED come with a car, a driver and a spy. The spy doesn't have anything to do with the VBIED, he's just there as a recce unit to find potential targets. VBIED seem to have the same ability to hide in civilians that combatants do, but I need to test that more fully. They don't require activation, just roll up adjacent the target and they'll explode.

Going to ground under mg fire in the middle of an open street, when there's a perfectly servicable building right in front of you (that you've been ordered to reach) seems inadvised. Combat Mission in general is a lot about understanding and anticipating the consequences of your orders - in general, the low-level ai is really pretty great, but that won't stop you ordering them to do suicidal things.

Aside from Hunt (which is explicitly move-to-contact), I think the main thing (and maybe the only thing, but that gets hard to test) keeping them from hitting the dirt are their soft factors.

Recently I've been using Fast movement more and more, and not really using Quick (except when fatigue takes effect). In a general sense, you don't want to ever be moving whilst under fire. When advancing towards suspected contact, I'll generally use Move, Hunt and Slow, depending on the terrain (Move across open terrain, Hunt in close terrain or likely contact, Slow to crest ridges, etc. If I'm moving to a covered positon, I'll often move Fast - getting out of the potential kill zone and into cover is the priority, and that's the best way to do that - it's great that an AT team on Quick will stop, kill a tank, and continue, but I suspect that shows an underlying issue - being surprised by the tank in the first place, and especially whilst moving, is a huge problem, and one that's worth trying as hard as possible to avoid. Obviously, these things happen.

Do you mean the Battlefront logo and chime? That's not a mod, that's an option - hold down "V" at startup. Modding the game music is going to be straightforward - it'll be replacing the music file with a blank one of the same name in the mods folder. I wouldn't be surprised if these were around on cmmods.

So, a couple of thoughts at this stage: - Is the right flank secure? From the overhead shot, it looks like the rightmost unit is not in any form of cover or concealment, so it would only take one LMG on the other side to ruin your day. - How much do you know about the enemy? The "1:1 ratio" comment implies that tou're working on the assumption that he has a full platoon in the objective. Whilst I think that's a plausible scenario, it's far from the only one - and it's probably worth learning more about the enemy before an assault is planned. "Probing attack" is certainly a sensible idea, but I'd be worried about deciding to concentrate forces in this way, without having an idea where the enemy is. - Smoke is valuable, but popping it as a distraction isn't silly. One concern is what reaction you're trying to provoke - if there are enemy in the leftmost woods, then speculative firing into the smoke seems likely (but doesn't this run against the ROE here?) - do the likely incoming fires actually hurt you more than help you? It certainly reveals that there's more than just a single squad there (assuming he has similar sound contacts to you). - I'm a little concerned about lines of fire here. If you're moving the central squad, can the leftmost squad cover the right squad's advance to the target? The middle squad looks (from here) better placed to do that, to me.

Cheers, I'll play around with a few - if I find a setting I like more than yours I'll send it to you.

Oh yes, I'm aware of why you did them that way Bulk-changing things like saturation with irfanview or something should be pretty simple - when you release the mod I'll give it a poke and see if there's a setting I'm happier with.

Really nice Bil. I do wonder if they're a little bright for the stark terrain - I might ended up desaturating them a little - but they do look cool.

I can't find a way to do that - that might well mean that the only way for the AI to take advantage of Uncon stealth is to use "Ambush 75m"-type orders, and to try to fight from static positions, or move between them only through covered routes, out of LOS.

Sorry, I'll try to re-word: I went into it assuming that the Civilian density would be the main thing controlling spotting distance. Whilst this is true, this is not the only factor. A Crack combatant team Move-ing on "None" density can walk up to two spots distance (i.e., 1x 8m square in between them). A conscript combatant team on "None" cannot - they get spotted much earlier. The same conscript team on "Very Heavy" *can* walk up to two spots away. Need to do more tests to puzzle out the details, but factors have to include: - Civilian density setting - Unit experience - Actions they take (these were Moves, running, deploying weapons, crawling all give you away). It's also not clear if terrain is a factor - there are no buidings in the above scenario, so that can't be a prereq for Civilian density, and no paved tiles. I wouldn't be surprised if roads were though.

Sure, but I meant whether you get a visual cue that it's activated - you don't in CMSF1, obviously, but with the later engine versions you get more information about various things - a message pops up when an aircraft has been shot down by a SAM, when an auto-deploying weapon is going to be deployed at the end of a move, etc. I wonder if we'll get an "IED jammed" message? That's probably testable with the demo - I intentionally haven't looked at the red side of Breaking the Bank, but the briefing does mention IEDs, and that scenario has Warriors.

I used to think so, but I've come around - what's being simulated is the fact that these guys can be indistinguishable from civilians, which is obviously easier in a crowd of civilians, but should be possible without. Even with no civilians, if the Crack irregulars above concealed all their weapons and dressed appropriately - are you going to open up and mow them all down? That seems unwise at best or a war crime at worst. Again, something like this: Is more than possible to do with the above mechanics, but would be difficult to do in another manner. Even civilians carrying AK-47's openly wouldn't necessarily mean they were enemy combatants, which makes this kind of thing tricky. I do want to do some more comprehensive tests around this, since I expect it's probably key to running these effectively. It's an abstraction, sure, and one of the key conflicts with CMx2 is that the line between explicit, WYSIWYG modelling and abstracted mechanics is sometimes blurry, and the lack of information about the underlying mechanics can make parsing that more difficult.

Yup, but we won't know whether electronic warfare affects cell IED's without the new manual. Also, I wonder if the Warrior's IED jamming tech will be a little more obvious now, since there's the "Deploy Weapon"-like messages in the latest engines.

Doing some more stealth testing of different Civilian levels, and the distance that combatants are spotted at. Assumption was that this would be some kind of linear relationship - perhaps something like 1 square for Very Heavy, 2 squares for Heavy, etc. This was the distance on "Very Heavy", which matches the previous tests. ... this was *also* the distance on every other test I ran, including civilians set to "None" (the screenshot is actually from the "None" tests) Now, the interesting bit was that I noticed this unit had been generated with Crack level experience. I tried a Conscript (set everything back to Typical) on the same "None" setting and they got spotted straight away. The same Conscript infantry on Very Heavy civilian density made it to the below: This does mean this stealth is more complex than the linear relationship I expected. Needs more testing, obviously, but it's a start. Other things found - Deploying an MG is a "giveaway" action - this is yet another reason why RPG's are really useful to have around.

I think we might need to have the talk. You see ncc1701e, when a mummy Abrams and a daddy Abrams love each other *very* much...

Ha, interesting. Yeah, happy with that plan.

This is where the Fighters start looking worse, I think - on typical settings they'll have worse equipment than Syrian regulars, but higher motivation. They'd be useful in a (costly) assault, perhaps, or as a last stand, but otherwise they're something of a third wheel - they're better equipped and trained than combatants, but worse than the army - and usually one or the other is better for a given task. With sufficient civilian density, the Combatants have tremendous utility as spies and scouts, at least until the shooting starts. Blending into the population and tracking Blufor closely. They'll still not match Syrian regulars for firepower, but that's not always important. Spies, IEDs and VBIEDs are disruptive technology, naturally - these can do things the regular forces on either side simply can't.