About tactical reload

[radioman999]

Not sure how other players feel about it, but I've come across more than a few situations where I wished that assault team or mg team to reload before entering a hot area. This is frustrating when I know that the weapon's got only a couple rounds left before having to reload and there's not much I can do before sending them forward, only to find them make contact with enemy and start reloading just then. Now, I could just target area and force them to reload, but sometimes that's not the best way to go about it. So, if not for the first CMSF, I wish it could be looked into for the next in series.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

There's no way for the AI to reload when it suits your plans. It can't possibly know. If it does so automatically it will as often as not get it wrong.

Best to leave it to chance. That way when a reload happens at an inconvenient moment people will think it mostly unlucky, rather then an AI being directly to blame.

[radioman999]

Yep it'd be pretty difficult for AI to anticipate the situation and reload accordingly. I was thinking more in the way of adding an option like 'deploy' so that player can decide when to reload.

[chaos49]

and its not only for MG could use it for all vehicle in the game.

the player wish to see how manny rounds are left before a reload happen, and there sould be a option were the player can choose to reload or not. before moveing out.

[acrashb]

How about, during a lull in the action (defined by movement and outgoing / incoming fire), troops automatically top up? I don't know the SOP, but if I had five left in my M4 and had a break, new mag goes in, old mag goes back in the vest and full mags bump across the vest to make room for it.

[stoex]

I want to drop something here because it seems appropriate.

First off, I would like a reload order option as well. Something I could choose to tell my troops to do when I need it, and ignore if I don't need it or don't want it. That's why it's called an option.

Second, and more importantly (and this is not the first time I get this impression), I think BF made a bad decision in the original design of the GUI for CMSF. The relative orders menus (you know, the ones where you scroll through the menus with ?some keys? and then give orders with the numerical keypad, which AFAIK nobody uses), limits the entire game engine to a total of 4x9=36 possible orders, which is further effectively reduced due to the grouping of orders into more or less arbitrary groups of more or less similar orders (movement, combat, special, and admin), which leaves open slots in some areas, while having not enough slots in others. I think one of the main reasons for BF avoiding various very good suggestions that have been voiced on these forums for additional UI options for the players (move to contact vs. hunt, reload, building assault commands for example) is the fact that they would have to redo the GUI or give up on the relative orders scheme to do so. Steve even gave this as a reason for something being difficult at one point, though I can't remember what exact request it was. The relative orders scheme may have seemed a neat idea at the time, but it's a dead-end street in terms of game development as far as I can see. Hard-coded into a corner...

Just my opinion of course.

[Jonny(FGM)]

An opinion with quite a bit of merit IMO

(OT Slightly) I would like to see a to contact option on all the current movement orders and hunt could become the CMx1 style hunt that it used to be

Also I think the reload option is a good idea, doesn't seem to matter that much for squads as they seem to time their reloading quite well most times but for GMG, MG teams etc it'd be pretty useful, for example i started a PBEM with some syrian AGLs and they all seemed to start off with a clip of 3 rounds for some reason which meant they had to reload seconds after firing their first shots

[Lethaface]

The contact movement options would definitely be welcome for me. Could even be done with the current interface imo, a checkbox like the pause command button for example.

Anyway I'm hoping to see UI updates in future versions of CM, for CMSF it will probably too late I guess

Oh and ontopic a reload order option could indeed be very helpful in certain situations.