Muzzleflash1990

AFAIK no arty smoke is IR opaque in CM, only smoke popped from vehicles is. That leaves only ordinary smoke, which I guess light in the infrared spectrum travels easily through unlike the visual one. That leaves the trees and the dust. The only trees that appears to be blocking LOS is the tree line perpendicular to the LOS; the one just below the horizon in your image. The trees lined along the road does not seem to in position to block. And those trees appear to only have foliage in their upper part, leaving several meters of visibility under the brush. The blocking made by dust is hard to quantify. Based on that image alone, and what I guess the terrain obscured by smoke looks like, I cannot say anything is wrong. But maybe that's all because you know that is on the other side of the smoke, and I can't see.

If only it was possible to export an image of the entire map with elevation markings at zoom level 4 from inside the editor, then it would be a trivial image recognition problem to extract the elevation markings.

Yeah, occasionally helicopter launched ATGMs bounce. But wasn't this fixed in 1.03, or was is just the weird flight paths that also occasionally happened?

My understanding of this thread is roughly something like this. The hardcoded range should be relaxed/removed so we can fire at more than 200m. The counterargument is that submachine guns are not that accurate. This is then countered by some, saying that ingame they are accurate enough that people want the restriction removed such that they can fire at say 250m. The implied argument being that submachine guns modelled ingame are too effective at range (e.g. the ppsh at 200m), and they would also be "too effective" at 250m, enough to warrant shooting at that range. Instead the problem is that the SMG hit probability/range curve is too high. By lowering the hit probability, players would not want to fire beyond 200m anyway, and the TacAI would calculate the probability of hitting at 250m too low anyway, and therefore rarely fire SMGs at that range - even when the squad is forced to with a target order. On a personal note, I often find units with SMGs, like MP40 or Thompson (not entire ppsh squads, but still a bit), to run out of ammo very quickly. Often they would have spent it all very fast on targets at about 80-150m where I sometimes would have preferred to have some left for when closing with the enemy.

I have only read very limited about WW2, only a couple of books, so I may be in error here. In Stout Hearts, the book recommended in another thread, one of the accounts (from a British soldier), explains they suffered low amounts of bolt rifle fire from the Germans. Instead it seemed they supplied the LMG gunners with "seemingly endless supply of bullet", or something like that. From some other sources, from the German perspective I seem to recall, states the same; the squad leader would direct targets for the gunner and ensure the other members brought ammo, or something akin to that. Could this be the reason for the low rate of fire for bolt rifles?

I always thought it was the ground tile that mostly determined cover when speaking about nature. In a forest it would be easier to find some dirt to hide behind, than in the open. But do trees actually provide cover of significance? I thought rifle ammo like 7mm+ went through most "ordinary" trees, and still had enough power left to hurt. Though I seem to recall bushes occasionally absorbing bullets in CM.

You don't seem sure of what it is other people say is wrong with the game; you just seem to recall they didn't like it for some reason. You played the demo: so why base your opinion on that of others, instead of your own? For all games, there will always be something that people dislike. For most games, there will always be something that people do like. Of course, if the prospect of a single, or potentially more, $10 compatibility patch™/update™ is not acceptable, then all else does not matter.

I really hope they will find some way to be back-compatible with old quotes.

I just recently had my 3rd go at it. My previous "go"s were quite frustrating. The first time I played as soviet trying to encircle 320th or something like that. One problem was, as have been mentioned, the AI doing weird things, like attacking in the operational map and the doing nothing or fumbling around in the RTS part. When in combat it is quite confusing, you don't get any information about why things are happening. It's not that war is hell and I lose control; I get that. I want to know why I lose control, or why my mean with fire superiority is losing morale. Sometimes units would freeze and not move anymore. Why can't I share ammunition between squads inside platoons? The second time, was just as frustrating. I started a campaign, and was attacked by more tanks and more infantry than I had. I wanted to ambush the tanks sent forward alone. My men only had some anti-tank grenades and other stuff. My troops waited in the dark and the tank rolled by. Why did they not attack? Couldn't they use that weapon? Were they afraid? Did I select some option not allowing them (don't think so). Again not frustrated they didn't attack the attack or I couldn't control them to do so, but more because I had no idea why not. My spotting of the tanks during night was quite poor and lossy, even with numerous platoons around. But when the tank spotted my soldiers, it picked of the members of a squad one by one, like it knew where they were. In my futile attempts at close attacking it with AT-grenades, there were units all around it. The gun just magically locked onto members one by one, some coaxial fire onto each one in sequence. If the last couple of soldiers were on varying bearings from the tanks it would still target them without pause. Was a bit surrealistic. The third time went better for me. But was still quite frustrating. I picked another campaign, "Pavlovka" I think. It was supposed to be easier, and boy it was. You could just steamroll the enemy, which then didn't seem very smart. They made a night attack with a dozen tanks and some platoons, against my 2 tanks and a platoon across a fording. The two tanks cut down the tanks crossing the ford but they just kept coming. It was a slaughter, only lost like 3 men versus 11 tanks and 60. Similar battles of slightly smaller scale occurred. The AI in CM has a poor reputation for attacking: sometimes it does very poor, sometimes it does decent. I found that the random AI in GTOS consistently have a random performance between poor and awful. The frustration of lack of information persisted. Why, during some night battles, did the sky light with flares? Did the enemy shoot them, or did mine? And if mine, or the enemy for that matter, why did it not happen during some other night battles? Why did the campaign maps say most of my units and "ammo: 100", and then squads were almost entirely empty? Do formation really have an impact, did seem like it in my battles? I finished the campaign, and haven't started the game up since. Maybe me and the game are just too different...

Yes, facing and 180 degree targets arcs are equivalent, except one minor detail. Facing sets direction, which influences, spotting. Target arcs set both facing and limits fire to the arc. The minor detail is that, while units with a 180 degree will not shoot at targets spotted behind them, units with a facing might.

I have not experienced such a situation, and i'm not sure I can visualize your situation properly, so am not sure what to say. Since we are talking about a minute here, and you say the 'soft' target will be suppressed soon, I would focus only on the tanks. I can not tell you what to do, but I can offer these tricks you might find useful, if you don't already know them: - You are of course using the Armor arcs to prevent them wasting ammo on infantry. - From your text, it seems like you believe the target arcs "focus" attention on an area. The arcs do not mean focus on this area more, and less on the outside. They mean only fire at enemies inside the arc. It will not give you spotting bonuses to units inside, or penalties to units outside. The only affect arcs might have on spotting is that the center of the arc is the facing your unit will assume when not shooting. - Maybe this will be useful, maybe not. Remember your the two points that determine your arc can be placed at vastly different distances from the units. Perhaps this can help targeting the right areas. - You can make a target cicle by holding down SHIFT I believe. If the 'soft' targets are far away, and the Panzers will remain relatively close, regardless of their potential 'race' across ground, this might be a solution. I'm not sure what facing your AT unit will assume if you use this. I think it will just use it's current facing.

Just to be clear, i'm not not questioning the lethality of a rifle, or even multiple, vs. a LMG at 300m, only the per-round hit probability. Sorry, maybe I'm dim, but what I don't get is the argument about SMG (and the LMG), that firing more rounds in a burst somehow is the reason for the increased, and also flat, rounds-per-hit ratio. Like, "the increased number of bullet from each burst making up for the decreased accuracy per bullet", seems contradictionary to the idea of SMG and LMG having better per-bullet-accuracy. For the flatness of the SMG case, if you are able to hit with every 175 bullet at 180m, the target being closer at 120 you should be able to do even better? That is the lines in the graph can at best be linear, at worst, curve upwards? About K98 and Mosin Nagant, you are right. Since it requires so many bullets, without knowing how many casualties occurred, like at least 30, it is impossible to conclude, the K98 is more inaccurate at 300m. Oh, btw, thanks for taking your time to do all this

I do not understand some of these result. Why do the SMG flatout? I mean why are you able to hit as often at almost double the range (180m vs 120)? The K98 skyrockets, whereas the snipers stay almost constant. That suggest the reason for KAR98 is the difficulty in actually seeing and lining up the target. But then why is mosin nagant then significantly more accurate? If it is not in difficulty of seeing the target, then 300 shots at 300m, against a target the size of a football, from a unsuppressed shooter, that sounds rather poor? Also, I can understand why you might be able to hit more often with a LMG, but not how you hit with more shots? Surely the shots with rifle are all about same precision and at least as accurate as the first shot from a LMG, whereas for LMG bursts the remaining shots will be more dispersed.

1. It is incompatible with quoting. You may end up quoting, sentences, or even, paragraphs, that have changed. A quoted 'can' was corrected to a 'cannot'. 2. Breaks continuity. You cannot continue reading a thread without missing important changes, because someone may have changed previous posts (relative to 'your latest read post'), and the forum software skips to your latest read post. But I agree with you on the voting boxes - don't see the need.

Well they could add Amazon's cut to the price on Amazon. But that would further reduce the incentive of going through the trouble since most would probably buy it cheaper directly from Battlefront anyway.

The high rate of fire can also be a drawback. In one game I had most of a platoon of pure SMG infantry move into some buildings. About 40-50m from the building was an enemy AT-gun I wanted them to take out. All the squads opened up on the AT-gun. Pretty sure that at least one soldier in each squad was shooting at any given time. They fired for about the 1½ minute I believe. I did some rough math with the time they were shooting and how the ammunition supply dropped (to almost nothing from about 2000 to 200 for each squad). The total rate of fire was just short of that of a minigun! Problem was that the shots that didn't hit the AT-gun's shield went into the ground. So one lone enemy soldier unintentionally made the better part of a platoon combat ineffective due to lack of ammunition.

I'm not sure what is conflicting; I document observed ingame behaviour. Maybe I was unclear: I argue that I had (full blue LOS) at long ranges before planning and I also have it after. That I have "too" long ranges for during the night for the eye too see (unless full moon which I did not consider for this test) The test with SMG was just to further reinforce that the LOS tool is not burdened by the limitations of human eyesight or weapon engineering.

https://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Real_Role_of_Small_Arms_RDS_Summer_09.pdf

Got some interesting results. Just tried to replicate Bulletpoint in CMBN v2.12. I had the same result as just you, max 400m. Then I tried again and I ended up with the same map again. But this time I had no problems targeting 1200m and farther (further?)!!. The difference? The first test the time was 2AM. The second test it was 3AM. I'm not sure how much difference that hour makes in September, which was the ingame time for the test? We are mid July, and although I am in the city, it doesn't begin to get bright until the time is closer to 4 than to 3. Anyway, for planning purposes, the LOS tool should only be considered as a maximum theoretical thermaling telescope x-ray device. You are not gonna spot some infantry by sight alone in WW2 during the night, unless you got a full moon and get lucky or somefink.

Well, it is very simple to test, like I did, just fire up a night battle. But to spare some time, my test (also I only spent about 5mins so nothing to do with the sun moving): I QB attack in Red Thunder at night as russians, think it was 4:00 AM. During planning I made target lines many hundreds meters, at least up to 900m. Full blue lines. After starting the game I ordered some SMG infantry and a Maxim to fire at about ~800m. Full blue line. The maxim fired and my SMG units did not. I also tried moving an SU-12? around and gave it fire orders about 1km away. Also full blue line and on the third shot it hit. Of course we know that units will not spot each other at that ranges (edit: as slysniper just said), it is only the target tool that let me do it. I initially concluded this behaviour first in CMBS. In the tutorial mission you have some ukranians without NV and some americans with. And I wondered why I was able to target so far with blue lines with the ukrainians since they had no NV. But of course this is game design. In some cases, imagine a group of enemies letting out a ton lead and tracers. You might not see individual units, but surely you should be able to area target due to muzzle flashes ( ) and whatever.

Just performed a quick test: fired up a night QB in RT. The LO(S/F) tool ignores night time. You can give target orders against buildings and terrain more than 1km away if you want - well beyond visual range at night. You can also give target orders that are out of range of the weapons, the unit will just not shoot. I'm not sure the fog restricts the range of the LOS tool though.

I'm not sure if this is the same problem, but it is definitely a issue I have often with infantry units. You make a waypoint to some crest or terrain contour and it tells you do have LOS to the other side. But when the squad gets there, all units go prone and cannot see anything or has a huge dead zone in front. Bit similar to the problem in CBMS with AT units spotting targets whem moving, and losing sight when stopping and crouch or lying down. I prefer not to use LOS tool most of the time. Instead I get the camera down and find that often works just as well as the LOS tool. Sometimes it is worse, but occasionally it have been "more true" than the LOS tool. The only problem is the camera sometimes cannot get as low as you need.

Maybe you have LOS, but the units do not fire because they do not have LOF. One thing that drives me mad is when a vehicle spots a target and prepares to shoot. Then just when the gun is about to be aligned, the very act of turning the gun, caused it to lose LOS or LOF to the target (I guess this is because the spotting equipment and the barrel are not at the same angle relative to rotation, and noew some tree trunk or whatever blocks sight?). The vehicle will keep moving the gun back and forth.

I've wondered about the effects of non-direct hits. In my playing of CM I find artillery have almost no effect on vehicles unless a direct hit occurs. However, some couple of other sources, like this one page 10: suggest that 155mm rounds falling within 30m of tanks have a chance to rip of the tracks. It also offers examples of HE fragments from near hits going through armoured vehicles. I'm not sure what a near hit is, but is this result in CM to be expected: http://postimg.org/image/4qev20fsl/full/ I would not have expected it to be out of commission, but there isn't a single dent on it. Not even the launcher, radar or tracks has gone from very green to geen-lightish damage.

What are the vertically protected area using Arena? I had a TOW-2 attack a tank equipped with it. Normally I would guess it have a decent change of intercepting the missile. However, the tank was on a downwards facing slope and the TOW-2 was destroyed about 70-80 degrees above. I do not have the save game, but did record a video: I know the angle of the video isn't best, but I did try to find better approximates of the angle from the side, but one thing is sure: it is definitely higher than 45 degrees, and i'm quite sure it was more, from the "tanks horizontal plane".