holoween
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Posts
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Posts posted by holoween
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1 hour ago, SergeantSqook said:
To have any relevant discussion on this, the vehicles characteristics should be compared side by side and then that compared to their cost;
From this picture guess which costs 190 and which 299.
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58 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:
This has basically nothing to do with how QB costs are calculated, the vehicles characteristics are punched into a formula which gives the output, they don't base it on a vehicles ability to epically 1v1 a different vehicle.
When their formula spits out prices that are at odds with all player experience then it might be worth finding out what is causing that discrepancy.
58 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:The StuG has comparable but slightly better armour,
Sure
58 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:a better gun
Only in pure penetration. HE is at best equal, it has far less ammo and is limited by not having a turret.
58 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:and a much, much smaller profile.
Until the sherman goes hulldown and then the sherman is smaller.
58 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:To have any relevant discussion on this, the vehicles characteristics should be compared side by side and then that compared to their cost; rather than this weird 1v1.
Sure but even then the only time the stug comes out on top is if you compare short, long range tank duels.
58 minutes ago, SergeantSqook said:(again though big props for the uber-loaded comment where you mention all the Shermans advantages but none of the StuGs. Very cool)
Its not exactly loaded when all you could come up with to countere have been the points you mentioned above. Those even if taken at face value dont make the stug 50% more valuable.
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24 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:
Life is not meant to be fair especially during a war.
But quick battles are supposed to give a roughly fair fight.
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15 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
It's not really that the AI finds small holes in the vegetation, but that the graphics of the game don't quite show the real conditions.
Vegetation seems much denser visually than how the game engine calculates it, which means we as players think our units are safe in the forest even though there's a real risk they will get spotted through the leaves.
Conversely, darkness and fog seems a lot less dense graphically than the game engine atually calculates visibility levels. Which means in many scenarios, we will not be able to spot units at distances where it looks graphically like it's not that dark or foggy.
Both issues are not so much a case of the simulation getting things wrong as not showing the conditions clearly to the player. I've seen so many players post questions about these things, and I've posted several, myself, but eventually I just learnt to work my way around the issues.
Id argue that that in itself is quite a significant failing though probably not easy to fix( if its even possible).
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6 hours ago, The Steppenwulf said:
Try a "slow" (crawl) movement command to move away from the axis of suppressive fire retaining the "hide". Still disagreeing?
With regard to the MG42 you are aware that this weapons main quality is to suppress the enemy. It is not particularly accurate. My reading from your comment in the other thread was that you think "effectiveness" means its capacity to inflict casualties. This is easily misunderstood by players that come from other games like CoH and possibly other mainstream RTS titles. I know I played them myself! The MG42s in those games are misrepresented in this (not to mention ranges and everything else about those games that is disappointingly represented). In CM I've had frequent firefights [MG vs Bren gun by way of example] and the Bren is far more effective in terms of inflicting casualties but comparatively weak at the side of the MG42 with regard to its suppressive capability. But the Bren needs superlative cover to prevent getting suppressed and the German player can only stack the odds in his favour if he has another fireteam to flank the cover.
You'll find that this game experience tactically checks out with what to expect historically. The tactics employed in CM correlate pretty well with the accuracy of the weapon modelling. That correlation is better than I've found in any other computer game thus far, otherwise I'd move on.
I'd suggest that this is what Steve means when he talks about staying in business; for all the progression with the product the consumers would like to see, the company continue to sell their products. That's because if some other dev was doing it better we'd all stop purchasing BF's products. Ergo; Steve would be flipping burgers instead.
He's right yeh... so perhaps cut the dev some slack!
A weapons ability to supress is directly corelated to its ability to inflict casualties. basically a function of how many rounds per unit of time youre able to get on target with the target being small for a casualty and somewhat larger for supression. Or differently put: how much a weapon supresses depends on how much the supressed thinks hes going to die when sticking up his head.
In regards to mg42s accuracy id say its quite underestimated. To give a point of reference with an mg3 firing single rounds im getting a group size about 2-3 times that of a g36. For bursts up to 3 rounds the group size again doubles for the mg3.
And since its something that will come up i personally found the slow rate of the mg5 to be far less pleasant to shoot and couldnt get better groups with it even tough these were new weapons compared to 40year old mg3s which saw heavy usage.
Note that this obviously reflects my own skills with those weapons and others might differ but the general trend for accuracy holds true.
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1 minute ago, domfluff said:
I suspect it doesn't do a bad job of faking it though - particularly in the modern titles with radios everywhere, and various battlefield management systems.
Once you notice it it becomes very obvious and in the modern titles id say it matter more.
Just ran a test with a german tank btl and information about a hostile tank was at the btls hq before it was at the platoonmates tank which is simply impossible irl given how the radios are set up. It still got there in a minute but it should have only taken a few seconds.
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14 minutes ago, IanL said:
They do model who gets a radio and who doesn't and who reports to whom. That clearly has an effect. But otherwise doctrine is not in the CM model - its in our orders.
It doesnt model properly who sits on what radio. The information simply flows up the command chain and back down.
5 minutes ago, domfluff said:Yes, it absolutely does.
The most obvious effect is in Cold War. The US pushes combined arms down to the company level - if the M150's spot the incoming armour, then the tanks will hear about it very quickly.
The Soviets instead mostly do not, and their combined arms layer is at the battalion level (e.g., that ATGM formation is probably attached at the battalion level, so has to go through more steps, and often worse steps, to spread to the equivalent tank platoon).
That has a lot of consequences, some of them subtle but it does mean that the Soviets will tend to suffer at the smaller unit level, comparatively speaking.
That's quite aside from differences in optics, number of crewmen (all else being equal, a three man tank crew will spot worse than a four man tank crew, since the autoloader can't tell you what it sees), and quality or quantity of radios.
That TO&E structure is entirely due to doctrine, and has a strong effect on the outcome of how information is shared, and ultimately how spotting will work.It doesnt model things like an entire platoon being on the same net so as soon as information gets transmitted over the platoon net it should reach everyone but ingame it only reaches the platoon leader.
So while low level recon assets do help quite a bit of information sharing is simply not correct.
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46 minutes ago, domfluff said:
That's the big thread, but it's really key to "how to play CM" in a lot of ways. The C2 sharing is sophisticated, and it has some obvious consequences.
Agreed:
But then you realize all militaries have different doctrine on how exactly to deal with this which also changes with time and CM doesnt(as far as i can tell) model any of that. Its just a generic system.
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15 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
You missed a key part of the equation. Yes, people need to purchase a game to mod it, but they only need to purchase it one time. Combat Mission currently has the equivalent of 8 games, so that's a potential of a 90% decrease in revenue just for the Base Game sales we currently have. For Modules and Packs, there's now a potential for a 100% decrease in revenue.
Obviously in reality many people would opt to purchase Battlefront branded content because it's likely to be superior to scattered free stuff. But how many sales and how much people are willing to pay for sales is a big question. What isn't a big question is that the amount opting to not buy anything more from us would be extremely large.
The only way to make up for this is to sell "single games" to new customers who otherwise would not have purchased it. If we presume a 50% overall reduction in sales, that means we have to double the number of individual people we're currently selling to. We do not believe that is possible to do just because the game is moddable.
What this means is we slaughter the revenue we know we can count on, and which keeps us alive, for something we have zero faith we can achieve based on decades of professional experience. No sane business would ever go down that path.
I think youre misjudging the risks and chances.
No modder in their right mind is going to redo work you already did. More likely them masing their mods on games with all modules and packs forcing anyone wanting to use them to actually buy all of them.
They are also far more likely to cover timeframes and areas youre simply not going to be able to make games on due to time/cost constrains. So anyone with a special interest in those would buy a CM game without being interested in the game itself.
23 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:I will say there is an alternative system that we, so far, have rejected -> subscription software. This is the model that almost all professional software has moved to. The customer pays an annual fee based on various factors to "rent" the software for the year. As soon as payment stops, use of the software stops.
This is similar to how things work with our Professional customers. It works because that's the norm for that market. For the gaming market it isn't. As innovative as we think we are we don't feel like trying it out.
Steve
Id personally get it if it just allows any combination of units and maps from any previously purchased game just so i can play SF2 units on good maps. But i might be an exception there.
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9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Nope, 10 random tests as they came, if you are using exactly the same conditions then we are probably talking dice rolls. Those are good documents but I am still having a hard time accepting that a tank built in 1979 has a worse backup targeting system than a Soviet tank built a decade earlier...but stranger thing have happened. That, and competition range conditions is going to work very differently than wartime tactical friction.
The backup sight from Leo2 is comparable to the main sight of T72. Seems reasonable to me. It is a backup sight so no point massively overbuilding it.
9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:AKD is correct, we would probably need to do 100 plus run throughs to really see the curve but these conditions are very controlled if you load and run the exact same scenario 10 times.
Plot the results on a graph and youll see a pattern. So far with with 60 tests under 3 different conditions i can certainle see a trend emerging.
9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:I am pretty much past the whole "spotting is broken!" thing at this point.
It isnt broken. For the most part it works great.
9 minutes ago, The_Capt said:What I am finding interesting is Tank Platoon behavior at the moment. So when the target get spotted, not all 4 tank immediately spot it. Normally one does and then the rest follow up, particularly after the first tank start firing. This might give us a sense of how C2 works. Communicating a target to a friendly unit is incredibly hard to do (it is there...right there! Where is there?), we have developed a lot of procedures and tactics to do it, simplest being "follow my tracer". CM looks to have something under the hood going on but I have not pinned it down yet.
I can see why UK Mod got onboard with CM Pro because if you can simulate effective tactical C2 under various conditions repeatedly, you are moving past a training support tool and entering into operational research territory.
Run 4 tanks without command links and see if they have worse results. The time between no contact to any contact at all should be exactly the same between 4 tanks in and out of C2. Only if there is a noticable differece is there a chance platoons working together is modeled.
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8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Let's say the typical CM customer purchases 3 different Base Games and 3 Modules over the course of 3 years. That's about $285, or just under $100 per year per person. Now let's say the engine is opened up for free modification. We might still release new content that is of superior quality (at least that's the way we market it!), but obviously sales will be harmed by the competition with free stuff.
Id say thats just a fallacy that has been proven invalid quite often.
Just because there is free stuff doesnt mean it competes with you. They still need to buy your games to play the mods and having more content makes it far more attractive to actually purchase the game at all. And while some might not buy as many games and modules that is offset by others buying it at all. I have personally bought several games specifically because of mods and know several others who did the same. Ive also bought CM basegames and expansions to take part in campaigns and turnaments so extra content does certainly generate sales.
But obviously its not my risk so easy to say you should allow it.
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54 minutes ago, BeondTheGrave said:
Given the fundamental assumptions and limitations of the CM system, I feel like these are pretty good and historically accurate, to the period, results. Even if there are some slight issues, @TheCaptain's several tests seem to suggest that they push the Soviet player to behave historically (closer engagements with plenty of backup) anyway. To reduce it to simple nerfs and buffs, I dont know that the Soviets need their long range spotting buffed really. If youre having trouble, the solution ought to be to keep pushing in, and to bring more tanks, which is Soviet doctrine anyway. As an American once said, "grab their nose and kick 'em in the ass." Just my .02$
Not bad spotting doesnt push the soviet player to play soviet doctrine. Lanchesters square law does that plenty. Look at any tank attack and youll see that they all look practically the same. Currently the Americans do Soviet style attacks better than the soviets because they actually see their targets.
It may very well be that soviets tanks were worse at spotting but im not convinced that was inherent to their vehicles rather than the training level.
You could also blame it on doctrine and have a modifier for it for each nationality but that would be difficult to find out, model and leads to strange results like M1A1 being more comparable to a loe1 than a leo2
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/library/ebooks/Canadian Army Trophy Book_2018.pdf
see page 240
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2 minutes ago, akd said:
I feel like I am going to have to repeat this over and over again until somebody listens or I just do it myself: you cannot make judgements about relative spotting ability or average spotting times using small samples in CM unless all you are testing for is can spot / can never spot.
With a controlled test environment you can remove any influence apart from spotting ability.
Youre getting low confidence with the results from the few tests and the variance means the average spotting time isnt immediately relevant ingame but as a comparison it certainly works.
2 minutes ago, akd said:And you are going to have to control the test so you are only testing spotting against the same target in the exact same conditions (including all soft factors).
That is easy to do:
make a scenario to test it and simply run the scenario as often as you want to get as much data as you want.
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44 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Oh that is exactly the kind of study we need on the T72, except I cannot find the range to the targets...did you?
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/library/ebooks/Canadian Army Trophy Book_2018.pdf
Thats the best i could find regarding ranges at the CAT. Up to 2000m
44 minutes ago, The_Capt said:I think it is a leap to say that a Leo II and T72 has the same optics (even without using the thermals) but both are using an 8x sight. Questions remain: how quickly/easily is the sight traverse? How clear are the optics? Ergonomics of the sight itself. Stability. That said crew quality definitely matter and I would say the Leo II crews were not "Regular" by Soviet standards but that is again a guess.
The traverse is going to be better for the t72. the Leo2s backup is very slow so usually its brought roughly on target by the driver neutral steering before doing anything more if the commander sees something on the flanks.
The T72 optics at least have 9° fov which should make them comparable. How clear they are i cant tell.
Ths document gives a nice overview on early cold war tanks stats. The t72 fits right in there so should probably be on a similar capability scale as far as spotting goes.
And crew quality is a seperate stat so soviet standards being lower should be reflected by the crews being lower veterancy rather than the equipment being made worse.
34 minutes ago, The_Capt said:And for those still tuning in, ran a couple more tests. Lone T72 at 1000m vs M60A3 (had to dismount the A3 as it was starting to see a lot better even from the back at 1km)
Are you removing outliers? At 10 rounds at 1000m i already have one taking 177s to spot and one taking 255 yet im not seeing such results for your tests.
34 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
So as we can see, spot times go way down when these tanks are working together, but that is not the interesting part. The arc length at 90degrees/2000m is 3141 and 785 is about 25% of that per tank if they divide the arc up evenly (again makes sense). 21.5 seconds is 25% of the 86 seconds we saw in the original to-full-spot time for a lone tank at 2000m. Not definitive but those tricky lads at BFC appear to have linked spot time to scan distance, or at least this is a working theory.
Or each tank has x chance to spot each cycle and you have 4 tanks therefore dropping the expected time to spot for any of them.
19 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:I remember reading something about the protocol. Commander spots a target and lines up a laser, the laser paints the target and by a computer adjust the optics for the main gun. The technology ensures a 90 % hit probability not the optics itself.
Were discussing sights before laser range finders in case of the t72 or without them active in the Leo2s case.
Also for spotting the FCS and laser are irrelevant.
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3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Sorry I am not familiar with german tank gunnery standards. Which ones? Which tanks? When?
Currently in place so Leopard2.
Though the measure im applying is the one for Emergency use so no electric turet drive and only an 8x magnified backup sight.
Targets are nicely illustrated here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235040314_Canadian_Army_Trophy_Analysis
3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:Not sure, would have to test. Again CM is simulating RL, not RL, so how it creates delays of RL situations is bound to vary.
It does make a difference though. If units spot others in the open and in broken terrain similarly the distinction starts to matter less than it probably should.
3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:You and me both, probably should have said "RL commentary" VAB posted a lengthy commentary, am seeing stuff around but no actual honest data on T72 spotting and gunnery ability...that might take a trip to library.
At least from the technical specifications i cant see any reason why they should perform worse. And since crew performance is a seperate stat that should have by far the largest impact.
For the technical comparison i can send you some documents.
3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:Agree to disagree. T72 (or T64) has no thermals and is doing this thru an 8 power sight, or zero power periscopes. The time to spot "something" is less, time to identify that something with enough resolution to engage (CM does not model free-fire zones), 1 minute and 25 seconds is not crazy. I think this is the heart of the matter...how long should a T72 tank take to see, identify and start shooting at a stationary, none firing, tank 2000m away, in 1979? As I posted well back, I have tried to spot someone firing at 1500m and it probably took us at least a minute (we weren't really timing) with binos and to get sights on that target, it is the only real reference that I have but we all do have opinions I guess.
I havent sat inside a T72 yet so i cant say it exactly but for a Leopard2 even just using the backup sight it should be far lower if its in an open field.
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4 minutes ago, Artkin said:
I dont think it's range either, as I said before. The flat range tests all passed great for me. I elevated my troops and they all had spots past 5km (Max CM engagement range for CW atgm)
The Shturms even killed some shyt. But in pbem they have performed god awful.
Ive looked at your pbem files and your troops did spot ok.
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14 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:
Testing's all the rage these days!
How else are you going to gather ingame data?
2 minutes ago, Redwolf said:I don't think range is a primary factor involved here. We can easily make Soviet tanks spot at 2000m in isolated tests.
How do you do that because all the testing ive done so far points towards them having quite a bit of trouble spotting at that range.
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5 hours ago, The_Capt said:
VAB, thanks for that, I think I may be starting to unpack this mystery a bit.
Ok, so out of an abundance of curiosity I ran a series of ten tests on a different test set. I remembered something Steve once said about flat ground "not being flat and empty ground in CM". So even though it may look like a bald grass covered plain, in CM the numbers under the hood take into account small divots, grass clumps etc. So I tried an trick from the old days and put these tanks on pavement (see attached) and comparing to VABs original test it seems to make a significant difference.
If you recall (third post on this thread) ranged from 9 sec to 443 (7min, 23 sec) for the T72 to spot at 2000m. In my test series it saw nothing nowhere near as long.
So the longest for the T72 to do a (?) spot (i.e. there is something there) was 1 min and 28 seconds. Shortest was 15 secs.
Longest to clear spot (I see an M60, lets kill it) was 2 min and 5 secs. Shortest was an immediate clear spot at 24 secs (gotta be honest, that one feels a little fast)
The T72 won 8 out of 10 engagements but I had the M60 turned around backwards (the fact that it managed 2 wins is pretty interesting, that beast can see). With the longest time to first hit at 3:02 (but this was really crappy gunnery because they had a clear spot at 2:03). The shortest was 55 seconds.
So i just used your scenario to get some data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18Ma_-1Wl273jK9zck8gmlmqj1FPw2uQGNvbe90ZwuVI/edit#gid=0
I gave the m60 a short firing arc because the test isnt about comparing t72 to m60 yet. At this point its a simple test to see how long the t72 takes to spot. Ill replace the t72 with an m60 and a t64 later to get the comparison between them. Also a 1000m experiment.
Things that i noticed:
- Some of the crews are legally blind. A third of them took over two minutes to get a contact. Who let those guys into tanks?
- Only two would qualify as per german tank gunnery standards and then only when applying emergency mode times. (normal ones are 15s from target presentation to target hit and emergency with the backup sight and controlls its 30s)
5 hours ago, The_Capt said:So what? Well first off we cannot look directly into the scopes of the gunner and commander in CM. I suspect that the TACAI basically scans the horizon until it "sees" something. To scan a 90 degree arc at 2000m is covering approx 3100m of scan distance (https://www.omnicalculator.com/math/arc-length, note I am not sure it works this way in RL and my math may be off), at the noted
Id assume 60° for such a caslulation (basically gunner from 11 to 1) but thats variable. Working as a platoon generally each tank would have even less space to cover.
5 hours ago, The_Capt said:looking for a 3.6m tank...that is not something done in a few seconds. Then the TACAI has to fully identify the threat (is it a tank or a barn? It is a tank, ok whose tank?)
CM doesnt see to differentiate between cluttered and clean environment. A tank sitting somewuere between the buildings of a village should be much harder to spot than one sitting in the open but this doesnt appear to be the case.
5 hours ago, The_Capt said:Some of the RL data is pointing to the T72 having visibility issues
Id love to see which ones. None of its technical data suggests it should be worse than any contemporories.
I wouldt take the gulf wars results as an indicator that t72 had bad visibility. Thats more a case for how much thermals outperform non thermals in bad visibility conditions.
5 hours ago, The_Capt said:And probably should be seeing worse than the M60. Still at an average Zero to See/Start Shooting time of about 85-86 seconds at 2kms, for a last gen tank than is not bad at all.
In broken up terrain or bad weather id agree but the test was in clear weather and open and flat ground. And even then the times are quite long for a fully exposed tank.
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Just now, Artkin said:
There were two targets there actually, and the one that wasn't on the road killed that particular T64A.
can you send me the pbem turn and the pw and ill take a closer look as soon as i get some time (1-2 hours from now)
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11 minutes ago, Artkin said:
These bushes are lower than the driver's viewing port and all three crewmembers have a clean view to the target.
Yes all three can see but:
26 minutes ago, Artkin said:
This is the area they have to scan at the very least probably more.
30s from them being able to theoretically spot it to engaging it is ok considering the situation.
TC is more busy reestablishing comms as he currently has none and the driver while not obstructed in the view has adifficult time spotting. And the gunner has to scan a fairly large area so its quite possible he scanned past the target once especially considering hes nervous, the area he has to scan is busy and es only a regular.
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7 minutes ago, Artkin said:
It takes this T64A over 30 seconds to acquire a M150 moving on slow up a road toward us. The M150 fires at 1:19:48, and it is acquired at 1:19:27. This seems normal??? The tank is facing forward the entire time, the driver can even see it.
This is perfectly normal.
The enemy is moving forwards so no its not giving away much by moving and your tank has to cover and spot in quite busy ground. The crew is also nervous and has no contacts to anyone so it becomes quite easy to miss something.
This is a great example of CM doing exactly what it should
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1 minute ago, Hapless said:
Good luck figuring out if that's an enemy tank. Remember, you've got to decide RIGHT NOW and if you get it wrong you'll either DIE or KILL YOUR FRIENDS. No pressure.
Hes not looking at you you have time.
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14 minutes ago, dbsapp said:
Probably it does.
But we don't know how. Apparently it produces very strange results.
They arent very strange. In most situations the system works ok. Basically only the cases where it should be exceedingly easy or hard to spot dont quite get as far as they shouldd.
12 minutes ago, Bufo said:Why would be this outside the scope?
because animating the turret turn rather than simply calculate as if works far better since the spotting works in distinct rounds every few seconds so simply getting an area that was scanned and calculating the los like that works well for the scale.
Petition to equalize QB prices of some similar WW2 tanks
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted
So you dont want to accept a simple duel between them which is reasonable.
But you also dont want to accept looking at the vehicles individual stats that they derive their cost from to compare them
Can you please lay out how you would want a comparison because to me it looks like you just dont want to compare because the conclusion is too obvious.
Ive yet to see you put forward a coherent argument why the price should be at the point where it is.
The player experience im referring to coms from players consistently playing HvH QBs and Turnaments. I have yet to hear anyone consider the Stug to be deserving of the price it has no matter how you try to compare.