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Hand to hand idea


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Just reading the Italy forum about hand to hand and came up with his idea.

Maybe when units\soldiers go into hand to hand combat we get a floating icon (similar o the surrender) but here show a bayonet above the units in hand to hand combat..add sound effects aswell maybe.

This way no complicated animation needs to be done. We get to see which units are in HtH and no need then for shooing at zero range to simulate it.

For me this would be enough and I'd be happy with it. Making animations for HtH would be very difficult to make it look reasonable, this way there is no need for it. In Graviteam Tactics they have the soldiers kicking each other..looks silly to be honest.

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Sounds a bit too much like a gimmick to me.

Really? I imagine the reason HtH isn't in game is due to getting it took look even decent with regards to animations. Now MG is out and it has far more urban combat then HtH becomes abit more important as a feature. Instead of some silly animation (like Graviteam goose step kick). I suppose you could show the icon and have the soldiers a knife in hand facing each other, which wouldn't be to hard to animate.

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After the U.S. Civil war it was determined that less than 1% of all casualties were caused by bayonets. And there was far more close quarter fighting in that conflict than in WW2. Just sayin'.

But... there was some hand to hand that took place in Arnhem during MG. And the last great bayonet charge occurred, iirc, in the Falklands War.

That said, it would be a fun addition.

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Re: bayonet charges. I've got a book floating around called "Battle Tactics of the Civil War" by Paddy someone or another. (My apologies to the author.) Great work on how the regiments actually fought. Ranges, effectiveness, etc.

Anyhow, the gist of it regarding bayonet charges is instructive. At one point in a battle, a unit will gain enough emotion (call it "bloodlust", "anger", whatever) to want to physically kill the enemy. Fixing bayonets and charging helps induce that state of emotional fervor. The odds of BOTH formations (friendly and enemy) being in that state of hyper-aggressiveness at the same time are quite low.

The result is that one unit, with bayonets fixed and running at the enemy with a deranged wide-eye scream, is ready to kill or be killed. The other unit is in the fight, but not quite so committed. They'll take their chance with marksmanship, but not a knifefighting, clubbing, choking, gouging melee. Rather than stay there, most units would then pull back.

The bayonet charge works. If you can close ground so that the receiving unit has no doubt that you will arrive there, intact, and ready to gut them. In that case, if the receiving unit has not upped their emotional state to the same level, they leave.

Hence, despite the prevalence of bayonet charges in the US Civil War, the low proportion of bayonet wounds. Most units run away.

Ken

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I would agree with most of the recent comments about the relative rarity of 'hand to hand' combat. It probably happened in urban fights but perhaps mostly by accident i.e. running into cover in the wrong house or jumping into the wrong slit trench and even then most people were still probably killed by small arms.

British soldiers with bayonets on generally used them on enemy casualties they were passing "just to make sure". Not good if you were wounded and unable to move

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Hand to hand fighting would be kinda neat. Sometimes I'll have an assault team make it into an enemy trench, and they'll be all out of ammo by the time they get there. So there is an awkward moment when my men stand there reloading with the enemy cowering right at their feet. Or some enemies will stand up and awkwardly stare at my guys for a few seconds at point blank range before they decide to run away or someone gets shot. This happened twice during one of the Market Garden battles I tried earlier. I would like my men to just whack them over the head with their rifle butt, but it's not a big deal anyway. It's still pretty rare.

It seems like it would be a lot of work to implement this kind of thing no matter how simple it is.

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