Engine 5 Wishlist

[CarlXII]

2 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

A pet peeve of mine is certain aspects of armoured combat which could be improved upon.

Armour quality ought to be a factor. Soviet, and especially German tanks later during WW2 were well known for having brittle armour owing to a scarcity of resources. Tiger and Panther tanks routinely saw frontal armour which on paper should been impenetrable to 75mm projectiles fail catastrophically due to this: in CM, armour values seem to be taken at face value.

I belive that this is already implemented...IIRC even CM1 had it.

2 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

Non penetrating hits should cause crew suppression. Historically this is another fact often seen in the case of well armoured tanks in cases when their armour did hold up to incoming fire, but the repeated heavy caliber hits slamming into the armour, causing sudden loud noises, reverberations, reminding the crew that the next hit just might find a weak spot, etc. often caused "significant emotional events". See T-34 and KV crews in Barbarossa panicking under a hail of technically ineffective 37mm fire, or Tiger and Panther crews retreating or even abandoning perfectly functional tanks when pummeled by 75mm HE and WP shells.

Same with this...I don't recall right now if they show increased suppression but they do take moral hits after multiple non penetrating hits on their tanks...

[Anthony P.]

I just ran a quick test on that in CMFB and could see no sign of either, not even in extreme circumstances.

1x Late Panther G (to ensure that it ought to have been a late production with as low armour quality as possible) against an entire 75mm Sherman company at just shy of 300m. The Shermans are all set to Elite to ensure that they can really lay it on, and the Panther is immobilized to prevent it from turning.

Result: the Panther was counted as destroyed after just shy of 2 minutes of an entire Sherman company unloading on it due to repeated lucky partial penetrations of the weapons mount, but not a single hit to the upper front hull caused spalling of any sort, partial or normal penetrations.

In regards to suppression and moral, both depended on crewmen becoming casualties. At one point this happened, and both suppression and a moral hit was achieved, but nothing more. Not even when every single component was fully destroyed did any moral hit or suppression effect occurr.

 

It's possible that a moral hit might occurr from repeated non penetrating hits which do not result in casualties to the crew over a longer period (I would concede that 18x Shermans hitting the poor cat at cyclic rate didn't exactly allow for that to develop), but on the whole I'd say it both demonstrated that low quality armour either isn't a factor or isn't working to a realistic degree, and that suppression and moral damage should set in for AFV crew easier.

 

Edit: having quickly repeated the same test with a Tiger (again, latest model, immobilized), I would dare say that even a prolonged exposure to non penetrating hits do not cause moral damage or suppression. The Tiger, having no shot trap or weaker lower frontal plate, did not get knocked out as the Panther was, so it remained in the test until the entire Sherman company was literally all out of 75mm ammunition (both AP and HE). Apart from briefly when a lucky 75mm AP projectile must've hit the driver through his vision slit and presumably killing him, the crew did not experience any hit to moral or suppression, and was after enduring in excess of 700 AP hits and 900 HE hits over a period of ~15 minutes.

Edited November 14, 2023 by Anthony P.

[CarlXII]

At min 18.30 if you don't want to watch the whole thing...

I belive that the game unit manual will tell you the same thing....Some of the tanks have lowered quality armour...

How well this actually works in the game i don't really know though...

[Anthony P.]

On 11/14/2023 at 9:29 PM, CarlXII said:

How well this actually works in the game i don't really know though...

I would honestly say that it doesn't appear to work much at all, at least when looking at the tests I made. Perhaps armour value has been set to e.g. 100mm x 0.9, but that would only really affect AP hits which penetrate 90mm rather than replicating armour/welds cracking, significant spalling, etc.

 

Just adding on to the existing armour warfare improvements which would be welcome:

AFV optics should be "layered" in range, e.g. 70% at 1500-2000m, 80% at 1000-1500m, 85% at 500-1000m, 40% at 100-400m, 10% at 0-100m. The current solution appears to be one uniform value across all ranges, which means that especially tanks like the Panther are too good at spotting enemies quite close in as a result of having a high "optics value" to represent its fixed, high magnification gunsight... but that fails to replicate how hard a time Panther crews had spotting targets close in owing to a lack of panoramic/moveable low magnification optics (the Panther is just an example here, it would obviously affect all AFVs).

Crews of immobilised tanks should be liable to bail out unless they're fanatics. Remaining in an immobile tank under fire should take some really cool heads, or fanaticism.

Everyone's favourite... being turned out should really not be the death sentence it is. It should be dangerous under fire, but the current situation isn't workable for a number of AFVs. Vehicles and tactics which were well known to work very well during the war are frequently outright impossible to replicate in the game due to how easily turned out troops are picked off. E.g. German flame halftracks (doesn't help that the flame gunners can't seem to turn their weapons more than ~10 degrees as opposed to real life 60-70 degrees, or that the range is just 33m (that of handheld flamethrowers) as opposed to real life 40-50m), or the real life German panzer grenadier tactic of fighting mounted from inside their halftracks on occassion is simply not possible.

On the flip side, some crew members should stop turning out of their vehicles. E.g. AVRE Churchills should really pause reloading their petards if they find that they're under fire when the loader opens his hatch, or the driver and loader in the M150 (the TOW M113) for some random reason unbuttoning along with the gunner... that's obviously not very helpful or realistic.

 

And light brush/foliage shouldn't detonate HEAT shells. And tree branches and brush really shouldn't stop AP shells or APFSDS cold.

Edited November 22, 2023 by Anthony P.

[Erwin]

1 hour ago, Anthony P. said:

tree branches and brush really shouldn't stop AP shells or APFSDS cold.

From your mouth to BF's ears.  This has been complained about since CM2 was released in 2007.  Ridiculous that a viable CM2 tactic to make your vehicle indestructible is to hide behind a tree.

Another big issue is that modern ATGM vehicles with telescopic optics and missile launchers are not modeled properly so that in order to fire (say) a TOW, one has to reveal the entire top of the vehicle - making that ATGM vehicle very vulnerable and hence we are unable to use them as in RL.

[Andrew Kulin]

Maybe also allow soldiers from the same side speak freely with other troops from the same side.  Seems to me that if I have infantry within 10 feet of a tank, and the infantry sees enemy tanks moving towards their position while their own tank does not (in my experience, a very high probability with Soviet Forces in CMCW for example), that information is not passed onto the tank.  You would think there should be no problem hollering this out to the tank crew parked nearby. 

Seems to me this does not happen because of chain of command things - information has to be passed up the chain and then back down again.  Which is fine for information from a squad 500 m away from said tank reporting tank movement near their position and that this information then eventually makes it way to said tank as a contact in that area 500 m away as it gets passed up to the overall HQ and then back down to other units.  But it just does not look like these same infantry units directly relay the information to other units within voice range of them, at least not to units under a differnt command chain.

[RMM]

@Andrew Kulin You also touch on something else that really bad in the current C2 process, which is that local units, certainly HQ units, cannot advise adjacent indirect fire units of targets they can see but the ordinance cannot! This even includes a mortar's own HQ unit! Even that HQ has to go all the way up through the C2 chain to order get an indirect fire mission (along with the attendant delay) from their own subordinates!

[Anthony P.]

2 hours ago, Andrew Kulin said:

Maybe also allow soldiers from the same side speak freely with other troops from the same side.  Seems to me that if I have infantry within 10 feet of a tank, and the infantry sees enemy tanks moving towards their position while their own tank does not (in my experience, a very high probability with Soviet Forces in CMCW for example)

That is a feature, you've just got to ensure that the crew is turned out since they're not on the same radio net.

What I think is noticeable though, since I read others comment on it, is how singularly poor Soviet AFV crew can be at spotting in CMCW compared to Soviet AFV crews in CMRT, or any other nation's AFV crew in any other title. That might be the cause rather than a lack of communication.

[Andrew Kulin]

34 minutes ago, Anthony P. said:

That is a feature, you've just got to ensure that the crew is turned out since they're not on the same radio net.

I have done that to no effect.

[Bulletpoint]

4 hours ago, Andrew Kulin said:

Maybe also allow soldiers from the same side speak freely with other troops from the same side.  Seems to me that if I have infantry within 10 feet of a tank, and the infantry sees enemy tanks moving towards their position while their own tank does not (in my experience, a very high probability with Soviet Forces in CMCW for example), that information is not passed onto the tank.  You would think there should be no problem hollering this out to the tank crew parked nearby. 

Seems to me this does not happen because of chain of command things - information has to be passed up the chain and then back down again.  Which is fine for information from a squad 500 m away from said tank reporting tank movement near their position and that this information then eventually makes it way to said tank as a contact in that area 500 m away as it gets passed up to the overall HQ and then back down to other units.  But it just does not look like these same infantry units directly relay the information to other units within voice range of them, at least not to units under a differnt command chain.

Info does pass directly from infantry to tanks, but only if they are very close. In CM terms, infantry in the square the tank is on, or the square right next to it.

If this doesn't happen, then it's the bug where the tank already has the info but it's not visually updated to the new location after the target tank has moved. The tank still gets the spotting bonus for having the info though.

Edited November 22, 2023 by Bulletpoint

[Erwin]

5 hours ago, Andrew Kulin said:

Maybe also allow soldiers from the same side speak freely with other troops from the same side.  Seems to me that if I have infantry within 10 feet of a tank, and the infantry sees enemy tanks moving towards their position while their own tank does not (in my experience, a very high probability with Soviet Forces in CMCW for example), that information is not passed onto the tank.  You would think there should be no problem hollering this out to the tank crew parked nearby. 

Seems to me this does not happen because of chain of command things - information has to be passed up the chain and then back down again.  Which is fine for information from a squad 500 m away from said tank reporting tank movement near their position and that this information then eventually makes it way to said tank as a contact in that area 500 m away as it gets passed up to the overall HQ and then back down to other units.  But it just does not look like these same infantry units directly relay the information to other units within voice range of them, at least not to units under a differnt command chain.

One also experiences this in modern titles where a unit spots an enemy tank, and one moves an ATGM unit to the spotter's position.  Even after a few minutes, the ATGM team may still be unable to see the same tank that the the spotter that they are literally sitting on top of can see.  Just as you say... units immediately adjacent to each other should be able to communicate with each other regardless of what formation they are a part of.  

[chuckdyke]

In Edge of Darkness the sniper gets a full contact with the bunker but the Tactical Air FO even after five turns in the same spot as the sniper doesn't get a full contact only has a tentative contact. Things like this start to annoy me.

[Anthony P.]

On 11/22/2023 at 11:23 PM, chuckdyke said:

In Edge of Darkness the sniper gets a full contact with the bunker but the Tactical Air FO even after five turns in the same spot as the sniper doesn't get a full contact only has a tentative contact. Things like this start to annoy me.

Any specific action square/bunker? The three bunkers to the West were spotted by the Headquarters Team (strange name since they have an FO symbol) now when I tried it.

[chuckdyke]

5 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

Any specific action square/bunker?

The one on the very top of the hill. I put my spotters on the edge before the river.

 

[Anthony P.]

15 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

The one on the very top of the hill. I put my spotters on the edge before the river.

 

Pretty much right next to the deployment zone? I put a sniper team up there, and then sent the FO team up to the hill as well after the snipers had spotted bunkers. The FO team saw the bunkers too, maybe you had bad luck with the RNG/TacAI?

[Brille]

Adds to the wishlist:

- adjustable/alternative firing times for pre planned artillery.

5/10/15min are not that flexible. In fact as the oponent I know exactly when I need my forces to hunker down and when not.

Plus some maps are very big or you want to move more cautiously. 15min maximum here is just to short sometimes.

So either you should be able to adjust the minutes yourself or have at least a wider variety. Maybe it could even be possible to synchronize with the ingame clock.

So for example that you can Type in the exact daytime as it is. "I want that artillery firing at 12:35 on that hill !")

 

- different/ more tac ai behavior especially concerning tanks.

I often witness that tanks duell things out even when they are heavily outclassed or in a bad situation.(Side to the enemy)

So user input is often required to make them retreat. 

So for example If a Sherman (short 75mm Canon) encounters a (King)Tiger up front at medium to long range, He should more often than not have the tendency to drive the hell out of there and /or smoke. Especially when Said Tank is already aiming and firing at him. 

As it is now usually the tac ai often evades other Tanks when damage is already done (partial Penetration, wounded crewmember).

A better Crew morale would add to this.

Often times crews seem to be unimpressed from non penetrating hits.

And Im Not saying that they should always abandon their vehicle. But it should at least have more of an impact in their ability to fight back.

I remember in CMBB you could knock on a T34 with multiple Panzer III at a time. You rarely would penetrate him but the constant plinging of shells often drove the Crew inside crazy,forcing them to retreat or even abandon their tank.

Another thing would be the other way around: In the old games crews would get more nervous when they repeatedly hit a tank without penetrating him. Untrained crews even could get shaken uppon that to a degree that they would steer their tank out of the way.

Also to this: Cover arcs should be Not as absolute as they are now. In the older games it was dependant on the experience and current morale of the unit if they hold on to it.

So it could be possible that Units would negate the arc entirely if they feel threatened.

So in general what I am trying to say is that units should be more acting in self preservation than they do now.

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by Brille

[PEB14]

@Brille

And you maybe forget: dedicated order to turn turrets independantly of covered arcs and vehicle direction.

[Brille]

53 minutes ago, PEB14 said:

@Brille

And you maybe forget: dedicated order to turn turrets independantly of covered arcs and vehicle direction.

We have a saying in our family: "Wünsch dir zu viel und du bekommst garnichts." (Wish for to much and you get nothing)

Secretly I also want the old "hunt" order back but I dont want to test my luck.

 

[Centurian52]

It's actually surprising that this thread is still so active. We know at this point that none of these features are coming with Engine 5. For one thing it's probably well into development (possibly getting hung up on some particularly difficult bit of code), so it would be too late to add anything new to it by now anyway. And for another thing, they've already announced it's going to be about performance, not features.

But, if we are still adding things to the features wishlist for some eventual engine upgrade (not Engine 5, but some future feature-focused engine upgrade) then I really need to voice my support for a shoot and scoot command. I didn't need it back when I was playing RT. But now that I'm exclusively playing WEGO the inability to shoot and scoot is a serious handicap. One way I could think to implement it would be as a reverse command that becomes active when the vehicle shoots. Or perhaps it could be a sort of pause order that deactivates when the vehicle shoots. I could just really use some way of shooting and scooting in turn based play.

[Anthony P.]

"Cumulative/organic" TRPs ought to be a thing: if you've called in fire missions during a mission, the FO should realistically be able to call for a "repeat" fire mission on the same coordinates as opposed to having to start all over again.

It would also be nice if TRPs could have some more visible icon in mission. In large missions such as the Neuhof defensive mission in the Cold War campaign, the TRPs are pretty much invisible on such a large map.

Ideally aircraft should also have an "adjust" option, instead of having to be sent back to a holding pattern again when the TACP should be able to simply say "ok, now bomb the treeline next to the village you just bombed".

[Vacillator]

45 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

It's actually surprising that this thread is still so active

Particularly as I don't believe the thread is actually monitored or acted upon in any way by BFC. 

I would be happy to find out I'm wrong about that, but until I do I think this thread is just a sounding off place where users air their thoughts to each other on improvements.  There are similar 'bug' threads in the various forums.

[LongLeftFlank]

I want to play CM on a pregnancy test. Can @Battlefront Charles get right on that please?

(found via this blog post) https://taylor.town/pardon-2023

 

Edited December 12, 2023 by LongLeftFlank

[Anthony P.]

Pixeltruppen not in action should ideally reload/top up their weapons after a while of inactivity, e.g. reload the coaxial MG in tanks and the such.

AFVs part of core units in campaigns should redistribute ammunition between themselves between missions where they haven't been resupplied, instead of having e.g. Stryker A proceed with 100% ammunition to the next mission whilst Stryker B proceeds to it with just its remaining 2-3% ammunition. On the same note, AFVs with a weapons system destroyed and not repaired in time for the following mission should offload as much of its remaining ammunition to other AFVs in the unit, instead of Stryker C moving on with 100% ammunition for a destroyed .50 cal whilst Stryker D proceeds to the same mission with 0 .50 cal ammunition remaining.

AFV crewmen of open topped vehicles, or vehicles where the crew needs to unbutton to reload (e.g. Strykers) really, really should have some kind of option/command to delay the reloading process until the player instructs them to do otherwise. It really is unreasonable to have crewmen fanatically/suicidally expose themselves even to intense fire from nearby enemies when their weapon is out of ammunition.

 

The first and the last suggestions could probably be solved by adding a "Reload belt/weapon" and disabling/providing an "off toggle" for automatic reloading of exposed weapons on AFVs. Additionally, crewmen reloading such weapons should ideally be subjected being forced to button up in response to enemy fire, just as turned out crewmen/passengers in general already are.

Edited December 12, 2023 by Anthony P.

[Vacillator]

45 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

I want to play CM on a pregnancy test. Can @Battlefront Charles get right on that please?

. 

Is that really Charles' tag?  I think it's actually @Battlefront?  Hello Charles if you get to read this .

[Erwin]

16 hours ago, Anthony P. said:

AFVs part of core units in campaigns should redistribute ammunition between themselves between missions where they haven't been resupplied, instead of having e.g. Stryker A proceed with 100% ammunition to the next mission whilst Stryker B proceeds to it with just its remaining 2-3% ammunition. On the same note, AFVs with a weapons system destroyed and not repaired in time for the following mission should offload as much of its remaining ammunition to other AFVs in the unit, instead of Stryker C moving on with 100% ammunition for a destroyed .50 cal whilst Stryker D proceeds to the same mission with 0 .50 cal ammunition remaining.

AFV crewmen of open topped vehicles, or vehicles where the crew needs to unbutton to reload (e.g. Strykers) really, really should have some kind of option/command to delay the reloading process until the player instructs them to do otherwise. It really is unreasonable to have crewmen fanatically/suicidally expose themselves even to intense fire from nearby enemies when their weapon is out of ammunition.

Mentioned over the years many times, also obtaining/swapping ammo from adjacent leg units - like from ammo dumps - rather than the cumbersome current method with vehicles.