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Friendly Fire


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Anyone else experience misidentification of targets and friendly fire? I was playing the Son scenario as the Americans and I noticed on a couple of occasions I had a couple of my machine gunners and maybe even one of my bazookas target and fire on my own troops across the river confused.gif They were almost at the limit of the LOS (overcast conditions led to less than 200m LOS). I checked, and there weren't other enemy troops nearby.

Derek

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Not at all

With COs demanding 'shoot your bloody guns' (Frequent complaint of Coy. Commanders was the platoons not actually firring their guns enough since they thought they'd get shot at if they stuck their heads up) and the confusion of location in a night battle it's very easy to misidentify another group in the dark, and it's just as likely that the officer will missidentify as joe soldier!

Night battles are tricky to carry out which is why most armed forces didn't bother with it and those that did and got it working well were feared by their enemies.

I've read AARs of US units conducting night battles in Italy. They were VERY careful, had favourable conditions and still were lucky to pull the battle off. They generally lined up and advanced in column and only deployed to attack at the very last minute, thus the forces remained very close together through the advance to contact period.

I imagine friendly fire could be worse on the defence. Standard practice was 'see anything move, shoot it'. It was very dangerous to wander around outside of your foxhole at night.

I guess just remember that from our perspective we can tell exactly where all our units are, but for those guys on the ground, they hear some rustle in the bushes and perhaps a helmet that they're SURE is a heinnie tin-pot (or tommy) and start blazing away, their squad joining in..

PeterNZ

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"Patriotism is the virtue of the viscious" - Oscar Wilde

"Don't F*CK with Johnny Cash!" - Chupacabra

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Originally posted by Horncastle:

Something one would expect to happen in poor visibility happens a lot at night too, happened in WWII quite a bit I hear.

Good feature I thinks.

And not only during WWII, I remember one occasion during larger military exercise where we accidentally engaged a friendly squad. On positive side, we only had blanks and not live ammo smile.gif

Darkness is confusing even when you have those nice nightvision binoculars with you. And when you have squad of people walking right into your face in middle of the woods, near supposed enemy positions, it's time to start shooting at them. I think it's a nice feature too and very realistic, though it sucks when your own MG starts firing your bazooka smile.gif

-- MS. --

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Weren't 90% of all UN casualties in the Gulf War from friendly fire?

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No bastard has ever won a war by dying for his country. They won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

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Surprisingly I have only experienced friendly fire once (that I noticed). I don't mean that my squad was in a house with an enemy squad, and the friendlys from outside shot up the house including both squads. It was an obvious "who the hell is that" "I don't know, FIRE"! I had an GM42 HMG team moving into position. It was dark and the enemy was near. A friendly Panzergrenadier squad spotted the MG team and lit em up. One man was hit and the team went for cover. I did take note that there was two squads in LOS of the MG team. The one that opened fire was of "regular" status and the other was "veteran". I'm not sure if that made a difference or not, but with a game this GOOD I bet it did.

-Head

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"No man ever won a war by dieing for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

-General George S. Patton, Jr.

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I had a little situation where by a platoon of brit airborn were coming under 81mm fire by some mortar about 120m away, after shooting at it for 4 turns to no effect and no further German inf popping up I decided to rush the mortar and take it out.

The first squad to run across then got butchered by another airborn platoon in a house about 80m away who had five mins ago just walked past the same hapless souls to take up their positions in the building.

Anyway I lost 4 men and caused it them to break, luckily my second squad charged with no such bad luck.

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