Drunken movement?

[markshot]

An ATG is given an order to move a gun maybe 30M down road.  They are not under fire as their eventual target is obscured by smoke.  And yet they cannot just push the gun down the road ... they wobble back and forth ... up one embankment ... down another embankment.  Now, perhaps these terrain detours are just abstractions and are not costing any time.  But the whole crew looks drunk and hopeless.  (50 mm L/50 A1 American).

Now, I can understand a squad QUICK or RUN across a field doing this.  Zig-zag to make harder shots for the enemy and the ground is irregular.  But a gun is not a light (normally towed by a vehicle) weapon.  It is far more unwieldy than an HMG.  It is hard to imagine why the crew would not want to follow the road and move in a straight line.  I guess this crew has also been tagged with the soft factor "death wish" like my men who prefer to position themselves in front of wall to face the enemy.

???

Edited December 17, 2019 by markshot

[Frenchy56]

AT guns are definitely not this game's strong side. If they are abandoned, they cannot be re-crewed either. If they open fire, they will only rarely survive. 

Edited December 17, 2019 by Frenchy56

[Bulletpoint]

2 hours ago, markshot said:

It is hard to imagine why the crew would not want to follow the road and move in a straight line.

For all its qualities, there are many instances where something could be improved in this game. You just found another one of them.

[Glubokii Boy]

4 hours ago, Frenchy56 said:

 If they open fire, they will only rarely survive. 

I mainly agree with this...but when placed in good possitions i have found that they have decent survivability atleast against  direct fire weapons like guns and HMGs...

Also...when designing a scenario...elevating the terrain infront of the gun-possition using ditch lock 1 level will make a pretty notable differnce imo...This terrain elevation might be a bit tricky to 'hide' though because of having no FOW...In the right terrain, circumstances it can be useful though..

[A Canadian Cat]

8 hours ago, markshot said:

It is hard to imagine why the crew would not want to follow the road and move in a straight line.

Yeah its a limitation. They are treating the ATG like is a MG and not a vehicle. That leads to odd looking swings of the gun model and using the same movement as infantry. It does look bad agreed. I don't see the animations changing any time soon though so we kind of have to live with it.

[A Canadian Cat]

8 hours ago, Frenchy56 said:

AT guns are definitely not this game's strong side. If they are abandoned, they cannot be re-crewed either.

Abandon means the crew is leaving and never coming back so they disable the gun. That was SOP if you were going to abandon gear - make sure the enemy cannot use it against you.

The game does not model leaving a gun temporarily for cover and then coming back to it. This is where the limitation lies. This is just not modelled.

We players might have wanted BFC to model temporarily moving away from a gun to find cover and not model abandoning the gun but that was not the choice they made.

 

8 hours ago, Frenchy56 said:

If they open fire, they will only rarely survive. 

Well if you have a keyhole position and good cover they can be difficult to KO. They are not going to survive because the are prime targets and your opponent will spend what ever they need to in order to remove it. AT guns firing at range and from good cover do take time to be spotted.

[Frenchy56]

24 minutes ago, IanL said:

Abandon means the crew is leaving and never coming back so they disable the gun. That was SOP if you were going to abandon gear - make sure the enemy cannot use it against you.

Well, you knew what I meant. Is this how BF sees it? Hopefully they make a system that can rival Graviteam's for CM3x

Edited December 17, 2019 by Frenchy56

[Xorg_Xalargsky]

AT guns are really not that bad in CM2. That being said, I think there are three major problems in the way they are modeled, two of which are stats' based.

1 - setup/packing speed : it is simply is too slow, especially for lighter pieces

2 - movement speed : in the case of the lighter pieces, it is simply much too slow, especially on good ground like roads

3 - lack of flexibility : a change in this area would require much more work than a simple stat' change, but the lack of an ability to man and leave the guns in a non-routed state (I understand why being routed requires the gun to be spiked) is extremely limiting , especially in terms of enhancing survivability under light artillery fire (ie. moving the crew a few meters back in a trench to wait out a small mortar barrage)

[Frenchy56]

16 minutes ago, Xorg_Xalargsky said:

AT guns are really not that bad in CM2.

Really, I think the only good things AT guns in this game can do is stay hidden and fire. Their survival mostly rests on their placement.

Not to shill for it, but Graviteam addresses all the issues you listed. Crews can simply push or drag their gun immediately, and lighter guns are quite swift. When entrenched, the gun will be manned only by necessary crew, the rest in foxholes. It makes them more durable and their fire more effective.

Edited December 17, 2019 by Frenchy56

[Xorg_Xalargsky]

That's certainly one aspect GT has over CM2.

[Bulletpoint]

16 hours ago, Frenchy56 said:

Really, I think the only good things AT guns in this game can do is stay hidden and fire. Their survival mostly rests on their placement.

Not to shill for it, but Graviteam addresses all the issues you listed. Crews can simply push or drag their gun immediately, and lighter guns are quite swift. When entrenched, the gun will be manned only by necessary crew, the rest in foxholes. It makes them more durable and their fire more effective.

I agree with what you wrote, but also AT guns have a big advantage in CM because of the WeGo turn system. In real life, an unbuttoned tank commander would notice a shell whizzing over his tank immediately and often be able to back off (behind cover such as a hill or simply to break LOS, even deploy smoke) before the gun got a second shot. In CM, you have to wait for - on average - 30 seconds before you can respond to taking AT fire.

So if you give AT guns more advantages, you change the balance of the game. One way of rebalancing would be to make them more realistically vulnerable to explosives. I often see guns - not dug in - take several very close 81mm mortar rounds and keep firing.

Edited December 18, 2019 by Bulletpoint

[Zveroboy1]

To be fair though, in real life a whole tank platoon and all the available machine guns on this side of the Rhine would not all simultaneously open fire on an ATG emplacement like a well oiled hive mind of doom and death 30 seconds after one of its tanks noticed the enemy position. So maybe it balances out.

All the house rules proponents who suggest not allowing a unit to area fire on a square without contact info and a C2 link might have a point.

Edited December 18, 2019 by Zveroboy1

[Bulletpoint]

2 hours ago, Zveroboy1 said:

To be fair though, in real life a whole tank platoon and all the available machine guns on this side of the Rhine would not all simultaneously open fire on an ATG emplacement like a well oiled hive mind of doom and death 30 seconds after one of its tanks noticed the enemy position. So maybe it balances out.

Yes, that's true.

 

2 hours ago, Zveroboy1 said:

All the house rules proponents who suggest not allowing a unit to area fire on a square without contact info and a C2 link might have a point.

Thank you