arty bug repeated

[Treeburst155]

Originally posted by redwolf:

The only question should be if he can see the spotting rounds. If he can, then the barrage should land where the spotting rounds came down.

If he cannot see the spotting round, then the barrage should not start.

Agreed. This is also inline with Michael Emry's suggested arty behaviour change.

Rather than discuss arty "bugs" that can't be reproduced at will, I've decided to attempt to determine arty behaviour that CAN be reproduced.

Everything I've posted to this thread as a "FACT" is something I believe will happen every time. These facts will enable the player to more effectively use his arty.

In order to reduce the number of possibly bogus arty bug reports, someone should take up the task of writing an arty manual for CM to replace the unclear text in the real manual. I will do this. Hopefully I can finish it this weekend.

The difficulty will not be in writing the tiny manual, but in the extensive testing that should be performed BEFORE the manual is written. I'd hate to put out bad information.

[Haohmaru]

I don't have CMAK yet but I've seen some erratic behavior in CMBB. The worst thing is that if indirect fire is way off and you want to replot you have to wait another 5 minutes or whatever for the rounds to start falling since you can't adjust it. If the spotter is in LOS the rounds SHOULD strike the target, even if it has been broken, but I have seen it fall off many times. After all, that guy's got binoculars and a radio, he should be able to see what's going on and inform the battery of the necessary adjustment by himself right? Having to adjust fire ourselves introduces an unwanted level of micromanagement IMO, if a tank misses it's target we don't have to tell it where to shoot again, it will correct its aim by itself, the spotter should do the same. It ends up making the turn 1 fire plan so much more powerful because that will always be on target and you don't even need LOS.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Haohmaru:

After all, that guy's got binoculars and a radio, he should be able to see what's going on and inform the battery of the necessary adjustment by himself right? Having to adjust fire ourselves introduces an unwanted level of micromanagement IMO, if a tank misses it's target we don't have to tell it where to shoot again, it will correct its aim by itself, the spotter should do the same.

Yep. This is exactly my point. You could make how efficiently he brings the arty onto target somewhat a variable function of his experience level, but basically that's how it should work.

Michael

[Treeburst155]

I've just spent some more time with my arty test scenario, and it's really fairly simple. Smoke can NEVER be allowed to block your spotter's LOS during THE DELAY PERIOD, even briefly. If this happens it is the equivalent of your spotter losing communication with the battery. It's over. You'll have an off-target strike. You can try adjusting (replot the target point) after LOS clears; but you'll be lucky if the adjustment moves the strike on target. Odds are it will move the strike; but not accurately.

If smoke blocks spotter LOS AFTER the strike has begun landing successfully on target, you are still good to go. The rounds will land accurately, no matter how much smoke is blocking LOS.

It is very difficult to block a "green line" arty shift with smoke in a test because the delay period is less than a minute. The smoke would have to be fired in the previous turn, but late enough in it that the spotter still has LOS for his greenline adjustment in the orders phase. It's hard to time. So, smoke effects on a greenline adjustment have not been tested.

DUST does not affect arty strikes at all. It only prevents LOS to potential target points during the orders phase.

Smoke during delay periods is the problem people are having I think. A small puff of smoke, two minutes before the rounds are fired is enough to throw off the strike if it happened to interrupt continuous spotter LOS.

EDIT: BTW, spotting rounds can land several hundred meters off target and you will still get an accurate strike. I even had a spotting round land on a spotter once, 300 meters from the target point. Hehe...needless to say, that fire mission was cancelled.

[ December 13, 2003, 12:32 PM: Message edited by: Treeburst155 ]

[CMplayer]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

Again, I have a thought that is not precisely about the problem being discussed here, but I think is closely enough related to bring up in this thread.

I think it would be closer to reality if—when a spotting round for whatever reason drops out of sight of the FO—instead of dropping a FFE salvo immediately, the game would automatically drop another spotting round. Furthermore, it might be nice if there were a correction process even when the SRs do fall in sight. That is, they get progressively closer to the intended target until they are within some defined distance, say 100 meters or something like that. Then and only then would the FFE be fired.

For the serious arty grogs in the audience, does this sound approximately realistic, or is it too ideal?

Michael

The tac ops system works really well. There you choose whether you are calling in spotting rounds, or FFEs. Every time a spotting round or FFE lands in LOS of an observer, the accuracy level of the strike goes up (from 0-5) . You can choose to switch over to FFE whenever you wish. Also, you can convert the targetted point to a TRP at any time (and said TRP will have the current accuracy level )

Frankly, I don't see why CM can't view their project like academic research and apply the best results developed by others (in this case Major H) until such time as they come up with something better. As it is, it certainly is much worse.

[Treeburst155]

Yeah, you gotta love that TacOps.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

BTW, spotting rounds can land several hundred meters off target and you will still get an accurate strike.

Furthermore, it can even land completely out of sight from the FO. I had this happen when playing LoD. The spotting round landed at least 200m off-target and behind some woods, but less than a minute later the FFE came in right on target. In reality, the FO would have called for another spotting round. He could have called in a rough adjustment based on sound direction and ranging or could have seen something above the trees, so the next SR should have been closer to the target, but I think he would still have called for another SR.

Michael

[JasonC]

"It ends up making the turn 1 fire plan so much more powerful"

Well, that is actually quite realistic. Some of the complaints here sound justified, some frankly do not.

First on the idea that the FFE should not be fired unless the spotter sees the spotting round. The problem is sometimes fire out of LOS is intentional. E.g. when you are firing blind at the enemy side of a hill you can't see over. Accuracy is supposed to suffer, but you must still be able to force the battery to fire the mission.

"But it so rarely hits anything". If you try to micromanage each individual flight of shells onto a spotted infantry target, it may appear so. But that is not entirely realistic as a typical use of WW II arty. They often fired larger amounts of ammo, in wider patterns, at larger target areas. And just expected random occasional nearest rounds to do the damage.

Remember they had something like 10 times as many heavy shells as the enemy had men. They did not need each 105 shell to get 5 men. In CM, it is true this historical use is most effective with the biggest stuff, 150mm and up. Because lighter arty isn't available with enough rounds to make up for wide sheafs and still do much.

(In the real deal, cover effects against lighter arty were extreme, and units caught upright in the open could be badly hurt even by quite diffuse arty. Even a few mortar shells could mess up a whole platoon under the right circumstances. The effect of just going prone against arty shrapnel is like a factor of 10 in overall exposure. In CM only the big stuff hurts far enough away to see diffuse arty effectiveness).

Map fire as planned fire was even more common. Meaning in game terms, you plan to assault woods A around minute 10, so arty works it over turns 6-9. If there is nothing there (or your rounds persuade whoever is to back out), you don't worry that you wasted your arty, you just are glad you got woods A without serious fighting.

But called fire missions routinely missed by 200m, sometimes by 400m. A target 400m from friendlies was considered "danger close". Players seem to be implicitly measuring the error from the spotter's location, but the accuracy is really driven by the whole range from gun to target. Which was typically around 3 to 5 miles. A 200m miss is ~3% of the distance from battery to target. And shot to shot variation in range could be spread that wide.

A typical CM fire mission has a single battery of 4 guns fire ~3 rounds apiece at a target the size of a platoon or less. In the real deal, a typical fire mission had a whole battalion of guns fire 5 to 15 rounds apiece at a target the size of a battalion or company. They put a much wider, but less "saturated" beaten zone over a larger target. Doing less to each man within the zone but putting more men within it, more reliably.

I don't like the MM of retargeting. I don't think momentary smoke should automatically make the strike miss, though if it forced an adjustment delay (an extra half minute to minute) that would be fine and realistic.

The easiest way to deal with both, though, for me, would just be some sort of indicator that the FO was firing an out of LOS strike. Like a red dot next to the delay time, or those numbers printed in red. Then if I am deliberately firing out of LOS I see it but don't react. If I thought I had an observed strike but actually dust made in unobserved when first placed, I'd see it later in the barrage count down even if I missed it initially. If smoke intervened then cleared, I'd have a red time to fire and would know I must adjust. Then I'd see white numbers (with extra delay) the following turn, and all would be fine.

[Haohmaru]

Interesting observations about smoke causing all these problems. I am very curious to know then whether this could be a problem when you are firing smoke rounds? Is it possible that your own smoke shell spotter round could block your LOS thereby screwing up the accuracy of the barrage? It would be a pretty rare occurence but if you are using the large calibre stuff I imagine it could happen.