Gunners - defective short-term memory breed?

[PzKfw V Ausf G]

Scenario:

My Über-tank (KT, crack) is covering a road exiting a forest (Wood) ~1500m away (cover arc armour). A T-34/85 emerges and the KT targets it and shells starts flying. The T-34 does not fire back (due to bad optics?).

After 3-5 shots the KT scores the first hit and soon after that the T-34 is destroyed. So far, so good. Then another T-34 emerges in exactly the same spot, the story repeats itself once again. Believe it or not, another 4 tanks share the same destiny...

So what am I complaining about?

The number of shots fired before scoring a hit on each tank (after the first)! You would think that the gunner should be pretty confident hitting since neither the target nor the firing platform has changed position ("Hey Gunner! You are supposed to be of Crack STATUS, not ON crack" )

I realize it's almost impossible to implement a "range-memory" but it sure would be nice in situations like these.

How it ended? The KT ran out of AP and T-34 #7 showed up and decided that getting shelled with HE wasn't funny...

[narren2002]

BAAAA_HHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA....

AIROFL AT THAT..IT IS ALL TO TRUE.....

[Redwolf]

As far as I could figure so far:

the very restricted zeroing in in CMBO, which would drop back to base probablity on any movement or on ceasing fireing, has been extended in CMBB to work on an area, zeroing in for all targets in an area seem to work, that means you can shoot at one tank and then switch to a tank next to it and apparently get zeroing in.

However, it seems zeroing in is still lost when fire is ceased once, which is probably what you have seen here.

All results with statistically not meaningful numbers of tests, somehow I don't see why I am supposed to figure stuff out that belongs in the manual and that BFC can figure with one look into the source code...

[Battlefront.com]

PzKfw V

My Über-tank (KT, crack) is covering a road exiting a forest (Wood) ~1500m away (cover arc armour). A T-34/85 emerges and the KT targets it and shells starts flying. The T-34 does not fire back (due to bad optics?).

After 3-5 shots the KT scores the first hit and soon after that the T-34 is destroyed. So far, so good. Then another T-34 emerges in exactly the same spot, the story repeats itself once again. Believe it or not, another 4 tanks share the same destiny...

DAMN! I wish your übertank gunner was in the game I played this morning. A Crack StuG III G at 700m took out 5 out of my 9 T-34/85s within the first three turns and then another 2 a couple of turns later. Some were moving too! It was pretty much one shot one kill for each Fortunately I got a track hit and flanked it with my one surviving T-34 (an AT Gun got my other one). Boy did that ever suck

As is well know, there is no memory for units. This is unfortunately something that was impossible to add when we made CMBO due to the hardware of the day and the desire to have PBEM games that could be played with standard phone modems. Things changed since then but the engine could not support such a fundamental change, therefore we have to wait for the engine rewrite for this.

A gunner can "remember" range to target until he either loses contact or switches to another target. If motion is involved and LOS is lost for a couple of seconds the gunner will likely retain aim on the target and therefore not lose the range knowledge. One second too long and the targeting line will "break" and the info will be lost.

Sorry folks, as frustrating as it is there ain't nothing we can do about it until the engine rewrite.

Steve