Troops surviving destruction of buildings

[Bulletpoint]

I find that quite often, there will be enemy left (and in fighting condition) in buildings that are destroyed by shellfire. Shouldn't that be at least really unlikely?

[Vanir Ausf B]

Not necessarily. Building destruction in CM is abstracted. In reality, buildings rarely collapse all at once like they do in the game.

[womble]

I think the game gives pTruppen on the ground floor a decent chance of not being buried in rubble, but any troops higher up than the collapse will be toast. Most buildings don't catastrophically collapse entirely, as the rubble tiles from CM depict; those are a generalised, unmistakeable abstraction of jumbled, canted upper storey floors and semi-collapsed interior walls. Looking at photos of rubbled buildings, you can see that it's not like the upper storeys come crashing down like a piston inside the ground floor walls, crushing everyone inside to pink goo...

Without running some tests, you will have difficulty knowing whether a taller building collapsing, which you might reasonably expect to drop enough rubble from upper storeys to make the ground floor a dashed uncomfortable place to be, has more chance of killing the PBI fighting from the building than the more "normal sized" buildings we tend to see in BN. I hear BS has 9-storey modular buildings...

[A Canadian Cat]

14 stories actually - fun to knock down.

[womble]

14 stories actually - fun to knock down.

Without actually going in and running a test, it occurs to me that I'm not sure whether a building can "collapse to halfway" if you take out, say the middle floor of that 14-storey tower... Only ones I've ever really seen that it'd be worth doing anything other than bring the whole thing down are the modular "cathedral" towers, and they don't fall over, even under naval bombardment...

Or does the weight of the top 6 floors, falling the height of one floor onto the top of the floor below have enough momentum to just keep on piledriving down.

Do the big towers just collapse to a "footprint" of rubble, same as a 2-storey building does? Or are there larger rubble piles...?

[Bulletpoint]

Without actually going in and running a test, it occurs to me that I'm not sure whether a building can "collapse to halfway" if you take out, say the middle floor of that 14-storey tower... Only ones I've ever really seen that it'd be worth doing anything other than bring the whole thing down are the modular "cathedral" towers, and they don't fall over, even under naval bombardment...

 

Oh, disappointed to hear that. Never tried, but always assumed they would fall down eventually.

[womble]

Oh, disappointed to hear that. Never tried, but always assumed they would fall down eventually.

They might if you throw more than one module of naval at them, or lots and lots and lots of really large-bore arty, but from the brief tests I did, which addressed what I'd been handed in a mission, that I needed to know the capabilities of, it'd take more arty than I've ever been provided with...

[A Canadian Cat]

Without actually going in and running a test, it occurs to me that I'm not sure whether a building can "collapse to halfway"

<snip>

Or does the weight of the top 6 floors, falling the height of one floor onto the top of the floor below have enough momentum to just keep on piledriving down.

You know I never actually tried that - hummm. Collapsing upper floors taking the whole building down is pretty likely in lots of cases but I have no idea what the game would do. I fired at the first and second floors to bring it down.

Do the big towers just collapse to a "footprint" of rubble, same as a 2-storey building does? Or are there larger rubble piles...?

I was a long time back in testing so I should not comment but try it again and report back...

[A Canadian Cat]

OK two collapsed 14 story buildings later and I can tell you that targeting the first and second stories brings it down. So does targeting the 9th and t10 stories. In both cases the buildings came totally down. In both cases the teams on the 14th floors did not survive. In both cases the rubble was pretty much the same as if it was a shorter building.

[womble]

Cheers Ian Testig to destruction is often fun, neh?

[A Canadian Cat]

Sure once in a while. It took a huge amount of ammunition though so not something you want to be doing a lot of in game. I do remember once having to do it twice in CMFI. In both cases the objectives were so tight I could not get my tanks in close enough to bring fire on the entrenched enemy. I did take two buildings down in order to succeed. That is the only time I have ever fired for the sole purpose of destroying a building. Plenty of buildings go down during games but in those cases I was firing at the occupants.