Leaders that won't die buildings that won't be hit

[Cauldron]

Hy,

Its remarkable.

I set up a city board and luanch a 100 mission 120mm mort on it AND:

NOT 1 building was hit.

Even in WW2 artillary WAS the God of war. In this game its the God of exactly nothing.

In another a leader gets pounded by a MMG, a regualr squad ( say 100 fp) and a Horchkiss AFV with MA at 60 m.

He continues to have a cup of tea and after being sprayed with prolly 300 rounds finally moves. [ In direct LOS of the AFV btw].

Can someone tell me how any of this has any correlation with real life events..

Ta

eric

:confused:

[Warmaker]

While 120mm Mortars are powerful (as far as mortars go) they're not "gamewinners" with their blast values like 150/155mm artillery can be.

There's a number of factors to your mortar and "invincible leader" dilemna that I can think of since I don't know of the terrain/setup you faced.

*Dug in infantry, plain and simple, is a bitc# to clear out unless you can bring treebursts into play (or VT fused artillery the U.S. has).

*terrain features of course play a role for cover and concealment.

*Heavy Buildings can provide oustanding cover. A properly defended heavy building is a real pain in the rear to take out if you're not careful. 105mm artillery shells require quite a few close impacts or a really lucky direct hit to destroy one. Small arms fire (rifles, SMGs, etc.) require even an extraordinary amount of fire to suppress and inflict casualties to a stubborn defender(s) located in one.

[chrisl]

The arty problem could be one of two (or maybe more)things:

1) you aren't seeing the shells hit, though they are hitting the buildings. A single 120 mm shell won't generally take down a building, especially a large stone one in a city.

2) a bit of bad luck.

I generally buy large quantities of arty in various sizes in QBs, and it's great stuff, especially as the amis. It's usually what I pick first, so I make sure that I have enough. I've seen numerous buildings flattened by arty-- to the extent that I'm very careful about concentrating troops inside them.

As for the leader not getting hit- sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. He was probably in sufficient cover to not get hit. Don't forget that in WWII immense amounts of small arms fire was pointed at the various participants, and only a small fraction actually hit anything besides the surrounding terrain. I've seen squads sit out huge amounts of fire for extended periods with little damage, and I've seen whole platoons in cover vaporized in two volleys from just two squads as if I had Star Trek phasers.

There's a lot of dumb luck involved-the trick is using tactics that are relatively robust against fairly large amounts of bad luck, and noticing when you have some good luck and taking advantage of it.

[ParaBellum]

I setup a little test,too.

5 120mm spotters target a village, about 10 houses of different sizes.

Result after 2 minutes: 7 houses destroyed, 2 **damaged, one *damaged.

So I can't see a problem with the effectiveness of 120mm arty.

As mentioned above, if you want to crush heavy stone buildings, a mortar round just doesn't pack enough punch to do the job.

And to your second point: I've seen entire squads mowed down by MG fire in mere seconds, I've seen a platoon HQ suffer 3 casualties and then destroying a tank!

So, like in real life, a lot of things may happen in CM.

[Michael Emrys]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by ParaBellum:

So, like in real life, a lot of things may happen in CM.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Some time ago I posted a dissertation on this subject. The essence of it is:

A graph of all the possible outcomes and their probabilities would form a bell curve of one kind or another, some long and flat, some peaking sharply, some skewed toward one end or the other. Most games, for the sake of simplicity, trim off the ends of the curve; i.e. they simply eliminate the chance occurrences that you wouldn't see most of the time anyway.

We have all grown up on such games, and our gameplaying expectations have been shaped by them: we expect pretty predictable outcomes from given situations. The real world isn't much like that. Wild-ass improbable things happen often enough to be noticed and recalled. When Charles and Steve began coding CM up, they deliberately retained as much of that as possible. They didn't trim the ends of the bell curves. As a consequence, wild-ass improbable things happen in CM too. And like in real life, they get noticed and remembered. And frequently commented on.

Michael

[Bobbaro]

Reminds me of stories of whole companies on the firing line lining up on a wandering deer or cow to be chewed out afterwards to the effect that, "Don't ever let that happen again and the worst part about your indicipline was that no one hit the animal."

Of course the language was more to the point and pungent.

Then those cases where some anus fires a weapon generally into the air expecting the round to impact harmlessly only to read in the paper where some innocent was killed by a bullet from nowhere.

[Chupacabra]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bobbaro:

Then those cases where some anus fires a weapon generally into the air expecting the round to impact harmlessly only to read in the paper where some innocent was killed by a bullet from nowhere.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm studying Zimbabwe at the moment. When Independence was announced on April 17, 1980, it was naturally an incredibly happy moment for thousands of freedom fighters, some of whom had been in the bush for ten or more years.

Most of whom had Kalashnikov rifles.

Many of whom decided to shoot off a few clips in honor of the occasion.

What goes up must come down.

A lot of cattle bit the dust that day.

[Doug Beman]

Cauldron, if firing 300 rounds guaranteed a kill, WW2 would have been either a lot bloodier or a lot shorter. I'm sure somebody out there can quote the number of small-arms rounds fired for each combat casualty in WW2. The figure of 300 sounds like it's in the ballpark.

What I mean by that is, dumping ordnance on a position is not a guarantee of destroying that position (and the people inside it)

I'm sure the Marines who went ashore at Tarawa, or Saipan, or Iwo or Oki would agree.

DjB

[Guest Babra]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Doug Beman:

The figure of 300 sounds like it's in the ballpark. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I believe the number is in the many thousands, but I can't remember where I read it or vouch for its accuracy.