Machine guns

[vbfg]

Hi Folks,

I'm a fairly new player to CM. I've had the game for about a month and a half and haven't played any PBEM games yet.

I've been setting up a few quick battles recently to experiment with a few things I'm not that familiar with. For example, I know about LOS but I don't know about how well troops can remain hidden in LOS, or while on the move, etc. I want to do this to figure out how well they can see me and how close I have to be before this happens.

Also I wanted to see how different kinds of individual units face off against each other in a straight head on fight so I know what to avoid in future and what I might be able to get away with.

One thing I've noticed (on a completely flat, no terrain features or trees 1km x 1km map) is that MGs aren't quite what I'd expect them to be. I wanted a massacre so I had five Stuarts lined up on one side of the map against an ordinary German rifle company. I ran one Stuart quickly past where I knew they were to uncover them. It was sacrificial but nothing hit it so I still had fifteen machine guns and 5 37mm all opening up on these enemy positions. I'd set it up as a meeting engagment so they wouldn't dig in.

Now I wished I'd hotseated the game so I could have seen clearly what kind of damage they were doing. I didn't do that as I'd normally do with an experiment because I expected the 'Eliminated' tags to start appearing in pretty short order. Five turns later my five crack Stuarts had eliminated one anti-tank team. By the time I'd decided my results were disappointing they'd closed to 200m and I was getting a few more 'Eliminated' tags. Again though, these *appeared* to be (I'm not sure) just two man AT teams.

Does this sound about right to you more experienced players? I'm no grog by any standard but from what I have read I had better expectations than this, especially from all those MGs against troops in the open.

It didn't matter much in the end, I had five 155mm VT FOs too. Like I said, I wanted a massacre. Got one too.

I'm going to do something similar tonight, perhaps advancing an the rifle squads of an infantry company into a dug-in weapons platoon. This time I'll hot seat and see what they're doing to each other.

[ June 24, 2002, 05:34 AM: Message edited by: vbfg ]

[Soddball]

No, MG's aren't modelled correctly. They target individual units. The problem is code-based and will be improved in the release of CMBB.

[athkatla]

Originally posted by Soddball:

No, MG's aren't modelled correctly. They target individual units. The problem is code-based and will be improved in the release of CMBB.

With all the new stuff I've been reading about CMBB it looks like it's going to be a whole lot better then CMBO, if that's possible!! :eek:

[Redwolf]

The actuall killing that MGs do to the targetted unit is not that bad. However, there are problems:

There is no burst fire mode to get more shots off in a turn when you really need it.

Infantry is too effective when moving in run mode, so it can wrestle the MG down in an unrealistic manner.

Only the targetted unit is affected, morale-wise. Only the one unit may break or take cover and stop moving. In reality the whole fire lane in front of an MG would go down, at least temporarily.

Especially the two latter points combined make MGs pretty weak.

But many people's expectations about MG casulties are far off, in my opinion. Against units with proper tactics, using cover and leapfrogging they are not WW1 walk-in massacre units anymore.

In the case of the Stuart there are more effects, amoung them that vehicles with more than one MG make very bad use of any other than the coax MG and that most vehicle MGs count as something between light and heavy MGs in CMBO.

[Pak40]

Originally posted by vbfg:

Hi Folks,

By the time I'd decided my results were disappointing they'd closed to 200m and I was getting a few more 'Eliminated' tags. Again though, these *appeared* to be (I'm not sure) just two man AT teams.

Does this sound about right to you more experienced players? I'm no grog by any standard but from what I have read I had better expectations than this, especially from all those MGs against troops in the open.

I think there are several misconceptions happening with your expectations, which most new CM players make (myself included, when CM first came out):

1. You're correct in saying that you should have played hotseat. Only in that mode can you fully see the true damage to the enemy infantry.

2. Machineguns, although more effective than other small arms, are not very effective at ranges of 300m or greater. Take an infantry .30 mg and look at the firepower stats for those ranges and you'll see that the firepower is greatly reduced.

3. This is probably the most important misconception that new CM players make - OPEN GROUND does not mean that the land is completely flat or featureless. Combat Mission abstracts each terrain type's cover & concealment values. For OPEN GROUND this means that little things like undulations, mounds and sparse vegetation are taken into account. Although CM visibly portrays an infantry squad as one unit, we must remember that CM abstracts the squad into a 20-40 meter space and that each man would be finding the best cover available. This means that soldiers will lay down in that small ditch or undulation which could theoretically be out of line of sight of the tanks.

If you truely want to test a flat & featureless terrain, I think pavement would be a better choice.