Are snipers good for anything...?

[xerxes]

And the chance of getting spotted is heavily dependent on the number of enemy eyes on your position. You don't want to unhide when an entire company has LOS to your location.

[Cameroon]

Snipers/sharpshooters (whatever), well they're nice for buttoning tanks/vehicles and distracting units so that others can kill 'em, but I've never had a sniper kill anything. Certainly not panic or cause abandonment.

Then again, I play QBs mostly with regular troops so the best you can get is vet. Apparently they go from being bothersome to being lethal at crack+.

[Yggdrasill]

YankeeDog,

Good points you make.

I also thought about the issue of having to commit a leader. I always seem to have a "spare" one who comes with a weapons platoon or some such (not to imply that I couldn't use them more effectively elsewhere). The question is, can you achieve similar results more cheaply? I think the answer is yes.

On reflection, I think it defeats the purpose of snipers to send them in a team of, say, 3. You want them isolated, both for their own protection and so they can cover more territory. If you use 'em to spot enemy guns, for example, and the risk to them is too great if they attack the unit themselves, then just call in artillery to take the guns out.

Also, snipers attacking from several areas, rather than from one general area, creates more confusion.

[JasonC]

I will say this about sharpshooters in CMBO. They do have their uses against high value targets, but they are overpriced and undermodeled compared to real aimed rifle fire. They get only 10 shots. They usually don't kill things with those shots, only pin them. Occasionally they will hit 1-2 guys. The cost as much as a half-squad with 4 times the shots and a greater ability to kill things (not to mention to withstand reply fire).

Now, if they were modeled with a 50% times exposure base chance to hit one man (at a medium range), and more like 20 shots, and cost 1/2 to 2/3s what they cost today, then they would be a useful unit and a real additional "arm" on the battlefield. If not eliminated and they got their shots off, they would take out a few men in cover or more than a few men in the open. Commanders would use them "surgically", to do things like take out an AT team or a MG nest.

They would have a general pinning effect over wide open areas to long ranges because any unit moving out there might lose several men to aimed rifle fire - as realistically happened. People would take them as often as MGs and use them as a serious arm of the force. Their opponents would put much more emphasis on taking them out before they got their shots off, and they would even be useful against their enemy counterparts.

If you think this would make them too common, consider this. The Germans fielded around 175,000 scoped rifles during the war. They fielded only 50,000 AFVs of all types. When was the last time you played a CM battle where there were 3-4 times as many sharpshooters present as tanks?

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by JasonC:

If you think this would make them too common, consider this. The Germans fielded around 175,000 scoped rifles during the war. They fielded only 50,000 AFVs of all types. When was the last time you played a CM battle where there were 3-4 times as many sharpshooters present as tanks?

These were all hunting rifles for the monocle-wearing officer smartasses

[Fairbairn-Sykes]

British Sniper Team: 1944.

[ June 28, 2002, 12:03 AM: Message edited by: Fairbairn-Sykes Trench Knife ]

[YankeeDog]

Originally posted by JasonC:

I will say this about sharpshooters in CMBO. They do have their uses against high value targets, but they are overpriced and undermodeled compared to real aimed rifle fire. They get only 10 shots. They usually don't kill things with those shots, only pin them. Occasionally they will hit 1-2 guys. The cost as much as a half-squad with 4 times the shots and a greater ability to kill things (not to mention to withstand reply fire).

I guess the reason CM makes them so expensive is the fact that they are more often more valuable *not* shooting because they spot enemy really well with very little chance of being spotted themselves. This, of course, gets into the whole 'borg' spotting issue.

I suppose if a future iteration of CM were to solve the borg spotting problem, we could Sharpshooters priced more for their acutal combat functionality.

You point about sniper rifles issued vs. tanks is a good one. I was reading about US Army TO&E at the platoon level the other day. I don't remember which website I was looking at, but it listed the "HQ Unit" of the platoon as 4 men: a lieutenant, sergant, messenger, and a sharpshooter.

If correct, then should the U.S. platoon be a 3-man HQ with a sharpshooter organic to the platoon? That would put a lot more of them in CM battles. . .