Reaction Times

[Pieter Soldaat]

Hello,

After a few tests, I live under the impression that the reactiontimes for gunners are not correctly modelled. Tanks (or infantery) suddenly appearing at full speed from behind a cover (being a row of houses or forest) and dashing for the next cover are often hit by enemy gun fire.

IMO this is not correct because the human operator of the gun has to react himself (1-2 sec, has to lay the gun, (even when the gun is allready pointing in the right direction (gun rotation is allready modelled)), and has to aim a distance in front of the moving target, which is difficult. All of these actions take a few seconds that should give a change to a fast moving target that is only shortly visible.

I wonder if anyone knows more on this subject and how it is modelled.

greets,

Pieter.

[MAUS_TD]

?????? a junior member #449 ?????????????????

[Michael Emrys]

He's a quiet, reserved sort of fellow, ain't he?

Michael

[Moon]

Originally posted by Pieter Soldaat:

Hello,

After a few tests, I live under the impression that the reactiontimes for gunners are not correctly modelled. Tanks (or infantery) suddenly appearing at full speed from behind a cover (being a row of houses or forest) and dashing for the next cover are often hit by enemy gun fire.

IMO this is not correct because the human operator of the gun has to react himself (1-2 sec, has to lay the gun, (even when the gun is allready pointing in the right direction (gun rotation is allready modelled)), and has to aim a distance in front of the moving target, which is difficult. All of these actions take a few seconds that should give a change to a fast moving target that is only shortly visible.

I wonder if anyone knows more on this subject and how it is modelled.

greets,

Pieter.

Don't forget that one squad in CM represents a dozen men or so. It's not like all of them completely disappear and completely appear within seconds.

The whole system of firepower values and unit small arms "bursts" is abstracted. The key is if that abstraction is genuine within itself and is producing realistic results (I think it is). Taking one element out of this and making it "more realistic" doesn't necessarily enhance the end result.

[Michael Emrys]

Well, Pieter, I have kind of the opposite problem sometimes. I see an MG or a squad fire off a burst at a distant target. Immediately afterward, some enemy troops emerge from cover and go marching stolidly across the field of fire. And what does the squad/MG do? Nothing. They've already filled that fraction of the turn and must wait for another to come around before they can fire again. Union rules, I guess...

Now, there may be a very good reason for this. It may be the best way that the program can model something that really happens. But it looks funny as hell to see them sitting there ignoring perfectly juicy targets and then finally snapping to just as the enemy reaches cover again.

Michael

[xerxes]

If the firing unit isn't "facing" the target they do have to rotate to fire. MGs do this more slowly than infantry and you can use it to dash across an open space. Works even better if you move a "target" to distract the enemy first.

Make sure you have EFOW on, you'll see the behavior of defenders not acquiring a target before it can make it across a clear patch.

[YankeeDog]

I think another part of the abstraction has to do with when exactly a gun crew would become aware of a tank or other target.

Example: A tank is out of LOS relative to an AT gun behind a stand of trees. At some point the tank decides to attempt to dash across an open space to another position behind a stand of trees a short distance away. IRL, an experienced and observant gun crew might well get some advance warning that the tank is about to come into the gun's field of fire - maybe a glimpse of movement through the trees, the sighting of an exhaust plume above the treetops, or a radio message relayed from a forward infantry observer.

So by the time the tank actually comes into the gun'ss field of fire, the gun crew has already roughly laid the gun into the approximate area where the tank will be appearing and most likely has an AP round in the chamber. In this type of situation, I suspect a decently trained gun crew could indeed get a good shot off at a tank within a couple of seconds of the tank appearing.

It's an abstraction, but for the most part, I think it works reasonably well. Of course, there are times when a target suddenly comes into a gun's field of fire, and the gun would have no reasonable way of knowing that the target was about to show itself. In these cases, I agree that that gun response time in the game probably is unrealistically fast. If gun response times were slowed too much, though, it might create the opposite problem, where fast moving vehicles could zip across fields of fire from defilade to defilade with virtual impunity since the guns wouldn't be able to react fast enough to target them (you can already to this to an extent if you have a fast enough vehicle).

I think there are a whole host of underlying engine issues, including the ubiquitous'borg' spotting, that would have to be changed in order to improve this abstraction, though. For now, I think the present system works reasonably well in most situations. Perhaps in the model rewrite we will see further refinement.

Cheers,

YD