Fortification near bocage - is it right that it doesn't work?

[Renaud]

+ 1 to this...you should be able to place fortifications into one side of a hedgerow. This should give an additional, if not 100% cumulative, protection from explosions and direct fire coming from the berm side of the hedge (as well as providing the normal 360 degree protection). A fortified hedgerow provided more protection than an unfortified hedgerow, from all types of fire. The entrenchments in a hedgerow should not be any easier to spot than troops in a hedgerow, possibly even harder to spot than unfortified troops - the germans expertly concealed this type of position. It might look ugly graphically, but the foxholes already look ugly.

Maybe something that can be added over the course future modules or games. After all, CMBO was pretty basic compared to the later CMBB and CMAK.

[GreenAsJade]

Are individual pieces of shrapnel from treebursts modelled?

If not, how exactly does this effect come into play?

[Wengart]

Which is great since if your troops are shelled or flanked they can get down from the berm and take cover in the trench.

Except when its not so great because I play wego and while in the trench they have los through the bocage anyway. So you get a situation where there is a perfectly good trench 1-2 meters behind them from which they can fire through/over the bocage, but they refuse to use it properly because there is less suitable, but tacai higher priority cover directly in front of them.

[Ryujin]

Are individual pieces of shrapnel from treebursts modelled?

If not, how exactly does this effect come into play?

I believe there is sort of a "LOF" check between an explosion and your troops. If there's something in the way (like something exploding on the other side of a wall from your guys), they get blast and other protection from the explosion. Steve even mentioned that vehicles can help shield your troops.

I don't think individual pieces of shrapnel and such are tracked, there is a just a percentage chance of getting hit by shrapnel based on distance, cover, and having "LOF" or not.

If your troops are cowering in a trench and a shell lands next to it, there should be no "LOF" for the shrapnel to your guys, so they should generally be OK. If a shell hits a tree above the trench, it could get "LOF" into the trench.

I don't know the exact details of how shrapnel is done in CMx2, but from playing CMSF, this seems to be the case from using all sorts of bombs and arty in that game. I've had guys survive a 500lb bomb hitting across the street because they had something between them and it while their buddies in the open farther away took casualties.

It also seemed that this worked with air burst rounds in CMSF, if it could get "LOF" into a trench even though it was not directly on top of it, it would cause casualties. Where as HE quick needed to land pretty much in the trench.