com-intern

yea as a player this is something to keep in mind. I think the most obvious decision from a wego perspective: * Attempting shoot and scoot Hulldown * Before a major engagement has occurred (ambush position) Hulldown * Once you are/are likely to be in a shoot out open ground (preferably keyholed) Essentially you are trying to make the decision on whether you will need the concealment more than the armor. Once a real fight breaks out the armor is probably preferable since getting hit is just a matter of time.

Thanks for bringing stats up for us. Over in the tank accuracy thread it appears that gun damage is pretty heavily tied to whether a vehicle is hull down or not. So depending on how you fight you might actually be seeing fewer or more gun damage results. I wonder if more casual players are intuiting that there is a difference but not understanding why. Because it appears that a Panther could reliably wipe the floor of a large number of Shermans if it were in the open while if it were hull down it would lose its gun.

It sounds like you live in the fantasy land of scenario design. CM isn't reality and its not unusual to find yourself in scenarios where you are essentially engaged in straight up brawls with enemy big guns. If you play CM for a day it would not be unusual for you to see more Tigers than the entire American army did. Edit: Hell if you are a longtime CM player there are decent odds you've seen more Tigers in game than were ever produced.

Also I'd argue that the current habit of the AI repeatedly slamming the same spot is unrealistic. A PAK36 firing ~10 rounds into the hull of an approaching T-34 would: - Start walking rounds to other portions of the tank looking for a damaging hit - leave the position in good order - panic and abandon the gun These are humans after all and unless they had very high motivation levels (and low experience) they would foresee their doom and get out of dodge. RobZ iirc has made that mod EDIT: Also RE: gun damage complaints. Yes their might be some expectation that German armor is invulnerable but I would not totally discount people with lots of hours picking up on the hull-down vs open-ground results but not understanding why they are happening. E.G. player runs Panther down road and slices through a Plt+ of Shermans because they all aim at the front plate and then they lose the Panther to a single gun hit from hull down. Given enough play time they might intuit that something is up.

Given QB and scenario design you are often straight-jacketed into certain positions. Yes in reality you might have more room to maneuver and more time but there have been more than a few scenarios where the alternate positions are a stones throw away from the current position. I think that would be obvious. Shermans rarely if ever have hull superiority whereas there are regularly situations where the German player will have access to tanks that can shrug off rounds. @RobZ winrate test should make it obvious why you might want to do that. ~~~~~~~ Principally from a player perspective none of this is a MUST. However, it is something to be aware of when playing the game. Its a tool you can use to your advantage. Does that mean you drive your tanks around in the open constantly? No. What sort of idiot would do that? But you should be aware of the stats and be aware that it can be advantageous to fight from the open. ~~~~~~~~ Warthunder does have maps where you engage targets 2.000+ meters with WW2 era vehicles and none of the arcade hit displays. But principally you are talking about the arcade mode and the smaller maps. On the larger maps in the more realism oriented modes what I see more often than specific "gamer science shots" is players bracketing targets for a hit. HITTING and then repeatedly firing wherever they initially hit. Depending on the situation that often means that you have repeated hits off the center of mass because that happens to be where the first round landed. ~~~~~~~ Overall though I don't get why some of y'all are talking as if folks want some uber pinpoint shooting on the part of the gunners?

Hull down essentially is question of how reliably you think you know your opponents kit. If you know or suspect they have peer armor then it makes perfect sense to go hull down. Since any hit is going to be damaging. However, if you can reliably identify that they lack peer armor then it makes sense to fight in the open. The slightly more micro intensive option is to start the fight in a hull down position but move out of it once you start being engaged. Essentially if you can ID that the enemy brought a platoon of Sherman 75s and you have 1 Tiger then you want to stay in the open ground. Outside of some freak circumstance they are not going to penetrate the hull but they will get your gun. I don't think anyone is forgetting this.

Reading Bruno's post and he does come off as frustrated but I think this thread links quite a lot with @RobZ 's good testing with tank gun accuracy. This discussion is inherently an extension of how guns target tanks and talking about it without linking in that thread is a waste of time IMO. Because damage is not just about what the round should do once it hits but whether it should hit at all. I did some simple tests recently in Red Thunder V3 and saw an uptick in gun damage in hull-down positions to the point that I feel comfortable recommending that heavy tanks (i.e. tanks that will likely not be penetrated by the average gun) should not enter hull down positions as it increases the risk that they will suffer gun damage. Overall it seems like something is off with targeting routines and I suspect its that the shooter has perfect knowledge of the target once it has been spotted. There are no 50% spots and so on that you naturally get in reality. ------ I was shooting cans over the weekend with a friend and he was repeatedly missing a shot. I eventually got out my binoculars to see in detail what was happening and it became clear that he couldn't tell the orientation of the can. The top of the can was reflecting the sun and was a very easily spottable target. However, the can was oriented at 45 degrees while he assumed it was sitting straight up. This basic misinterpretation doesn't seem to be happening in CM and instead you have unspotted and spotted targets.

Oooh boy this thread got petty for a bit. RE: Scenario Size Play in CMx2 tends to be smaller across the board. The maps themselves are smaller and the forces are also smaller. But this is almost certainly a direct trade-off between bigger scenario size and detail of the simulation. CMx1 had what... 20 meter Action Squares compared to CMx2's 8 meter Action squares. 2.5 times smaller so that a 2,000 meter stretch has gone from 100 squares to 250. That increase in detail has a cost and while in most cases I think the cost has been worth it I do miss the larger scenarios (and the ease of creating them) in CMx1. I will also say that Modern titles take the brunt of the hit. RE: Hull Down The way the game does targeting makes it inadvisable for certain vehicles to remain in hull-down once they are spotted. Since a hull-down position will guarantee turret hits and if your turret armor is weaker than hull then you are setting yourself up to be penetrated. You also increase the odds of gun damage which is especially pernicious for tanks that are otherwise proof to enemy fire. Effectively once a vehicle is spotted the shooter has perfect information regarding that vehicles so some of the benefit that hull down would grant you such as blending of turret with terrain and the inability for the shooter to accurately correct fires is lost. This in turn makes the decision whether to go hull down or not an actual one since you are trading away your hull-armor.

Unfortunately I've not read Barbarossa Derailed but do have his Leningrad book and so far they are similar. @benpark I thought I recognized that name and it turns out I have his Waffen SS in Normandy book. I'm enjoying it but I will say that (and in my experience this is a common issue) you almost need to print out maps to have on hand or spend significant time internalizing the operation area. The attached map book in Bloody Streets is one of my favorite features.

Really I would be interested in his macro view of the topic because something like gun hits is really only going to get resolved by pulling out vehicle loss (or hit) data. And I have a vague memory of JasonC having access to that sort information. Although at this point my memory of most of his posts is quite cloudy. I've been reading quite a bit of Glantz and just got the second volume of the Stalingrad series in. Its a monster. I may be incorrect but I've gotten the generally feeling that Glantz has superceded Zologa as far as Eastern content goes? I've also been trying to pick up some more books detailing specific units/battles as I feel that sort of info is more pertinent to the Company/Battalion scale of CM. Although unlike the operational stuff its harder to pin down quality books and authors. For example, if you are interested in the history of the Eastern Front at an operational scale you will be served well by just buying up anything Glantz has written on the topic. Its not all perfect but you are definitely in the ballpark. Whereas as you go to more granular detail authors tend to be far more specific. Stephan Hamilton, for example, wrote the excellent Bloody Streets which I just got in the mail a few weeks ago but has apparently only written one other book on the Oder Front.

Yea I always enjoyed JasonC's posts. I don't mind people being fiery as long as they are posting good content. Too often you don't get that combination but JasonC would call you an idiot and then layout in detail why you were one which is valuable in a lot of ways. In the discussion on tank gun damage I would be interested to see his input for example. From my perspective I don't necessarily want to (or always) follow doctrine to the the nth degree but playing out a scenario in a way that is close enough to doctrine can definitely be enjoyable. I recently finished Glantz's Leningrad book and recall a passage describing a Soviet assault where essentially had a rolling barrage ~200 meters (maybe 300m) in front of the infantry. The logic being that yes you are going to lose men to short rounds but this allowed the men to be on top of the Germans as the barrage passed over. I wouldn't want every scenario I play to be that sort of attack but it would be interesting to mess around with it in a scenario or two. And for my money I'd kinda prefer the campaigns to be a bit more generic in their scenario structure. Too often I feel like they try to throw curveballs at you and while I don't mind that in one-off scenarios I find it quite annoying in the context of a campaign. Which getting back to the Soviet campaign in Red Thunder I felt that too many of the scenarios were not giving you adequate equipment to complete them in a reasonable fashion.

Generally I agree with @SimpleSimon Excepting that I did win it on my first go. It was years ago but I recall moving my entire force up a board edge for most of the playtime and then coming in on the objectives. It wasn't fun and frankly I would have enjoyed having an artillery barrage far more as there would at least have been eye candy. Really the worst part is that Soviet assault tactics are actually quite interesting and playing them out would be an enjoyable challenge. Not least of which because most players will not have carried out an attack like that while playing CM. I did not complete the campaign, making it to the fourth or fifth mission, but generally the whole experience reinforces my dislike for the CMx2 campaign system.

Yea the crew profile in half-tracks is a huge issue for their survivability. I've been hoping that we would see an update in one of the new modules fix it for at least that game but no luck so far it seems.

Hull down is worse for German heavy tanks since their armor will naturally block most shots. One of the primary issues that seems to cropping up is that the gunner of a tank has too much information once an enemy is spotted leading to rounds hitting center mass and center mass of a hull down vehicle tends to be the gun. Part of my suspicion due to playing SABOW in the past and more recently Warthunder. Is that the gunner has a sort of "perfect idea" of what he is shooting at. You never, at least that I can recall, get those situations where the gunner sees a portion of the enemy vehicle and is unable to decipher the center of mass. Think of those shots through heavy forest that we occasionally see posted on the forum. People ask "how can they see through that" and while I don't doubt that the enemy could be seen it more likely is just a portion of the vehicle. Whereas in CM the gunner instantly knows the entire vehicle profile. Another example would be poor weather where you may be able to identify a portion of a vehicle but lose the rest of it in the heavy fog/rain/etc... In CM it appears that the gunners don't have these marginal target acquisitions and instead spot the whole vehicle. If anyone has gone hunting a decent amount you will likely have experienced similar situations. I've had to let more than a few Deer get away because while I knew exactly where they were I couldn't be sure of a clean shot.

At the end they also show that they use Flashpoint Campaigns.

Essentially yea. The game doesn't need any actual AI but if you give designer more options then you could have much more competent scenario AI. Triggers based on % casualties for an AI group, AI group SOPs and so on. Essentially ways for the scenario designer to say IF THIS THEN THAT for their plans. It'd make the AI more resilient and make scenario design far easier. As right now good design requires a ton of play through to get a feel for "most likely outcomes" and sort of prediction of what players will do. For example, I made an AI attack scenario a few years ago and essentially watched and recorded the results of a ton of slight variations of an attack. Like most of the AI creation time was just trying to figure out how well the attack went and then trying to see into the players mind. If I could have just said "DO this attack until X then do Y" it would have made a more competent opponent and not taking so many hours. --- If you look at my second example in my long post you can kind of see what I'm talking about. Essentially a trigger for % casualties suffered by AI group opens up a lot of options we don't current;y have. It isn't extremely different but each additional trigger allows for increasingly complex scenario AI design.

The issue with a scenario is that both players will likely be capable of winning. I would suggest building a QB beforehand wherein your friend gets 4x to 5x your force. Essentially he should not be able to lose. For example: You have 1x Plt. of Soviet infantry, 1x platoon of T-34-76, maybe a mortar Your friend has 1x Company of Panzer Grens, 2x Plt of Panthers or a Panther and Tiger platoon, and some 105mm guns on-call. Essentially you are going to be more experienced and until he is up to speed you want to be able to at most give him a bloody nose but not really stop him. This will allow him to comfortably learn the game without being beat down by a pro. After he is comfortable with the game you can start bringing things up to parity.

Fundamentally the issue is that the strategic AI does not exist. Only tactical AI and that AI is only reactive never proactive. What we all call the strategic AI is simply the designer creating from scratch a per scenario AI that is going to follow a rote path. The real limiter on scenario design is that the designer is pretty limited on their ability to build scenario specific AI. Cool things can be done with it but its still limited. Its not abstract thinking - you just consider it abstract thinking because @RepsolCBR described it using human language. You can achieve RepsolCBR's "abstract thinking" via logic gates. The scenario designer is doing this right now its just that the options are limited. Below for example is a series of options that can be done in-game currently. #5 could be construed by some people as abstract thinking but its really just a trigger. 1. The AI is to move at a cautious speed 2. AI is to attack starting from POINT Alfa to Point Bravo with GROUP 1 3. The AI may call artillery on LOCATION November 4. After arriving the AI will delay 20 minutes 5. The AI will attack from Point Bravo to Point Delta if enemy troops detected at LOCATION NOVEMBER Now if you had more detailed and granular options with the inclusion of SOPs and some free flow from the AI you could get more natural reactions. 1. The AI is to move at a cautious speed 2. AI is to attack starting from POINT Alfa to Point Bravo with GROUP 1 3A: If GROUP 1 sustains 50% casualties reroute GROUP 1 and GROUP 2 TO POINT CHARLIE. 3B: Once POINT CHARLIE is reached proceed to POINT BRAVO 3. The AI may call artillery on LOCATION November 4. After arriving the GROUP 1 will delay 20 minutes 4A: If GROUP 1 casulties > 40% cancel all orders proceed to DEFENSE POSITION 5. GROUP 1 will attack from Point Bravo to Point NOVEMBER if enemy troops detected at LOCATION NOVEMBER All of the above could again be done within the bounds of the scenario designer system in the game currently. Just a bunch of triggers. And again if you gave the AI some free hand you might not even need to do all of this. 1. The AI is to move at a cautious speed 2. AI is to attack starting from POINT Alfa to Point Bravo with GROUP 1 AI LOGIC: If GROUP 1 engaged by infantry ClOSER than 200 meters TARGET BRIEFLY 50% of buildings within 200 Meters along route of march. 100% of buildings that contain contact marker Now you have the AI automatically reacting to a group threat. A single unit in the group has detected an infantry threat at close range and now the entire group is going to react via searching fire. If the AI suspects that a unit is there (a contact marker) it will definitely fire at the position. AI LOGIC: If GROUP 1 Casualties > 50% reroute remainder 400 meters Left/Right to area of greater cover and attempt to move to AI POINT CHARLIE and then to POINT BRAVO And the AI will no longer continue a suicidal attack down a single avenue of approach but attempt another route. All it does it say "where is more cover" and then add its own intermediate waypoint between ALFA and BRAVO ----- All of these examples have something in them that you might consider "abstract thinking" but none of it actually is. Its all just a series of decision points that the AI arrives at. The difference between CM and many other games is that there are no decision points for the AI at all. Any decision is inputed by the scenario designer. You don't necessarily need the AI to make its own decisions and the CM system is fine. But as we;ve seen over the years the more power you give the designer the smarter the AI can appear. I've done both some Arma scenario design and Combat Mission and the Arma system has no real strategic AI either and is handled by player triggers. The system is far more complex and as a result you can get far more complex results from it if you put in the time. Edit: I will say I've done some game AI design and none of its simple. But you do not need an AI capable of abstract thinking. You just need to spend enough time working with it so that the maths behind each decision makes sense most of the time. Abstract thinking really only comes into play when you want a universal AI but no one here is talking about that. This is all just bespoke AI that exists solely to play Combat Mission - you can do that and do it quite well with the technology on hand. The issue is that building it is going to eat up time. Which is, I assume, why we have the scenario designer doing AI programming. Which again is fine, but the more options you give the designer the better the resulting AI can be. Any of the recommendations people have made could be done with a designer system there are just insufficient options for it currently.

Its not against yourself. You can assign one of the red forces to the AI. Red vs Red is scenario editor nomenclature but it plays no different than the standard battles included in the game.

IIRC back when CM:SF1 was still played by people there were several Red on Red scenarios and I think a campaign. One was set in a fictional African country and it fits your request almost perfectly. I don't know if its still around anymore but if you search in either the CM:SF1 or CM:SF2 repositories you may be able to find several of them. If you are into multiplayer you could also play CM:SF2 with some custom rules in Red V Red to achieve this also.

Part of the issue is that Combat Mission does not record well. I sometimes enjoy watching youtube AARs DARs, for example Josey Wales, however even I can find it quite boring at times. So much of the game is in the mental planning and then seeing your execution and that tension generated by wondering "will the round hit" or rewatching a freak ricochet that kills the Coy Commander. When you are simply watching a video you do not get that and are left with some of the worst parts of the game. Another example is that I enjoy playing Chess and participated in sanctioned tournaments for 10 years or so. However, I will not ever watch a video of someone playing chess as I find it extremely boring because you lose so much of the game. If you would like to "sell" the game to anyone I highly recommend that you get them the demo and perhaps assist them through it or let them mess around with it. SInce the player decision making process and then the reaction of the game is critical to how enjoyable CM is. Unfortunately as demos have become rarer it is increasingly more common for people to judge a game via video rather than hands on. If I had to judge CM via video I would likely have never played it.

Yes, I was wondering about the physical sights on the gun. Not about the effective range or anything really related to its Combat Mission application. I just figured that a forum like this would likely have someone with info on it as CM tends to attract a certain group. Online its quite easy to find that the war-era Thompsons quickly went over to the fixed sights. However, you will generally just find some text that says: With no information about the fixed sight. Sometimes they will mention that it had a peep sight and notch sight but again no mention of what ranges these were for. Without any definitive info you see people then post what they heard or what they assume is correct. The most popular answer is that the peep is 50 yards and the notch is 100 yards. The second most popular answer seems to be that the peep is 100 yards while the notch is 50 yards. In the video Sgt. Squarehead posted above Ian from Forgotten Weapons says that the peep is 100 yards while the notch is 250 yards. I'm inclined to take is word on that even though I've yet to be able to track down a technical manual or training film from the era the explicitly states this.

yes, this is the point I was trying, and failing, to make. I don't find it a constant issue in the WW2 games as an aggressive attack can succeed, however in the modern games it essentially dooms many attacks before they even really begin. RE: playing different games I wonder if its not related to the maps being played? If anyone played FEAR, a first person shooter from 2005 or so, they'll likely have heard that the AI is superlative. However, in reality the AI isn't anymore advance than just about any other FPS. What the designers did is specifically design the maps for the AI to take advantage of. If placed in any other terrain they would be hopeless but in the very specific maps made for FEAR the AI was stellar. Within the CM context specific map design might give you much "smarter" ai deployments than others. I notice in Freyberg's post for example there aren't any deep woods that I can see and the roads appear to be relatively open. Perhaps that is influencing how good the deployment is in some way. Because when I play QBs I often see absolutely terrible deployments. Critical AT guns in the middle of deep forest, directly behind a house with no LOS, etc... It might also have to do with the size of the battles being played. If you give the AI more units then its going to have more chances to get it right and the fact that the 88mm gun is in the ass end of nowhere isn't as noticeable or critical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.E.A.R._(video_game)

Obviously you can;t tell the ai to be successful because there is no AI to speak of. I think we all know that. The CM decision of only having bespoke designer intent is quite good when the designer is both skilled and lucky enough. It can create some truly fantastic scenarios, however, it can also be significantly worse and the QBs suffer the most.

Unless I am mistaken the AI makes no threat assessment. Individual units will make reactive assessments to pressure placed on them but they are always reactive. Never forward looking. E.G. A player may decide that their chosen avenue of attack is too costly after seeing a Platoon vaporized by fire and reroute or bring in more support before sending anyone else to die. Whereas the AI will never realize that. They will just keep feeding men into the machine. Those individuals squads and sections will realize that they are in a high threat situation but only after leaping into the fire. Regardless of their morale ratings they're all in the same pickle. Playing modern exacerbates this issue as its far rarer to get second chances. The lessons learned when Javelins are raining down must be learned by adjacent units. As the unit engaged by the Javelin no longer exists. At least that is my fundamental issue with the AI on the attack. That they have a difficult time adapting to a threat unless you provide them with overbearing numbers or firepower. Because they essentially have no understanding of economy of force. yes the 2 surviving crewmen will skedaddle back to safety but 2nd platoon is on deck and ready to die.