A couple spotting bugs.

[jshandorf]

OKay... I have mentioned one of these before but BTS never made a comment on it also this other bug I have seen someone else mention it and I am curious as to BTS's comment on this also.

The first bug was during a night game where I could only see about 180 meters. After the deploy and during my first orders phase I could see a barb wire fortification that my opponent set BACK into heavy woods well out of my LOS because of night conditions and the fact it was back in the woods. There should be no way I should be able to see this barbwire.

For the second bug during the game I was dropping some big arty on a section of woods in the back corner of the board that I didn't have LOS to. A large arty round hit, 170mm, and eliminated a german squad. Up to that point I could not see the squad and had no idea they were there but when they died they should up and I could click on them and see they were eliminated. Now I was thinking that maybe at one point I had seen them at one point and had some limited spotting on them but then they pulled back and hid in those woods. I never saw them retreat to that point and I had no german symbol to represent that I had spotted them nearby that point at any time.

Thoughts?

Jeff

[bazooka10165]

I'm sure that this has been covered before (then again after 13,000+ posts, what hasn't been), but I too have been puzzled about why I am able to spot eliminated units and abandoned mortars in areas to which I never had LOS. I am playing a PBEM now in which I called in artillery on a wooded area in which I suspect the enemy was hiding. It was night so I could only get LOS for about 10 meters into the woods. Many of the shells however landed further back in the woods. After the barrage, I was able to "spot" an abandoned mortar about 50 meters back in the woods. No way any of my units ever had LOS to that area. Seems a bit quirky. I am sure that there is some compelling programming reason for this given Steve's high standards for realism.

[L.Tankersley]

Here's another FOW-related spotting/info bug I saw recently: I last saw an enemy squad on the ground floor of a building, and the generic symbol stayed there to mark the spot. A couple turns later, the symbol was still on the ground floor of the building, but when I selected the symbol, it said it was located in "top floor," presumably because the actual unit had moved upstairs leaving its history marker behind.

A similar problem has to do with passengers: even when a vehicle is out of sight, you can keep tabs on the passengers (and changes to the passengers) by bringing up the info window for the vehicle.

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Leland J. Tankersley

[Doug Beman]

L, if you don't have LOS to a vehicle, how can you bring up the passenger window?

BTS has, IIRC, acknowledged the "barbed wire" thing. The reason is that fortifications are treated as terrain and NOT buildings/other objects> Terrain is, by default, visible to everybody. This is also the reason you can't put people in/take people out of a bunker; that bunker has the same status, game-engine-wise, as a tree.

It's my suspicion that the way BTS enabled dead bodies involved making dead bodies equal, game-engine-wise, to terrain (as with barbed wire) Otherwise the game engine would have to calculate LOS etc for dead bodies, just as for dead vehicles, and the CPU load would get out of hand (lots of battles wind up with DOZENS of dead body markers on the ground that would have to be LOS calculated)

DjB

[Wolfe]

The only way you will see an Eliminated unit show up is if you had spotted it previously during the battle. I think you get the dead body graphic because the engine has to remove the iron cross indicating where you last saw the unit. I think ever since the Beta demo, you could only have one graphic represent one unit (obviously there weren't dead bodies in the Beta, but you would see Iron crosses as German units moved into and out of LOS, and they would disappear once you caught sight of the unit again).

I just tested it by bombarding an area I couldn't see and if you hadn't spotted the enemy unit previously, you wouldn't be told he was dead unless you walked your units over to that area.

Personally it wouldn't hurt my feelings to not know I had killed a unit I can't currently see. I think it would be a nice FOW touch. It would also be interesting to be able to have multiple unit sightings displayed for the same unit (such as for an infantry unit that keeps passing into and out of LOS as it travels through the treeline). It might look like a whole company passing through the area and could potentially affect your command decisions. They're everywhere! They're everywhere! It could make for some great feints, but it could also just end up cluttering up the screen. And add to the drain on CPU power.

- Chris

[Dschugaschwili]

Another thing regarding spotting:

I one battle I've played, an enemy Sherman reversed out of sight after spotting my Panther (it disappeared behind a small hill) and although none of my units had LOS to it for at least 10 turns, I saw the marker show "bogged in" and later "immobilized" (the ground was quite wet).

And another anomaly I've noticed in an earlier version of CM (so it may have been fixed already) was a "infantry?" unit I had put under fire while it was moving in some woods showing the "immobile" tag. Of course this tells me that it must be either a mortar or a MG team that I had shot down to one man.

Dschugaschwili