Blasting

[c3k]

Gents,

A minor issue: Sometimes BLAST fails to be executed.

Example: Several buildings separated by open ground such as this - X X X.

All the doors are on the North and South faces, which are covered by enemy fire.

I BLAST a squad into the first building, entering from the West. Very good. I now order 2 more blasts. A BLAST to exit the building towards the East, putting the squad in the open ground between the two buildings. Another BLAST to enter the next building.

Result: Blast into the open ground works. Despite more charges, the squad decides NOT to blast, but rather QUICK around to North door and enter the building that way.

Why?

Thanks,

Ken

[TheVulture]

As I understand what you've said:

The first command was a single blast move to get into a building. That movement completed, leaving the guys at their final waypoint.

You then plotted a multi-stage move involving two blasts (with or without a non-blast move of some sort between them?)

Sounds to me like a fairly straightforward bug based on code being written with the implicit assumption that you wouldn't have a single blast move followed by another blast immediately.

Can you work around it with blast, short move, blast, or is there not enough ground between the buildings? Or does that fail too? (I would test it, but my lunch-break isn't for another hour...).

Either way it doesn't sound like a major problem to fix (caveat that I have no idea what the CM code looks like obviously, but all the ways I can immediately think of coding something like this would make it a pretty simple fix).

[Fat Dave]

Hi Ken,

I too have seen this. The Al Huqf map is where I tried this. 3 to 4 houses in a nice line, with the doors covered by enemy fire. They could blast into and out of the first house, but then it all went a little wrong. No subsequent blast used for the next house, opting for the door instead. Not sure what was happening there. I only tried this once, putting it down to to some 'fuzzy' logic or some sort of TAC AI response to enemy fire somewhere...

Can you consistently reproduce this?

[TheVulture]

Done a little testing, and I can now make it happen or not fairly reliably in my test scenario. You *can* have back-to-back blast orders quite happily, so my first guess was wrong

It depends on the spacing of the houses and position of the blast waypoints.

The first rule of blast club is that they will go stationary at the start of the blast move, wherever it is, and try to blow up the nearest wall in the direction they want to move. (So you can have two houses, put a single blast move across the first house and into the second, and they will blow up the near wall of the first house and then run around the outside into the second - which is prefectly reasonable behaviour to my mind. I just mention it so that people know what to expect from a blast).

The second rule of blast club is that if there isn't a wall in range (range is around 16 meters AFAICT) they will go prone, wait for the 10 seconds, and when no blast comes get up and do a 'quick' (it looks like) move to their destination.

So one explanation is that the blast command path started too far from the house they were to enter, so they changed it to a quick after the wait.

How close together were the houses, and where did they waypoints go?