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Shooting just beyond LOS


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Hi there,

I'm wondering if it's realistic that a tank cannot "area fire" beyond it's LOS. To take the most extreme example, let's say I have an assault gun trying to knock down a building. If the enemy drops smoke right in front of the building, the tank cannot be ordered to fire on the building. Surely tank commanders in real life were willing to shoot through a smoke screen if they had a pretty good idea what was behind it. This same principle applies to other limited LOS situations such as fog, night, etc.

Any thoughts?

Dr. Rosenrosen

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Smoke concealing a building may be the only situation where you might have a chance of actually hitting your target. Even then, no one (except a Sturmtiger) would do it because you would want to hit a specific part of the building, not just anywhere.

At night /in fog : how can you hit a target you can't see?

And the game would have to store information like 'unit X had LOS to point Y just 10 seconds ago' - and there are thousands of points 'Y' on the map and hundreds of units. Can you say '20 MB PBEM turn file'?

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A good if somewhat unreliable way to fire past intervening hills is to area target as far over the hill as possible in line with the target. The shell usually misses and sometimes hits near the target or even scores a direct hit. This worked once for me with a SP 150mm, which got an antitank gun with "indirect fire" that was too dangerous to approach in LOS.

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Dr. Rosenrosen, one thing to keep in mind here is that we have to be concerned not only with what is - in theory - possible to do on a one by one basis, but also with things that, if allowed, would be severely abused and could possibly unbalance the whole game. Shooting through smoke or "just beyond LOS" is one such thing. Since the player has a much better overview of the entire battlefield than any single soldier would have in real life, allowing certain things like these could have tremendous implications on gameplay, and in the end provide for much more unrealistic results. Firing blind is possible in real life, yes, but that's not enough of a reason to have it simulated in a game on CM's scale. The same is true for a number of other "features" occasionally asked for by players, btw.

Martin

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