Casualty Tracking/Morale Issues

[Guest R Cunningham]

The horse on the display of casualties has been beaten to a fine mush. But I've still got questions on casualties, how they are tracked, how they occur, and what secondary effects they have on units.

From the FAQ:

"Infantry: Squads track individual hits. A stray bullet might claim a squad member, or a well placed artillery round might wipe out the whole unit. In any case, losses will be reflected in the unit's ability to attack and defend. This is especially detailed in CM because individual weapons make up a unit's firepower. So if an SS PzGren unit is down to 1 man, it will be firing EITHER a Mauser, MP40, MP44, or LMG42, and NOT a generalization of them all.

Teams that suffer casualties will become less effective. A 4-man HMG unit, for example, can lose two men without disrupting its ability to shoot. But without those two extra men there is no one to carry extra ammunition, and the HMG will have to leave behind most of its ammo if it decides to move. Once the third man is hit the HMG will suffer a reduction in rate of fire and become totally immobilized (and that's if the last guy doesn't panic!)."

This implies a level of individual soldier tracking that hasn’t been readily apparent before. I have checked the threads going back 100 days and haven't found a detailed discussion of this topic.

Which leads to the following questions....(apologies if any of this has spelled out clearly somewhere and I missed it)

1. How does the system determine which individual soldier gets hit?

(Does the system track the location of each soldier in a unit and use his location to determine if he is hit?)

2. What levels of casualties are there?

a. Can a soldier be hit more than once and go from being a light casualty to a litter urgent?

b. Other posts indicate that individual soldier attributes are not tracked, but if a soldier is hit and not killed how is the unit’s effectiveness changed (if at all)?

c. At what point does a soldier get labeled inactive/ineffective?

d. Can a severely wounded soldier be killed if his location takes additional fire?

3. Even though casualties are not displayed do they have any other effects on their and other units' performance? (apart from Global Morale)

a. Does a squad that has taken casualties become more likely to get pinned, panic than other, unscathed units of the same type/experience level?

b. Can the casualties incurred by one unit in a given location have a detrimental effect on another unit if it shares the same location or if moves to that location later? (i.e. SGT Johnson’s MG team in a house gets wiped out by a tank. 10 turns later SSG Hammond’s squad moves up to the house. Do the dead/dying troopers of SGT Johnson’s team have any effect on SSG Hammond’s squad?)

4. Is morale strictly a unit level phenomenon or can individual soldiers within a squad panic on their own?

[Fionn]

I'll answer the ones I'm sure about and leave the rest to Steve and Charles since I don't want to say something is in when it isn't etc.

2b. If he is badly wounded he is rendered combat ineffective. If he is dead he is also combat ineffective.

2c. When they die or are seriously injured sufficiently to render them combat ineffective. Generally the first shot will render someone combat ineffective unless its a graze. Sure there are exceptions but not all too many.

2d. Since the locations of fallen wounded soldiers aren't kept in memory (remember the dead bodies discussion) they aren't tracked and available to be hit later. There's no shooting of wounded. Again, it wouldn't add much to the game.. What would giving the ability to shoot wounded men lying in the ground add to the intellectual challenge of tactical combat?

4. Morale is a squad-level thing.

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Fionn Kelly

Manager of Historical Research,

The Gamers Net - Gaming for Gamers

[Guest Big Time Software]

Ok, just time for one more post before I have to leave

1. Rondomly. However, units will try and keep their SAW (LMG/BAR/Bren). This means one weapon (usually a rifle) is dropped and the LAW picked up.

3. Yes, casualties have a big impact on how the unit responds to enemy fire and rallying. A really beat up unit will be much more likely to panic or break.

Steve

[Guest R Cunningham]

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2d. Since the locations of fallen wounded soldiers aren't kept in memory (remember the dead bodies discussion) they aren't tracked and available to be hit later. There's no shooting of wounded. Again, it wouldn't add much to the game.. What would giving the ability to shoot wounded men lying in the ground add to the intellectual challenge of tactical combat?

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Nice shot Fionn.

But the sarcasm doesn’t become you.

I was not trying to push for the ability to shoot the wounded. I was merely trying to get more info about the nature of the system used by CM. We have combat ineffective prisoners, and they can be killed, excuse me, rendered more combat ineffective, such that they then vanish like the wounded. What do prisoners bring in terms of intellectual challenge? Why do only healthy prisoners matter? What of the wounded enemy laying about? Are they not prisoners as well?

Why do we care if prisoners get killed but not the wounded who are waiting for evac?

At this scale of game (to use a popular phrase) I see no value in prisoners because they can’t actually give you the immediate HUMINT that a real life commander would get from them. Why waste precious Polygons on maintaining prisoners marching around a map?

So what we’ve got is an infantry system a few steps beyond Tobruk where an infantry squad consisted of x number of men who get marked off on a sheet as they are hit. Now we have a randomness factor that determines which of the number of x is hit and identifies him by the weapon he carries. It is no longer automatic that the most important weapon in the squad section will continue to fire. ( as a side note SAW – Squad Automatic Weapon – is specific to the M249 SAW. It is not a catch all term for the fire power base of a squad. A modern US light infantry squad has two, one in each fire team) Why is such attention paid to tracking individual heavy weapon rounds only to randomize the outcome once it hits a squad cluster?

[Fionn]

*Sigh*..

There was no sarcasm there... I think if you read what I wrote again you would see that "What would giving the ability to shoot wounded men lying in the ground add to the intellectual challenge of tactical combat?" CAN be a question without any sarcasm attached.

I wrote it without any sarcasm. Of course, I can't control how you are going to interpret it but I can simply state you're taking it the wrong way and leave you to decide whatever you choose. At this stage I'm too tired and wasted after being sick to try to convince you of my good intentions.

As for the other stuff, quite frankly I think your tone has become a little bit too combative and sarcastic for my tastes right now so I'll leave it to Charles and Steve to answer.

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Fionn Kelly

Manager of Historical Research,

The Gamers Net - Gaming for Gamers

[Moon]

Looks like this got off to a bad start somehow. How about me sticking to the original set of questions using what I have seen in the game?

1. How does the system determine which individual soldier gets hit?

(Does the system track the location of each soldier in a unit and use his location to determine if he is hit?)

Random determination. The smalles unit in CM is the team/squad, no individuals are tracked.

2. What levels of casualties are there?

One - combat ineffective.

a. Can a soldier be hit more than once and go from being a light casualty to a litter urgent?

Nope, see point 2.

b. Other posts indicate that individual soldier attributes are not tracked, but if a soldier is hit and not killed how is the unit’s effectiveness changed (if at all)?

CM would be not much of a squad level combat simulation, if casualties would not hurt the effectiveness of a squad, don't you think? Unit effectiveness changes in many respects (morale hits to name one), but most visibly by deducting weapons from the squad which has a big impact on that units firepower. If the LMG guy gets shot and nobody picks it up, that squad will lose a lot of his combat effectiveness.

c. At what point does a soldier get labeled inactive/ineffective?

When he is inactive/ineffective.

d. Can a severely wounded soldier be killed if his location takes additional fire?

Severely wounded and killed is the same with regard to the game - that soldier makes no difference to gameplay and is not tracked/represented on the battlefield.

3. Even though casualties are not displayed do they have any other effects on their and other units' performance? (apart from Global Morale)

Nope, apart from Global Morale, no.

a. Does a squad that has taken casualties become more likely to get pinned, panic than other, unscathed units of the same type/experience level?

I am not 100% sure about that one and would ask Steve or Charles to verify it, but I believe this is indeed the case.

b. Can the casualties incurred by one unit in a given location have a detrimental effect on another unit if it shares the same location or if moves to that location later? (i.e. SGT Johnson’s MG team in a house gets wiped out by a tank. 10 turns later SSG Hammond’s squad moves up to the house. Do the dead/dying troopers of SGT Johnson’s team have any effect on SSG Hammond’s squad?)

No, again - apart from Global Morale there is no effect.

4. Is morale strictly a unit level phenomenon or can individual soldiers within a squad panic on their own?

There are no individual soldiers tracked/represented within a squad. Hence the answer is no.

All of the above, please understand, is taken from what I know about the game. I didn't code it, so some of the answers are given to the best of my knowledge.

[Bil Hardenberger]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>At this scale of game (to use a popular phrase) I see no value in prisoners because they can’t actually give you the immediate HUMINT that a real life commander would get from them. Why waste precious Polygons on maintaining prisoners marching around a map?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

First of all a maneuver Battalion Commander does not have an organic MI section, so in reality he will not have the resources to do an interrogation that will be worth a damn. So he will not be able to get any HUMINT from them, if he did, I would think it would be very suspect.

Second, prisoners can escape and rejoin their unit in CM, as has happened in the AAR, if they are not properly escorted. So they do have a purpose in CM in my opinion. Maintaining and managing prisoners is an aspect of war at this level. You have to assign guards, escort them to the rear, etc.

[This message has been edited by Bil Hardenberger (edited 09-24-99).]

[Doug Beman]

Time for me to weigh in here (work is slow today) with some elaboration on somethign Fionn said:

"a. Does a squad that has taken casualties become more likely to get pinned, panic than other, unscathed units of the same type/experience level?

I am not 100% sure about that one and would ask Steve or Charles to verify it, but I believe this is indeed the case."

I'm pretty sure that this is correct. In fact, I remember reading here somewhere that a squad that takes 5 casualties in 1 turn is more likely to panic than a squad that takes 1 casualty per turn for 5 turns.

In other words, getting whacked really hard once is worse than getting whacked gently a bunch of times.

I'm fairly sure that's the way it was presented; guess we won't know until next week.

[Guest R Cunningham]

In a previous thread on casualties

(http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum1/HTML/000417.html) steve wrote:

"Chris, Chris is right (ah, the Rourke one ) CM's casualties run the range from frozen with fear to a lost limb. A good general rule of thumb for physical casualties is that there are about 3 woundings for every death. One is very short term (i.e. nicked) and is back in action within hours, or a day or so. 1 wounding is medium term, and requires some sort of rear area treatment, but the soldier gets back to the front. The other is wounded to the point of never being able to go back into combat, or dying because of wounds. This is, obviously, a gross generality. I have detailed casualty figures, but I don't feel like looking them up

Taking the above into mind, technically you should get back about 10-25% of your casualties back after a battle or two. These guys would come back even sooner if the unit was cut off. The other 2 out of 3 wounded would not be back within CM's timeframe, so they don't factor in at all.

Because we simulate other forms of ineffectives, the number returning is likely to be higher. Depending on resources, you might also get replacements, and that will make it higher still."

There's something not jiving here. On one hand units (team, section, squad, half-squad)

are the lowest level tracked for morale purposes. Everyone seems to agree on that.

Everyone also seems to agree that individual soldiers are not tracked (i.e they have no name, no characteristics of their own).

But this casualty thing...the statement from the older thread above indicates the CM is tracking the individual casualties for replacement purposes.

/ is my original question

// is moon's response

////me again

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/1. How does the system determine which individual soldier gets hit?

(Does the system track the location of each soldier in a unit and use his location to determine if he is hit?)

//Random determination. The smalles unit in CM is the team/squad, no individuals are tracked.

//// Got the random determination part.

But at some level individuals are being tracked. If a casualty is going to return to his unit, the game has to know what unit he came from.

/2. What levels of casualties are there?

//One - combat ineffective.

////Again Steve's earlier posting indicates something more complex is going on. For the player it seems, it is expressed in those simple terms that his troops are active or out of the picture as casualties. But behind the scenes the game is actually figuring out which of those soldiers will return for the next battle.

/a. Can a soldier be hit more than once and go from being a light casualty to a litter urgent?

//Nope, see point 2.

////Again I'm thínking that the game is tracking soldiers that are lightly wounded with no immediate effects but a subsequent hit can make him drop out as a combat ineffective guy. It leaves open the possibility that one guy could get hit numerous times before becoming combat ineffective.

/b. Other posts indicate that individual soldier attributes are not tracked, but if a soldier is hit and not killed how is the unit’s effectiveness changed (if at all)?

//CM would be not much of a squad level combat simulation, if casualties would not hurt the effectiveness of a squad, don't you think? Unit effectiveness changes in many respects (morale hits to name one), but most visibly by deducting weapons from the squad which has a big impact on that units firepower. If the LMG guy gets shot and nobody picks it up, that squad will lose a lot of his combat effectiveness.

//// what I was getting at here is if there is a lightly wounded guy who still counts as combat effective (he's still in the game) is there any negative effect to the unit, say, if he was the LMG gunner? (does the firepower drop a little? I'm thinking the answer is probably not.

/c. At what point does a soldier get labeled inactive/ineffective?

//When he is inactive/ineffective.

////Here I was fishing for info on how many hits a soldier could conceivably get before becoming Combat ineffective.

/d. Can a severely wounded soldier be killed if his location takes additional fire?

//Severely wounded and killed is the same with regard to the game - that soldier makes no difference to gameplay and is not tracked/represented on the battlefield.

//// I'm with you as far as what the player sees. Once he' out, he's out. But if the game is tracking these various levels of casualties for returns, is it possible that the wounded can change to dead and hence not be potentially available for return to his unit? I suspect the answer is no. Though I thought this was a possibility. Since the primary reason for not displaying the dead/wounded is the demand of the extra polygons, it appeared plausible that the behind the scenes tracking of these casualties was perhaps not a major drain on system resources.

/3. Even though casualties are not displayed do they have any other effects on their and other units' performance? (apart from Global Morale)

//Nope, apart from Global Morale, no.

////Again just trying to get clarity on what is being tracked. If the rest of my outrageous hypotheses were correct, then it semed reasonable that CM could also factor in a negative effect for the presence of the casualties on active soldiers in the immediate vicinity. I think Global Morale may be an approximation of this.

/a. Does a squad that has taken casualties become more likely to get pinned, panic than other, unscathed units of the same type/experience level?

//I am not 100% sure about that one and would ask Steve or Charles to verify it, but I believe this is indeed the case.

//// we know half squads are more brittle than full squads. We also know that all units become more brittle as the entire force incurs losses due to Global Morale. But is a squad that got shot up and has half its guys left more brittle than a regular half squad? Doug Beman's example is another layer: two like squads both having lost 5 men, but one lost all five in one shot while the other lost the 5 over several turns. I accept that the first squad is more traumatized immediately, but is there a lingering effect 5 turns after that (is that squad permanently more affected, not just immediately more likely to panic)?

/4. Is morale strictly a unit level phenomenon or can individual soldiers within a squad panic on their own?

//There are no individual soldiers tracked/represented within a squad. Hence the answer is no.

//// I got that idea form one of your AARs where you described a squad leader successfully rallying his men (or what was left of them). I got he impression that maybe the squad leader was OK, but his soldiers were not.

Bil Hardenberger:

BCs don't have organic interrogators, but there are some attached to Brigade. My point was, the value of prisoners to the tactical commander is intel, but that in all likelihood there won't be a way to give the player extra info especially when playing against a human opponent.

My argument against prisoners is simply, if we accept prisoners as appropriate to this scale of game, why is not casualty evacuation likewise appropriate? The maneuver commander has to get his casualties back to the rear to the casualty collection points. I can see that this won't be real fun, especially since most units are woefully lacking in assets to do this.

[Guest Lokesa]

Cunningham,

it is my understanding that the qoute you used was in relation to the campaign and that if I remember correctly it is abstracted. I dont believe that individual wounds are kept track of rather for a subsequent battle of a campaign some of your ineffectives from previous battles may be avaliable. I dont believe this is a direct percentage of the total but instead each incapacitated has the chance to return. (seems like a lot of coding )

[Guest R Cunningham]

Ach so, I hadn't considered it from that angle. That certainly would be a much easier way of doing things than all the drivel I read into it.

[Ben Galanti]

I just want to second Lokesa's post. I believe that's how it will work. As for the question about lightly nicked soldiers, I don't think there is such a thing in CM. A soldier is either at full combat effectiveness or ineffective for the rest of that battle (with a percentage chance of returning for a later battle if it's a campaign) Now, what I don't know is if that percentage chance is affected by where the battle ended. I know that there is a chance to recover dead AFV's between battles if they are behind your front lines. I don't know if there is any affect on the percentage chance of an ineffective returning depending on the front lines...

[Bil Hardenberger]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>BCs don't have organic interrogators, but there are some attached to Brigade. My point was, the value of prisoners to the tactical commander is intel, but that in all likelihood there won't be a way to give the player extra info especially when playing against a human opponent.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I understood your point. My point is that there would be no extra info to give to the player (in reality).

WW2 Divisions were not on the Brigade system like modern armies. They had Regiments. Sure there was the occasional Brigade running around(i.e. Russian Tank Brigade), but the difference is that a Brigade is capable of independent action, a Regiment isn't. A Regiment will not have the type of inherent support that a Brigade will. That being said, I find it unlikely that there would be more than an Intel advisor at Regiment level. Even if there was an interrogator there (unlikely) by the time the prisoners are transported to Regimental TOC, pumped for information, the information analyzed and sent back down the chain, it would be too late for it to be of any value to the CM battle.

[Guest R Cunningham]

Bil Hardenberger:

I know that the current brigade system is different from the old regimental system, but I was under the impression that the older system was superior for the regimental commander. I once heard a speech by the "regimental Colonel" for the 17th Infantry Regiment (an honorary position these days) and he remarked that when he was the actual regimental commander in Korea, it had it much better than today's brigade commanders since they didn't own the organic assets he did. The modern brigade is not a fixed organization. The brigade commander doesn't control all of those "slice" elements and even when he takes them to the field or to war, there is still the overlapping chains of command to confuse the issue. The Forward Support Battlion commander works for the Division Support Commander but he has to support the Brigade Commander. What does he do when he gets conflicting signals?

And back to the intel point.

"...by the time the prisoners are transported to Regimental TOC, pumped for information, the information analyzed and sent back down the chain, it would be too late for it to be of any value to the CM battle."

Exactly, so why does CM bother with them?

[This message has been edited by R Cunningham (edited 09-25-99).]

[Dan]

I dont...know....hmmm...mabey because some times pepole don't think it's a good day to die?

CC series which you so love to defend has them do you ask them that question.

Oh that's right they only use POW to give away your postion...

[Fred]

Bill wrote it:

"Second, prisoners can escape and rejoin their unit in CM, as has happened in the AAR, if they are not properly escorted. So they do have a purpose in CM in my opinion."

In the city, after Moon cleared it, a captured us soldier changed his status from captured to active (even if only armed with a pistol).

Fred

[Guest L Tankersley]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>"...by the time the prisoners are transported to Regimental TOC, pumped for information, the information analyzed and sent back down the chain, it would be too late for it to be of any value to the CM battle."

Exactly, so why does CM bother with them?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Because, although of no intrinsic value to the battle being fought in CM, they _are_ of value to the larger picture. Taking prisoners and escorting them to the rear is useful because then the humint boys can have a go at them, and possibly learn something useful. It's a way to encourage behaviors that are realistic by issuing victory points (in much the same way that victory locations award points to the side controlling them).

L. Tankersley

[Fionn]

Why are prisoners in?

Because prisoners WERE taken and because it'd be unrealistic to leave them out totally.

In a battlefield very little HUMINT can be picked up in the midst of a battle (except perhaps.. "There are some guys in the farm buildings there") and so that isn't modelled.

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Fionn Kelly

Manager of Historical Research,

The Gamers Net - Gaming for Gamers

[Guest R Cunningham]

Dan,

I don't think I "love" to defend CC.

I know that CC has prisoners and that they are modelled differently in each of the three games. In Cc1 they stood in place. In CC2 they folowed the capturing unit around until they found a lower quality unit to tag along with. In CC3 they just walk towards the enemy side of the map.

But CC also has the wounded laying around.

Fred, LT, Fionn,

I just wanted to know why prisoners are modelled and the wounded are not. Captured wounded soldiers can provide HUMINT as well. And they should be able to be recovered by their own side.

And another question on prisoners. Does the player get more for capturing officers than NCOs and more for NCOs than lower EMs?

[Dave]

From what I’ve read, I think wounded are modeled, but are either considered to be slightly wounded and still active or severely wounded and out-of-action. The severely wounded/ incapacitated and dead, I think, are in one group.

Considering the scope of CM and it’s playing time (30-60 minutes), there would be very little time for intelligence gathering beyond the obvious (The enemy is/was over there!).

Prisoners SHOULD be a part of this game. In a 30-60 minute battle, prisoners will be taken, most likely, and they have to be dealt with. This doesn’t mean interrogating them, which could and probably SHOULD take hours, but just getting them under guard, out of the way, and continuing the battle. In a campaign, maybe something could be included where the number of prisoners and their rank would have a bearing on what you know at the beginning of the next battle. If it’s not in there already, I like the idea of getting more points for capturing NCOs and officers.

[Moon]

That's already in the game from what I know. You get more points for HQ units that surrender, and more points for, say, a Battalion HQ than a Platoon HQ.

[Guest L Tankersley]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>I just wanted to know why prisoners are modelled and the wounded are not. Captured wounded soldiers can provide HUMINT as well. And they should be able to be recovered by their own side. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, at bottom this is a design decision that has to be answered by the designers. But I suspect it's because it was easier to model prisoners, for the following reason: units surrender and become prisoners as a unit, so when a squad (say) gives up, you can just change its status from "ok" to "surrendered;" the unit itself stays together and still functions as a single entity. Conversely, wounded get dropped all over the battlefield. If you were to model wounded, you would have to spawn lots of additional units on the fly to represent the wounded guys and their status, which could end up being quite expensive in resources of one coin or another (even if it's not particularly costly in terms of execution resources, it would probably require a dramatic shift in the program architecture which would be expensive in time and programmer hours).

L. Tankersley

[Guest Big Time Software]

Well, it looks like the wounded thing was cleared up.

From R. Cunningham:

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Why is such attention paid to tracking individual heavy weapon rounds only to randomize the outcome once it hits a squad cluster?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And what is the alternative? Simulating ever stick and twig, rock and clump of dirt that each man is using for cover? Do an exact mathematical model to simulate each shard of a shell and its path through said cover to the man that has each centimeter of his body simulated so that we can tell you exactly what happened? For a company to battalion sized engagement? Right Anything less than this is an abstraction, which is what all games must be in order to actually run on anything but a network of super computers programed by an army of grad students over a period of several decades. CM is abstract, as it MUST BE, but it is far less abstract than other games on the whole. The end result is a FAR more realistic wargame than any other out there.

CM works on the principle of scientific probability for determining casualties. If there are 12 men in a certain spot doing a certain action and a shell lands x meters away, depending on quantifiable factors (shell type, weight, distance to center, cover in between, etc.) we can predict how many men would PROBABLY fall victim to that hit. Randomness is applied in measured quantity to simulate the wonderful world of uncertainty we live in. The results are as realistic as any that can be determined without actually subjecting 12 men to such a shell hit. That is so long as the qunatifiable factors, probability, and randomness are all factored into sound equations. This is what CM does best.

The CC games use no fewer random elements than CM, no matter how detailed the game looks. In fact, I bet you anything they use more. I know that their armor penetration and ballistics treatment is very simplistic compared to CM's. As for their treatment of wounds and such, why not randomize the whole thing? How would you know the difference as the gamer? You can't, so why bother chewing up CPU cycles to simulate something that isn't able to be simulated realistically (see above about every stick and stone). In CC a unit is fired at, the game figures out if it is hit by "rolling", if it is some more crunching to figure out to what degree (more rolling), then it assesses some result based on probability (or perhaps totally random). Obviously there can be some more complex things going on, but probability and randomness are the backbone for sure.

As for the whole prisoner thing is concerned, it is simulated because it is important. Prisoners have a real, tangible, place in a CM sized battle. In real life men were captured and, fairly frequently, liberated all within the space of an hour or less. If you get your own guys back, well then, you just earned back some victory points you lost. It is also fun (yes, a dirty word I suppose) to see the enemy give up and stick their hands in the air. Of course this isn't so fun if they are your guys! But why don't we simulate wounded with the same degree of detail? For the same reason we didn't want to make a M*A*S*H game instead of a wargame Yes, wounded littered the battlefields of WWII, and yes they did impose logistical problems on front line troops. But frontline troops also had medics, stretcher bearers, special vehicles, etc. to get the wounded off the battlefield. If we simulate wounded we would have to simulate all that stuff as well since many of the wounded wouldn't be able to walk. Don't know about any of you, but I would no more play a game where 1/2 my time was spent moving around wounded than I would play a game that simulated a KP units making sure that every dogface got his chow So this last comment should pretty much answer the question of why wounded aren't simulated.

Steve

[Guest R Cunningham]

All,

Interesting responses.

Another disclaimer: I know a lot of the inherent flaws and limitations of the CC series. I don't hold up CC as the paragon of computer wargaming. I do think it valuable though to discuss various design ideas. I've had discussions with some of the delopment team about why they couldn't improve the armor system.

I wouldn't want to play MASH either. What I would like to see though is some limited treatment of casualties as least in a campaign game. What I am thinking of here is not a visual representation but some sort of recognition by the game that casualties are located somewhere and take that location into account when the battle ends. If we take the current battle between Fionn and Martin and say it's a campaign game we can get some interesting possibilities. Would the casualties that Martin took in positions now overrun by Fionn be counted as part of the total for possible returns for the next battle? Or the casualties Fionn suffered when he lost the town? I would submit that they shouldn't be. I have no idea of the programming hurdles to make this happen.

The point about recapturing prisoners is valid, but they can't be sent back into action after recapture can they? The game isn't tracking where they surrendered or where they lost their weapons so those weapons can't be recovered. I assume they will be rearmed for the next battle in a campaign.

Also, since CM is a game of a relatively small time frame (30-60 mins has been citred before) what delay do friendly units incur when capturing prisoners? I've seen Fionn getting them to move around but during the actual turn, do the capturing units have to spend a minute to search and disarm the prisoners? From my own experience (in training, not with real POWs)this can take a few minutes depending on how many prisoners have to be searched.

And a question from last year. I remember some discussion last year about prisoners and how they were modelled. There was a furor about the ability to execute them and the idea of atrocities. I can't remember what the outcome was. I thought I saw in the AARs that Martin (with artillery) did cause casualties amongst some of his own surrendered men. Is this kind of fratricide the only way this will happen?

[Guest Big Time Software]

In Campaign games a very small percentage of your casualties are returned to you for the next battle. These would be the VERY lightly wounded (most likely stunned), mild panic cases, and even a few that dropped out to help a buddy get back to the aid station.

If you recapture your own men they can not be sent back into combat. They have no weapons (not even pistols) and would be too demoralized to start fighting again. Sure, there would probably be some exceptions every now and then, but to allow these involves coding time that simply isn't worth the effort. In a campaign game you get the guys back, armed and ready for combat.

When you capture an enemy unit it can take some time to get it moving. Depends on the circumstances, but I have seen it take as little as one turn and as much as three.

Man, you remember that POW execution discussion? Sheesh, that one was a doosey Although all armies in WWII regullarly killed unarmed, surrendered soldiers out of hand (and in some cases, especially in the PTO and Eastern Front, with malace) we decided it wasn't something that we needed to simulate.

As far as fratricide goes, it can be caused on purpose by using artillery and guns, but there is actually a built in disincentive for this. When the casualties in the AAR game happened a few threads discussed this in more detail. Other than that, artillery fire, air attacks, and night fighting are the main causes of accidental friendly fire casualties.

Steve