Are Snipers Useful?

[JuanValdez]

How do I make a sniper team act like a sniper team? When I give mine a greenlight to engage, the whole team engages, not just the sniper. It is rather annoying to spend several minutes of game time moving them into position and then assigning a target and the spotter starts lobbing 40mm rounds at a target 500 meters away :mad: Plus the sniper is a REALLY bad shot.

[-Eddie-]

I agree with the sniper being a terrible shot. I setup a firing range (inf 54 I think) with one enemy HQ team standing up 500m away. The conditions were clear, no wind, haze, cloud and it was midday. I set the British sniper team to 'Elite' and leadership '+2'. Nine shots it took for him to kill ONE of the men, one. I decided to let my Sniper team leader open up with his L96 and he was better than the sniper with a dedicated spotter and sniper rifle..

It's not just in testing either, I've noticed very poor sniper performance in game.

[c3k]

When you say "sniper", do you mean "autonomous enemy bullet absorption unit"? If so, I think they work quite well. I move the AEBAU nearby known enemy units. Then, I order them to either HUNT or SLOW towards a position giving LOS to the enemy. Of course, I use FACE or COVERED ARC as well. As soon as they get into a concealed location with LOS, that's when they begin their function. While they're busy absorbing the enemy firepower (which they're quite good at, although limited by the small size of their unit; BF.C, any chance of creating a 13 man sniper squad?). Anyway, while they're absorbing, I use my line infantry (hopefully with short-barrelled weapons) to take the 400 meter head shots.

That works for me.

Ken

[LuckyDog]

I had a sniper HQ unit engage a syrian MG unit at around 60-70 meters. Pop, pop, pop with the L96 and about 3 minutes later the scenario ended with him getting one kill.... The sniper was a good quality unit (I was playing the airfield attack in the Brits campaign). Not the result I expected. Maybe his hands were shaking, but he wasn't getting any return fire.

[Splinty]

I actually had very good results from the sniper teams in the first mission in Task Force Panther

SPOILER!

The 2 teams held up and pretty much massacred the uncons that attack from the right side of the airfield. I don't remember the exact amount of casualties they caused, but it was impressive.

That is the only time my snipers were effective in any mission I've played.

[souldierz]

Snipers I find are very useful. In urban areas when I had them over watching from top floors with no fire command, they would kill enemy quickly that shot at other troops. Now they wouldn't kill the whole squad, but I had many firefights that turned in my favor or that ended with the sniper rifle be heard firing a shot.

It's good to use them to cover your troops movements, so they can automatically open up on enemy that engage your troops,but yet remain unaware of the sniper.One other method you could do is attach them to a platoon and move the snipers with the platoon,and maybe place them with the MG teams, forming a squad with the qualities of power and precision.

Sometimes though they are a poor shot, kind of like the Javelins in some situations, nothing goes right and they keep missing.

Would wind be a strong factor for sniper teams in CMSF?Does the wind affect the ballistics of the pixel troops bullets, and is that coded in the game?

[JuanValdez]

I guess I got my answer. At least it's not just me. Guess I'll just use forward observers to gather intel and drop snipers from the inventory. Shame though. I've always had an affinity for the sneaky rascals...

Thanks for the responses.

[MikeyD]

Wow, some of you people have considerably worse luck than me. If you put a sniper team in an advantageous position and let them do their own targeting they tend to hit high value targets with single shots at decent ranges, with low chance of discovery. The thing is, though. if you order them to target a particular enemy the team interprets the command a "All hands on deck!" and everyone starts firing.

[Marc Anton]

let them do their own targeting

That it guys, but that isnt new to combat mission players, its called AI.

[Chainsaw]

Snipers are useful indeed. but for me its not to shoot at enemys, I use my snipers as forward recce, trying to infiltrate the enemy area on key locations so they can provide me with key intelligence on enemy movements.

So their main jobb is observing and calling in Arty and CAS while remaining silent. Only rarely do I let them fire on anything, I dont want them to be revealed and loose the intel they provide.

[meade95]

I still believe a tweak up in terms of situational awareress and shooting accuracy at elite level would be incredibly helpful to a large segment of CMSF customers (and not have any ill effect on anything/anyone else.....because it would only effect/affect elite level status).