Trees

[WinOrLose]

I'm just wondering how much concealment trees are meant to give? From my limited experience not a lot.

On quite a few occasions I have been unable to see anything through trees using the camera but tanks have been able to spot and fire through them almost as they were not there.

[Sailor Malan2]

I am not sure to what extent this is modelled, but you need to factor size in to effect. Clumps of trees come in two sorts (in RL). If the woods are not too big/thick, there is often undergrowth that can conceal people. Tanks are way too tall to benefit much from that. If typical thicker darker (e.g. pine woods) there is no undergrowth, but individual men can hide (lying prone behind trees). Tanks are too wide to do that! Thus woods give much more concealment to people than tanks

[MOS:96B2P]

I'm just wondering how much concealment trees are meant to give? From my limited experience not a lot.

I learned the following from womble. He posted this back in February 2014.

Trees just give the cover and concealment of their trunks and foliage. "Being in a tree line" is not the simple concept you might think (as it is in most other games). If the trees are set on short grass or dirt, being prone underneath the edge of the patch of trees gives you very little more protection than being on a patch of dirt in the open. The different "Forest" terrains give some concealment, but little cover, and "Light" forest gives a lot less than "Heavy". It's also important to recognize that your concealment depends not so much on "where you are" as on "what the LOS has to cross". So if your team is in the first/edge square of a patch of heavy woods, they get the concealment of (on average) 4m of vegetation. If they're in the second square back, they get the benefit of twelve meters.

If your lucky maybe womble will come across this thread and comment. He seems to have a good understanding of the game mechanics.

[womble]

MOS has said much of what I'd say. I think this particular query has been prompted by the (apparent) inconsistencies of the concealment provided by tree foliage in particular, though. I say "(apparent)" because I don't know how the concealment provided by canopy is calculated. I do concur that sometimes you'll hide behind the foliage of 2 or 3 trees and be as non-visible as the LOS tool says you should be, but just occasionally, you'll find that there's a way through. My guess about this is that it's a function of concealment always having a small, miniscule chance of being seen through. The AI sits still a lot more than we players do, so it gets the chance to spot where we didn't think it orter be able to more often than our TacAI does, but I have seen it work the other way round on occasion, too.

I would say, though, that you should beware the impression of "quite a few occasions". The natural tendencies of the human mind will remember far more clearly the times when the unexpected happens than it will remember the far more frequent times that the tree foliage gave the expected "no-LOS". And certainly don't get to thinking it's something the AI only can do. Personally, I think it's something that could do with a little polishing; I don't see the need for everything to have a "residual minimal chance" of happening, as old-skool wargames give with the "always succeed on a 6" for example.

[Erwin]

Sometimes, it seems like the AI can spot an enemy unit if there is a pixel-wide gap that is invisible to humans through trees.

Sometimes, this benefits the player and one sees one's unit shooting through what looks like impenetrable woods to kill the enemy. Sometimes, it's the enemy AI killing you.

So, on the whole this balances out. It is frustrating however, that the AI can see things that the human cannot.

Sometimes, (too often), you see tanks firing off one precious round after another cos the unit thinks he has LOS to an enemy, but every round impacts on a tree and the AI isn't smart enough to hold fire.

LOS is still a problematic area in CM2. It is an almost unfair advantage that one can put a waypoint anywhere on the map, and check LOS from that waypoint. However, this is often negated by the fact that when your unit actually reaches that waypoint, for some reason it can't get that LOS that you previously checked.

These are some of those non-WYSIWYG features of CM2. I would guess that LOS is an extremely complex programming issue, so it's doubtful that we'll see any improvement and one needs to just figure out strategies to deal with the current issues.

[MikeyD]

Different trees offer different levels of concealment. The tall pines without branches halfway up offer as little concealment as you'd imagine they would. The small low trees with branches nearly touching the ground do a better job. It also depends on what YOU are doing. I believe units left in place are interpreted as 'not moving' and are much more difficult to spot. If you're trying to use foliage to cover movement the chance of the enemy spotting something going on is much higher, even if its a fleeting contact. Also there are two forest floor types, woods and hvy woods. Not that easy to tell them apart but hvy does have more undergrowth. A patch of woods growing out of a short grass tile is not exactly optimized for concealment.

[Michael Emrys]

I believe units left in place are interpreted as 'not moving' and are much more difficult to spot.

In real life this is dramatically true. While I haven't conducted an exact scientific study on the subject, casual observation suggests that a moving man will likely be spotted four or five times as far away as a non-moving man on the same terrain. Of course, how he is moving has a huge effect; a stealthily moving man will not be spotted as far away as one running flat out, for instance. And I think the effect of motion on spotting is even larger for vehicles of any size than it is for men on foot. Motion catches the eye. That is hard wired into our nervous systems by hundreds of millions of years by evolution.

Michael