LOS "Line" remains on Target despite no LOS

[GDog]

My AT unit targets a BMP, but before it can get a shot off the BMP moves out of LOS.

However, the red "target line" remains attached to the now out of sight BMP and tracks it as it moves around.

Seems kind of unfair and unrealistic to know where the Enemy is despite not having LOS. Am I missing somthing?

[birdstrike]

I've seen units keeping a target line to units in buildings which disappear because they stopped firing - which seems okay, because the unit stays focused on the building without firing, in case the target reappears.

But vehicles moving out of sight and still being tracked doesn't sound right to me.

[Mud]

If somebody else has LOS to the target unit, not such a big deal -- target choice is retained, at least for a while, because the alternative is a target order getting canceled and the unit possibly doing something stupid every time a targeted unit drops out of sight.

If it's violating FOW because there's also nobody else that can see it, and you're therefore getting information that couldn't otherwise be obtained -- then it'd seem there's a problem.

[SlapHappy]

Maybe they are trying to simulate that you can still see where the unit is, but your chance of hitting it is negligible to the extreme?

Just a guess.....

[Battlefront.com]

Mud has it right. In CMx1 the TacAI had a "now you see it, now you don't" approach to targeting. If the target went out of sight even for a few seconds the targeting unit would forget all about it. If the target came back into view the targeting unit had to retarget with all the negatives that come with it (loss of knowledge gained, for example range). This was partly due to the inherent turn based system, but it was far deeper than that. That's why we only made very modest improvements over the original releases.

In CMx2 the TacAI will keep its attention focused on a unit out of LOS far longer than CMx1. At some point it decides it might be better to look for other targets so the unit doesn't get the opposite problem; target fixation.

To show this to the player we keep the targeting line tracking the enemy unit. This can continue even when the unit itself loses track of the target. What we're simulating here, though it is crude, is the targeting unit guessing where the target is going. For example, if you see a vehicle traveling at 20mph behind some trees, going left to right in your frontal arc, if you lose sight of it for a few seconds, where do you think it might be headed? To the right. Assuming the vector is still true and the speed is also still true, you'd be able to guess where the enemy vehicle would be in 2 seconds. It's not likely to have changed, though it could. If the enemy unit stays out of LOS for a bit of time (not much) you would presume that it's deviated course or stopped. In such a case you might give up on it.

This simulated "estimating" allows the TacAI to behave far more realistically than CMx1's in terms of traget tracking. It's not perfect in terms of FoW, but more often than not it isn't far off and the alternative is what I will now call the Dori Effect (think "Finding Nemo" ).

Steve