rails

[poesel]

Do rails give abstracted cover? Many movies taught me that soldiers used to cover behind the rails but CM has them flat.

Problem is that you can be either on the side of the embankment and have no LOS (infantry) or on top of it where it feels like being on the silver platter for the enemy.

[womble]

One way to check is set up a test range and see if any pTruppen survive shots that are drawn on-screen as passing right through them. You see the "cover save effect" a lot when troops are firing out of strong buildings with heavy incoming fire.

[General Lee Irked]

Do rails give abstracted cover? Many movies taught me that soldiers used to cover behind the rails but CM has them flat.

Problem is that you can be either on the side of the embankment and have no LOS (infantry) or on top of it where it feels like being on the silver platter for the enemy.

Agreed, it seems to me, you are restricted by the Action Square in these instances.

[Michael Emrys]

Do rails give abstracted cover? Many movies taught me that soldiers used to cover behind the rails but CM has them flat.

Don't trust anything you see in the movies without independent confirmation. Movies are mostly fantasy, even when the claim is "based on a true story."

As for real life, rails might provide some cover, depending on the relative height of the target and firing unit. So far as I have ever seen in this country, rails are usually no higher than 15cm above the surrounding soil. The thickness of the average prone human body would be nearly twice that. So barring quirks of elevation or unlikely irregularities in the ground contour, not a whole lot of cover...maybe none at all. Given all that, it wouldn't surprise me if BFC didn't find it worth their while to try to model it at all.

Michael

[c3k]

As implied, I too find the lack of cresting with rail embankments the biggest issue.

I can either be totally behind cover, or exposed on the sleepers. There's no way to creep up to the crest and only have my men's heads exposed.

Ken

[sburke]

Perhaps this is more a design issue for putting rail beds on a ditchlock level? I'd have to experiment to see what that does for AS positioning etc.

[MikeyD]

I've had infantrymen fighting on railroad sections and you can hear the bullets bouncing off the railroad ties. So 'something' is being abstracted, though I'm not sure what. The basegame scenario 'A Delaying Action' has a length of railroad track on a raised (pre-ditchlock) bed, though the road bed the Germans are fighting from was raised even higher.

[poesel]

Testing time.

Setup: US infantry on both sides, regular, fanatic, 200m distance. One side get a tight CA the other no orders. KIAs recorded after one minute.

I can second MikeyD that you sometimes hear a metallic ping when a bullet hits a rail.

They setup quite nicely behind the rails:

And this is the control group:

Result:

Rail group: 150 KIA

Control group: 149 KIA

Spotting was 'instantaneous' both ways in both tests (everyone spotted after 7 seconds).

Looks like rails give neither cover nor concealment. That is a bit surprising and against my gut feeling.

Caveat: there may be an effect but it may be so small that the few tests I ran might not have noticed it.

Scenarios:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8811801/rail%20spotting.zip

[JasonC]

In real life it is the embankment that provide the cover. CM does have difficulty depicting rises and falls in the ground that are small than its terrain tiles. But the right way to depict the cover that tracks provide would be to elevate the tile the tracks are on, one level above the surrounding landscape. Sometimes more. It isn't the rails themselves. But I see the original poster's point, that the visual depiction shows a small rise, but that rise doesn't seem to be more than eye candy.