In what bizarre world is this possible

[Amizaur]

I

If you look at the screenshot, it appears that the underlying terrain is HEAVY FOREST.

Wouldn't it be usefull if the kind of terrain tile a unit is located in, was displayed somwhere in unit's data ? I remember.... No, I won't say that

It would be just nice to know what kind of terrain my AT-gun is in, without remembering how every kind of tile looks like (and what mods that could change it's look I have installed...)

Heavy forest represents an extremely heavy growth of secondary, um, growth. Lots of dead branches, bushes, saplings, etc. Given that level of obstruction, perhaps it is not unreasonable that an enemy unit, even a tank, cannot be seen.

Ok, I can buy it that there was an abstracted heavy foliage betwen the tank hunter team and the tank. They could in fact not see it. But the tank should not see them either.

And when the distance decreases, as they are closing in carefully, then I believe that in 90% of cases they should have better chance spotting first a SHOOTING tank (that they know is there), than the shooting tank's chances to spot those tank-hunters trough all that bushes !!

But from many of such reports there seem that when there is a difficult LOS, a buttoned tank has a better chance spotting soldiers trough bushes, than soldiers to spot a tank.

And while I could try to understand difficulties with spotting a stationary, non-shooting, green-painted, quiet (with disabled engine) tank hidden in a forest - I believe it could sometimes spot a moving man first... then I can't understand numerous reported cases when soldiers can't "outspot" a roaring and shooting tank on a road - before it spots them....

Well, it 100% realistic game it could happen... but it should be so rare, that a single case could be described here in forums every year or so.

Likewise, a sound contact should become available IF the team can locate the sound source with some degree of accuracy.

To this moment I was not 100% sure that sound contacts are possible in CMBN at all... Never seen a contact that I was sure could be only estabilished by sound, for example a "?" mark behind a buliding where no one of my men could see...

I'm glad they exist.

Having said all that, I concur that there seem to be situations where it just seems impossible that my guys haven't noticed the enemy. Grrr.

I would add - impossible and happening A BIT too frequently ....

Regards

[JonS]

Wouldn't it be useful if the kind of terrain tile a unit is located in, was displayed somewhere in unit's data?

Bear in mind that multiple combinations of up to six different types of terrain - plus flavour objects - can be in each tile*, and the direction you're looking at a tile from can make a significant difference.

So, not that useful.

* Edit: believe it or not, there are over 780,000 unique combinations of terrain possible in CMBN in each terrain tile, without even including flavour objects, and ignoring viewing direction (and I didn't count bridges either, which would push it out to about 5 million unique combinations, or different types/sizes of buildings which would push it into the many 10s of millions). CMBN is a complex game.

[Amizaur]

I meant, a kind of _underlain terrain_ tile. Nothing more.

I can see the type and density of trees / bushes with my eyes.

I'm only not sure about type of underlaying terrain tiles.

[SnakeTheFox]

Now, if the tank had been seen/spotted by the AT team first, then they entered the FOREST and lost total awareness of the tank, that would be odd.

I forgot to mention this in the OP, but they actually did spot the Stuart initially some 80~ odd meters away (they're about 30~ meters or so away in this pic IIRC), they spotted the Stuart and fired 2 'shrek shots which both neatly impacted a tree about halfway in-between themselves and the Stuart. That was when I (regrettably, in hindsight) decided to move them up closer to a better and less obstructed firing position and they lost not only visual contact but any sign at all that something should be there.

[womble]

I forgot to mention this in the OP, but they actually did spot the Stuart initially some 80~ odd meters away (they're about 30~ meters or so away in this pic IIRC), they spotted the Stuart and fired 2 'shrek shots which both neatly impacted a tree about halfway in-between themselves and the Stuart. That was when I (regrettably, in hindsight) decided to move them up closer to a better and less obstructed firing position and they lost not only visual contact but any sign at all that something should be there.

IME, it's possible that some slight elevation change meant they had some sort of "letterbox" through the foliage out at 80m range, which stopped framing the armour when they displaced.

While "tunnel hearing" might be a problem that is abstracted into the spotting algorithms, I'd argue that even "Tiring", those Crack troops with no suppression and good morale who are actively hunting a tank should only vanishingly rarely fail to find it in those circumstance. Since they're out of contact with any comrades to tell them there's a tank there, it could be argued that they're not actively hunting the Stuart, and so shouldn't get any special exceptions, except for the fact that they've already fired on it... I'm sortof surprised there's no "?" there for them.

The biggest problem for me is that the buttoned tank (deafened by engine noise and gun report, myopic as any tank) spotted the crack, 2-man team of tank hunters sneaking through the dense woods before the tank hunters saw the snorting, bellowing beast well enough to even register its presence.

I'd be interested to know what move orders the 'Shreck team had: Quick; Slow; Hunt? Were they being given Hide orders at each waypoint? Were they pausing at the waypoints? Moving troops don't spot so well, neither do Hidden ones. I'm not arguing that the observed outcome is "correct" as anything other than a very (because of the quality of the team) extreme statistical outlier, just trying to help elucidate the factors tha might be causing some sort of spotting glitch.

Was your opponent human? Can you ask whether they had other units (maybe CA-ed like an FO unit, so it didn't fire on your team) in the area that could have warned the Stuart that it had better watch its six?

Is there any way to go back and "skim" the game forward to this point so the stalk can be retried, to see whether the same results eventuate, and to see whether changing the movement modes of the team across the same ground change the result if it is consistently reproduced?

[MengJiaoRedux]

No less crazy than expecting a computer simulation is going to always give exactly the expected results. Seriously a couple of times out of how many situations does this occur and the game HAS to be tweaked?

S**t happens, it's a game. They can either spend the next ten years ironing out every occasional oddity in the behavior of the AI or they can keep working on bigger items. Does it suck when it occurs to you (or me) yeah probably, but how often is that? I pay really really close attention to my units (yeah I am one of those nut cases who splits all my teams in an entire battalion) and I can't say I have seen this behavior standing out. Not to say folks aren't seeing this but is it a matter of the occasional incident just being frustrating or are they seeing it a lot?

My AT teams are functioning and successfully ambushing tanks, my sniper teams work (including my asst not blowing our position and wasting ammo). Not trying to be a pain in the ass, but at a certain point not everything that goes wrong has to immediately mean BFC has to start tweaking the engine. (at least not if we want to see them churning out the big ticket items)

I have had this happen once (and documented in the screenshot thread way back in some shots of a battle with vKleist in Bois de Baugin. So rare for me I can remember the one time in almost a year it occured.

I agree. "Defending the functioning" is a strange way to characterize accepting that the game can't represent everything for every situation for every secong all the time.

If there were some other game where WWII battalions were represented down to the last man and jeep and this game somehow represented every event exactly second-by-second -- well that would be some kind of thermodynamic wonder and what would be the point? Would most players ever watch every second of every event from all possible view points?

There is in this case very little difference between the game effect of a perfect representation (about which people would still complain) and a very close representation which sometimes presents less-than-credible representations of events.