Shooting at Unspotted AFVs in your LoS that are Spotted by Friendly Units Considered Bad Gameplay?

[chuckdyke]

13 minutes ago, Redwolf said:

Area fire with smallarms seems pretty effective to me, that does cause casualties.

At a semi contact icon? Yes and watch your ammo expenditure. 

[Codreanu]

Soviet squads seem to really chew through ammo like nobody's business, I once had a platoon of tankodesantniki go through their entire load of ammo in one, maybe two turns trying to shoot at a guy cowering in a trench. It was like watching a fireworks show seeing 30 submachine guns mag dumping and spraying ricochets everywhere.

[Erwin]

1 hour ago, chuckdyke said:

area fire and it comes down to logistics. I think mathematically it is rare to hit anything firing at unspotted units.

Am assuming you mean in RL.  Certainly in CM1 a sound contact was very vague and it was usually a waste of ammo to shoot at one.  But, in CM2, a sound contact is quite accurate and area firing at such contacts is usually very effective.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Erwin

[chuckdyke]

3 hours ago, Erwin said:

But, in CM2, a sound contact is quite accurate and area firing at such contacts is usually very effective.

A  new sound contact I think they should fade away quicker they clutter the GUI next to no time.

[Bozowans]

10 hours ago, Probus said:

Good ideas. A 'Target Single' command or 'Single Burst' command would be good, no Great!

Also a 'supressing fire' command may be what you are looking for.  Something that uses less ammo but lasts for a period of time and is in the form of an arc so you can tag the whole treeline or front of buildings.

Yeah ive seen stuff like that suggested before and it always makes me think it would be cool if target commands could work the same way as artillery fire missions. What if you could adjust the duration, intensity, and area size of any units fire? I dont see why they can't just re-use the exact same UI commands as you get for artillery.

Like giving a machine gun a linear target with heavy intensity along a treeline for 2 minutes, and then he will hose down that treeline left to right as much as he can for those 2 minutes. Or giving a rifle squad a circular area target with harass setting for 5 minutes, and they will slowly pop off individual rifle shots at random points within that circle for those 5 minutes. And of course you would have point targets that would be like what we have now, only you could adjust rate of fire and duration for that point.

For BMPs, a harass setting could mean single 20mm shots every so often, light could mean short 2-3 round bursts, and so on up to heavy where the gunner holds down the trigger for maximum destruction. 

A system like that would make recon by fire a lot more workable, realistic, and with less micromanagement too. When you ask a question like what should you shoot at when doing recon by fire, the answer is, well, everything right? Unless there are some kind of rules of engagement, you would logically want to shoot at as much as possible because you never know where an enemy might be. Yet it's annoying to have to constantly draw new target points for every one of your units, have them shoot at that point for 15 seconds, then have to go and draw new targets for every one of your units for the next area a few meters over. Over and over again. So most players avoid doing a realistic amount of area firing unless they know or have a good idea that an enemy is there already. And then we plaster the hell out of that position and we end up feeling gamey about it.

It would be so much easier if you could tell your units to "shoot literally everything" by drawing a huge circle in front of them so they fire at everything in it at random for a specified amount of time. Like sometimes I just really want to tell my guys to "shoot that town" in front of them without having to pick out the exact building and exact floor of each building for every single unit. I just wanna draw a circle over the whole town. And then I just want my guys to sit back and take potshots at the town instead of unloading on it with everything they have like that scene in Full Metal Jacket.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Bozowans

[Erwin]

7 hours ago, Bozowans said:

Like giving a machine gun a linear target with heavy intensity along a treeline for 2 minutes, and then he will hose down that treeline left to right as much as he can for those 2 minutes. Or giving a rifle squad a circular area target with harass setting for 5 minutes, and they will slowly pop off individual rifle shots at random points within that circle for those 5 minutes.

Good idea...  assuming this reflects RL tactics.   Right now (for a vehicle) one has to make lots of small movement waypoints with a fire order and pause at each waypoint.  If it's an HMG or something that cannot move easily, you are out of luck.