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Engagement Ranges


hoolaman

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Ok big announcement.

Next question, assuming armour penetration and battle damage is realistic, and assuming that a realistic workable method of controlling your forces has been found, and assuming that the AI doesn't suck:

Are the engagement ranges in this game realistic?

What size are the maps?

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LOL! No, Megakill is Nikolay from 1C, so he knows what he is talking about smile.gif You will see him as well as Anatoly and David from the developer side on this forum as moderators and ready to answer questions and the like.

To add to what Nikolay said:

The playable area usually is at least a couple kilometers across. A lot more of the map is actually rendered but not used for the battle.

Due to map design (hills, forests) you will rarely fight across the entire playable map, though, and most enagagements seem to take place at around 500 meters I would say.

Martin

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Originally posted by Moon:

LOL! No, Megakill is Nikolay from 1C, so he knows what he is talking about smile.gif You will see him as well as Anatoly and David from the developer side on this forum as moderators and ready to answer questions and the like.

To add to what Nikolay said:

The playable area usually is at least a couple kilometers across. A lot more of the map is actually rendered but not used for the battle.

Due to map design (hills, forests) you will rarely fight across the entire playable map, though, and most enagagements seem to take place at around 500 meters I would say.

Martin

Furthermore on some maps there is a battle going on around your palayble area - thus the feeling is created that your unit is a part of a much bigger battle.
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Originally posted by Pvt. Ryan:

I haven't read through all the details on the website, so this may already be answered, but how many player controlled units will be on the map at once?

Check out the screenshots for an idea of how big some of these battles can get (each icon is a controlable unit, soldier, team, or vehicle). They can get pretty big at times.

A typical enagement with you on defense might have you with a platoon of infantry setup in a trench system (defense in depth) reinforced with AT guns, some MG's and maybe some armor elements with reinforcements coming in throughout the battle.

Madmatt

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Originally posted by Megakill:

Trust me you will have a lot of fun with that somefink tongue.gifsmile.gif

Ahhh shades of Chance Encounter are dancing through my head!

Mord.

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If there is time, and it can be done, I want ToW to ship with some classic CMBO scenarios like Chance Encounter.

ToW obviously has a much quicker pace so some play balancing and whatnot would be required, but with over 40 historical game maps available to use, I am sure I could come up with something close enough to match the map of the original (one of my all time favorites).

No promises, but if its humanly possible to do it, then I will.

Madmatt

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Furthermore on some maps there is a battle going on around your palayble area - thus the feeling is created that your unit is a part of a much bigger battle.
Woa, sounds like something groundbreaking might be a this way a commin'
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There will be 40-50 unique maps (including different seasons for the same map). Each map consists of a large area (8 sqkm I think Nikolay said) within which you have the playable game area of roughly 4 sqkm.

Martin

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Well the original question for this thread was never really answered, only danced around.

Okay, I understand that most engagements will be less than 500M, however there might be the odd engagement that is well beyond that. I notice from the few screenshots I looked at, that armor penetration is only rated out to 500M... should I worry about that, or is AP actually calculated out farther than that but we just can't see it?

IOW Matt or Moon, have you seen any engagements, even the odd one, beyond 500M?

Bil

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Yes, I have seen tanks and AT guns engage beyond 500 meters. The little penetration table (which is just a graphic) that is shown to the player only goes up to 500 meters though and is meant simply as a user tool, just like the chart in CM was. It does not mean that the game prohibits long range battles.

Madmatt

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At what range was tank warfare considered to be at point blank range? I'm guessing, and this is purely a guess as I am not a tank grog, that at 500m hits should be more common than misses - making penetration/damage issues the biggest side of the equation. Is this true? Might it be true by '44 but not in the earlier campaigns?

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Originally posted by Darren J Pierson:

At what range was tank warfare considered to be at point blank range? I'm guessing, and this is purely a guess as I am not a tank grog, that at 500m hits should be more common than misses - making penetration/damage issues the biggest side of the equation. Is this true? Might it be true by '44 but not in the earlier campaigns?

Depends on how you want to look at it. It is true, that with a well-trained crew, in firing range conditions, you'd expect to see first-round hits a very high percentage of the time at 500m ranges.

Thing is, combat rarely takes place under firing range conditions. And the closer you are when you spot the enemy tank, usually the more likely a condition like smoke, fog, low light, etc. exists. Or just the rush to get the darn shot off before the enemy does. . .

Historically, average kill distance had as much to do with terrain and visibility conditions, as it did the theoretical range one tank could knock out another.

There were plenty of armor-on-armor conflicts in WWII where engagement ranges were comparatively short. It depended a lot on region. For example. Many of armor clashes during Bagration took place at compartively short ranges, due to the wooded terrain. There are also many examples of "knife fights" in Normandy, the Ardennes, etc.

It's hard to say with so few details out thus far, but my own SWAG is that ToW will be better suited to playing armor-on-armor clashes in relatively tight terrain, but may not be as good at modeling wide-open desert or steppes fight. Number of units will also be a factor here -- in general, the larger and more open the map, the more units play a role in the combat. With RTS, too many units to command over a really wide area usually ends up creating a clickfest.

Much like happened with the CM series, I'm sure players will push the envelope, and I'm also sure that players will discover that the further they get from the kind of engagement the game was intended to model, the weaker the simulation gets.

But it's impossible to create a game that plays every type of engagement perfectly. Even within the restriction of more closed-terrain, smaller unit engagements, I'm sure they're finding plenty of historical battles to model. And then there's the hypothetical, semi-historicals. . .

Cheers,

YD

Edited to add: before someone jumps down my throat, my "very high percentage of first round hits" comment for 500m above assumes a decently high velocity main gun, and generally adequate sighting equipment. Once you get into low-velocity guns, or other weaknesses, you would see the % of first-round hits drop dramatically.

[ July 28, 2006, 02:50 PM: Message edited by: YankeeDog ]

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