CMx1 to CMx2 recipe

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[MikeyD]

About sterile bland maps. Did you catch the PBS documentary "Bad Voodoo" that played last night? Convoy escort in Iraq. Oh my God, compared to those real-world landscapes CMSF looks positively lush!

Let's also remember the CD scenarios were meant to be played by everybody. Some purchaser with a low end machine would probably not have appreciated trying to play on 2 sq km of forest cover and a thousand bomb craters.

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[Cpl Steiner]

Originally posted by Adam1:

What else is there? What other fundamental design failings of 1:1 are there?

Well, for a start, "friendly fire" is not modelled except for very large area effect weapons such as tank, artillery and air delivered ordnance. This needs to be addressed IMHO, as it makes it possible to conduct highly unrealistic assaults, such as forming a firing line and then using "Assault" to send forward fireteams that are covered by other fireteams to their rear. In real life this would be a recipe for shooting half your own men in the back!

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[gibsonm]

Yes but at the moment I can park a BFV right behind my assaulting squad (i.e. the target light line goes right though their position) and blaze away with 25mm and coax and nothing happens to the squad, even if the building in front of them collapses due to the weight of fire the BFV is putting out.

Now to fix that we need the Tac AI to understand stuff like “cut off last safe moment” or some such but at the moment it can’t so the work around is for friendlies to be immune.

And lets not talk about friendly units charging through vehicle dispensed WP smoke with no affect on them.

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[thewood]

I have not seen many people say CM1 has as much or more fidelity than CMSF. IIRC, the arguement was how needed that fidelity is or there is a mismatch in the fidelity level of different aspects of the game.

[JasonC]

But I don't control each man. The Tac AI does. It decides what cover they will or won't use. If there is no way to make them use the cover because they are not under my own control - unlike full squads in CMx1 - and they do not get an abstracted cover benefit just for being in an area with sufficient cover if the individual man goes and finds it - then the result is less use of cover. Couple that to trajectory firepower modeling, and higher lethality will result.

Not all that much higher for the wrong weapon, however. Because I've had the experience in CMx2 of blasting away with about 2 platoons of Syrian infantry until the magazines were all dry, at about a dozen and a half "turtles" doing the crawl of death in open ground, and only hitting about 5 of them. The range was about the 300 meters you cite. AKs at medium range simply aren't effective. They need to get within more like 100 meters, in my admittedly limited experience. The MGs are marginally better, but those still mostly maintain pins.

If there is one place I'd really like to see the effects of per shot modeling, it would be snipers that can actually hit things. I don't see it, even with poor use of cover by the targets and a weapon that can realistic slice through body armor without difficulty. They simply don't hit very often, which to me sound rather more like FP numbers under the hood, in all but name, and rather less like tracking each bullet's trajectory. Or, the trajectories that go through a squad location still have to "roll" to do anything, it would appear.

At close enough ranges with automatic weapons, that doesn't much matter - you just fire until the hits occur, which they will soon enough with lasting target exposure.

The other place the lack of cover use remains noticable, though, is against vehicle weapons. Vehicle MGs simply chop the leg squishies into mincemeat, in my again admittedly limited CMx2 experience. There are no suppression issues, no ammo limitation issues. There isn't any cover effective against them, really - perhaps with toned down ability to penetrate that will change somewhat, but it is what I saw in the past with 50 cals e.g.

The only effective infantry cover against small arms and MG fire appears to be buildings, and those appear to be extremely vulnerable to quite overmodeled HE and HEAT weapons, which readily "nuke" entire squads, too bunched up as they generally are.

As a result, the tactical lessons I learned in CMx2 were not about cover use, they weren't about how to coax the tac AI to path well. They were to forget the infantry and just use a tank. Tank HE nukes infantry in buildings. Tank MGs nuke infantry anywhere else. Sitting and firing beats moving.

Realistically, infantry has serious advantages in stealth, in use of cover, and in ability to go anywhere. I haven't found any of them critical to winning a CMx2 outing. If a scenario forces me to use leg squishies because it is all I am given, practically, then obviously it can become so, but not because the job requires it. Only because I am sent into action hopping on one leg and armed with a plastic spoon.

What else do I continue to prefer about CMx1, that I'd like to see moved over to standard issue in CMx2? Working QBs would be a big plus. The ability to fully edit force types in them, rather than picking from an menu of vanilla formation types, and those heavy on the squishies. More effective forms of cover, and placable fortifications. Terrain that truly favors infantry because vehicles just can't handle it, would be another plus.

I think there is a lot of potential in the scripting of game AIs, but that it hasn't really been exploited yet. Likewise with the editor, I just haven't learned how to use it well enough. My first impressions were that it was possible to do a lot more, but also that it took more effort to achieve the same effects as CMx1, when one wasn't using every bell and whistle - but I freely acknowledge that was a first impression and might be revised on more extensive use.

I'd like to see, for example, the editor used to make terrain that would truly require infantry to overcome, and I don't mean MOUT. There is a wadi scenario built in that looks more like a race course, for example. Instead let the thing be not southern-Iraq flat but western Syria deep - in canyons on the edges of the Bekka, the relief can change 2000 feet in height inside 500 meters lateral distance, for example. I don't think M-1s would entirely rule in those canyons.

So far, I haven't seen a single CMx2 situation in which M-1s wouldn't utterly rule. Single optima combined arms is inherently less interesting. Part of that is period, of course. I also haven't yet seen a CMx2 situation in which pulling triggers until the enemy is dead wasn't the winning strategy. Single opt... you get the point. Some of this is undoubtedly period and typical assymmetry, and some is probably the small size of my sample. But you asked.

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[JasonC]

It may help as background to explain my initial hopes and tactical interests in CMx2. I wanted especially to try out various red force infantry tactics against the modern US equipment. Occasionally supplemented by a full T-72 platoon pulled out of a back pocket, or an MRL strike, to be sure. But basically, ways of using infantry with modern weapons and shoestring tactics against full mech, was the draw.

There are certainly modeling and system requirements for the game engine, to make that sort of investigation possible or interesting. A radical downgrading of the realistic effectiveness of infantry compared to light vehicles, for example, suffices to kill half of it, straight out. Undermodeled AKs hurt it. Undermodeled sniper shooting hurts it. Most ATGMs given huge minimum ranges and low accuracy per shot hurt it.

Spotting routines that make it completely routine for hiding infantry in what cover there is outside of buildings, to be lit up from clear across the map by an IFV, hurts it. No placeable fortifications hurt it. If it is physically suicidal to move infantry outside of buildings, then infantry tactics consist of where to sit and when to open fire, and are pointless anyway if the buildings available are limited enough compared to the enemy HE supply.

In MOUT with more buildings that you can shake a stick at, that may ease off somewhat. But if that is the only situation left of interest, and if the right formula to counter anything tried there is to spot with vehicle optics and level things from a kilometer away, perhaps sacrificing a few relatively useless squishies to get defenders to fire - well, that might be interesting about twice.

Really, it is kind of important whether infantry can use cover so effectively that it is truly difficult to dislodge, and requires definite special tactics to do so. If that isn't there, then my original reason for interest in the subject matter pretty much evaporates. I freely admit it is a personal and special interest, and others will have more fun being a modern GI Joe in Strykers struggling with MOUT or what-have you.

What interests me is what opponents may or may not be able to do about our superior tech, via tactics. If the game system decides for me, "not much", then I simply don't need it. I know the real answer emphatically isn't "not much". And to even start on the tactical move and counter ladder I think has to be there, for real, I need the game system to agree on the point.

The specific points on which I think present (or recent past) CMx2 fails on this score, are poor individual cover seeking by the tac AI, all effective cover being visible to all from the word "go", the basic impossibility of hiding infantry from optic equipped vehicles in anything but a building interior, and infantry in building interiors being readily "nukable" by any kind of HE.

An argument can be made in favor of any single one of those as realistic, I am aware. But combined, they give a picture of what works and fails in modern combat that I just can't believe to be true - specifically, leaving infantry maneuever far too weak compared to vehicle based, and nearly static, firepower tactics.

You are welcome to show me I'm wrong about that.

[JasonC]

Sorry, the fact if it is a fact that internally, 48 different factors are strung together to roll the result, instead of one roll of the result, makes no operational difference to me as a force commander. The factors would have to be exposed to control and to vary in ways important for tactics depending on the use made of them, for it to matter to me at all.

In practice, I simply learn from game feedback which things will work and which will not. I cannot rely in this on a real world estimation of it - in the real world, the 2 guys with Dragonovs in my 16 turtle crawl of death example would have sufficed to wipe them all out in less than five minutes.

If you tell me the reason they missed is the game awarded the individually placed men additional cover seeking bonuses, then I have two reactions. One, why did we go to individual man placement and fire tracking, again? And two, no they weren't using any cover, there wasn't any cover, you've modeled every do-dad and they were just crawling pathetically across open sand. And 2 guys with scoped rifles 300 meters away and unsuppressed, couldn't hit them before running out of ammo.

So I have to go by what works in the game. Fine, snipers were weak in CMx1 and I dealt with it. I just don't seen a gain from the shift, that I'd expect to see if it were done right.

The operational reality I learn from just watching what works, without regard to anything I've been told about how it is working under the hood, is that squishies suck and AKs suck harder, and to use them right you need to wait for 100 meter ranges. Fine I can do that, I know how to use SMG squads in CMx1.

Then I also learn that an IFV at the back of the map is excellent at seeing hiding infantry behind a crest in trees or brush, and therefore holding fire until a good ambush time isn't going to work very well, and full defilade "reverse slope" defenses are legally required.

Is this because now there are 48 different factors being legally checked? Perhaps. It is a realistic edge to good IR? Perhaps. But the tactical result is, squishies suck and vehicles rule. Is this the last word on modern tactics? I sincerely doubt it, even though I am a firm believer in the usefulness of heavy armor, in general.

Show me the gains in tactical effect, on incentives, on real trade offs - not supposed gains in literalism, in other words. I won't believe the literalism regardless, it isn't remotely close enough in either system, or in any game. But I'll believe the functional relationships, the moves and counters, the system's incentives set up, if the design is good.

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[JasonC]

If the lethality points I've made seem conflicting, it is because I am thinking about the effects of cover above all. It is what makes well positioned infantry drastically superior to poorly positioned infantry. What I've seen instead is that raw firepower matters, and cover placement barely does. (The barely is that buildings are effective cover vs. mere small arms, but that is only a barely because HE exists and handles it).

A paradigmatic situation - some squishies are spread out before a waiting defense, in the worst possible positions, caught flat footed in open ground. But behind them they have some vehicle overwatch. In front of them is an infantry position, superior in numbers, heavy weapons load out, cover, readiness, everything. What happens?

In CMx1, the defense fires, it may not slaughter the exposed men as fast or as thoroughly as it would in reality, because of generous cover-seeking implicitly awarded to the subcomponents of the squads depicted at a few points on the screen. But the practical effect is rout. The exposed men will be pushed into cover panic, they will get up to run when the fire gets too intense, and once running they will be cut in half. A scattered unusable remnant of stragglers will make it to the next body of cover back. You can't believe each individual shot, or how hard it was to kill the last 1-2 men in the fragments, perhaps. But the overall result is - minimal ammo and time spent, exposed infantry blown to the winds.

And in the meantime, until the last of them routed anyway, the overwatch got some spots, and shot back. But did so into good cover, at a large position. It pinned a few units and reduced the incoming somewhat. But those shot could skulk and rally, others continued, some shooters were stealthy enough they remained sound etc. And after the expose infantry is blown to the winds, the overwatch is impotent. They can approach, the infantry in cover will just go quiet on them and given them nothing to chew. Their infantry support broken, combined arms lost, the attack has failed. Soundly positioned infantry in cover wins, poorly used infantry in the open is powerless and vulnerable. Vehicles are dangerous but can be mastered by tactics.

Now I related instead what happened to me in a similar situation in CM. The squishies in the open are turtles. The shooters include lots of AKs, at ranges from 200 meters to 300 meters. I've shot that weapon at those ranges and it is perfectly effective over them. 40 guys empty every magazine they carry. They hit maybe 4 men, and none of the rest rout. OK, I put it down to body armor - but there are also 2 Dragonovs firing, and a 7.62mm machinegun. Still nothing to speak of in the way of wipe out.

Meanwhile, the overwatch chews through one emplaced unit after another. From a kilometer. Spotting some before they open fire, stationary in vegetation beyond a crestline. Eventually they come closer. They don't really need their squishies, they spot fine on their own, they shoot better. Crestlines and vegetation might as well be open ground. The critical difference is not positioning, it is not exposure, it is not even numbers. It is 25mm and armor, or 7.62mm and shirts. It is tech and not tactics.

Well, maybe some think that accurate. If it is, we have few problems to worry about. We also have no interesting game subject. Bring a bigger water pistol, that is the sole lesson. I am all for bigger water pistols, but I have this nagging suspicion that tactics matter as well, and that we aren't fully capturing the advantages well used infantry actually has in the real world, when it catches people "out" like that.

In short, in lethality I want to see more of an effect from cover differential and tactical positioning. I'd be perfectly happy to see higher per shot lethality into open. I think the lethality should vary more with the cover. I think there should be effective forms of cover from being prone and stationary and in pre-prepared simple positions ("foxholes" in CMx1 terms) and in concealment terrain and with ridge crestlines etc. Not, "in a building or not", and "able to fire or not".

I've seen some slope-lip cover effects, to be fair. But I've also seen 2 Bradleys chew through two platoons at range without tensing a muscle, cover be darned, and a single vehicle 50 cal nuke a squad in a trench in less than 60 seconds. To me that isn't much of a cover differential. The morale again ends up being, "screw tactics, screw positioning, just bring a bigger water pistol".

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[Kwazydog]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Undermodeled AKs hurt it. Undermodeled sniper shooting hurts it. Most ATGMs given huge minimum ranges and low accuracy per shot hurt it.

Just for the record guys, ATGM stats and for that matter all weapon data is based on real world data, we dont fudge up minimum ranges in order to balance game play, etc. Its possible we have some figures that are incorrect as there is a lot of conflicting info out there and as always we are open to reviewing them, providing we have solid info to base those changes on.

Jason, a lot has been refined in recent builds with regards to what you describe. Im wondering by some of your comments if maybe your basing your info on earlier builds. I have recently had my first PBEM battle in quite some time which was an infantry heavy engagement and overall I was very impressed with the results which we will continue to refine as time goes by.

Dan

[ April 02, 2008, 07:18 PM: Message edited by: KwazyDog ]

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[JasonC]

KD - sure, my impressions are largely from builds through patch number 5, inclusive. I've patched on since then but played maybe twice since that point. If everything I mention has been fixed, great.

Adam, on sniper effectiveness, you might simply post your result.

Do you deny that covered squishies mostly suck compared to vehicles, or that sitting and shooting usually beats maneuver? If that overall impression has been changed by patching, great, it is my main underlying concern.

On ATGMs, my impression no doubt interacts with cover impressions. Using any of the earlier model Russian types, through AT-5s I mean, my early impression was that opening with them from picture perfect ambush was far more likely to result in a dead ATGM team than in dead AFVs at the far end. Dinkie recoilless rifles were outperforming them just by waiting for closer range. Javelins vs. infantry on the other hand, my impression was "tactical nuke".

But perhaps those have been corrected too.

[Huntarr]

Play it and get caught up.

[MikeyD]

"I've patched on since then but played maybe twice since that point."

Wow, you've only played twice since v1.05? I think each subsequet patch had averaged fifty(?) major and minor changes.

About armor overmatching opposing infantry - welcome to the 21st century! I recall one real-world Stryker soldier on a chat group bragging when a MGS turret starts to rotate all incoming fire suddenly stops. The closest WWII equivalent you've got to an Abrams 120mm gun would be a Jadgtiger cannon! Armor intimidates infantry. Modern fast turret rotation and high-power IR optics makes armor doubly dangerous. This isn't just a gameplay issue but a real world issue.

[YankeeDog]

I can't speak to earlier versions as I only started playing with 1.07. But I'll certainly agree that the pendulum has swung some towards armor in CMSF as compared to CMx1 games. But as MikeyD notes, you can make a good argument that this is realistic.

But IME, "squishies" are far from impotent against armor. US infantry, of course, have their Javelins, which dominate against armor until you run out of them. Once you run out of Javelins, though, the AT4 is good for BMP hunting in close terrain, and that's about it. I've actually been keeping informal count, and so far in "real combat" (as opposed to testbed scenarios), I'm getting about a 2 kills per 3 shots with Javelins on T-72s. Hits are about 80%, but not all hits kill. So it's good, but not infallible.

But even Syrian infantry can be very dangerous to armor. As long as it's a competent crew, I generally see good first-hit percentages with both the AT-4 and RPG-29, and even the RPG-7 is nothing to be sniffed at. The AT-3 is kind of pants due to the long minimum range and low hit percentage, but everything I have read suggests this is pretty realistic.

The Abrams can be a bit of a juggernaut, at least on the frontal aspect, but all other US armor types are very vulnerable to the above weapons. And you can knock out Abrams, too, as long as you get flanking shots.

[spoiler -- SMASHING METAL -- SPOILER]

The first time I played this as Syrians, I managed to get 3 of the 4 Abrams within the first 10 minutes. IIRC, my ATGM teams hit and immobilized two of them, and also KOed a Stryker. They scored 3 hits out of 4 shots before they were taken out, and each hit caused significant damage. the AT-4 teams didn't live beyond these 4 shots, but this weakened the Abrams enough that I was able to engage them successfully with my T-72s. Not too bad. IMHO, the balance isn't all that different than 57mm ATGs and 75mm Shermans vs Tigers, though the details of the balance are very different.

[END SPOILER]

As for the rest of the stuff, I must have really bad luck er sumfink. When I screw up and get a US squad caught in poor cover under Syrian small arms fire, the casualty count climbs very quickly. Lost an entire squad in about thirty seconds last weekend when I accidently ordered them to stroll out into the field of fire of 2 Syrian units (infantry squads, I think, though could have been MG teams er sumfink else similar). And when I advance Bradleys or Strykers without benefit of forward infantry scouts, I often get an ATGM or RPG in the snout, usually to deadly effect.

The US soldiers' body armor should give them some advantage; I haven't done any controlled tests so I can't say for sure. But whatever advantage they have, IME it's nowhere near enough to disregard fire and maneuver, and just "turtle" through enemy fire.

Same goes for the fancy US armor. Definitely superior to Syrian kit, but I still lose my multi-million dollar AFVs very quickly even to just RPG-7s if I just bull forward and rely on superior weaponry and spotting abilities to see and kill the enemy before they kill me.

Regards,

YD

[Darkmath]

I concur with the nearly invulnerable M1 front armor.

I played the scenario "A fistfull of doodads" , involving T72 vs M1 duel in a small village.

I've managed to move the T72 towards the M1 as close as 30 metres , after disabling M1's main gun and smoke screening the area, then every 125mm rounds APFSDS didn't penetrate!

It would be interesting to see what results we could get in a M1 vs.M1 .

From my little experience with Blue vs. Blue engagement, 120mm sabot cannot penetrate M1 front armor too.

[gibsonm]

Well great so you just need to employ your T-72's better.

Engage from a flank. Support them with suitable ATGM and other assets (OMG a combined arms team, who would have thought) and you can disable then destroy them.

Its even easier in MOUT if you infiltrate your Infantry around the tank.

All weapons have strengths and weaknesses. As usual your job is to pit your strengths against the enemy's weaknesses.

If you stand out in front of it at 100m and "say here I am" don't expect the results to be much different to a Bazooka trying to fire on the frontal arc of a Jagdtiger at 120m.

[YankeeDog]

Ya. With what you generally have avilable to you in CMSF, best you can really hope for attacking an M1 on the frontal aspect is a track or gun hit. So, much like 75mm shermans vs. Tigers, it's flank or hope for that lucky track or gun hit. It does seem like track hits happen fairly often on the Abrams when it gets hit by something fairly big on the frontal aspect; often enough that it's worth a shot if you've got no other option.

If you do manage to flank, though, IME your kill chance is very good.

It will be intresting to see how much things change when the USMC module comes out. IIRC, we may get Milans, which have a top-attack mode. Abrams is not significantly better than other MBTs against top-attack munitions.