Line of Sight--in buildings

[DavidFields]

I am having a bit of a hard time working with LOS and units in buildings.

I have a habit, from CC days, of placing my units directly adjacent to the wall when they are in a building--so, presumably, they can fire out the windows. In CM, however, the buildings sometimes feel as though they are glass houses when it comes to staying hidden.

But I find that units deep inside a large building can seem to fire "out the window" without much difficulty. This makes me wonder: should I be placing my infantry units, the ones I want to engage enemy units at close range, away from the walls and closer to the center of the building? Would they be, then, harder to spot?

[JasonC]

Yes. Put them back from the walls. If you put them so far back you barely have LOS, you will be hardest to spot and hit. But you will also limited your LOS. The best is a little farther forward than that. Use the LOS tool to check the width of your field of view.

An additional plus in a large enough building is you can break LOS completely (important e.g. against tanks) by withdrawing only a short distance. If it still gets too hot, run out the back side of the building and use the whole thing as your LOS block (particularly if direct fire HE is hitting the structure).

So you use complete cover (no LOS at all) mixed in time with good cover (in a building, 8m deep or so). You chose which and when. Enemy infantry in range, up. Enemy tanks tossing HE, back. If instead you just put them at the forward windows, tanks will level the place; in wood buildings even small arms will hurt you.

[IntelWeenie]

Don't forget that infantry units occupy an area, not a point. That's another reason why they can see out from deep within a building. Even though the center point of the squad seems like it should not have LOS, some parts of the squad will be considered closer to the edges.

For a good example of this, place a large squad(10+ men) in one corner of a small building then try and move another squad in the middle of the building. Even though their "points" will be a few meters apart, they won't stay there because the areas they occupy will overlap.

[xerxes]

What JasonC said.

You should never defend a building near the edge unless you're in night/heavy fog and LOS is very short.

[DavidFields]

Thanks for the info.

So...it seems that LOS drops off in buildings as though the interior were scattered woods or woods? Is there a "wall effect" at all?

On the other hand, it seems to me that if I put something behind a building, even a small corner of the building will block LOS (I am at work, so am doing this from memory). I don't remember being able to shoot/see through a corner, even if the distance was small (which is accurate, of course--but implies that the game engine can tell when two walls of a building have been crossed in a LOS calculation, thus totally blocking LOS).

I hesitate to dissect the game engine too much. It might cause me to use tactics which are game-engine specific, rather than more accurate of real life. But I just finished an urban scenario with many large buildings (A Second Job at V____), and the oddities with building LOS were just too large to ignore.

[YankeeDog]

Briefly, yes there are 'wall effects' with buildings - whether or not you can 'see through' a corner depends on how close you are to the corner, etc.

The best way to figure out how it works is to go into the editor and play around with buildings and units.

As long as you rememeber to think of infantry squads as 10 or so men distributed in a general area, most of the building LOS rules mostly make sense. For example, for a squad behind a building but close to a corner, one or two guys might be peeking around the corner of the building, so the squad as a whole in CM is abstracted as being able to see 'through' the corner of the building.

Cheers,

YD

[xerxes]

The modelling of building effects is fairly unrealistic in CM. I'm sure that's on the list of things to fix for the engine rewrite.

I think you're forced to use the game mechanics are written, I wouldn't consider that gamey.