How can one determine if a stream is passable or not?

[chuckdyke]

43 minutes ago, nikolai said:

I have to micromanage units giving them the very basic orders

Here is where you go wrong, huge battles can't be played that way. When you play the AI you play a human player the author. He plays only one turn the first one and painted a Battle Plan and he painted triggers he can't micromanage his units. You on the other hand can change every minute if you play WeGo otherwise on RTS any time. Most beginning players have problems beating these experts. To do it you need to understand the TacAI. The TacAI will engage automatically on every full contact it will find a path to go from A to B. It will do 90% of the work for you. Make a battalion to cross a bridge select all of the battalion by selecting the HQ and click a destination point on the other side. If you need a recon on the other side first select a Company HQ double click and let them move first. 300 pairs of eyes see more than 2. By micromanaging too much you have a far less enjoyable game. That is at least my colored past experience. 

[Monty's Mighty Moustache]

Back to the original point I find sometimes that if the gap between impassable tiles is too small, especially when said tiles are on a diagonal, vehicles won’t pass through it. I’ve had this when blasting walls for vehicles to pass, when on the diagonal I need to blast two gaps to ensure there’s enough room otherwise the vehicle tried to go around. In this particular case I would look for alternate avenues given the preponderance of impassable tiles and the risk of bogging but that is just me obviously  

MMM 

[Combatintman]

7 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

That I am not a scenario editor. 20 is the default level I would like to see a default 18 waterlevel. Whenever we paint a river or stream it is automatically lower. That is the cause of in my opinion of the bridge issues. The tiles determine or we can cross something or not and sometimes they border streams at triangles as is the case here. I said 'I think it is not a bug. I never said, 'It is not a bug'. Kind regards. 

No 20m is not the default water level, the water level defaults to the elevation of the tile that it is placed on and can only be on that elevation so if you place a water feature at 350m all water features will be at 350m.  Maps containing water tiles must have a minimum elevation of 5m.  The default elevation whenever you start making a map is 20m.  For clarity's sake, in relation to this discussion, stream tiles are not water tiles.

The bridge issues over the years are not limited to those running over water features and as @sburkesaid it has defied all attempts to resolve.

[nikolai]

12 hours ago, sburke said:

There is, it just has a different function.  CM Tactical AI is pretty sophisticated however it is concentrated in determining how the AI reacts not to make decisions at the scale that Command Ops does.  Watch your pixeltruppen.  They'll do some pretty awesome stuff especially when they decide to ignore your orders because something happened that takes precedence.  If there was no Tac AI in this game you'd find a lot of folks looking elsewhere and BF could churn out games a lot faster.

Probably a better place to start would be defining what you mean by tactical AI because it most certainly exists in CM.  It is not absent by design, it is in fact the heart of the game.  And yes I have Command Ops.  Just not an RTS guy so my interest flagged.

In my opinion, tactical AI means *making decisions*. That is, finding a reasonable trade-off between multiple options given the current uncertain information about the enemy. You know, finding the shortest path is not a tactical AI, but finding the safest path would be. Running away after being broken is not a decision/trade-off, as well as dying after being shot is not a decision. A tactical decision would be to decide whether a unit should engage an enemy or not based on chances to kill the enemy versus the risk of being spotted and shattered by return fire. As of now, so called TacAI is not even able to choose an appropriate weapon for the target, it just fires everything that has even the slightest chance to damage the target.

Sure, the decisions needed at CM scale are different from the decisions at CO2 scale. However, notice how many tweaks are there in CO2. That's because there is a tactical AI and it needs your input to adjust various trade-offs to your high-level plan. I think that if BF ever decides to add a tactical AI to the game, it should start with adding Aggressiveness and Rate of Fire parameters for units. The units would use those parameters to decide whether to engage the enemy or not, and which weapon to use.

[nikolai]

12 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

Make a battalion to cross a bridge select all of the battalion by selecting the HQ and click a destination point on the other side. If you need a recon on the other side first select a Company HQ double click and let them move first. 300 pairs of eyes see more than 2. By micromanaging too much you have a far less enjoyable game. That is at least my colored past experience. 

I don't know... It sounds as if we play different games... In the CM that I played, group movement orders just do an affine transformation. That is, every unit is moved by exactly the same distance to exactly the same direction. No intelligence involved. No attempt to optimize placement of individual units to find better firing position or better cover.

[sburke]

5 hours ago, nikolai said:

I don't know... It sounds as if we play different games... In the CM that I played, group movement orders just do an affine transformation. That is, every unit is moved by exactly the same distance to exactly the same direction. No intelligence involved. No attempt to optimize placement of individual units to find better firing position or better cover.

This is true.  In effect it is move forward X meters maintain this formation as all units are given the same direction and distance.  If you want a unit to do something in CM, you have to tell it that.  The same is true in Command OPs at a different scale.  You have to decide how you want to take an objective and give the appropriate orders.  The game won't do that for you.  And I micromanage the hell out of CM.  It is actually how I get enjoyment. I watch every freakin pixeltruppen    If you want to see how I approach the game, click the Hamel Valle link in my signature.  It is the single best game of CM I think I ever played (meaning fun). It is against a human opponent but I take a similar approach all the time.

Regarding TAC AI I think we have different definitions.  What the TAC AI does in CM is different than what the AI does in Command Ops.  Command OPs does not have to take into account things CM does and vice versa. Command OPs is 2D which totally changes what it has to factor in. If you want to defend a town in Command Ops, you move the unit into town and set a posture.  You want to defend that town in CM, you better look at lanes for fire, cover, secondary positions, observation points for indirect fire and comms set up, assigning a reserve to respond where needed. CM is designed to have the player make decisions, not take the decision making out of the player's hands.  For Command OPs at operational scale it is designed to allow the player to decide intent and the engine to try and apply.  In essence you are a staff officer.  Not criticizing, Command Ops is an outstanding game.  Just a different cup of tea.  And Combat mission units do make decisions on weapon type and target, not sure where you got the impression otherwise. Watch a sniper and note who they target.  Just watch a Javelin equipped unit in CM Modern for a very very clear example. (or go back to that Hamel Vallee link, there are tons of examples - have I pitched that enough yet?)  For the beta testers this is something that is always looked at, what is the behavior of a unit and is it appropriate especially if a new feature is added or weapon system..  It is also an area BF is constantly looking at to enhance as there most certainly are limitations.  Would we like a game format that let you set more of a level of intent and reaction parameters, most certainly.  We just don't have anything like that yet.

Edited June 15, 2021 by sburke

[chuckdyke]

By micromanaging too much is when you get beaten by the AI who doesn't do anything at all apart from the Battle Plan. This is from the game manual the TacAI is real and can override your decisions.

Just as in real life, your virtual soldiers are not robots and therefore will not mindlessly execute each and every order from you. There are many situations - usually under heavy enemy fire - in which soldiers may simply refuse to execute a Command you have given them or may replace it with what they consider more suitable. For example, you may give a unit a Fast Move Command only to see it changed instantly to a Slow Move Command because the soldiers feel hugging the ground is the better way to stay alive. Units with or without orders will also usually initiate evasive action on their own in the face of extreme danger - for infantry this may including crawling to cover, for vehicles it could mean popping smoke, rotating to face the threat, and retreating away from threats. This could happen if you ordered it or not, if you want it or not, as the unit is simply concerned about its own survival at that moment. Keep this in mind when you see that your Commands are not exactly working out as you think they should...

[MOS:96B2P]

On 6/13/2021 at 5:12 PM, Bulletpoint said:

if you look at @nikolai's video, it seems he's scanning directly over the swamp tiles, and the cursor doesn't change to show those tiles are impassable?

Wow, we are on page three now.  What happened?      

Yes, the video of the cursor does seem odd.  I did the same thing with the cursor on my PC and it changed from green to red to green to red as you would expect.  I even intentionally moved the cursor over where the corners of the marsh tiles touched.  The cursor would briefly turn red even when moved kind of quickly.  I can't replicate or explain why the cursor in the video didn't turn red more often.  

[chuckdyke]

Leave it to the Units saves you a lot of time. Scouts in my mom and dad's language are padvinders or pathfinders, use them as such sometimes. Ok vehicles can't cross that spot in the meantime infantry is infiltrating.

This fording place was not landmarked.

[Erwin]

Yeah... in scenarios with a river crossing required, it's always worth doing a snorkeling trip along the whole river as there may be hidden fords.  Sometimes kind designers will leave some muddy tiles at the entrance and exits of those fords to make em obvious, other's... you just have to get wet and cold.

[chuckdyke]

14 hours ago, Erwin said:

Yeah... in scenarios with a river crossing required, it's always worth doing a snorkeling trip along the whole river

I had the 'If only' moment. 2men scout-teams if they can't go somewhere nobody can. For me 'Fast' means ASAP and river crossings are one of them. Snorkeling you can do. TBH, I don't see the need, I made him move on fast after a 45 sec pause. He made it and I became complacent and had 3 casualties.