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I am in a 2ooo point qb (cmak) night battle. When I noticed my opponents men turning and shooting each other, I found it very funny. But on the next turn I noticed one of my squads quit firing at the enemy and start shooting at my flank squads platoon leader. This I do not find to be the least bit humorous. Someone please send a pigeon or something

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Friendly fire is pretty realistic particularly at night, but not necessarily as it shows up in CM. I think different formations in contact and at range should be at the greatest risk. Especially when one is significantly forward of the other. On the other hand, I've seen squads in command, that have been in command the whole game just haul off and gun down their HQ at 10 paces with no warning. This is particularly brutal with SMG troops where you can lose a squad entirely before the turn ends and you can untarget. I like FOW as much as the next guy, but I think that the parameters need a little tweaking.

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Yep, I think the friendly fire during night battles is overly harsh too. I had the same thing happen to my troops as did Slappy -- several times.

I try to compensate for those little -er- misidentifications by keeping the platoons close together as possible. It doesn't work all the time, though.

I did have an instance when one of my squads was 30m ahead of my mortar team. The squad suddenly stopped, spun around and sprayed the mortar team with a lot of lead. Poor fellows didn't have a chance.

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In two separate PBEM games this has happened to me:

I roll my tank up and begin shooting at the enemy from a decent distance. There is a building a short distance in front of and to the left or right of the tank. There's enough room to clear the building but it's close to the path of the projectile. Several of the tanks HE shells hit the building. Of course, my men are inside and they take a beating. I lost an entire squad like that.

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The problem is similar to friendy fire from aircraft. While in itself realistic, the distribution of such events over different conditions is not.

Realistically, friendy fire should be much more likely if two units move in a pincer movement trying to squeeze an enemy position and ending up opposing each other. As opposed, for example, to friendly fire from one known trench to another known trench as long as no enemy unit has been seen anywhere near either trench and no movement at all has happened.

From my observation, these two situations have the same probability to trigger friendy fire in CM.

That is a playability problem. To make friendy fire a valuable thing to have in a tactical wargame you should be rewarded for tactics that avoid it and punished otherwise. This is not the case.

The unit quality xerxes mentioned is the only probability modifier I noticed so far and the player has absolutely zero control over it. Maybe one of the HQ bonus values has an effect, but if it's not documented...

It is also a distortion that friendly fire doesn't seem to happen at all at daytime. It becomes strange when you observe that low visibility in fog does not trigger nearly as much friendly fire than night.

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I agree that the friendly fire system could use improvement. I am especially looking forward to a CM with Multi-multi-player where we can get mid-IDed friendlies under control of another player, and get players actually ordering their units to target friendlies. . .

In the meantime, if you're playing at night, may HEAVY use of Covered Arcs - When I'm playing night battles, just about every unit on the board gets one. For Covered Arcs to help, though, you need to plan your movements so units aren't moving through the Covered Arc of another friendly, though, which can sometimes be tricky. I also tend to use "Move to Contact & Hide" alot - this seem to reduce the occurrence of units stopping and then opening up on the nearest moving friendly.

Cheers,

YD

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YD

Thanks for the tip! After having ordered a pioneer sq to clear an APM with DC at night and those idiots starts shooting behind them instead, killed two platons of my infantry plus shocked a SPW. :mad: I guess I will make use of your tip from now on.

Regards/

[ April 10, 2004, 06:25 PM: Message edited by: Sgt AA ]

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have only CMBO but I know the felling of night battles for sure ( I learned the hard way). TO avoid FF I have my troops ROTATE away from an advancing unit and it works (usually) however on one occasion I had A truck with a Limbered up 105mm rolling up to blast away my position however my MG42 (heavy) gunned down the Truck, I then Ordered a Volksgrenadier Squad to kill the 105 (lack of Judgement use th MG) as the Squad advanced my MG rotated onto the Volks.and gunned them down

P.S My MG was busy with some Royal Engineers come to Blast im away

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