Dead spotters calling in fire missions - Engine bug or mission design?

[Smitty23]

While playing the final mission in the Shield of Kiev campaign, I noticed a really weird issue. In this mission, Russia has a lot of air support. After losing 3 BTRs that were hidden in the forest to Russian air, I suspected something was not right so I ceased fire in order to use the AAR to discover the location of the Air Traffic Controllers that called in the fire mission. I then reloaded my save and killed the observers to test whether or not the air support would stop. It did stop momentarily, but exactly 16 minutes/turns later, I lose a BTR on the other side of the map to another air attack. Again, I ceased fire to see who called in that fire mission and surely enough, the observers that I killed 16 turns before gained another BTR kill. Does anyone know how this would be possible? Can dead units call in fire missions or is this just a bug in the mission design? I'm not sure if you can force a unit in the editor to call fire missions at a certain time, and whether or not their death would conflict with those orders. Maybe that's what's happening here?

[A Canadian Cat]

11 hours ago, Smitty23 said:

Can dead units call in fire missions or is this just a bug in the mission design?

No, they should not be able to. The way things are designed there are a couple of things that can happen: There could be pre-planned missions, they do not require a living FO or Air Controller because the details have already been worked out. That may not be entirely realistic but I'm pretty sure it will work that way. Another thing that can happen is the call was made and then the FO or AC died. In reality that probably would not work but in the game currently it will. The Air attacks don't require spotting so once they are called they will arrive. For the artillery the mission goes ahead after a long spotting interval even if the spotting does not get corrected. This does not reflect reality, of course, but its how the game works.

11 hours ago, Smitty23 said:

I'm not sure if you can force a unit in the editor to call fire missions at a certain time, and whether or not their death would conflict with those orders. Maybe that's what's happening here?

An AI script planned air or artillery attack or target of opportunity that doesn't have a caller is an interesting issue. I had not thought of that and I'm not sure how that should work.

[Artkin]

You know how you can call in strikes on turn 0 before the game starts? The AI can do this too and is programmed to do this through the AI tab of the editor - it's the 6th option in there. 

What happened was that the AI was programmed to call in air on turn 0. Turn 0 fire support is uninterruptable if the observer dies. This is because of the game design. It makes sense that the fires or air support would come in anyway because it was pre planned. 

So when you killed them on turn 1, it was already too late

 

[Artkin]

Actually I didnt see you say you reloaded your save. How far into the game did you kill the observer?

[Smitty23]

4 hours ago, Artkin said:

Actually I didnt see you say you reloaded your save. How far into the game did you kill the observer?

It was turn 60 when the first air attack happened. Then on the very next turn, I killed the spotters. So it wasn't a setup phase fire mission. Around turn 75 was when they called in the second fire mission over a KM away from the initial fire mission.

 

 

6 hours ago, IanL said:

No, they should not be able to. The way things are designed there are a couple of things that can happen: There could be pre-planned missions, they do not require a living FO or Air Controller because the details have already been worked out. That may not be entirely realistic but I'm pretty sure it will work that way. Another thing that can happen is the call was made and then the FO or AC died. In reality that probably would not work but in the game currently it will. The Air attacks don't require spotting so once they are called they will arrive. For the artillery the mission goes ahead after a long spotting interval even if the spotting does not get corrected. This does not reflect reality, of course, but its how the game works.

An AI script planned air or artillery attack or target of opportunity that doesn't have a caller is an interesting issue. I had not thought of that and I'm not sure how that should work.

I think you might have hit the nail on the head here. The past few times I've attempted this mission, Russian air support always comes at turn 60 so I believe it is a pre-scripted fire mission. It's just not in the same place every time. If the Russians have visual on any of my units, the fire mission gets called on them, but if they have no visual on my units, it seems to always default to my deployment zone. The thing that is still weird though is the fact that if this was a pre-planned mission with the details manually worked out by the scenario designer, why would the fire mission jump around from different locations as if it was a live non-scripted fire mission? Is it possible to script fire missions that target spotted units, but also default to a specific location if no units are spotted? Because that would explain everything there.

Also it might be the second case you described where I might have killed them on the very turn they called the mission, but then that would mean their air support takes over 15 minutes to arrive which seems too long. Then again, I've never played as Russia yet so I don't know if 15 mins for air support to arrive is normal on Iron difficulty. I would assume the average is like 10 minutes.

Ultimately though, I think its safe to say its not a game issue, but just how this particular mission is put together. I've also never experienced this issue on any other mission so I'm thinking the designer has some funky things going on with the Russian air assets. I've never really messed around too much in the editor so I don't really know what it's fully capable of doing, especially with fire missions, but your response definitely is pushing me in the right direction. One of these days, I need to find a way to open this mission in the editor to see what exactly is going on.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Smitty23

[Artkin]

Interesting, I've never toyed with the triggers but I now assume that's what's doing it.

16 minutes is a normal air support time for the Russians so that's why I thought you were starting from the beginning. I was eating and typing out that post with one hand too.

Sorry about that

[MikeyD]

I don't know anyone whose tried this, but a spotter calling in an 'emergency' artillery mission then dying wouldn't/shouldn't halt the fire mission because the artillerymen aren't expecting spotting round feedback. Does aircraft called in for an area strike need a live FO after he's given the necessary coordinates? aircraft aren't expecting feedback from the ground.

air strikes can be called in at startup then the planes will just loiter during much of the scenario picking off targets of opportunity.

About triggers and off map artillery and air, that's a no-go. I've never got off-map units to respond to trigger area fire. On-map units will but not off-map.

[Combatintman]

Some fairly recent testing of a CMCW AI plan suggests that if air is available, an eligible spotter automatically targets the middle of the map with the target circle covering the whole map area on turn one, or whenever they rock up.  The aircraft then just zap things they can see.  This is what I think is happening based on the original description.  As @MikeyD has pointed out, it certainly is not due to any triggers.

[dan/california]

On 6/7/2023 at 5:36 AM, Combatintman said:

Some fairly recent testing of a CMCW AI plan suggests that if air is available, an eligible spotter automatically targets the middle of the map with the target circle covering the whole map area on turn one, or whenever they rock up.  The aircraft then just zap things they can see.  This is what I think is happening based on the original description.  As @MikeyD has pointed out, it certainly is not due to any triggers.

Is that hand coded in, or a trick the AI sort of "learned"?

[Chibot Mk IX]

I haven't played this campaign so I have no idea what's going on. But I would bet it is a scripted AI strike mission.

On 6/2/2023 at 4:35 PM, Smitty23 said:

 

I think you might have hit the nail on the head here. The past few times I've attempted this mission, Russian air support always comes at turn 60 so I believe it is a pre-scripted fire mission. It's just not in the same place every time. If the Russians have visual on any of my units, the fire mission gets called on them, but if they have no visual on my units, it seems to always default to my deployment zone. The thing that is still weird though is the fact that if this was a pre-planned mission with the details manually worked out by the scenario designer, why would the fire mission jump around from different locations as if it was a live non-scripted fire mission? Is it possible to script fire missions that target spotted units, but also default to a specific location if no units are spotted? Because that would explain everything there.

 

What's the distance between your deployment zone and the units detected by Russia?  Air strike mission can have a 700m strike radius 

 

On 6/1/2023 at 11:12 PM, Smitty23 said:

Again, I ceased fire to see who called in that fire mission and surely enough, the observers that I killed 16 turns before gained another BTR kill.

I had a similar experience recently.  One of Russian ATGM kills my UKR BTR, then I wiped out this ATGM team. At the end of the game, I lost one more BTR to mine, guess what, the dead ATGM team got 2 BTR kills on its final tally... 

[Combatintman]

10 hours ago, dan/california said:

Is that hand coded in, or a trick the AI sort of "learned"?

Well put it this way - this mission has an AI bombardment plan set up and the air assets are available at mission start.  However the AI bombardment plan has no action squares painted dead centre of the map area where the centre of the blue circle is plotted from the observing unit during execute.  As there is no other way for for a scenario designer to hard code strikes by off map indirect fire and air assets, my educated guess is that this is just what the Tac AI does when it has a combination of a unit eligible to call air in and air assets available.  I will add that no units on the opposing side to the air controller and aircraft presented themselves anywhere near the targeted action spot that is the centre of the blue circle.  

[Centurian52]

What everyone else said, and I believe that the air controller is not the only unit that can call in air support. So it may have been another unit that called it in. It takes longer, since it isn't their specialty, but FO and HQ units can also call in air support. Of course it's been months since I've played the Russians in CMBS, so I may be misremembering. But I don't recall air assets being denied to HQ teams.

[Artkin]

4 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

What everyone else said, and I believe that the air controller is not the only unit that can call in air support. So it may have been another unit that called it in. It takes longer, since it isn't their specialty, but FO and HQ units can also call in air support. Of course it's been months since I've played the Russians in CMBS, so I may be misremembering. But I don't recall air assets being denied to HQ teams.

Only Russian air controllers can call air, FOs and HQs cant iirc.