Poor quality armour crews too effective, imho

[nijis]

First off, I'm delighted with the game, even with its bugs. The battles are spectacular to watch, and I can run even the largest ones on my 2 GHz laptop with a GeForce 7600, albeit with the graphics turned all the way down.

However, the game does not ring true for me in one key way. I can routinely pull off maneuvers with conscript- or green Syrian armoured units that are virtually unheard of in the entire record of 20th century Arab military history. For example, in the demo scenario, I was able to take three conscript- and green-rated tanks, all lone survivors of different platoons, and run them over the hill to take the attacking US forces in the rear. They were able to acquire Strykers within a few seconds of entering LOS, and hit on the first shot more than half the time -- even against a moving target.

This is precisely the kind of maneuver that Arab militaries were unable to carry out throughout the Arab-Israeli wars. I realize that Battlefront is assuming that the Syrian military has improved considerably since then, but these were reserve armoured units, not frontline troops.

Given that "conscript" is as low as you can go in the CM ranking system, I think it is fair to base the performance of Syrian conscript units on poor-quality Iraqi units, or the worst-performing Syrian units in 1967 and 1973. These were barely one step up from having been grabbed off the street and stuffed in a tank. One of my friends who was an Iraqi tank gunner IIRC had fired exactly three shells in training in his entire career. Conscript tank crews in combat are people whose systems are flooded with adrenaline, attempting to perform complicated mechanical tasks which they have performed maybe once or twice before in their lives, many months or even years ago.

Back to the scenario. Thanks to poor communications, my Syrian tankers would likely have no idea that the Americans were on the other side of the ridge. Their commanders would be highly unlikely to take the initiative to attempt a flanking maneuver. And their crews would likely be far too flustered to fire at a stationary target, let alone acquire and hit a moving one. I need to go back and read my sources -- sundry books on the 1991 and 2003 wars, as well as Kenneth Pollack's fairly exhaustive Arabs at War -- but off-hand I can't think of any instances where Arab armored units (as opposed to infantry units, which were often much more effective) pulled off a successful flanking maneuver at the battalion/company level.

Obviously, BF does not want to program a game wherein the Syrian player is limited to suicidal frontal assaults. Also, I think it's fair to assume that the Syrian military is training much harder and more realistically then it did in the past. The Syrians should have regular and veteran units, who fight just as effectively as US units with the same rating.

But the lowest quality armored units, in my opinion, should be virtually ineffective. You should not be able to use them for the same tasks for which you use professional troops. They should acquire targets with painful, hair-pulling slowness. They should miss the broad side of the barn at point-blank range, particularly if the target is moving. They should have crippling orders delays to prevent them from taking advantage of the player's knowledge of enemy vulnerabilities.

Give them an area-fire order against a building, and there should be a good chance that they should target the one next to it. (Actually this should be true of higher-quality forces as well). Even when the pathfinding routines are fixed, they should continue to use the buggy ones.

This is a highly subjective assessment which is difficult to support empirically, but I'll go through my sources and try to come up with some examples that back my point.

[ August 23, 2007, 02:19 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

[bartleby]

Could this partly be due to that the player is effectively providing junior leadership in CM:SF? That's the biggest thing Arab forces have missed historically.

[nijis]

To a degree, but there's also poor marksmanship, minimal situational awareness, and other issues that come of putting raw troops into a complicated, noisy machine with limited visibility and pushing them into a highly stressful situation with virtually no meaningful training.

[bartleby]

Originally posted by nijis:

To a degree, but there's also poor marksmanship, minimal situational awareness, and other issues that come of putting raw troops into a complicated, noisy machine with limited visibility and pushing them into a highly stressful situation with virtually no meaningful training.

Yeah, I didn't mean to ignore those, I just haven't done much from the Syrian side so I can't say. Conscripts shouldn't be that effective period, but a player can at least attempt some maneuver instead of "realistically" being shot in place.

[nijis]

Or they could be used as they were historically in the 1973 Egyptian and Syrian offensives -- as blunt instruments. Allow players to send them off on their initial attack with a very short orders delay, but any on-the-fly amendments would have them sitting in place for five or ten turns before attempting something new.

[Battlefront.com]

There isn't much we can do about this. The same exact issues exist in CMBB when playing average Soviet formations, Romanians, Hungarians, and Italians. So it is not a new problem for Combat Mission.

The number one problem with poor quality forces is the lack of ability to coordinate with each other. Well, you as the player fixes that and there is almost nothing we can do about it. We'd have to make units disobey orders or basically do whatever they wanted to, as if controlled by the AI. That would be far more realistic, but it would be extremely frustrating for the Human player.

As for the ability for Syrian vehicles spotting things... I don't know how it is that you (Nijis) managed to get them to spot and shoot at targets so easily. The Red vehicles are pretty poor in terms of their ability to spot. In fact, we have a LOT of people posting here about their vehicles not seeing things that are literally right next to them. So I think we have the balance of factors done fairly well.

Syrian T-72s aren't great at spotting thigns, but they are not completely blind. If they come directly upon an enemy unit they will likely spot it quickly if the conditions are favorable (lighting, terrain, etc.). Range is also VERY important. It's hard to miss from a few hundred meters, even for a poorly trained crew. Remember, the major advantage the West has is (theoretically) not having to get to within such ranges because of air, artillery, and other things done long before they have a chance of striking out.

Steve

[Subcomandante]

The same is when none of your people has spotted a hostile unit (not even as (?), but you as a player can see the tracers and muzzle flashes, indicating where you have to direct your heavy weapons.

[nijis]

I'd like to see poor quality units simply ignore orders! But I understand that other players might not...

The long orders delays in CMx1 made coordinated attacks difficult. They don't seem to be as dramatic in CMx2.

It wasn't the spotting so much as the accuracy -- or indeed, the ability to make the weapon fire at all -- that struck me as overrated. When you're undergoing an adrenaline rush, trying to do basic mechanical tasks can be difficult unless you've done them many times before -- and a conscript tank crew I would think would only have fired their vehicle's weapons a few times. I don't know how a T-72 cannon is fired, but I've would expect conscript crews to do the equivalent of forgetting to take the safety catch off, or putting the shell in the chamber.

I doubt those are documented, but I'll try to find examples from the Iraq wars or the Arab-Israeli wars of poor quality armor being completely ineffective even at very close range.

[Lee]

Steve has a good point. In order to simulate just how bad arab armies suck at fighting, he'd have to effectively disconnect, at least partially, the ability of the arab forces to receive and follow orders in any sort of coherent and competent way. haha

Kind of makes it hard to make a realistic wargame when fighting against such armies. Certainly it's very important to hit them with appropriate heavy command delays, spotting penalties, reaction time to threat penalties, accuracy penalties, morale penalties (so that they become panicked and confused much more easily in intense combat than highly trained units), etc. These things will help simulate the arab armies more accurately, but there's a limit to how how accurate you can make it if you have a very competent player issuing the orders to them.

One of the things on that list that is particularly important is the command delay factor. This should be made very high for typical arab units, thus simulating their poor abilities. Yes, the player can still issue very unrealistically coordinated and complex orders to them, but they then carry them out so slowly that it somewhat effectively simulates their real-world lack of such abilities. The good news is that BTS can easily adjust that command delay factor for the arab forces to account for this.

[dalem]

Originally posted by Lee:

Steve has a good point. In order to simulate just how bad arab armies suck at fighting, he'd have to effectively disconnect, at least partially, the ability of the arab forces to receive and follow orders in any sort of coherent and competent way. haha

Kind of makes it hard to make a realistic wargame when fighting against such armies.

On the contrary. A "realistic" game would have the crappiness for Arab armies built right in.

-dale

[nijis]

In the interests of not glomming on the Arabs too much, I'd argue that any army's training deficiencies are going to affect its tanks more than its infantry.

Also, Pollack makes the point that Arab armies were quite good at carrying out their orders -- ie, storming the Suez Canal -- when they had been well-rehearsed. They just weren't really trained to readjust on the fly. So hefty command delays I think would work really well.

[Feltan]

Originally posted by Subcomandante:

The same is when none of your people has spotted a hostile unit (not even as (?), but you as a player can see the tracers and muzzle flashes, indicating where you have to direct your heavy weapons.

Which, in real life, is about 75% of your engagements. I wish I had a nickel for everytime I heard "WTF! Where did that come from!"

Regards,

Feltan

[Omenowl]

I don't know when I play the demo I have found my crews abandoning the BMPs even though they weren't even in combat. I also found the M1 abrams are almost impossible to kill unless attacked from the side or rear (IE surprise).

I do think that delaying of orders while it will help with some of the unrealistic problems we also have to remember many Non western armies do not promote initiative amongst their officers. Many are promoted more for their loyalty than their competence. So we as players are free to improvise or take the initiative where the arab officers or NCOs would not.

[Battlefront.com]

dale,

On the contrary. A "realistic" game would have the crappiness for Arab armies built right in.

That's the problem, though. We can't do that AND allow the player the sort of control he wants. Again, I point back to CMBB. Coordination, even with delays and shakey morale, aren't enough to stop careful coordination by a Human player.

I'd also like to point out that a LOT of people thought the command delays to be themselves highly unrealistic. Why should a tank have a command delay to restart driving down a road that he stopped on half way along? This is the sort of thing that should be instantaneous. It should also not be ignored unless there is a reason for it to be.

As I've said now, and since early CMx1 days, any wargame that gives the player the ability to directly control more than a single Human figure produces an inherently unrealistic amount of coordination. This is the God problem we've discussed on this Forum at great length. There is no way around this except to remove the player from the game which, at that point, makes the game cease to be a game worth playing.

Steve

[Omenowl]

Perhaps you can put in a delay, but put into status waiting for orders to be relayed or something to indicate orders are being given, but have not be relayed to the men on the ground.

[thelmia]

Nice to see someone else read Arabs at War.

The thing the Arabs lack is tactical leadership from junior officers.

You're providing it, so they do better. In effect, you are the platoon leader, company commander and NCO rolled into one. There's no way to dumb down the player.

What the game shows you is the real reason Arabs tend to get clobbered in conventional war. It isn't the equipment or the troops. They'll do what you tell them and are very brave. It's the leaders.

Going with the visible muzzle flashes, audio surveillance needs to be nerfed. I can target artillery by looking around the map and listening for Arabic.

[ August 23, 2007, 11:39 AM: Message edited by: thelmia ]

[dalem]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

dale,

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />On the contrary. A "realistic" game would have the crappiness for Arab armies built right in.

That's the problem, though. We can't do that AND allow the player the sort of control he wants. Again, I point back to CMBB. Coordination, even with delays and shakey morale, aren't enough to stop careful coordination by a Human player. </font>

[Bradley Dick]

I think the difference between the amount of time it takes to complete a real battle and the amount of time it takes to complete a PC game battle is because of the human factor.

You can attempt to model morale, command delay, fitness, and other human factors. However, this is just a pale substitute for real life.

Your entire force is unified under a solid command. Everyone is completely under the control of the commander, unless panicked, who has the ability to pause time. Your forces are all uniformly competent. There are no weak links, each soldier is exactly the same. And they all react the same to your orders. In real life, this isn't always the case. You can say "Move to point A" and get fourteen different results from fourteen different groups of soldiers.

In fact, probably one of the most realistic bugs in the game is the crazy pathfinding issues.

When you can command your troops with almost telepathic control, knowing you're going to get a uniform reaction from them, then battles tend to be alot shorter.

EXAMPLE of real life.

Bulldog three alpha, this is Bulldog main.

Bulldog main, this is bulldog three alpha.

Bulldog three alpha, have bulldog three four

victor move up to house delta six four, over.

Bulldog main, wilco, over.

Bulldog main, out.

//The Platoon leader switches to his platoon net.

Bulldog three four victor, this is Bulldog three alpha.

Bulldog three alpha, this is Bulldog three four victor.

Bulldog three four victor, move up to house delta six four, over.

Bulldog three alpha, wilco, over.

Bulldog three four victor, out.

//the order is carried out, hopefully

In any game, it's a few mouseclicks.

[dalem]

Originally posted by Bradley Dick:

In any game, it's a few mouseclicks.

Right. Plus, they usually go where you want and don't get lost, etc.

When we run our tabletop games here or even better, Kriegspiel map games, we spend a lot of time explaining to new players that we are trying to duplicate chaos, and that the umps will obfuscate, literalize, and even lie. That's on top of players who nod and nod and nod when told how to go sit on ReserveMan's Hill and wait for the command to engage, and who immediately charge into battle on turn 2 because they saw what they perceived as a vulnerable flank.

I love it.

-dale

[Renaud]

That's the problem, though. We can't do that AND allow the player the sort of control he wants. Again, I point back to CMBB. Coordination, even with delays and shakey morale, aren't enough to stop careful coordination by a Human player.

May I suggest variable random command delays, the range and min/max of the delay being related to the quality of the unit commanded and the commanding unit in contact (penalty for being out of contact with a commander, just as in CMx1), and morale state of the unit. Furthermore, the delay applied by the system would not be visible to the player. So you would not know exactly when your guys are going to start moving.

For example, ordering 1 green and 2 regular t72's to hunt forward. Regular tanks would have 4-8 seconds delay. Green tank would have 6-12 delay. In other words, both quantity and range of delay increases as the troop quality declines. This would make it harder to coordinate crappier troops as they would be more likely to move out at significantly different times.

An out-of-command conscript tank crew with shaken status might have a horrible delay range, something like 24-72 seconds. It would be virtually impossible to achieve any kind of coordinated move with such units. Conscripts would move out at totally random times, usually 1 at a time with a large time gap between each tank.

An in-command elite crew on the other hand might have a delay range of a mere 2-3 seconds. You could perform highly coordinated manuevers with groups of such elite units.

Note that the random command delay would be hidden at all times, so you couldn't just keep trying until you got the delay you wanted. This would be both realistic and necessary to make the system work. The exact delay numbers and ranges would need to be carefully tweaked during testing.

[Battlefront.com]

We'll definitely revisit the whole "Command Delay" aspect of CMx2. We deliberately decided to downplay it in CM:SF because the CMx1 system was far from perfect and had a lot of legitimate shortcomings. We didn't want to stick to the CMx1 system just because it is what we did before when a lot of people clearly weren't happy with the way it worked.

Personally, I think the sort of coordinated stuff that works in CM:SF now would still work with noticable delays. What I mean by that is nijis' example above would likely resulted in the same thing because timing wasn't the reason why his flank attack worked. The reason why it worked was that he got several vehicles into a superior position. I don't think a delay would have changed that.

The thing that would have realistically hosed nijis' flank attack would be randomly, and without any predictability, have his tanks do whatever they wanted to do, which may or may not have been what was ordered. This would have prevented them from getting into a good vantage point, which is the real thing that needs to be changed to reflect the command problems the Arabs typically have shown in combat (yes, I have a copy of "Arabs at War" too )

I dunno... we might try something like this in the future, but if we do it will probably coincide with having CoPlay (multiplayer team play). That's where the big bang for the buck is in terms of whacking the God aspect upside the head. How so? Because with CoPlay you now break down the battlefield into more than one overall commander.

Steve

[RT North Dakota]

Please let me correct some general mis conceptions that may be arising here in this thread. Arabs are dam good soldiers. Loyal, brave and pretty tough.

The IDF has whole Arab units of Druze and Bedouin. Bedouin Border Guard Units make LA SWAT look like schoolgirls.

The PROBLEM is ARAB Armies. Generally THEY DO NOT TRAIN, in a way we understand and they have no clue as to how to do so. It is my personal opinion that the education system is the deciding factor. - Why and how, not for discussion here.

Remember that training is only one of the three generally accepted elements of combat power.

[RT North Dakota]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

I dunno... we might try something like this in the future, but if we do it will probably coincide with having CoPlay (multiplayer team play). That's where the big bang for the buck is in terms of whacking the God aspect upside the head. How so? Because with CoPlay you now break down the battlefield into more than one overall commander.

...and now you have a product you can license for military training. Right now (or by 1.08?) it can be used for eductation.. always a good thing... but it's very limited for training.

[Pandur]

...and now you have a product you can license for military training.

if it works out i hope thats enough money to free their minds from "popular" design decisions

and the few month of TCPip WEGO coding should be a joke than.

if not its big time wasted time and resources.

[Renaud]

I look forward to co-play of any kind...that will be just awesome.

I liked the old cmx1 command delay system well enough. It was better than nothing. The only problem with it was that the player always knew to the second when his units would start moving (unless the unit got suppressed in the mean time). Randomized and hidden delay 'ranges' would fix that...but my suggestion is only one of many possible systems. Worth noting that for me realism and simulation = fun. The better I can model a historical engagement, the happier I am...yes, i'm a nut. My posts over the past 8 years prove that much at least...