Infantry in buildings just won't die.. (and now they won't run away either..)

[JoMac]

3 hours ago, Gkenny said:

Try low motivation troops? I feel like motivation level would be the primary deciding factor that determines whether they stay and fight vs flee or surrender. Training level in my experience affects how well they perform in combat (spotting, shooting, etc).

I play that Scenario in Iron Mode (as all Scenarios, QB's)...Not Training Level. 

Doesn't seem to matter as Low Quality Troops tend to Surrender early instead of retreating early to rear cover, you know, to fight another turn (I rather see a Rinse & Repeat, then die in place)....So, whatever happened to Troops leaving Cover in an orderly (semi-orderly) manner to next Cover when taking heavy Suppression...Yes, adding a couple-few turns to force them out with Small Arms is fine (as it should be compared to what 4.0 did), but with 4.03 they seem to stay, fight, die, and surrender in place.

Keep in mind, when the Moral of Troops in Good Cover is increased, it also increases their resilience to being Suppressed, which in turn keeps them firing back for several turns, before finally dying in place...Anyways, just looking for that middle ground. 

Report back your experiences against AI/Human Opponents, Play Testing, etc to keep this Thread going.

 

Edited November 10, 2020 by JoMc67

[DerKommissar]

On 11/8/2020 at 11:21 AM, SDG said:

I have noticed that since the latest patch (?) infantry can survive small arms fire in buildings for a ridiculous amount of time.

After they patched infantry breaking from heavy cover, I felt the same way. Missions that were a breeze, suddenly demanded a fundamental re-thinking. I am, currently, finishing up the Khabour Trail campaign -- here's my two nickels:

1. Garrisoned enemy squads are ordered to only open fire at short range. This makes them difficult to spot. Once they engage, their AKs volume of fire takes precedence over the optics on your ARs. Try to engage at longer ranges, when possible.

2. In pure rifle engagements, higher ground is a distinct advantage. It is easier to hit a prone defender, if you're shooting down, into the window. Likewise, it is harder to hit someone prone, if the shooter is shooting up, at the window.

3. Use your mobility to your advantage. Attack static positions from various unexpected angles to overload their targeting buffers. Avoid LOS from suspected strongpoints, and outmaneuver them. Hitting their rear echelon will be easier.

4. Knowing is half the battle. Take your time to recon and probe, before you commit your forces. Briefings can give hints of likely enemy strongpoints.

5. Under strict engagement orders, you can use air-bursts as long-lasting suppressive fire. They can encourage a large area to keep their heads down.

After this patch, I've been concentrating my forces more. There is more depth, with multiple lines of over-watching units. The Schwerpunkt is usually  a hard to reach place, at the edge of the map. The enemy can't flank you, if the flank does not exist.

[Falaise]

I too was a little disappointed at the start, especially since the leak when the volume of fire was enormous seemed logical and reasonable to me.
However this disappointment is quickly transformed into enthusiasm for this modification.
Before, I play by only dominating the opponent by fire
now maneuver takes precedence and each building attack requires preparation and movement in precise timing
You must apply the excellent advice above
And like to me, the game will gained a lot of  interest .
For me,  my pleasure in playing this game has grown even more. 
and then when there is no choice, fire domination always works it's just longer and consuming ammunition.

[BornGinger]

14 hours ago, Ithikial_AU said:

I notice you are playing CMSF2 from the blue force side so I'd imagine the professional soldiers with high experience is partly causing this. Switch to WW2 titles

Sorry Ithikial. I think you answered to the wrong post. I already play a WW2-title and have only tried the demo to SF2 which was some time ago.

[FlemFire]

Why would small-arms fire be effective in killing people in buildings in the first place? Unless you can shoot through the material it's unlikely that your bullets will find targets, and even more unlikely when the enemy becomes pinned down. Your troops are basically shooting at a vague silhouette standing behind blocks of concrete. If you spend 9mins shooting at someone in a building, you probably could have spent 1-2mins doing that while simultaneously moving an element forward to properly destroy the target.

 

Personally, I find buildings to be death traps if the enemy has explosive weapons. Like in SF2 for example, if I hole up in a building and the enemy splashes it with an RPG I'm liable to lose a team or an entire squad.

 

[Combatintman]

20 minutes ago, Khalerick said:

Why would small-arms fire be effective in killing people in buildings in the first place? Unless you can shoot through the material it's unlikely that your bullets will find targets, and even more unlikely when the enemy becomes pinned down. Your troops are basically shooting at a vague silhouette standing behind blocks of concrete. If you spend 9mins shooting at someone in a building, you probably could have spent 1-2mins doing that while simultaneously moving an element forward to properly destroy the target.

 

Personally, I find buildings to be death traps if the enemy has explosive weapons. Like in SF2 for example, if I hole up in a building and the enemy splashes it with an RPG I'm liable to lose a team or an entire squad.

 

7.62mm NATO when fired from a GPMG will go through breeze blocks and bricks in heartbeat - so some small-arms fire would be expected to drop people in buildings constructed of those materials.

[FlemFire]

1 minute ago, Combatintman said:

7.62mm NATO when fired from a GPMG will go through breeze blocks and bricks in heartbeat - so some small-arms fire would be expected to drop people in buildings constructed of those materials.

Having a heavy machine-gun or some variant of it changes things, of course, but the pictures seemed to indicate he had 5.56mm scout squads and the like shooting at a hunkered target with "scoped rifles." The insinuation being that if we just shoot at the building long enough we'll eventually 'snipe' all the targets down. But if the guys inside are pinned and standing behind great cover, the probability of that coming true in a short period of time is pretty low.

And more to your point, in the 2nd picture he says the guy in the building has an MG. That's even more incentive to move in and destroy it. A bunch of Italian rifles shooting 200m for a solid minute is literally going to be less effective than a burst or two of .30-cal/.50-cal back your way whenever he picks his head up.

 

[Sulman]

Actually, having revisited CMBN after some 7 years I have to agree it's definitely changed some fundamentals. Occupy conditions are much tougher to meet because inf. won't flee, so it's easy to bleed a lot of points because one fire team has remained hidden.

Also I can't get some units to shift at all. I spent an entire game mortaring a tripod MG42 team (with a good spotter) and they didn't budge. HE seems a little inconsistent to me. RPG and 'schrek teams can do enormous damage with effective fire but 60 and 80mm mortars don't seem anything like as bad. Maybe it's my imagination but tackling strongpoints definitely feels way harder. 

[MikeyD]

Years ago I was playing a CM Afghanistan scenario. Russian special forces vs Mujahideen trading firing from nearby buildings. The Russians got the worst of it, dying like flies. The decision maker was the old Lee Enfield bolt action rifle in Mujahidden hands. Russian 5.45 carbines simply couldn't pierce the building walls no matter how much volume of fire was laid down. The .303 Lee Enfield round, by contrast, was going through walls like tissue paper. It reminded me of US Reserve (National Guard?) units early in the Iraq conflict desperately requesting for 7.62 M14s they had mothballed  in depot to be shipped to them because 5.56 wasn't enough of a wall piercer.

[Bulletpoint]

12 hours ago, Sulman said:

Also I can't get some units to shift at all. I spent an entire game mortaring a tripod MG42 team (with a good spotter) and they didn't budge. HE seems a little inconsistent to me. RPG and 'schrek teams can do enormous damage with effective fire but 60 and 80mm mortars don't seem anything like as bad.

Sounds like the MG was in a house. Smaller mortars are nearly useless against modular buildings.

[Sulman]

2 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Sounds like the MG was in a house. Smaller mortars are nearly useless against modular buildings.

Bocage.

[Bulletpoint]

2 hours ago, Sulman said:

Bocage.

You had bad luck then. I find mortars extremely effective against infantry in bocage.

[Freyberg]

On 11/19/2020 at 6:25 PM, Sulman said:

Also I can't get some units to shift at all. I spent an entire game mortaring a tripod MG42 team (with a good spotter) and they didn't budge. HE seems a little inconsistent to me. RPG and 'schrek teams can do enormous damage with effective fire but 60 and 80mm mortars don't seem anything like as bad. Maybe it's my imagination but tackling strongpoints definitely feels way harder. 

Artillery varies in accuracy a lot.

Playing Commonwealth, I find off-board mortars great for plastering a wide area, but poor at precision fire, for example a single AT gun or a building - there's too much spread.

For individual targets, I like on-board mortars with LOS; or for hitting individual buildings, the 114mm or 140mm howitzers are pretty accurate and pack a solid punch. Presumably heavier, higher velocity shells from a bigger gun are more likely to hit closer to a single point, which makes sense.

[Bulletpoint]

4 hours ago, Freyberg said:

Presumably heavier, higher velocity shells from a bigger gun are more likely to hit closer to a single point, which makes sense.

They do tend to fire at longer distances though, so that would take some of their accuracy away.

[Sulman]

I think the large charge explosives like 120mm mortars or howitzer rounds have a pretty big kill radius. I've seen a couple of action squares in some cases.

I've wildly varying luck with the M2 60mm mortars. I know some players swear by them but I remain unconvinced. The British direct fire ones seem a lot more lethal in the few scenarios I've had them. This might just be an issue with spotter efficacy.

[Bulletpoint]

2 minutes ago, Sulman said:

I've wildly varying luck with the M2 60mm mortars. I know some players swear by them but I remain unconvinced. The British direct fire ones seem a lot more lethal in the few scenarios I've had them.

Again, that's interesting, because my experience has been the opposite. The 60mm is a key weapon for the US, while the British mortar... It's rare it can even get within range, and then it barely manages to get a bomb on target before it runs out of ammo.

[Freyberg]

 

9 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

They do tend to fire at longer distances though, so that would take some of their accuracy away.

I'm not going to claim I'm an expert on such things, but for precision strikes (usually on large buildings) I've had the best luck with that sort of gun.

 

9 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Again, that's interesting, because my experience has been the opposite. The 60mm is a key weapon for the US, while the British mortar... It's rare it can even get within range, and then it barely manages to get a bomb on target before it runs out of ammo.

I agree with that - US 60mm mortar is murderously accurate, whereas the Commonwealth 2" is very much just a platoon-level support weapon - albeit also a good smoke mortar.

 

[FlemFire]

As an adaptation, I've been using more "area" fire even if I can target directly. It's by no means a new tactic, but I just find myself utilizing it way more often. The objective now is to pin the person down indefinitely while other forces move to destroy them (if tanks/arty are unable).

If you target the enemy directly then you often get this series of events:

1) Enemy receives fire, after about 15-30s they get pinned and duck down.

2) You lose contact of the enemy and stop shooting.

3) After 15-30s, enemy stands back up and starts shooting back.

 

Rinse, repeat. Because housed enemies are now so sturdy and hard to kill, this situation is way more common. As others have pointed out I think when it comes to scenarios/campaigns the issue is that the resource usage for these sorts of things is different than in the past. What you probably end up with is a lot of scenarios/campaigns where the expectations of player capabilities no longer match the new reality -- so a lot of these maps are suddenly much harder. I like the change a lot, even if I find myself wondering aloud "why won't you die!" as Abu Hajaar casually chills in a hail of gunfire from every direction.

 

 

[LongLeftFlank]

This is brilliant news, if true. I've never liked that you could sit at a distance and shoot men out of hard cover. It may lead me to finally acquire CMSF2, although work hasn't allowed me any gaming time in many months.

[JoMac]

Well, I wouldn't call it Brilliant news as it now makes shooting at same House last a whole day, instead of a few turns.

Now, even Green Troops with Low Motivation or negative Leadership tend to stay until the end.

Troops with lower Moral/Motivation should fall back from cover to cover after a few turns of small arms/HE. 

Edited November 21, 2020 by JoMc67

[Bulletpoint]

2 hours ago, JoMc67 said:

Troops with lower Moral/Motivation should fall back from cover to cover after a few turns of small arms/HE. 

in theory maybe, but what actually happened was that troops would just leave cover and run out into the open field or street to get gunned down. The game is not intelligent enough to make troops retreat in a sensible manner, so I'm happy with the way they now stay put.

[Glubokii Boy]

50 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

in theory maybe, but what actually happened was that troops would just leave cover and run out into the open field or street to get gunned down. The game is not intelligent enough to make troops retreat in a sensible manner, so I'm happy with the way they now stay put.

Agree...

[JoMac]

2 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

in theory maybe, but what actually happened was that troops would just leave cover and run out into the open field or street to get gunned down. The game is not intelligent enough to make troops retreat in a sensible manner, so I'm happy with the way they now stay put.

Yes, I know troops were supposed to leave to find other good cover, but thought this patch was supposed to fix it so troops don't run into enemy fire as much....Didn't think BF abandoned it in favor of having troops stay and die in place. 

Edited November 21, 2020 by JoMc67

[Sulman]

I returned to an infamous community favourite - The School of Hard Knocks. I remember breaking the defensive screen the first time I tried it years ago. There are about sixteen strongpoints between the US troops and the base of the hill.  I think the only reason I achieved this was because I got them to leave their strongpoints.

This time I had to accept a draw; I had all my armour (I suppressed the AT guns after a platoon on Overwatch sighted them) but, I could not crack that line of Axis troops. What surprised me in the AAR review was just how many were still in fighting condition, about all but one.  It's an incredibly hard scenario, but this board knows all about that.

Suppresssion worked as it should, there were just too many of them. It was like whack-a-mole. It only takes one squad in a defensive position with good fields of fire and you're not getting anywhere over open ground.

[IICptMillerII]

17 hours ago, JoMc67 said:

Well, I wouldn't call it Brilliant news as it now makes shooting at same House last a whole day, instead of a few turns.

Now, even Green Troops with Low Motivation or negative Leadership tend to stay until the end.

Troops with lower Moral/Motivation should fall back from cover to cover after a few turns of small arms/HE. 

Shooting at a house for a whole day is literally historically accurate. Why do you think the US had to roll in 155mm self propelled guns to blast buildings at point blank range occupied by the enemy? Or the Soviets who had to create giant armored beheamoths to assist them with leveling buildings in urban warfare, fighting against Germans with no fall back orders who would refuse to give up the city block? Because you cannot shoot an enemy off of a position, especially in urban warfare. This is as true today as it was in 1944. I have no idea where the idea came from that all you have to do is fire a handful of rounds at an enemy position and they will just run away, but it is just flat out not true. 

No artificial intelligence is self aware enough to be able to realistically displace itself constantly, seeking new and better cover with all of the considerations that come into play. So the argument that the previous behavior was correct but just not properly implimented is a non starter. BFC is too small a company to develop an AI that would literally change the face of artificial intelligence. A human opponent remains the only true way to get the most accurate experience, but then again that assumes the person you play against knows what the hell they are doing. Many do not. 

Green troops with low motivation should absolutely stay in place. No one, regardless of training, is dumb enough to decide "hey, there are thousands of rounds flying around right above my head. Better run out into the open in the middle of it all cause that is the safer move!" It is completely nonsensical. Further, poorly trained troops are much less likely to be well trained enough to realize that they need to shoot, move and communicate in a firefight, let alone have enough training to actually pull it off.

Realistically, the behavior makes no sense. From a technical standpoint, it is not possible.