QB's close to useless in North Africa.

[James Crowley]

Irrespective of the usual limitations associated with QB's, the map sizes available are simply too small, in most cases, to be meaningful for North African battles, especially armour-based ones.

A 1000pt battle yields, at maximum (huge), a maximum depth of around 1200m. Take away the set up zones, on average 500m, and you have forces 700m or less, apart at the start of the battle.

This could only represent the tail-end of an armour engagement, virtually point blank, robbing long range weaponry of any advantage and making manouever almost impossible.

Some battles, such as the demo Fruhlingswind, work well at a small scale but the sweeping armoured encounters of the Western desert will only be re-created by designers, which I feel is a bit of a shame.

At each iteration of CM, the faithful old QB becomes ever more redundant, so it seems.

[Michael Emrys]

Is it possible to import a map from the scenario editor to the QBMaps folder? I'm thinking that the map that Rune created for the Sidi Rezegh scenarios is big enough for anything just about.

Michael

[James Crowley]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

Is it possible to import a map from the scenario editor to the QBMaps folder? I'm thinking that the map that Rune created for the Sidi Rezegh scenarios is big enough for anything just about.

Michael

Yes, that seems the only solution.

I intend to create a whole load of appropriately sized maps in the editor and then load them at random when playing desert battles. Should work in most cases.

Having said that, I could never understand why the QB generator couldn't have been tweaked to produce deeper, less wide maps. With about 800pts and above the map is usually wider than it is deep and looks out of proportion.

[Redwolf]

We should also set up a community of people who put together quickbattle-like games for a pair of players.

Example uses:

- set up game with large enough map

- set up game without arty limit

- set up game with more ammo than normally given by CM (e.g. if you want to play a lot more turns)

- set up game with reinforcements

- set up game with forces not selected by player but not as half-track-on-defense infected as the automatic selector

- make sure you get the weather and ground conditions you want (I assume you can still get damp ground in good weather in the QB mechanism )

[John Osborne]

Hope you guys don't mine me jumping in on this. But what is the appropriate map sizes for differnt battles? ie Meeting Engagement, Assault, Probe.

Also on map contours, what is the prefer use of elevation on a map? 1.25m, 2.5n, or 5m

John

[Monty]

I also discovered the small maps made with the QB generator.

Yesterday, i made a 2km x 2km map with the scenario editor and used it for a QB

I was in the mood to kill some tanks with the 88 FLAK and the Tiger.

I had 2x 88 FLAK and 2 Tigers (medium)

At 1600 meters they engaged British tanks, but they did a POOR job in hitting them, i was a bit disappointed. ( 1 hit in 4 turns blazing away )

Ok,i thought, i throw in elite flak/tigers.

But still, they performed "bad" ( 2 hits in 4 turns, they had plenty of targets btw )

I always thought 88 flak and tigers were used on this distances with good result.

Should i have waited till the enemy tanks were closer? But then the flak guns were knocked out allready i think.

Monty

[atiff]

Not hitting at that range can be due to many factors; target speed, dust/haze, and others.

I think you might be fairly safe to hold fire until about 1 km, esp if they only have 2-pdrs to fire back with.

[Jim Boggs]

I haven't tried this in CMAK, but in CMBB you could generate larger maps by increasing the point totals.

You can use a 10,000 point map, but agree beforehand to limit your purchases to 1,000 or 1,500 points or whatever.

All it takes is a trustworthy opponent.

P. S.- Let me know if you find one!

[Lou2000]

I have to agree with Mr Crowley regarding map size.

Especially in QB's with the potential for high amounts of armour. For me the current size is fine for Inf/Mech, but the force separation is a little small for Pure Armour / Armour / Unrestricted battles.

Perhaps the map size should vary not only on the points value of the game, but also on the force selection criteria:

A huge map with Pure Armour / Armour producing a larger map than Infantry / Mech. Unrestricted also giving the larger map, due to the increased chance of players picking large amounts of armour.

As this won't/can't be changed then I'll just generate some suitably large maps and save them for use in armour based QB's.

Its mildly annoying ... but nowhere near a game killer !

Lou2000

[Michael Emrys]

I might also want to have larger maps in the case of armor attacking infantry with ATGs in order to try to find a week flank to attack.

Michael

[securityguard]

Trying making your own map - it's pretty easy to do, or import a scenario map and delete all the units.

To be honest, desert QB's are only fun when you have less amount of points. With random casualties, I tend to play with 600 - 800 points on attacks. It depends on how big the map is i'm playing on. A good setup is combined arms (defender) vs mechanized attacker, the battles get close. The bigger the map gets, the higher # of points you play. 800 seemed good on a medium sized map with plenty of terrain variation in elevation. If I want armor to play a larger roll I just increase the height/width of the map and add more points.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Jim Boggs:

I haven't tried this in CMAK, but in CMBB you could generate larger maps by increasing the point totals.

You can use a 10,000 point map, but agree beforehand to limit your purchases to 1,000 or 1,500 points or whatever.

That's what I used all along with the right opponents.

Besides a larger map you get a more victory flags, so you are actually fighting to seize the terrain. For my taste the normal flag ratio is insufficient and leads to gameyness about knockout points.

So for me this trick is double-good.

[ex PFC Wintergreen]

Originally posted by atiff:

Not hitting at that range can be due to many factors; target speed, dust/haze, and others.

I think you might be fairly safe to hold fire until about 1 km, esp if they only have 2-pdrs to fire back with.

Well, in one of the scenarios, I had three 88's that had the same rate of success at 300-400m, i.e. it seemed that they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. I understand the effects of smoke and dust, etc but it appears to me that something very fundamental has been changed in the game engine. I'm very surprised that this hasn't received more discussion on these boards.

[Michael Emrys]

It's always seemed to me that guns (and other types of projectile weapons such as 'zooks) have great difficulty hitting moving targets, especially those on a crossing course. This is due to the game engine being unable to calculate lead, so guns fire directly at the target which means that by the time the projectile arrives at the target location, the targetted unit ain't there anymore. It even happens if the target is moving infantry, although if the shell has enough blast value, it can still do some damage.

Obviously, the faster the target and the longer the flight time, the greater the miss.

Michael

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Michael, I agree that the game engine doesn't alow for leading the target when firing H.E. but when firing AP at an AFV it definitely does as otherwise, how would it ever hit? Mind you, there is still a fair amount of abstraction going on even then as I'm sure you've seen numerous times an AFV being hit "moments" after it's already disappeared behind a building or some other structure and theoretically out of LOS.

Regards

Jim R.

[MrSpkr]

I'm getting the same problem in the FlakFront! scenario. My eight 88mm guns, all under influence of a leader with combat bonuses, fired hundreds of shells at targets ranging from 700m to 1500m for about 14 turns. The result? Five dead British tanks.

That is the "feared 88"? My 50mm AT gun did better than that.

Sorry, but something about this just feels wrong. Maybe the numbers crunch the way they are supposed to, but the 88 just isn't working the way I expected from reading about it.

Perhaps the adjustment for accuracy is too low? Perhaps the penalty for firing in high heat is too high (one would think that after a few months of war, adjusting for the heat would be second nature for these gunners).

I don't know what the issue is, but I just don't like the way it feels. The 88 appears far too inaccurate until you get to ranges of about 400-500m. The problem is, the 88 has such a big sillouhette that by the time the enemy gets that close, your 88s are dead meat.

Please fix or do somefink!

Steve

[Redwolf]

The problem is that the zeroing in of CM guns is limited to a very tiny bit of target area.

In CMBO it would only work when the target was not moving at all, in CMBB they introduced an area. However, the area is very small, probably like a TRP. Even a slow tank leaves this area in short time so that zeroing in starts from scratch, the gun is back to first-shot hit pobability for every shot.

The TRPs do increase anti-armor hit probability but the area is much too small to be useful for anything. You couldn't even use it in CMBB, and now it's even worse.

Pillboxes with guns are always boresighted (which opens the question why defensive 88s are not) but since concrete bunkers can be killed with a 90% chance by a 20mm scout car in one turn (see my other thread) that isn't too useful either.

A partial solution would be to always give elite guns and 200-300 TRPs.

[MrSpkr]

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In my situation, the 88s could not have been boresighted, as they arrived as reinforcemnts throughout the game. However, there is no way I could recreate the historical action represented -- nor do I think 88s are particularly dangerous at range in CMAK, based on the performance issues I faced.

The highest hit percentage I got at ranges of 800m-1300m was 11%. This was with a veteran crew continuing to fire at teh same target.

Steve

[Redwolf]

Yes, but in reality these 11% would raise quickly when firing at the same tank or group of tanks multiple times.

In CMBB and CMAK that only happens when the tank is completely standing (CMBO) or moving very little (CMBB and CMAK). A normally advancing medium tank in CM is fast enough to get out of the zeroed in area between every shot so that the shooter starts from scratch every time.

Not to speak of the fact that anecdotical evidence suggests that the 11% might be too low to start from and/or that the zeroing in curve CM assumes (last time I checked it was just like the probablity addition) might be too flat. Real-life accounts of gunners generally give a low first-hit probablity but declare (depending on source) the second or third shot to be pretty secure.

Even if you zero in in CM (which you usually don't for a moving tank because of the too small affected area), then the 11% would raise to 21% and 29% on second and third shot, where anectodes would indicate higher chances at least for the third shot of a high-quality gun. Making the curve exponential might be more realistic (but would require a bigger area first to be effective).

As it is, the historical results cannot be achieved.

[ December 13, 2003, 10:06 AM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[MrSpkr]

Originally posted by redwolf:

Yes, but in reality these 11% would raise quickly when firing at the same tank or group of tanks multiple times.

Real-life accounts of gunners generally give a low first-hit probablity but declare (depending on source) the second or third shot to be pretty secure.

Even if you zero in in CM (which you usually don't for a moving tank because of the too small affected area), then the 11% would raise to 21% and 29% on second and third shot, where anectodes would indicate higher chances at least for the third shot of a high-quality gun.

And that increased chance to hit is exactly what I would expect, given the stories about the 88 (in particular). I never noticed this problem in CMBO or CMAK because, quite frankly, I don't recall too many maps big and flat enough for one to take multiple shots at 1000m or more. In CMAK, those flat desert maps make such opportunities a much more common occurance.

Perhaps an additional bonus, with some sort of ceiling, should be added to the "to hit" chances of guns with high-quality optics so long as they continue to fire at the same target and so long as it continues to move in the same general direction and at the same general speed as it has over the previous minute. That would make long range shots for these monsters much more doable, and would make the 88 a feared weapon once more.

Steve

[JasonC]

Entire batteries of 88s fought actions against battalions of tanks at ranges up to several km that lasted for hours. Tanks on the receiving end drove away from these engagements. They are not laser cannons.

To be effective, an 88 needs to get kills beyond range of reply. It does not need to kill with every round, because it had scores of rounds. The initial hit chance is low at long range and that is correct. But it rises rapidly for stationary targets.

This means any tank that stops within range of 88s can be killed rapidly. If they don't stop, they remain hard to hit. If they charge, they will get progressively easier to hit as the range drops, and are quite unlikely to survive the whole run-in. Just moving by 88s at range, never stopping or getting close, should not lead to automatic slaughter and doesn't.

What is less under player control than it might be is target selection and fire discipline. You can set arcs and thus choose the range. You can't tell the gun e.g. to not fire unless a target halts. What players need to do is regulate their ammo expenditure at various ranges and hit chances.

You can sometimes afford to toss half your ammo at long range for the 3-5 hits it may bring. That is useful. The enemy does not need to be slaughtered to a man to be persuaded to move. If you don't get killed yourself because he never got close, you just do it again tomorrow.

There were thousands of these weapons fielded in the course of the war. They did not each kill 10 tanks per engagement every day for years. If they did, they would have killed every enemy tank hundreds of times over. In fact, it is unlikely the average towed 88 (of those used direct, i.e. not vs. aircraft) killed 10 tanks over its entire service life, even under good conditions for their use.

Under poor conditions it was more like one half. Gerob's Normandy OOB gives some reports from III Flak Korps in Normandy, which used about 160 88s (including ~50 received during that fight). Most were used for air defense and this was not open desert, of course. They got a half a tank each on average. (The whole formation claimed 92 tanks, but 12 were by faust). Units specifically sent forward for direct fire during Goodwood lost 35 88s and claimed 20 tanks. His source was Wolfgang Pickert, the formation commander, who wrote a unit history for the corps.

[ December 13, 2003, 01:36 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[MrSpkr]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Entire batteries of 88s fought actions against battalions of tanks at ranges up to several km that lasted for hours. Tanks on the receiving end drove away from these engagements. They are not laser cannons.

Noone is saying they should be "laser cannons", Jason, but we are saying their to-hit chances are particularly low.

Also, we are talking about ranges from 900m to 1800m, rather than "several kilometers". I should think these are well within an 88mm gun's effective range.

To be effective, an 88 needs to get kills beyond range of reply. It does not need to kill with every round, because it had scores of rounds.

That is true of ANY weapon. The problem is, the 88 had a reputation for scoring hits at long range. In the game, it doesn't.

The initial hit chance is low at long range and that is correct. But it rises rapidly for stationary targets.

Umm, no, it does not -- at least, not significantly so. In the Flakfront! scenario, for example :

SPOILERS BELOW IN ITALICS!!!

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one of my 88s engaged an immobilized Lee at 1500m. The veteran 88 (under the command of a double combat bonus HQ) fired 37(!) rounds at the enemy Lee over the course of several turns. It did not score a single hit (the immobilization appears to have been caused by the terrain).

Another group of 88s engaged some British tanks (Crusaders, I think) that had stopped to trade shells over the course of twelve turns! The brits did not hit me much one gun knocked out by these guys) -- but the 88s did not score one single hit at 1900m. Collectively, they fired over 100 shells at this group.

Occasionally, they lost LOS due to dust from units in front of the British tank platoon. However, when the 88s re-engaged, they lost all cumulative targeting bonuses.

More on that in a moment.

Sorry, but that seems unrealistic to me. And, unfortunately, it is representative of the experiences I am having with these guns in CM.

This means any tank that stops within range of 88s can be killed rapidly.

See the above. One would hope what you say is accurate, but it ain't.

If they don't stop, they remain hard to hit. If they charge, they will get progressively easier to hit as the range drops, and are quite unlikely to survive the whole run-in. Just moving by 88s at range, never stopping or getting close, should not lead to automatic slaughter and doesn't.

Again, no-one is saying "automatic slaughter" except you. We are saying the incidence of hits at range seem artificailly low. In addition, the game does not seem to differentiate between a target moving in a single direction at a uniform speed and one that is actively "juking" to make itself a more difficult target. A truck on the highway, travelling at a uniform speed in a uniform direction, should not be that difficult to hit at 1200m once you have found your range depending, of course, on the angle of attack).

What is less under player control than it might be is target selection and fire discipline. You can set arcs and thus choose the range. You can't tell the gun e.g. to not fire unless a target halts. What players need to do is regulate their ammo expenditure at various ranges and hit chances.

Agreed, to some extent. Part of the problem, too, with dust is the tendency for the gun to break off firing at one target when dust interferes with LOS. The gun momentarily seeks a different target, resetting all the targetting bonuses, then switches back to the original target at a much lowered chance of success. In other words, the gun crews, even if told what to target, seem overly anxious to break off that target and seek a new one, even if visibility is impacted for only a moment. That seems unrealistic and is a partial cause of the lower than likely chances to hit, cumulatively, over time.

Covered arcs don't work well for two reasons. First, if you have a very narrow covered arc (to single out one or two vehicles at range), then it doesn't take much for those vehicles to move out of the arc. Your gun then sits, useless, for the rest of the turn.

If, however, you make the covered arc too big, then you run into problem number two: your gun tends to want to switch targets rapidly, destroying any accumulated targeting bonuses.

You can sometimes afford to toss half your ammo at long range for the 3-5 hits it may bring. That is useful. The enemy does not need to be slaughtered to a man to be persuaded to move. If you don't get killed yourself because he never got close, you just do it again tomorrow.

The problem, and I am relating this to the Flakfront! scenario as it is a good example, is:

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that if you are facing a large number of enemy tanks, they can easily overwhelm you AT RANGE through massed fire.

If the results I am seeing are historically accurate, then the surviving members of the British, New Zealand, Australian and South African armored units that fought in and around Gazala should be rounded up and shot, as should any of their progeny, just to cleanse the gene pool of anyone so pointlessly stupid. If real life worked like CMAK, they should have cleaned the German clocks when facing FLAK fronts. Just stand off at range and trade four of your shells for one 88 shell. Sure, neither of you have much chance to hit, but you are four times more likely to score on the large, ill-protected 88 gun crew (or the gun itself) before it can hit you.

Sorry, but I am disappointed in this. Again, it does not "feel" right. I don't have the physics background of some here, nor the ballistics research. I can only relate what I see in the game to what I have read in both scholarly accounts and oral histories.

There were thousands of these weapons fielded in the course of the war. They did not each kill 10 tanks per engagement every day for years. If they did, they would have killed every enemy tank hundreds of times over. In fact, it is unlikely the average towed 88 (of those used direct, i.e. not vs. aircraft) killed 10 tanks over its entire service life, even under good conditions for their use.

Of course -- and not every infantryman shot an enemy soldier. One would also not expect every 88 crew to be experts at long-range ground targeting. However, one would expect the ones we see in CMAK, particularly in the desert scenarios, to be a lot better at hitting the targets than these guys are.

Under poor conditions it was more like one half. Gerob's Normandy OOB gives some reports from III Flak Korps in Normandy, which used about 160 88s (including ~50 received during that fight). Most were used for air defense and this was not open desert, of course. They got a half a tank each on average. (The whole formation claimed 92 tanks, but 12 were by faust). Units specifically sent forward for direct fire during Goodwood lost 35 88s and claimed 20 tanks. His source was Wolfgang Pickert, the formation commander, who wrote a unit history for the corps.

Jason, I would expect that the 88 would not work as well in Normandy for the reason you denoted: it ain't the desert. An 88 in Normandy would be feared by armor because it would be highly accurate at the shorter ranges under which it operated, and it was very likely to get kills on the first hit. However, the abbreviated ranges would also make it likely that, in situations involving multiple tanks or tanks supported by infantry, the 88 would not survive the encounter for any great length of time. In those rare occasions in Normandy where the 88s had the same LOS ranges as North Africa, they posed a deadly threat to Allied vehicles (note the assaults in the Candian/British sectors on a large hill overlooking one of the British routes of advance. 88s on that hill were murderous in their dealings with Allied tankers)(sorry for being vague -- I recall the battle, but don't have my reference book handy).

Some examples of 88 deadliness at range:

</font>

• Halfaya Pass in summer 1941 was described as "impregnable" due to the emplaced 88s with long, sweeping LOS.</font>
• Auchinleck's attacks with the 23rd Armored Brigade at Ruweisat in July 1942, where the 88s killed dozens of Allied tanks at range</font>
• 29 May 1942, according to Col. R.M.P. Carver, a rearguard based on 88mm guns held the whole of the British 1AD at bay</font>
• Moorehead talks about the difficulties the British faced because the 88s had a longer range, were accurate, and the British had to run through a gauntlet of the 88s in order to bring the Germans within range of their own tank's guns</font>

Again -- noone is asking for GPS devices, TOT barrages, or laser rangefinders. However, given other game limitations -- rapid and dumb target seeking/switching with resultant loss of cumulative targeting bonuses, limited ammunition supplies, and the inability to effectively keep enemy armor out of range, something just doesn't feel right. It reminds me of the MGs problem in CMBO: it just doesn't smell right.

Steve

[ December 13, 2003, 03:33 PM: Message edited by: MrSpkr ]

[CMplayer]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

It's always seemed to me that guns (and other types of projectile weapons such as 'zooks) have great difficulty hitting moving targets, especially those on a crossing course. This is due to the game engine being unable to calculate lead, so guns fire directly at the target which means that by the time the projectile arrives at the target location, the targetted unit ain't there anymore.

This only applies when firing HE, not when firing AP at an armored target.

When firing at an armored target, the engine calculates a probability for a hit, then it just decides whether you hit or not. The time taken for the shell to arrive doesn't matter, and even if the target drives behind a LOF block, such as a building, then path of the shell will still be drawn to show a hit. There were a bunch of threads about this a while back. So you're misinterpreting what you're seeing.

You are right though, that when firing HE at a moving target, the tac AI fails to lead the target. The difference is probably that in this case the 'target' is actually a patch of ground, rather than a unit. So even if it gets a 'hit' on the right patch of ground, it misses the target which has moved away.

[Redwolf]

What I would like to see in CM is not much different from what we have.

I would like to see

1) a bigger area where boresighting is effective, both for TRPs and for the zeroing in gained on the fly. That would mean an assaulting tank would not have the gun aiming at it restarting from scratch every time it shoots (like it is now). This area would be much wider than deep. [NOTE: I don't say hit chances against a moving target in this area should be the same as against a standing target]

2) hit chance increase on subsequent shots should get an exponential factor. In effect, a tank getting shot at 3 susequent times while moving uniformly and not overly fast should be dead with a probability of around 80-90%, at a range which would be gun-dependent (not only initial projectile speed dependent).

3) just dreaming, to make good for TacAI screwups, the last or the two last boresighted areas should remain in memory. This is probably impossible to implement in the current engine.

Jason is right that hit probablity is gained on a standing tank, but not very quickly and lost too easily on a moving tank, even one that is moving moderately fast and in just one direction.

Right now it is like this:

- First shot: 11%

- Second shot while tank moved and got out of the boresighting zone: 11%

- Third shot: 11%

==> 29% chance to hit with any of these

If you had a big enough boresighted area and would carry the old advantage over to a new shot at the next location (using the formula which I found being used in previous CMs, but it's probably still true):

- First shot: 11%

- Second shot: 20%

- Third shot: 29%

==> 50% chance to hit with any of these

If you also applied an exponential factor to the raise of hit probability, in this example a factor of 1.5:

- First shot: 11%

- Second shot: 28%

- Third shot: 45%

==> 86% chance to hit with any of these

The last result would be very much in line with my readings, and that is without playing with the initial hit probablity at all.

There were a few tanks which are often noted that they are difficult to hit because they are so fast. Everbybody else shall be screwed if he moves around a gun area.

[ December 13, 2003, 03:37 PM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by CMplayer:

This only applies when firing HE, not when firing AP at an armored target. [...]

This is not quite correct. It is not the kind of ammunition you fire but the kind of target.

If the target is armored then target lead is taken care of, no matter whether you shoot HE or AP.

If the target is unarmored infantry, the gun never leads, no matter what ammo.

The famous CMBO bug that made the Flak halftracks (and jeeps) so hard to hit was that they were treated as unarmored units liked infantry and shootting guns did not lead their move. Since CMBB they are treated like armored vehicles and guns hit them just fine.