Squad AI silliness under fire

[Tiger]

Share your stories

Here's mine: Moving about 15m forward to a crest from their foxholes my British platoon exchanges gunfire with various German squads approx 100m distant down the other side of the hill.What does one of my squads do when they begin to waver? Why instead of retreating the 15m to their foxholes behind them, they oddly start to run the 100m towards where all the German rifle fire is coming from. They start vainly trying to zig-zag towards the enemy, often momentarily pausing before realizing that it may have been a better idea to step back the 15m to their safe foxholes. Now routed they run back towards their foxholes. The AI seems to recognize no cover but what's in front of them. I.e when this unit routed, now their foxholes were "in front" of them

:confused:

[Gyrene]

Testing out a new scenario I made, I had my 75mmm pillbox have a virtually pointblank (80 or so meters) shot at a grouped mass of AI ran squads huddled in scatered tress on a slope (Opposite rim of a small canyon), I have 5h 19a and 10s left, so what does the pillbox do?

Fire all the smoke of course! Even if I manually targeted the units the pillbox refused to shoot anyting but smoke. It could have leveled the remainder of a whole platoon, which already was under small arms and MG fire. Oh well.

Shameless Plug:I posted the scenario on the Scenarios board, but no takers yet, it involves a pretty nifty mountain top fortress and stuff...hint hint

Gyrene

[Peterk]

Hey Tiger. Don't know if you've ever played ASL, but there's this neat little thing in that game called berzerk status that can happen when a unit fires/comes under fire. The rule forces it to charge the closest enemy. What you're describing is sort of like that - were they broken when they were moving forward?

p.

[ 04-14-2001: Message edited by: Peterk ]

[Bruno Weiss]

I guess that is what one might classify Mad Tank Disease as being in actuality. It is really more than annoying, it is nearly game debillitating. It appears to me that the worst units afflicted are the open top vehicles.

In a current game, an artillery barrage starts, near, but not on top of a Marder II of mine. The Marder up and bolts out into the middle of the barrage, wildly charging towards the enemy lines. I then order it to reverse to a position behind a slope and again out of the middle of the barrage, but still close. Next turn. Sure enough, the Marder just turns up and bolts out into the barrage again, this time charging deeply towards the enemy and out into the open.

This has happened to me on many occasions with 251's and Marder II's and III's. There is simply no controlling the vehicle. The result is more luck and circumstance than skill and tactics. It's a really bad bug in the v1.2 patch. Nearly makes it so that all ones needs to do to counter any (German anyway), open top vehicle is target a barrage anywhere near them and they lose their minds, worse yet, every time so that it is completely predictable.

(I don't see a spell check anymore, so what you see is what you get).

[Kanonier Reichmann]

OK, how about this situation. I have 3 full strength "normal" British Paratrooper squads sprinting from one 2 storey heavy building to another, a distance of about 40 metres. The first 2 squads make it into the heavy building while under a bit of flank fire from 2 German squads but the 3rd squad loses 2 casualties from this flank fire when it is literally only about 5 metres away from the cover of the heavy building it was ordered to enter. Guess what it does. It immediately turns 90 degrees away from the cover of the building and proceeds to run around like a chook with its head cut off IN THE OPEN towards a light 2 storey building some 30 metres away whilst getting shot up in the back!!!

Would that happen in real life... I don't think so. I guess these things happen when there's no such thing as perfection, especially when it comes to computer programmes.

Regards

Jim R.