if 10% of the troops cause 90% of the casualties, then . . .

[yapma]

assuming this premise is accurate, wouldn't it make for more realistic play if there was greater disparity amongst squad qualities in scenarios.

i think it would improve the game if most scenarios involved troops ranging in quality from green to elite.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by yapma:

assuming this premise is accurate,

Before we assume that, could you tell us where this premise comes from?

Originally posted by yapma:

wouldn't it make for more realistic play if there was greater disparity amongst squad qualities in scenarios.

I doubt it. It is already possible to see very pronounced "lucky Alphonse" effects, and these are visible even in simulations where the quality of the troops is identical (or, in non-CM simulations, maybe not modelled). This is due not only to the natural variation arising from the ineluctable stochasticity of the universe, but the fact that some vehicles or sections just happen to be placed in a magical spot where they get plenty of favourable firing opportunities.

All the best,

John.

[Grisha]

John,

He may be referring to the work done by SLA Marshall on the combat performance of US troops in Korea and Vietnam.

[Ted]

There is something called the “Paredo Principle” or the twenty - eighty principle.

This holds that 20% of your men should cause 80% of the casualties.

It can be used in all sorts of ways.

In 20% of your time you will get 80% of your work done.

20% of your salesman will sell 80% of your product.

20% of your employees will give you 80% of your headaches.

20% of the people will get 80% of the tax breaks.

It has something to do with an Italian guy, Paredo, from like the 18th century who did a study and found out that 20% of the people owned 80% of the property.

Sometimes it’s surprising just how well it works.

[SgtMuhammed]

I found, in three years of simulated combat as part of the OPFOR that there are three types of vehicle crews. There are the Killers who will aggressivly engage the enemy and will make or break your unit, the support guys who can be counted on to not screw up too badly but don't expect wonders, and the riders who couldn't spot a tank if it rammed them. This breakdown seems to work for pretty much any military organization.

Often we would come back from a mission with a platoon total of 20 to 25 kills, 16 to 20 of which would have been made by two guys. (Yes I was one of the killers 120 Bradleys, 7 M1's, and 150 APCs and Humvees all computer confirmed)

The problem, of course, is if those guys get taken out or are not available then the performance of the platoon takes a nose dive. This is often true in the rest of life if you think about it.

The point is that even in units with the same amount of training and experience you will have widely varied performances. Some people are just plain lucky or unlucky. The quality levels don't reflect the number of kills the individual soldiers have recorded but rather their training, experience, and general moral. Every soldier in an elite squad isn't Rambo nor is every soldier in a conscript unit Beetle Bailey.

[ March 03, 2003, 09:26 AM: Message edited by: sGTGoody ]

[Andreas]

Here is is:

Pareto Principle

With picture.

There is another thing called 'Pareto Optimum' in economics, which is the state of affairs where you can not make anyone better off without making somebody else worse off.

[Other Means]

first time i've heard about it being a general rule.

in programming 80% of the work is done by 20% of the code, as the rest is there to catch outliers.

i find that i get similar results in CMBB anyway. as John said, it's being in the right place at the right time. therefore introducing it as a variable the player can see doesn't seem to be right. i think maybe there is already a "holds under fire" kind of variable that is set randomly and acts in concert with the green -> veteran status. at least, that seems to me to explain some behaviour i've observed.

of course, this just could be that i don't know infantry tactics properly yet.

sorry, what's OPFOR?

[ March 03, 2003, 09:36 AM: Message edited by: Other Means ]

[MikeyD]

Don't assume this isn't going on in CMBB too. I've gone back after a scenario was finished and checked over my troops. I'd often see the prized hmg I had so carefully positioned only got three confirmed kills while a lowly squad I had barely notice during gameplay racked up forty or more!

I recall someone in a previous thread wished there was a window to award medals for meritorious service to certain deserving units. Some units do indeed see more action than others.

--

OPFOR is one of those messy military semi-acronyms, meaning - I think - opposing force? Combat training using real world tactics in the real world against a real enemy... except nobody gets shot thru the middle.

[ March 03, 2003, 09:42 AM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[SgtMuhammed]

OPFOR (OPposing FORces) the U.S. Army's resident badguys. We're the guys the rest of the army comes to train and lose against.

One thing you will find is that your heavy weapons tend to drive the enemy into your lesser systems. Plus you have to remember that your machine gun is one shooter and is an area suppression weapon. A squad is usually half a dozen or more shooters trying to hit specific targets. With a few notable exceptions it usually works out this way which is why machine guns are not nearly as effective if they are by themselves.

[MikeyD]

I'm fascinated by the concept of an OPFOR guy also being into CMBB. Talk about a bus man's holiday! That'd be like me leaving work every day and spending all night sitting typing at the compu... oh yeh, that's what I do.

[Other Means]

wow! like Top Gun?

seriously, that sounds like a hell of a job.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Other Means:

[snips] i find that i get similar results in CMBB anyway. as John said, it's being in the right place at the right time. therefore introducing it as a variable the player can see doesn't seem to be right. i think maybe there is already a "holds under fire" kind of variable that is set randomly and acts in concert with the green -> veteran status. at least, that seems to me to explain some behaviour i've observed.

of course, this just could be that i don't know infantry tactics properly yet.

I don't think you need worry about your infantry tactics on that score. I don't see any reason to believe that there is a "hidden variable" at work in CM, either; the "Lucky Alphonse" effect works in other simulations, too, where the shooters are known to be statistically identical.

Some of Dave Rowlands' work for the historical analysis section of DERA found that the number of casualties attributed to MGs could be fitted quite well to a negative-exponential curve -- roughly, most MGs score a small number of kills, some get a middling number, and a very few rack up huge scores.

On the other hand, for those who prefer divide the population into different bins, some of his work on anti-tank gunnery identified the existence of a very few very high-scoring crews, tending to confirm the observation about tank crews being divided into killers, competent and stumblebums. As I don't have the relevant paper to hand I can't tell whether his observations would have been equally well explained by the appropriate random variation.

All the best,

John.

[CombinedArms]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

Don't assume this isn't going on in CMBB too. I've gone back after a scenario was finished and checked over my troops. I'd often see the prized hmg I had so carefully positioned only got three confirmed kills while a lowly squad I had barely notice during gameplay racked up forty or more! [snip]

Very interesting thread. I love the Pareto principle.

And I've had exactly the same experience as MikeyD. It can happen easily in an attack--the well positioned MG achieves heavy suppression but doesn't actually kill too many guys. A handy tank breaks several enemy squads but only kills a few. Some mortar fire breaks the enemy further. A couple of other squads from the platoon keeps the enemy heads down. And the one squad you sent to lead the assault hits the enemy position with everyone suppressed or broken and racks up a high kill total (often losing just a couple of guys along the way). This doesn't mean the other units didn't do their jobs, just that that one squad was in the right position to score the kills.

[ March 03, 2003, 12:15 PM: Message edited by: CombinedArms ]

[engima2003]

yo sgt can anyone play thge opfor or is it like a select group?

[MikeyD]

Anyone can play, as long as they're an American citizen (or from a Protectorate), have a high School Diploma, and are willing to spend at least 2 years of their life dressed in camou and eating in cafeterias.

[Other Means]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

[snip]

I don't see any reason to believe that there is a "hidden variable" at work in CM, either; the "Lucky Alphonse" effect works in other simulations, too, where the shooters are known to be statistically identical.

[snip]

yes, i agree. however i'd strayed to the other side of the argument with my

i think maybe there is already a "holds under fire" kind of variable

at that point i was thinking in terms of the defender. i've seen squads take an amazing amount of fire without breaking, while squads with the same experiance broke straight away.

on further reflection, i don't see any reason why the squads laying fire on them could not all have "missed". this would seem consistent with real life.

[White Phosphorus]

This happens in CMBB already. I like to check the kills after every battle. And I noticed that often times an individual squad from the same platoon in the same ambush position firing at pretty much the same enemy will score 2x 3x 4x and even 5x as many kills then the other squads that were right next to them the entire time.

Same thing with tanks. In one scenario with the Nash horns on a ridge, I swarmed them with T-34s. And one tank took out all 3 of them, then scored 46 enemy casualties and a mortar. The next best tank had something like 16 casualties under his belt. All tanks were running around in a big mob.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Other Means:

[snips]yes, i agree. however i'd strayed to the other side of the argument with my

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />i think maybe there is already a "holds under fire" kind of variable

at that point i was thinking in terms of the defender. i've seen squads take an amazing amount of fire without breaking, while squads with the same experiance broke straight away.

on further reflection, i don't see any reason why the squads laying fire on them could not all have "missed". this would seem consistent with real life. </font>

[Other Means]

dammit John, keep still so i can agree with you.

[flamingknives]

I know I've seen squads end up 'in the right place' and do rather well.

In one QB Vs. the AI, I had a green Romanian squad in a building rack up a 60 to 1 kill ratio - Rambo eat your heart out.

I've also seen tanks miss a 70% hit chance shot 4 times in a row, so I think that this angle is fairly well covered.

Bear in mind that some of the skill of the "high-scoring" units is being in the right place at the right time. Our little pixellated soldiers have to rely on us for that.

[yapma]

actually, the quote is a very loose one, but the gist is accurate. some time ago i read it some general talking about kill tallies from wargames conducted by the U.S. army.

i think the reality is is that the vast majority of troops spend their energy on the battlefield avoiding getting shot, and a small minority spend their energy trying to kill people. i dont have a real good source, but i think SLA Marshall did write something similar.

and i dont think this is indicated by the disparities in kills between squads at the end of the battle. that seems to be much more being in the right place at the right time.

so, to reiterate, would a cmbb battle be more like the real thing if the troops on each side varied widely in quality?

[SgtMuhammed]

What Marshal found was that out of a squad of 10 or 12 men only 2 or 3 would actually ever fire their weapons. This is modified for area weaponst that are usually directed to fire at areas rather than specific targets. What you find is that some soldiers are reluctant to shoot anything they are not sure they can hit, such as someone popping out from behind cover or a running soldier. Others will tend to spray bullets around at whatever may seem threatening, trees, bushes, people and will go through their ammo very quickly. Still others will freeze for one reason or another which may or may not have anything to do with common concepts of fear, morality, etc. Lastly you will have that group that is able to keep their heads and employ their weapons and their training effectively. Of course there are shades of in between all over the place such as soldiers who will fire their initial magazine but never reload or soldiers who will reload but never fire, and a million different things in between.

One of the big findings was that soldiers still clung to the socirtal convictions against the taking of another human life. While conciously wanting to engage the enemy the mind will think up a thousand reasons why not to pull the trigger. This is why the U.S. Army went to pop up targets for gunnery training, to instill in its soldiers a target reflex, you see something pop up you shoot. This greatly increased the number of actual shooters in Vietnam and I would suspect in the Gulf although I haven't really seen any figures.

So what does all this rambling have to do with the question? What one tends to find is that the distribution of shooters tends to even itself out. Every squad seems to find a couple people that it can rely on. Interestinly these are not always the same people. You almost never find an entire squad of shooters or of non-shooters. The quality levels in the game reflect how the squad performs as a whole rather than the presense or lack of any individual killers. It is very possible, and even the norm, for a squad to perform its job well and still only have a couple men in position to effectivly engage the enemy, the quality levels reflect this. Looking at a CMBB battle we see that the squad is credited with X number of casualties caused rather than soldier X is credited with those casualties. So while there may be vast differences in individual performances the whole squad still needs to work as a team to achieve the mission. Even a great shooter with no backup is going to get killed.

Notes about being OPFOR:

How to become OPFORE:

Join the Army. Request infantry, armor, or cav (OPFOR tends to be rather short of engineers or arty they are usually just simulated). Request to be assigned to 1st Battalion 4th Infantry Regiment in Hohenfels, Germany, or 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Ft. Irwin, California. Make it through Basic and AIT (not a real challenge these days sadly). Be prepared to spend the next 2 or 3 years of your life in the field or repairing tracked vehicles.

Good things about OPFOR:

When you go to the field you know you are going to get in a fight (which is the funnest thing about army training). In a regular unit you will often go to the field for months at a time just to sleep in the dirt.

You nearly always win. You are fighting over the same piece of ground over and over (I didn't use a map after my first six months in "the Box" [the manuever area]) and you don't have to worry about things like supply, casualty evacuation, or doing things the "right" way (BLUEFOR {the good guys} is graded on everything they do during a fight, even how they load their vehicles).

When a battle is over you get to go home (at least in Hohenfels, at Irwin (NTC) they stay in the field a lot longer because of the distances they have to travel (it is the size of Rhode Island). BLUEFOR has to stay in the box and be tactical even when there is no OPFOR around.

Things that stink:

Vehicle maintainance. You are constantly doing back breaking work to keep your 40 year old equipment running. Plus you have to do most of the work yourself because an OPFOR company has three times the vehicles as a regular army unit but only the same number of mechanics. Anything that breaks has to be fixed before you go home because there is usually another mission the next day.

Little time off. The NTC guys have the better deal here because they have more troops but not much better. You work, holidays, weekends, day, night, in bad weather and good. Once a rotation ends for BLUEFOR they go home and do normal Army stuff for several months. For the OPFOR you go back into th field to fight the next unit. I have worked for 75 days at a stretch with no days off during heavy rotational periods.

OPFOR is, at the same time, the funnest and worst job in the Army.

[Other Means]

i wonder if CMBB models the other factors that affect weapon firing chance.

i.e. if an automatic weapon is firing close to a squad, the chance of anyone firing increases. i imagine other factors would too, such as being under close assault.

-------------

thanks for the info on OPFORE sGTGoody. it sounds like the job most people here would love.

i've got 2 questions if you've got the time.

in case of war, what would your role be? i imagine you'd be very useful as advisors to normal regiments on what the enemy may or may not do.

also, what kind of vehicles do you use? do you get to go round in T80's etc?

cheers.

[CombinedArms]

I don't want to start a war or anything by bringing this up, but I read in some recent book (not sure which due to hazy memory, but it might be Doubler's Closing with the Enemy) an extensive critic of SLA Marshall's research and conclusions. The gist of the critique was that Marshall hadn't done all of the research and interviewing that he claimed to have done, and that his conclusions were a bit too extreme--i.e. that while there was surely truth in the suggestion that a smallish fraction of the soldiers did most of the real fighting, the claim that only 15% ever fired their weapons AT ALL is too extreme. One point made in the critique was that a VAST amount of ammo was fired by US soldiers and somebody had to be shooting it (even if just vaguely in the direction of the enemy.)

One might also look at the 6-1 or 8-1 kill ratios racked up by US soldiers on some of the Pacific islands vs. the Japanese. If only 15% were shooting, how did they kill all of those guys.

Anyway, CM covers this RL issue by giving bonuses for accuracy or firepower to troops with more exprience and by providing a firing bonus for HQs. I guess those HQs would be really paying attention to whether their troops were shooting, and shooting accurately.

[SgtMuhammed]

It is an interesting paradox. It has been estimated that it takes the expendature of tens of thousands of rounds to cause one casualty. So who is doing all that shooting. There is anecdotal evidence of troops feeding their extra magazines to the guys who were doing all the shooting. Then there are also accounts from earlier wars such as the recovery of thousands of rifles from Gettysburg and other battlefields that had never been fired but had been loaded several times.

One thing that several people have mentioned but that gets too little official notice is the right-place-right-time factor. You almost always end up with "sweet spots" on a battlefield. These spots just seem to give you an overwelmingly good position from which to engage the enemy. During one fight I was in I ended up flanking an attack into one of the mock towns here in Hohenfels. I must have killed nearly a platoon by myself and towards the end of the fight I was begging mags from the other guys in the building with me. The couldn't get the same angle because we didn't want to stuff a whole squad into one window. Conversly the area that the attacking unit occupied was a very bad spot. At the end of the fight I was out of rounds but most of the platoon still had plenty. Things like that happen all the time, with vehicles as well as individual troops. When all other factors are equal, luck often rules the battlefield. It often seems that such arbitrary things as luck have a huge effect on combat but are never officially recognized because they are impossible to predict.

The OPFOR at NTC uses M551 Sheridan's with fiberglass pannels bolted on them to simulate Russian equipment. Here in Hohenfels we use M113s as BMPs and M60's as T80's. No they don't look anything alike but they don't look like BLUEFOR either. We have several T62s and 55s as well as MTLBs and BTRs that are on display that we can crawl around in but nothing that we can drive around. At NTC they have a few actual Russian vehicles that the actually roll missions with. At JRTC (the light infantry version of NTC) they use actual HIND helecopters. I have climbed around on one but never flown in one (they are friggen huge).

During war time our mission was to continue to train the units befor they deploy. The army feels that the existance of the OPFOR as a training tool has greater benifits than breaking them up to provide any sort of subject matter experts. Remember, the majority of the OPFOR are just privates like anywhere else, they just get to do their job a lot more.