Limited fire orders

[ng cavscout]

Is there any way, especially with on-board mortars, to give a limited fire order, ie, "5 rounds, fire for effect"? If not, do you think it would give too much control to your units?

[Redwolf]

The only way to do that is to give a delayed move command so that they stop firing to move. But all kinds of disadvantages come with that.

[ng cavscout]

But then you lose your boresighting to TRP's.

BFC, any chance of you guys taking a look at that? or is it considered micromanaging?

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by NG cavscout:

But then you lose your boresighting to TRP's.

And you might lose ammo if your crew took losses and you trigger a setup time delay, and you might get spotted.

[Jim Boggs]

Originally posted by NG cavscout:

Is there any way, especially with on-board mortars, to give a limited fire order, ie, "5 rounds, fire for effect"? If not, do you think it would give too much control to your units?

I heard that. One of the biggest dilemnas in playing is when to fire your indirect weapons, cause they burn up the ammo so fast!.

It would be nice to have choices in regards the volume/rate of fire of indirect weapons including off-board arty.

[ July 22, 2003, 01:18 PM: Message edited by: Jim Boggs ]

[flamingknives]

Seconded.

[Barrett]

I agree, those on-map German 81mm's burn just about all of their HE in one turn...

[Sgt. Schultz]

1 Target

2 teeny tiny move order

3 Pause order to suit situation if needed

4 Lather

5 Rinse

6 Repeat

It takes practice to get the setup times and move orders down to just get off those few rounds, but it is do-able... it's just a big ol' pain in the keester and mostly not worth the aggravation. Vehicles and armor do this much better than man-portable weapons, as there is no setup time involved.

[ng cavscout]

Or, instead of making us do that, and as an added bonus, lose our boresighting, they could just add an option for mortar and/or OBA to fire a limited number of rounds.

[exSpecForSgt]

Originally posted by NG cavscout:

Or ... they could just add an option for mortar and/or OBA to fire a limited number of rounds.

Hey! Are you trying to be a smart-a$$ or something? Why on earth would they want to do something as simple and realistic as that?

It could be as simple a pop-up as we now have for a Targeting Order for an AFV:

</font>

• you tell an AFV to target an MG in that building and a pop-up asks "use main gun? Y/N"</font>
• you tell a mortar or OBA to target troops in woods and a pop-up asks "how many rounds? _#_"</font>

Short, sweet, -very- simple and =realistic=..... Now, why would we want to do -that-?

P.S.- how does one make the second row of Instant Graemlins appear in text? I've figured out the first row, but can't get the second to show up...

.

.

[tar]

Actually, rather than limiting this to indirect fire weapons, it would be nice to have some general control over fire volume, for specific targets as well as area fire. In the spirit of avoidance of micro-management (such as specifying this down to the exact round), I would propose having general categories of fire effort, say.

1) Harrassing Fire......slow rate, few rounds

2) Suppressing...........current small arms fire rate

3) All out....................current arty rate, close-in small arms

This would allow one to give some guidance as to the relative importance of effect versus ammo expenditure that one wants to have.

[ July 23, 2003, 03:34 PM: Message edited by: tar ]

[Joachim]

Try rotating away from the direction you have to fire.

15 seconds rotating away. 15 seconds rotating back. 30 seconds fire - alas only at the end of the turn, whily you want to suppress ASAP. But TRPs remain, getting spotted is less a problem.

Gruß

Joachim

[Warren Peace]

I just want to say I totally agree that the control of the rate of artillary ammo is a must

[Redwolf]

I think this is mostly a user interface problem.

CM is a game suitable for hardcore wargamers, but its markets extends bejond that.

I think every CM player who tried to show the game to somebody whithout military (real or game) background knows that there is practially zero chance to get them to make good use of even the simple CM artillery. That tiny spotter which looks like he can do nothing, and whatever he does he does with great delay, is actually very powerful because it can through large amounts of cheap fire without much chance to get hurt.

If you compare that to our TacOps multiplayer games it becomes even more obvious what kind of gap we face. TacOps has a better artillery model, amoung other things fire control by number of rounds as you want. if you have ICM ammunition you can hurt vehicles and in the typical scenario you get several times as much ammo than in a typical CM scenario.

In TacOps, the best artillery players (or should I say planners?) literally blow everybody else to pieces must of the time. A newcomer will go down in flames from fire he cannot even locate the source of.

OK, to get back to CM. If you introduced a better target model it would be more complex to understand. If you introduce fire rate or number of rounds control you need new user interface elements. They will confuse the hell out of new players and they will increase the gap between experienced and new players.

Then, artillery in CM is too controlled and reliable to start from, so introducing some screwups might actually balance things a little. Those who know my usual rants know that I very rarely think than randomizing one thing in a game makes for good balances against something else, but in this case it might.

Worst of all, if BFC introduced a new artillery model with -say- twice as much detail as the current one, then they'd get twice as many complains about unrealism

[Monty's Double]

Why not treat the cancel target order like a movement one - you would always have delays, but could extend at your choice. That would be more self-balancing as it would mean you could do what was mentioned above, but the flipside would be that you couldn't always cancel fire as fast as you would like (so that mortar crew might expend an extra round or two after you had told them to stop).

[dieseltaylor]

I love Tar's idea - simple to implement and understandable in military turns. Unless we get more ammo delivered onto the battlefield we need something to stop the infantry arriving useless at the main attack point. And I do not want to be

making units swivel, pause or any other convoluted order simply to slow down ammo use.

"Actually, rather than limiting this to indirect fire weapons, it would be nice to have some general control over fire volume, for specific targets as well as area fire. In the spirit of avoidance of micro-management (such as specifying this down to the exact round), I would propose having general categories of fire effort, say.

1) Harrassing Fire......slow rate, few rounds

2) Suppressing...........current small arms fire rate

3) All out....................current arty rate, close-in small arms

This would allow one to give some guidance as to the relative importance of effect versus ammo expenditure that one wants t"

[JonS]

Originally posted by redwolf:

... to get back to CM. If you introduced a better target model it would be more complex to understand. If you introduce fire rate or number of rounds control you need new user interface elements. They will confuse the hell out of new players and they will increase the gap between experienced and new players. ...

redwolf,

that does not follow. Take the case of covered arcs replacing the old (CMBO) ambush command. CAs are more complex, can be tricky, and take a bit of practice to get the hang of. However, most players wouldn't dream of giving them up now for a simpler model.

More to the point - you don't have to use them. Your soldiers will quite happily go about their business without them just as they did in CMBO. So for new players, you might choose to avoid that whole complexity until they get the hang on the basics, and introduce it later.

Same for fire control orders. The default would be the current rate of fire, with the option of uping or downing it if you wish.

Regards

JonS