MG's seem marginalized in the game

[SlapHappy]

And I believe it is based on the way they are modeled and the cover-sighting issues. Firstly, Mg's seem to want to fire only in bursts of vertical channels rather than sweep horizontally across the front of a wave of attackers. I'd always heard that a machine gun was an area-denial weapon. Not so much in the way it is depicted here.

Secondly, the lack of covered loop=holes makes it hard to put it in action against any kind of concentrated enemy force. The HMG is effective, momentarily. That is until 20 or so troops mass fire on it and take out the crew in about 10 seconds. A well-covered MG is a bitch to take out, but you wouldn't know it from this game, because you can't possibly put you're gun in a position to exploit cover. Simple concealment is pretty useless once you open fire, again because of the AI's ability to mass fire and take out solitary targets even at 200 meters.

[SlapHappy]

In regards to the post above, the first thing I'd like to see with some new terrain models, buildings, walls, etc. are some items you can really take advantage of in the game. For instance, why are the walls 2 feet higher than the guy's heads? I ended up knocking a hole in the wall with one of those German AT grenades so I could stick my field gun in there get a LOS. Of course the crew died fairly quickly under the effect of massed AI fire, despite the splinter shield.

How about some loopholes? You should be able to setup a situation where you can provide 90% hard cover for your unit, while maintaining a good field of fire to exposed enemy units in a kill zone. The only way to do that in this game is to use the concrete MG bunker.

[wokelly]

I think MGs in this game suffer from the same issue all MGs do, they target individual units rather then groups. Its like that in every game, AI MG'ers target individuals to kill, rather then groups of infantry.

[SlapHappy]

Exactly. It's not the same as firing a rifle. You want to put up a "wall of lead".

[ChrisND]

Yep MGs are just not represented accurately in this game at all. Too bad.

[wokelly]

Actually its the same in all games. I do not think I have ever seen a MG in a game with individual enemies like this target groups. I do not think there has ever been a game created that has MGs put out "walls of lead", they all target individuals until they are dead. Armed Assault does it, Operation Flashpoint did it. Even CM series only targeted groups because squads were stuck together as a single unit, but it never targeted multiple squads.

[ChrisND]

Yeah, but the MG fire did have an "area effect" at least. I could pin down a large amount of troops with one MG on area fire.

Slaphappy, agreed on the cover issue.

[SlapHappy]

I'd have to say I've never seen a game get it right, either. That being said, I don't think it's impossible to properly implement.

It always makes me wonder why game designers don't look at the way "it really was" (especially with wargames) and then say "OK, how do we code it to work like that?"

I have to figure they either don't approach it that way or it's just plain laziness.

[Popete]

Actually Company of Heroes did a good job with their MGS, they made it so that units were set into groups of about 5-6 and when an mg opened up it would quickly pin any groups that it was firing towards. So even if you targeted one squad any other squads in that are of fire would be supressed which would allow large infantry armys to be supressed and forced back with a well placed mg.