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Crew casualties


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That's a little something I observed. Crew casualties happen in nearly each battle, that's normal and realistic. But that leads me to some thinking.

Let's take an armed vehicel with a two men crew. The gunner is taken out by enemy fire. This means that the vehicel can still move, but not shoot anymore, since there's nobody to operate the gun. Depending on design and/or training reasons, the driver can not simple change his position to take the place of the gunner. This is relative obvious in this simple example, but in some cases we have crews of 3 or 4 men, but that still doesn't necessarily mean that one crew member can take the place of another for above reasons. That's still fine and realistic, but it ain't so obvious anymore to the player, who may simply not have knowledge which crew member is necessary to operate which weapon(s) in this special tank model. Wouldn't it make sense to deactivate all commands that can't be executed anymore, in my simple example all combat commands, and/or list the weapons in the status display as inactive!?

Some details about the status display, in the special case I observed, I had a BMP with a 73mm gun, machine gun, AT-4 and smoke launcher. After the gunner was killed, only the 73mm was listed in grey, but with a bold green '+'. All other weaponry was still listed in green and with a bold green '+', too. But the driver can't even use the smoke launcher on it's own. At least he didn't when ordered. Now I'm not sure if he really can't in a BMP, or simply didn't for whatever reason. But obviously I'm now rather confused about that, even in a simple day-to-day situation.

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I had an interesting thing happen when I played the Marine Demo battle. I was playing the red side and one of my BMP-3's had it's gunner killed. The driver scooted it to a safe place. I then tried to target an area for surpression, but it wouldn't target. Latter in the battle it was immobilized by a hit from an AT-4. Forgetting that the gunner was killed, I targeted the squad that fired the AT-4. The driver then took the gunner's place and toasted them with the 100mm. So they have it coded to allow them to switch but I don't think we have much control over it. Maybe it was just because the driver couldn't drive anymore or maybe they can switch but before the driver wanted to get away because of the surpression level was still high. Pretty cool though.

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I had a case where my BMP-2's driver was killed, and the vehicle immobilized. Shortly afterward the gunner panicked and abandoned the vehicle. When he came back to his senses, I ordered the gunner to re-man the BMP, but upon re-manning the vehicle he got in as the driver.

While in another case a T-55 with all but one crewmen dead continued to operate normally. The single crewmen would take over whichever spot was needed. If I ordered a move order he would switch to driver, and when targets were spotted he would become the gunner.

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The game definitely seems to prefer a weaponless vehicle that can be driven to a crewed weapons station with an empty driver's seat. Things get a simpler with modern tanks. The commander can take over the gunner's duties from his station letting the relieved gunner slide into the blood-stained driver's seat.

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Okay, here's what I have learned!

Indeed, the driver switched position when I gave a 'covered arc' order and took place of the gunner, at least in the BMP. Exciting! :) In this case it makes of course sense that the combat commands are kept active, even if the gunner is hit!

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Would be interesting to find out if this happens in all vehicels, or if design and/or training reasons make it impossible in various vehicels, or if each crew member can take each place in a vehicel.

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I lost my gunner for a recon Stryker. However, when I gave the Stryker a target command the driver refused to switch to the gunner's position. The Stryker was still mobile.
Was the gun damaged or destroyed?
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Same for me, regarding recon strykers. The weapons are NOT remote capable, so you need a gunner up to fire them. The gunners don't last long.... Even with no move orders for several turns, and a target order, the driver never leaves his position.

Weapon (whether a Mk19 or a .50) had ammo and was undamaged.

This just adds data to the thought that the AI weighs mobility as more important than firepower.

Regards,

Ken

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