AT guns and smoke

[sepruda]

In a game of CMBB some pesky russian machinegunners was seriously harassing my troops, since I had two AT guns with LOS to the machinegun (but unfortunately no HE grenades left), I thought I would use some of the 6 smokegrenades they had, to blind the machinegunner, but everytime i gave the order to fire smoke, the guns would retarget by themselves, and retargeting other infantryunits with AP grenades! No armour was left threatening the guns, and very little smallarms fire was coming their way, but they simply refused to fire smoke, and i tried it over several orderphases. Any ideas why?

[Slappy]

My guess is that you direct rather than area targeted the MG. The TacAI then decided that you had no chance of damaging the MG with Smoke and some chance of hurting the infantry with AP. Try area tarketing the smoke round in front of the MG. That should stick.

[sepruda]

No I didn't target the MG directly, I targeted in front of it.

[Broken]

Originally posted by sepruda:

No I didn't target the MG directly, I targeted in front of it.

Use an arc command to exclude other areas besides the spot you want to smoke.

[YankeeDog]

Units will simetime ignore player-issued Smoke and Area Target orders if they feel directly threatened by an enemy unit, instead targeting said enemy unit.

Guns and Tanks, in particular, do not like enemy infantry to get too close, and will aggressively target nearby enemy infantry, even if the infantry units in question are not currently targeting them. In my experience, it is not at all uncommon for Tanks and ATGs to use AP ammo against infantry if they're out of HE, especially if it's a larger gun.

Setting a covered arc does mitigate this behaviour somewhat, but does not totally eliminate it.

Cheers,

YD