Rate of ammo expenditure in close combat

[Blah Blah Blah]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

Many times I've had to rope in a squad or MG that was wasting precious ammo on a target that was too far away and/or under sufficient cover that they might as well have been blowing soap bubbles at them, or at broken units fleeing off the board. Covered arcs can help here, but you may also need to key x to get them to un-target.

Michael

Whilst cover arcs help they are a pain to do for a battalion and a halve. They also can be detrimental in allowing an easy kill go by because it is out of the cover arc.

Speaking of a lot of management clicking, I had to buy a new Cordless Desktop to continue playing this game as the others mouse was smaller and I got hand and wrist cramps.

[JasonC]

Michael is right that fire that suppresses is still useful, and that MGs are good at delivering fire you need to keep up for long periods. One way I combined these tactically is a certain division of labor between fire meant to break or to establish pins initially, and fire meant to prevent rally or maintain pins.

In short hand, "breaking fire" and "pursuit fire". I use heavy HE - 75mm direct, on map mortars, FOs - and squad infantry fire by whole platoons massed on single targets, for the breaking fire portion of this. While MGs handle as much of the pursuit fire portion as possible.

The idea is to get something lasting, in the form of either men hit outright or a deep morale "break", whenever you spend the really effective and scarce forms of ammo. Use the more abundant but not terribly powerful forms of ammo to prevent rally and maintain suppression.

An MG firing alone at long range into cover will not do much more than momentarily "alerted"s, which snap back almost immediately. But if a unit is already pinned, they can keep it that way, because the extra suppression is piled on about as fast as the target can typically rally. It doesn't snap back so easily down in the morale "depths", either - not like "alerted" does.

In a pinch, you can use one high ammo LMG and rifle infantry squad in place of an MG. But you don't need a whole platoon, not against men already heads down. The heads up guys, the guys firing back at you - burn the ammo to hit those hard. Don't throw tons more at already pinned or broken men.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Blah Blah Blah:

Whilst cover arcs help they are a pain to do for a battalion and a halve. They also can be detrimental in allowing an easy kill go by because it is out of the cover arc.

Yes, which is why I am circumspect about setting cover arcs. I usually only do them in specific cases and usually only for limited periods of time. But they sure are great when you need them!

Michael

[Snow Leopard]

I had noticed when I play "Air Assult" battle in CMBB. I send two men anti-tank crew to flak site as MG34 firing at it to keep enemy crew's head down. With "20" ammo on hand Anti-tank crew fire away at 7 men Flak crew in blank-point 3m distance and all ammo gone in one min as no kill score. Good news is flak crew never get up for next 20 mins. As in near end game, I decide to send 10 men squad to flak site to help anti-tank crew, sudden that cause flak crew get up and run away as 10 men sqd get near to flak site. ...yeah, flak crew didn't made to safe. I wonder how can make them in "captured" even they didn't make any move for next 20 mins. I will check info how make enemy surrender without force kill them.

[Blah Blah Blah]

Originally posted by Snow Leopard:

I had noticed when I play "Air Assult" battle in CMBB. I send two men anti-tank crew to flak site as MG34 firing at it to keep enemy crew's head down. With "20" ammo on hand Anti-tank crew fire away at 7 men Flak crew in blank-point 3m distance and all ammo gone in one min as no kill score.

Yes this is very fustrating.

[Blah Blah Blah]

Am I correct to assume that when I have a squad of 10, with 6 weapons that can shoot 500 metres, that when they do target an enemy at that distance that I will also loose the ammo for the submachine guns also? Or is the ammo expenditure reduced as not all weapons can fire?

[guachi]

In this case, likely yes.

If I remember correctly, a unit can, at extreme ranges, use partial ammo points indicating only the LMG is firing.

You can do this manually as well by dividing up a squad. Then just fire the half with the LMG (or two). Read the manual for the drawbacks of doing such.

Jason

[TheCrow]

Recently playing axis, i am having problems in firefights against allied squads (specially attacking), my German troops waste their ammo too quickly, meanwhile allied squads can continue fighting long time, with considerable firepower.

The poor ammo load of german squads compare to allied one´s, is a big flaw to first, than could be exploited by intelligent allied players.

[YankeeDog]

Originally posted by TheCrow:

Recently playing axis, i am having problems in firefights against allied squads (specially attacking), my German troops waste their ammo too quickly, meanwhile allied squads can continue fighting long time, with considerable firepower.

The poor ammo load of german squads compare to allied one´s, is a big flaw to first, than could be exploited by intelligent allied players.

First, a diclaimer:

As previously stated on this thread and elsewhere, I have some issues with the current modeling of ammo load and consumption in CM. Briefly, I think that high-automatic weapons squads get unrealistically penalized twice; once in the ammo 'point' count, and then again in the 'point' consumption rate at close range.

With this said, it is not *entirely* unrealistic for German squad especially to be at a disadvantage when it comes to ammo staying power. German squads generally have fewer men, which mean less backs to hump extra ammo. In addition, the MG42, while an excellent weapon, derives most of it's superior firepower from a very high ROF and therefore high ammo consumption rate.

So Allied squads centered around Brens and BARs probably should be able to outlast, if not outshoot, German squads armed with MG42s, at least to a degree. Exactly how much so is a matter of debate.

Hopefully, the new engine will use a more complex model for squad ammo load, allowing the game to track things like squad LMG ammo usage separately from ammo usage for other weapons in the squad.

Also, I think that especially on the defense, ammo replenishment needs to be modeled to some degree. IRL, a squad in a well supplied defensive position could send a runner back to bring up more ammo if the supply started to run low. This is a difficult thing to model, since position and lines of communication are very important -- if there is interdicted open ground between the squad and the ammo resupply point, it shouldn't get resupply! From what I've read, though, in some situations it was quite possible for a squad to get some degree of ammo resupply within a 15-20 minute timeframe.

Ideally, ammo load modeling should also take into account sort of "Variable Encumbrance" and ammo sharing modeling. IRL, reserve or overwatch groups especially would sometimes be assigned additional ammo loads, either to ressupply other groups, or so that they themselves had more ammo to shoot off. At present, you can't distribute ammo from one infantry unit to another. Also, infantry units carrying additional ammo don't incur any kind of encumbrance penalty. Personally, I'd like to see "Overloaded" infantry team more often in CM, but see them realistically slowed down by their heavier packs.

Cheers,

YD

Cheers,

YD

[tar]

Well, I also wonder if the players who have problems with ammo expenditure are also giving specific target orders to their units? Giving a unit a specific target will increase the rate at which it fires, above what it would do if left to the TacAI to pick targets.

One should also remember that the increase in close combat ammo expenditure was a change made a fair time ago in order to correct another problem: NOT increasing rate of fire in close combat. That flaw made it too easy to storm automatic weapon units, specifically machine guns. In addition to increasing suppression in moving from CMBO, I recall BFC also bumping up the fire rate at close range.

[Joachim]

My tactics to conserve ammo:

There are 3 types of fire mission:

1) Killing/Breaking

2) Keeping up suppression (JasonC's pursuit)

3) Blocking movement

If a unit can not achieve any of that on enemy units, it will receive a covered arc to areas where it can achieve that should the enemy go there. The unit will probably go on hide.

If it is to block movement - it will receive a covered arc for that area.

If the enemy is in good cover and my ammo is wasted - a covered arc. Either a small one for self defence or one containing the enemy unit.

If the enemy is pinned - only one unit will actively target him or use a covered arc where only the pinned unit is in.

If it is close combat with isolated and pinned enemy units - advance or assault with overwatch. Overwatch should be out of grenade range! While advancing the unit fires less but the enemy is killed faster - usually when trying to flee. A strong enemy group rushing in will flush out a suppressed enemy (see above - the tank hunters were ignored by the AD crew, but a numerically superior and better armed squad rushing in did the job). Don't know the model, but I'd guess that the more suppression, the less men are needed to flush out cowering units.

This needs micromanagement, but I usually start with covered arcs anyway as most of my troops use MTC and covered arcs instead of move - occasional incoming doesn't hurt them so much. On the defence most of my troops hide with covered arcs. Using CTRL+click for a 180° arc the covered arc is almost as fast as targetting a unit.

Troops far away from the enemy usually don't suffer from heavy ammo consumption and those in close combat deserve some micro managament.

Missing an easy kill or two may be annoying - but having too little ammo in the end may be much worse.

Allied units may outlast German units in a 1:1 shootout. But the higher fp of the Germans allows them to break the Allies faster.

What I consider buggy is the higher fp of US rifles - if they are able to fire faster, they should be penalized by using up more ammo and having less rifle ammo.

Gruß

Joachim

[ April 27, 2004, 04:59 AM: Message edited by: Joachim ]

[guachi]

Originally posted by tar:

One should also remember that the increase in close combat ammo expenditure was a change made a fair time ago in order to correct another problem: NOT increasing rate of fire in close combat. That flaw made it too easy to storm automatic weapon units, specifically machine guns. In addition to increasing suppression in moving from CMBO, I recall BFC also bumping up the fire rate at close range.

Was this lack of increase only for squads?

While playing the beta demo scenario of Riesberg, I had a German MG42 HMG unit expend some insane amount of ammo points at about 40m - like 35-40 points in 60 seconds. We calculated that he would have been swimming in cartridges by the time he was done.

Jason

[Redwolf]

Well, I think previous threads established very well that CM SMG squads fire off their ammo faster than the real-life soldiers could.

In addition, the 3m range and no kill from SMGs is not uncommon. Granted, a crew might hide where they are not hid by the SMGs - but then those wouldn't fire off all their ammo in a single minute.

So I guess CM might be a little overconservative with ammo load and a few other items like the first-burst-less-lethal thing discussed on the T&T forum.

[tar]

the first-burst-less-lethal thing

Especially because in general it should work the other way around. I would expect the first burst (at effective ranges) to be more lethal, since after the first burst, the troops would be more cautious about using cover.

It is similar to the reason that multiple rocket launchers (Stalin's organ, Nebelwerfer) were such effective artillery units. The rounds would all strike at close to the same time, thus not giving the units in the barrage zone time to find cover. Artillery (physical) effectiveness drops off with time as infantry hunkers down in covered areas.