HE Shell on buttoned up Tank

[TimoS.]

Had a PBEM going where an T34/85 hits a Stug3G with Open Hatch with HE Shell on Long Range. The Shell hits the Upper Hull between Driver Slit and Commander Hatch. The Tank was buttoned up and both Commander and the Guy to his Right where sticking their Heads out of the Tank.

Noone of them gets Killed or Injured. :mad: The Tank gets a yellow Track Icon for lightly Tracks hurt?! :mad:

Sorry to say that BFC but your Subsystem Damage System is at least to be "weird" to "inexplicable"

[Fizou]

Make some tests and see if you can reproduce this often.. in that case it might be a bug.

More likely its one of those rare occasions where no injury is inflicted. Remember that there is some abstraction in this game, and that there always will be. The results is not impossible after all..

[Kieme(ITA)]

Not very easy to replicate, I set up a scenario but it's hard to tell a t34 to shoot HE to a stug, spending all the ap against other targets might be viable. In any case it's very rare to see a HE shot from a t34 against another unbuttoned tank.

Tested it, the first HE shot hit the wheels (front), causing the stug crew to button. All in all I see this as a realistic possibility, it's a He shot alright, but it hits the front of the tank and the crew is not completely out of their hatches.

As regarding the track damage in original poster's case I belive that it is possible to assume that the blast radius of the HE shot caused a minor damage to the track, nothing strange there, this is a possible explanation of how the Subsystem damage works.

Maybe a screenshot might give more clues, get one next time.

[womble]

Had a PBEM going where an T34/85 hits a Stug3G with Open Hatch with HE Shell on Long Range. The Shell hits the Upper Hull between Driver Slit and Commander Hatch. The Tank was buttoned up and both Commander and the Guy to his Right where sticking their Heads out of the Tank.

Noone of them gets Killed or Injured. :mad: The Tank gets a yellow Track Icon for lightly Tracks hurt?! :mad:

Sorry to say that BFC but your Subsystem Damage System is at least to be "weird" to "inexplicable"

First, what you're describing is the opposite of buttoned up. Heads out is "unbuttoned".

Second, BFC have historically said that in WeGo play, the drawn point of impact of a shell is sometimes imprecise. I don't know why that might be but why would they lie?

Third, "track" damage might suggest that the impact was lower than the game drew it, making the verisimilitude of the result more convincing. It's "only" a 85mm HE shell, after all and if it hit low down to the front, the heads-out crew may be well shielded from the blast/fragments.

Fourth, just because you can't think of an explanation doesn't make it inexplicable.

[TimoS.]

Not very easy to replicate, I set up a scenario but it's hard to tell a t34 to shoot HE to a stug, spending all the ap against other targets might be viable. In any case it's very rare to see a HE shot from a t34 against another unbuttoned tank.

Tested it, the first HE shot hit the wheels (front), causing the stug crew to button. All in all I see this as a realistic possibility, it's a He shot alright, but it hits the front of the tank and the crew is not completely out of their hatches.

As regarding the track damage in original poster's case I belive that it is possible to assume that the blast radius of the HE shot caused a minor damage to the track, nothing strange there, this is a possible explanation of how the Subsystem damage works.

Maybe a screenshot might give more clues, get one next time.

The Shot was taken onto the Tile where the Stug was standing and it wasnt visible to the T34/85 shooting. Thats why the TacAI choosed HE Shells.

Second, BFC have historically said that in WeGo play, the drawn point of impact of a shell is sometimes imprecise. I don't know why that might be but why would they lie?

Third, "track" damage might suggest that the impact was lower than the game drew it, making the verisimilitude of the result more convincing. It's "only" a 85mm HE shell, after all and if it hit low down to the front, the heads-out crew may be well shielded from the blast/fragments.

Fourth, just because you can't think of an explanation doesn't make it inexplicable.

@womble: First we get weird results. Next is weird explanations from you to justifiy those Results? Sorry. But i want to see you one Day admitting that there might be an Error/Lack of Simulation or too much abstraction and maybe let the Devs explain this why its happening?

I always got the Feeling that you are the Propaganda Minister of BFC.

[Kieme(ITA)]

Then, if the shot was taken against the tile... how can you tell where exactly it hit the stug front?

Meh, too many gaps here to continue the discussion.

In any case, it's not obvious that a HE shot hitting a tank must kill the unbuttoned crew unless it's an arty shot Landing from directly above, and second it's more than plausible that a HE shot causes a light damage (or even full damage) to a track, whatever is the precise hitting point. Besides, I don't really find womble's explanation weird, seems just logic.

[Michael Emrys]

@womble: First we get weird results. Next is weird explanations from you to justifiy those Results? Sorry. But i want to see you one Day admitting that there might be an Error/Lack of Simulation or too much abstraction and maybe let the Devs explain this why its happening?

I always got the Feeling that you are the Propaganda Minister of BFC.

And for my part, I hope I live to see the day when you admit you have jumped to a grossly fallacious conclusion. Of course developers can make mistakes, and when presented with concrete evidence to back up such a claim have been ready enough to admit so and when possible to correct it. On the other hand, womble, along with many of us who have been around for a while, have also seen time and again hysterical accusations leveled against BFC which under examination have proven to be no more than instances of bad observations, false ideas of what constitutes "reality", bad application of logic, or some combination of all three.

Now if you have proof that the game is doing something it shouldn't, by all means present it so that concrete steps can be taken to correct it. But mere hand waving and shouting do not constitute proof.

Michael

[Volksgrenadier]

And for my part, I hope I live to see the day when you admit you have jumped to a grossly fallacious conclusion.

And probably created the wish in another customer to avoid this place...

Incredible forum.

[Holman]

Had a PBEM going where an T34/85 hits a Stug3G with Open Hatch with HE Shell on Long Range. The Shell hits the Upper Hull between Driver Slit and Commander Hatch. The Tank was buttoned up and both Commander and the Guy to his Right where sticking their Heads out of the Tank.

Noone of them gets Killed or Injured. :mad: The Tank gets a yellow Track Icon for lightly Tracks hurt?! :mad:

I think the simplest explanation is that the CMx2 engine shows crew position and soldier movement but does not animate "micro-movement" like ducking and dodging. Maybe the crew heard the shell coming and pulled their heads in just in time.

Given the number of unbuttoned crewman I *have* lost to bullets and shrapnel, I'm willing to accept that sometimes they have better reflexes than are drawn on-screen.

[womble]

...I want to see you one Day admitting that there might be an Error/Lack of Simulation or too much abstraction...

Oh, now let me see. How about my post earlier today wanting the passengers of half tracks to hunker down more in their rides? Or my eventually fruitless effort to get BFC to fix the mortar rezeroing bug in v1.x of CMBN, if you want to go further back?

...and maybe let the Devs explain this why its happening?

Thing is, if Steve (or, Ifni forfend, Charles) spent their time holding your entitled little hand and explaining exactly how wrong you are, they'd have no time left to develop the game.

I always got the Feeling that you are the Propaganda Minister of BFC.

And you're the First Fool? I'm a bloody awful Propaganda Minister, because when I see a flaw I'll jump on it. The difference is, I'll set up some tests, and save the game and work with BFC rather than just leaping to unsupportable conclusions and then shooting my mouth off about them. Oh, and I understand that sometimes the random/arbitrary factors of the game produce results that are, taken in isolation, surprising. Which you evidently do not. At least have the grace to accept that my second point permits my third. Rail at BFC for why their game can't always precisely accurtely draw impact points, but don't rail at me for telling you what I know.

Try thinking rationally sometimes. It really does help sort out models of the world that work consistently.

[Fizou]

I think the simplest explanation is that the CMx2 engine shows crew position and soldier movement but does not animate "micro-movement" like ducking and dodging. Maybe the crew heard the shell coming and pulled their heads in just in time.

Given the number of unbuttoned crewman I *have* lost to bullets and shrapnel, I'm willing to accept that sometimes they have better reflexes than are drawn on-screen.

This.. +1 and what womble said.

[Peregrine]

In a book about Goodwood I am sure I read that a Sherman bumped into a tiger and fired a HE shell at close range that hit the turret. The tiger crew buttoned up apparently unscathed.

[sburke]

I always got the Feeling that you are the Propaganda Minister of BFC.

Damn it, just when I was getting comfortable in my position as the anti logic, someone gets promoted over me!!

TimoS I can definitely attest that in wego the visual is not an exact. I had a save of a round striking a Panther. If you reloaded and reran the turn, the ricochet visual would give different results. However as far as I know the indication as to where the round struck is usually good. Do you have a hit decal showing? If so I'd say that is likely a high probability of where the round struck.

As to the crew not suffering injury, your description is conflicting. Buttoned up means hatches are closed. Were the crew visible?

Do you have a save per chance?

And probably created the wish in another customer to avoid this place...

Incredible forum.

Yes it is, even banned members don't stay away. Whether you fit that category is a something many of us continue to wonder.

[A Canadian Cat]

@womble: First we get weird results. Next is weird explanations from you to justifiy those Results? Sorry. But i want to see you one Day admitting that there might be an Error/Lack of Simulation or too much abstraction and maybe let the Devs explain this why its happening?

I always got the Feeling that you are the Propaganda Minister of BFC.

LOL

I see that @womble already pointed out what I find funny. I think of @womble as one of the least likely to just spout propaganda in the defense of BFC. I think of him as a person very likely to chime in to the forum with an issue and argue his point of view with skill and conviction.

Of course I have trouble understanding the highly defensive tone some people take about their behaviour. I think this is in part due to human nature - it cannot be my fault my armies are being defeated. Well, I regret to inform you that it is your fault The sooner you accept that and start taking lessons away from what happened the better.

Here is the thing those of us that have been here a while know that we have found bugs from time to time. If you think you found one start some testing. Respond to the critiques of your testing with more testing. Or do some research and present the evidence you find. Respond to the critique of your research with more research. If you really have found a problem guess what you will win the day. Over the last few years I can recall several topics that resulted in significant changes in the game three examples I can think of off the top of my head:

1. Sherman tanks becoming immobilized to often (turns out some of the early testing was flawed but in the end what was discovered, by a Beta tester, who did a ton of tests there was a problem with road edges that caused an inordainment amount of bogging)
   
2. MGs were less deadly that they should have been (in the original game you could just rush across an open field towards an MG with a platoon of infantry and they would take out the gun more often than not, try that now and you will be a sad platoon commander)
   
3. Infantry AT rockets would not fire from inside buildings (this one was argued with research and created quite a few lively discussions before BFC changed things)
   

Regarding your original post there is just so little there. Sorry you are frustrated but your initial post lacked clarity about

1. why HE was being used in the first place,
   
2. if the crew were unbuttoned or not
   
3. what you expected to happen and why you think there was a bug - including some kind of repeatable test
   

As you play the game you will see that often HE shells explode and pixel troops die. Very often it will not be the troops you might "expect" who will die. Sometimes a guy really close to the explosion will be fine and someone else 50m away will go down. The vast majority of the time something unexpected happens it is not a bug. It is just something unexpected.

And in the absence of a more complete explanation of your original post and some testing I am not even sure if this incident is even unexpected.

[Amizaur]

Make some tests and see if you can reproduce this often.. in that case it might be a bug.

More likely its one of those rare occasions where no injury is inflicted. Remember that there is some abstraction in this game, and that there always will be. The results is not impossible after all..

Would be much easier if we could set in the editor precise amounts of AP / HE shells for a tank, not only reduce the ammo as a whole...

Tracks being damaged after a hit on the upper hull would suggest that tank damage in CMx2 is somewhat "random" and not depending on which part of the tank was hit. I do not want to believe that. But in my recent tests I had some Panters A which had 3-5 hits directly at the bow machinegun mount and this MG was still undamaged... I had a Panther where 85mm shell hit directly at the coaxial machinegun port, and the MG was undamaged.

How the damage system works ? Is it based on where a shell hit ? Are there any "hitboxes" for vunerable components, or is there only some random chance for damage of bow MG if a shell hit front upper hull ? Or maybe every shell can damage anything, and it doesn't matter it hits ?

TimoS I can definitely attest that in wego the visual is not an exact. I had a save of a round striking a Panther. If you reloaded and reran the turn, the ricochet visual would give different results. However as far as I know the indication as to where the round struck is usually good. Do you have a hit decal showing? If so I'd say that is likely a high probability of where the round struck.

It may have changed. During testing I reloaded the same saved game few times, and the shell hit decals were exactly in the same places ever time. I hav screenshots of the decals done with various decal textures and hits are in the same place.

edit:

[womble]

How the damage system works ? Is it based on where a shell hit ? Are there any "hitboxes" for vunerable components, or is there only some random chance for damage of bow MG if a shell hit front upper hull ? Or maybe every shell can damage anything, and it doesn't matter it hits ?

My recollection of what has been said about this is that it matters where it hits, but that the damage is random, so a different "damage table" per hit location or some such. You'd expect, if my recall is accurate, that turret hits wouldn't often inflict "track" damage, for example. But many components are "distributed" (I think the "track" subsystem includes the drive train too; it certainly includes the wheels...) and so you might get a result you didn't expect sometimes. And the damage tables have to account for internal deviations, so even a turret hit might sometimes cause track damage, which could possibly represent a fragment wrecking the steering/braking/throttle mechanism at the driver's station. Precise details are subject to speculation, obviously; I've never seen the damage tables...

[womble]

It may have changed. During testing I reloaded the same saved game few times, and the shell hit decals were exactly in the same places ever time. I hav screenshots of the decals done with various decal textures and hits are in the same place.

I'd expect the decals to be in the "right" place; the variability comes when you try and eyeball the location that the tracer intersects the pixels of the vehicle. And it's not always off, just sometimes. Do HE hits leave decals? I'd sort of expect penetrating HE hits (on light armour say, or from big chuckers like ISU 152s) to leave a decal, but wouldn't expect to see a "ricochet" decal from a HE shell that doesn't penetrate; a shiny hole in the paint doesn't seem to fit with a hit from an HE projectile.

[Pelican Pal]

So it'd be great if folks could talk this over without getting super defensive and catty. Just because your "offended" doesn't mean y'all should try to scare folks off the forums.

Anyway chances are this was just a one off event. We can't really say for sure without a bunch of tests being run.

Unbuttoned Stug commanders tend to keep pretty low in the hatch so it isn't the silliest thing for him to have survived. The damage to the track is a bit iffier, and I'm not really sure how those damage calculations work. It could be that the percussive effect of the explosion randomly caused some damage, but we can't know for sure.

The results seem unusual, but unusual things do happen on occasion. I know I've seen plenty of guys survive a near direct hit from an HE round only for another guy 30M away to get killed by shrapnel.

[Amizaur]

My recollection of what has been said about this is that it matters where it hits, but that the damage is random, so a different "damage table" per hit location or some such. You'd expect, if my recall is accurate, that turret hits wouldn't often inflict "track" damage, for example. But many components are "distributed" (I think the "track" subsystem includes the drive train too; it certainly includes the wheels...) and so you might get a result you didn't expect sometimes. And the damage tables have to account for internal deviations, so even a turret hit might sometimes cause track damage, which could possibly represent a fragment wrecking the steering/braking/throttle mechanism at the driver's station. Precise details are subject to speculation, obviously; I've never seen the damage tables...

OK, so I understand that hits on front turret have some chance damaging coaxial MG, hits on upper hull have some chance damaging bow MG, ad this is not conneted with the precise hit location showed by hit decal.

But I would prefer that upper hull hit that damages "drive train" be rather called "engine damage" than "track damage" - easier to imagine the shock caused by the hit damaging the engine, that anything (shrapnel, shock) damaging the track which is in another place and not exposed to this explosion .

P.S. HE shells in CMRT 1.0 leave same decal type as AP shells. A shiny one for ricochet . I would suggest changing it to HEAT_ricochet decal type. And make a new decal - a big irregularr hole - for HE penetratons.

The decals have to be in the same place every time. Imagine a curved, rounded surface where a shell hit. The effect - penetration or ricochet - would strongly depend on where exactly it hit. If it hit in different place in a replay, there would have to be a different hit effect - ricochet instead of penetration or vice versa.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Hits that knock out the hull machine gun will use the hit location text "weapon" rather than "upper front hull", same as when the main cannon is hit. I presume the same is true for the coaxial MG, although I have never noticed the coax getting hit. If hit decals are showing on the hull MG ball but it's not being knocked out that is probably a bug, although whether it's a bug with the hit damage or with the decals is anyone's guess.

[sburke]

It may have changed. During testing I reloaded the same saved game few times, and the shell hit decals were exactly in the same places ever time. I hav screenshots of the decals done with various decal textures and hits are in the same place.

That was actually my point, the ricochet changed, the hit location decal however did not. Nice to know I wasn't wandering out in left field again.

[A Canadian Cat]

So it'd be great if folks could talk this over without getting super defensive and catty. Just because your "offended" doesn't mean y'all should try to scare folks off the forums.

Yeah, I might have been a bit over the top. I'll let you catty remark slide (to be clear that is a joke - cause I might have deserved it).

@TimoS. I should have held my tongue and saved it for if you actually did get out of line - which you really didn't.

So all you other posters these last few weeks complaining because the game punished your for doing something risky or because you think your favorite equipment is not uber enough in the game I was talking to you - yeah, yeah that's it.

[TimoS.]

Sorry Folks. Never wanted to be rude and im not that upset as my initial Post would suggest.

I cant write that often because sometimes after logging in the Forums just dont let me and want a logging over and over again when i hit the "reply" Button so i sometimes give up on this.

Also i want to make clear that im not that 5 Year old Child thats sitting there and crying that every Odd is against him. Every strange thing that occurs will come for the Opposing Side too. So.

I just have the feeling that when you sometimes come up with something that is explained very easily you get a complicated justification why it is the way it is. Or its just that 1:100000 Time that happens

Wasnt lack of Information on my Side i guess.

Tank was open Hatched. HE Round struck the Front Hull. HE Round so i had no Hitdecal on the Tank. The Stug was not Vivisble to the the T34/85 but Visible to the Players Godview.

I just cant help but got that feeling that Subsystem Damage seems to be random sometimes.

[Amizaur]

In my testing I observed clearly that 85mm, 122mm and 88mm HE shells leave decals same as AP shells - so ricochet decal or penetrarion decal. Strange that you haven't got decal.

[womble]

In my testing I observed clearly that 85mm, 122mm and 88mm HE shells leave decals same as AP shells - so ricochet decal or penetrarion decal. Strange that you haven't got decal.

Suggests that the shell didn't hit the tank at all, and a track damage hit is all you might expect from a near miss.