Close combat (or lack of it)

[Bulletpoint]

I think they do tactical reloads though. Pretty sure I noticed once that some guys that had been sitting in the same spot without enemy contact suddenly started to reload. Was surprised because I thought it wasn't in the game.

[DerKommissar]

I find that melee combat is laughable in computer wargames. In Theatre of War and Graviteam Tactics, the soldiers kick in the air -- as if they were dancing. Then a random algorithm causes 1 of them to fall dead.

In Island of Fire (Stalingrad book, by Jason D. Mark), they do mention sharpened shovels used in hand-to-hand fighting (by both sides). However, the King of room-to-room fighting are grenades and assorted explosives. SMGs being the Queen, if you will. I actually don't remember any mentions of bayonets being used against personnel. Troops would either run or surrender before they ran out of all ammo.

Bayonets were primarily designed to be used against cavalry. So, I wouldn't mind seeing cavalry, as well...

Is modelling something that rarely happened, and is largely irrelevant in a world with grenades and guns, the top priority here? No matter how much money, or people you have working on a simulation -- you can't simulate /everything/. 

[Bulletpoint]

41 minutes ago, DerKommissar said:

Is modelling something that rarely happened, and is largely irrelevant in a world with grenades and guns, the top priority here? No matter how much money, or people you have working on a simulation -- you can't simulate /everything/. 

 

4 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

It's not really anything I'd prefer them to spend their time working on, since apparently they literally have a list of 10,000 other issues that could be fixed or improved.

[chi-chi]

7 hours ago, Howler said:

It doesn't hurt either

It obviously does hurt when your MG-42 man fires two rounds and then is out of the fight during the critical moment.

The importance of having a full load increases as you go farther back in time and you have fewer critical weapons. One of 8 guys with assault rifles needing to reload is rarely an issue. The only many in the squad with an automatic needing to reload, on the other hand, represents a dramatic swing in capability.

 

5 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

I think they do tactical reloads though.

I've put many hundreds (if not thousands) of hours in CM2 since 2008 or so and I've yet to see a tactical reload. It may be that they do happen but just quite rarely or it may have been a weird on off instance you say. But I can't say that I've seen them happen while I can say that I've seen men begin fights after rest periods with nearly empty guns.


------

As far as actual implementation visually I would be fine if the bottom-left hand ticker (spotting, reloading, aiming, etc..) just said "melee". Mechanically just have it only occur for men sharing an action-square and have one of them end up okay/wounded/dead and the other end up okay/wounded/dead.

5 hours ago, DerKommissar said:

Is modelling something that rarely happened, and is largely irrelevant in a world with grenades and guns, the top priority here?

Given that these discussion do not guide future commitments I don't think it particularly matters. Talking on these forums, outside of bug reports, is something I see as equivalent to bull****ting at the local bar in pre-pandemic days. You have no expectation that your bull****ting is going to do anything yet you do it anyway.

[John Kettler]

On 9/22/2020 at 2:24 PM, Sgt Joch said:

yes, even as early as the Seven Year's War, bayonet charges were obsolete and musket fire would break up any attack or defence before the troops came into contact. In 1756-57, Frederick The Great ordered his troops to attack by bayonet charge alone thinking that by not stopping to fire, battles would be decided more quickly. The only result was 2-3 bloody battles were Prussian frontal attacks were repulsed with heavy losses. After that, everyone went back to standard stand and shoot tactics until one side breaks and run.

Sgt Joch,

Seems to me that every time the bayonet is again decreed to be useless, along comes a war in which it assuredly isn't. Soldiers have a visceral fear of being gut stabbed, and yes, I used that adjective deliberately. As Lance Corporal Jones many times averred of the bayonet on "Dad's Army" ref fighting the Fuzzy Wuzzies, "They don't like the cold steel up 'em." The British assaulted an Iraqi unit firing from a trench using rifles and bayonets in a 4-hour action and sustained no losses but killed 30 enemy soldiers--2004!

StieliAlpha, there are plenty of accounts of vicious had-to-hand combat during WW II. Both the Germans and Russians favored sharpened ETs which did fearsome injuries, sometimes fatal, with a single blow. Men have had their bare skulls smashed in by helmets wielded as clubs. Americans have used brass knuckles, bayonets, Bowie knives, straight razors, switchblades, etc., ETs on occasion, even hatchets, and the lucky ones had this nasty combo weapon: knife, brass knuckles and a skull crushing pommel all rolled into one. In the PTO, machetes were easy to come by, too. Dad brought one back from Korea, and he was Navy!

Every nation's soldiers were taught some form of unarmed combat, too. 

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

On a separate note, if anyone's interested, I can provide the full breakdown of Lance Corporal Jones's awards and medals. 

Regards,

John Kettler
 

[StieliAlpha]

5 hours ago, John Kettler said:

StieliAlpha, there are plenty of accounts of vicious had-to-hand combat during WW II.

Hi John

No doubt. I just doubt that it is relevant within the scope and scale of CM. And probably not longer relevant for the outcome of modern conflicts.

[StieliAlpha]

9 hours ago, chi-chi said:

As far as actual implementation visually I would be fine if the bottom-left hand ticker (spotting, reloading, aiming, etc..) just said "melee". Mechanically just have it only occur for men sharing an action-square and have one of them end up okay/wounded/dead and the other end up okay/wounded/dead.

Given that these discussion do not guide future commitments I don't think it particularly matters. Talking on these forums, outside of bug reports, is something I see as equivalent to bull****ting at the local bar in pre-pandemic days. You have no expectation that your bull****ting is going to do anything yet you do it anyway.

Re the proposed implementation: Now, THAT would be a “game changer”.

Re the “bull...ing“: Thanks for joining in!

[John1966]

14 hours ago, chi-chi said:

As far as actual implementation visually I would be fine if the bottom-left hand ticker (spotting, reloading, aiming, etc..) just said "melee".

I'd settle for that.

10 hours ago, John Kettler said:

StieliAlpha, there are plenty of accounts of vicious had-to-hand combat during WW II.

Yes, and especially in WWI where there were all sorts of improvised HtH weapons.

[John1966]

Lots of comments here have referred to the fact that if you got into close combat and had run out of ammo, you'd just run away.

The trouble is that, as far as I can tell, if they're in "good order", they don't.

And that is an issue within the scope of CM. Having British paras defending in an urban environment against fairly overwhelming odds is what got me posting about this. Many had run out of ammo. So should they stay put or not? If the Germans entered their building then it's just a massacre. The engine doesn't allow them to "put up a fight" but they don't run away. In fact they don't even surrender. In RL they'd do one or the other or they'd engage in HtH (which they can't). And, as I say, this isn't an entirely unusual set of circumstances in CM. In many ways it's what the attacker is working towards. If it was just altered (in the absence of HtH modelling) to "unarmed pixeltruppen in the same action square as the enemy will surrender", I'd settle for that as it's more realistic than what we're currently seeing.

[quakerparrot67]

4 hours ago, John1966 said:

.

And that is an issue within the scope of CM. Having British paras defending in an urban environment against fairly overwhelming odds is what got me posting about this. Many had run out of ammo. So should they stay put or not? If the Germans entered their building then it's just a massacre. The engine doesn't allow them to "put up a fight" but they don't run away. In fact they don't even surrender. In RL they'd do one or the other or they'd engage in HtH (which they can't). And, as I say, this isn't an entirely unusual set of circumstances in CM. In many ways it's what the attacker is working towards. If it was just altered (in the absence of HtH modelling) to "unarmed pixeltruppen in the same action square as the enemy will surrender", I'd settle for that as it's more realistic than what we're currently seeing.

this.  it would probably have a lot of application in the cassino and urban russian  battles as well. even trench-based r.t. scenarios. close combat 'melee' fighting was a major part of many wwii battle, and should -ideally- be better represented in the game.   however, battlefront have a lot on their plate right now, aside from the real world being kinda upside-down for  the duration, so we're probably gonna have to wait for a while. to be honest, i can live with that.

 

cheers,

rob

[Wicky]

My understanding is that pixeltroopen never fully run out of ammo - maybe this is from cm1 days - but IIRC when run low so they don't shoot offensively at med/long range but they retain sufficient /plausible ammo sharing way for short range tit for tat defensive combat. Saved BFC faffing about with animating hand-to-hand bish-bash combat.

[John1966]

4 minutes ago, Wicky said:

My understanding is that pixeltroopen never fully run out of ammo - maybe this is from cm1 days

Yes, I think that was a CMx1 phenomenon. Pretty sure that in CMx2, once you're out, you're out.

In fact, thinking about it, you'd like to think they'd keep their sidearms for cases of being overrun with nothing else left to fight with. And that would be a reasonably realistic scenario. But if a "gunner" runs out of ammo (the guy with the high rate of fire thing that uses different ammo to everyone else), he blasts away with his pistol along with the rifle guys. And in the para situation I mentioned above there was whole squads firing out windows with pistols. So in the end, they had nothing.*

Guys firing at range with pistols aren't contributing very much so if they're down to side arms, it'd be better if they only fired at targets in the same action square so they've always got something left for CC.

I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that's why they were issued with them.

 

 

*I'd like to add that I won this game with a total victory.  But it was pretty tense.

[markshot]

I believe CMx1 had this, because when you entered an enemy position, you could hear the sound of blows and physical struggling.

However, I also believe the out of ammo state for small arms were modeled as a very low rate of fire; not totally out.

[Lethaface]

21 hours ago, John1966 said:

Lots of comments here have referred to the fact that if you got into close combat and had run out of ammo, you'd just run away.

The trouble is that, as far as I can tell, if they're in "good order", they don't.

And that is an issue within the scope of CM. Having British paras defending in an urban environment against fairly overwhelming odds is what got me posting about this. Many had run out of ammo. So should they stay put or not? If the Germans entered their building then it's just a massacre. The engine doesn't allow them to "put up a fight" but they don't run away. In fact they don't even surrender. In RL they'd do one or the other or they'd engage in HtH (which they can't). And, as I say, this isn't an entirely unusual set of circumstances in CM. In many ways it's what the attacker is working towards. If it was just altered (in the absence of HtH modelling) to "unarmed pixeltruppen in the same action square as the enemy will surrender", I'd settle for that as it's more realistic than what we're currently seeing.

At least as a player you could (and probably should) order troops who are low on ammo away from the front especially if you expect the enemy to push their position.

So, "they don't" but you can make m 

[John1966]

4 minutes ago, Lethaface said:

At least as a player you could (and probably should) order troops who are low on ammo away from the front especially if you expect the enemy to push their position.

 

Well in theory you can give them a covered arc to stop them wasting ammo at targets they're unlikely to affect (distant buildings, for example). I did that to loads of squads in that para scenario. But you might not remember/realise/notice or it might otherwise be too late so it'd be nice if you didn't have to.

[John Kettler]

This is from a Russian 2012 film called The Life and Destiny. It splendidly depicts what an absolute nightmare it would be for BFC to depict melee combat. If you've got PTSD, you may not want to watch this--ugly and intense. Things like this only make we wonder afresh how they can get people to subject themselves to this stuff?
 

Regards,

John Kettler

[markshot]

One often wonders if PTSD was part of the ancient world.  One historian said no, because on aspect of PTSD has to do with ones cultural upbringing.

Supposedly most deaths and captures in the ancient world happened when a formation broke and routed.  Ancient armies were actually followed by slave traders who would buy captives post battle.

A recent video I watched cites the spear and shield (phalanx) being far more effective for the moderately trained; in formation and lines.  It is often side shots by spears which get you (not the guy across).

However, Roman scutum and gladius were effective, since they were professional and disciplined to close rapidly together and get inside with their swords.  Much to the shock of the Hellenistic world of Alexander's heirs.

So, did their 20 years of service to the Empire produce PTSD?  There were some horrific numbers even back then.  Rome was said to lose 60,000 in a single day at Cannae to Hannibal/allies.

[Freyberg]

20 hours ago, Lethaface said:

At least as a player you could (and probably should) order troops who are low on ammo away from the front especially if you expect the enemy to push their position.

So, "they don't" but you can make m 

Well, if it's a QB, you should always buy a supply platoon...

[Bulletpoint]

4 hours ago, markshot said:

One often wonders if PTSD was part of the ancient world.

 

 

[markshot]

Thanks.  Yes.  I like Lloyd Nicholas (his real name).  He is not simply an academic, but gets out there and experiments with spears, swords, shields, falxs, ...

[John1966]

6 hours ago, Freyberg said:

Well, if it's a QB, you should always buy a supply platoon...

Of course, but not a QB. Oosterbeek scenario.

There was one jeep with some ammo but not very much. Went quickly.

Mind you, the driver got a medal (I assume we all give pixeltruppen medals after a game). Shot two Germans at close quarters who'd got into the garden of an objective (both had missed him with their MP40s) before going into the objective and joining in the defence. One round out of his thirty left at the end.

[John Kettler]

This is part of an epic (War and Peace of WW II) film which is Included with Prime or available by 30-day Free Trial.

Regards,

John Kettler

 

[SimpleSimon]

On 9/26/2020 at 4:39 AM, markshot said:

One often wonders if PTSD was part of the ancient world.  One historian said no, because on aspect of PTSD has to do with ones cultural upbringing.

lol there's almost no way to address this sort of thing objectively because we're applying a very modern concept (medical psychology) retroactively to historic people's whos lifestyles and norms were incredibly different to our own. 

[Erwin]

2 hours ago, SimpleSimon said:

applying a very modern concept (medical psychology) retroactively to historic people's whos lifestyles and norms were incredibly different to our own. 

Interesting point.  My parents survived WW2 Eastern Europe, lived in camps and were refugees.  But, so were all their displaced person friends and it was "normal" for them.  Based on my recollections there is no doubt that today they would both have been diagnosed with PTSD.  

In addition I read research that extreme stress, anxiety etc can be passed down through generations.  ie:  It has some effect on ones genes or DNA.  Cognitive Behavior Therapy supposedly can help with that and alleviate the problems facing the children of such parents.  (At least it has worked on lab mice.)