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Vehicles + hedgerow holes = GNARGHHH!


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I must say, getting vehicles through holes blasted in hedgerows is an exercise in frustration. I'm currently playing the second scenario in the Panzer Marsch campaign. Got my Pioneere to blast some nice holes, and the Panthers went through no problem. But the halftracks, oh, that's a different story! Some make it through OK, some seem to chicken out at the last moment, make a U-turn, and take off to god-knows-where. And that's for near-identical movement paths, approaching the hole head-on---not at a funny angle---at "Move" speed.

It really gets old having to reload your scenario and replot your movement paths over and over because half your Hanomags are acting like skittish horses coming up to a jump. Incidentally, this is one place where having non-draggable waypoints really adds insult to injury...but that, I suppose, is a whole other can of worms.

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Not 100% certain, but this might have to do with turning radius. Tracked vehicles can pivot on a spot; wheeled vehicles can't. Shermans and Stuarts seem happy with tank-sized holes in bocage. Trucks and Jeeps can have problems, even to the point of taking the scenic route along roads laden with AT guns. Urgh.

Try to have the truck or jeep going very straight at the opening for some distance before it reaches it, and as perpendicular to the bocage as possible. And go no faster than Move.

- Chris

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Playing the second Panzer Marsch mission, I tried to drive 2 Panthers and some half-tracks through an existing gap widened by the engineers. 1 Panther simply refused every time to pass through the gap, but I was (eventually) able to drive all the other vehicles, including the other Panther, through the gap. The one that couldn't get through was the HQ late Panther G, with a -1 command penalty, whereas the one that could get through was an early Panther G with no command penalty. No idea if command penalties (or even the Panther model) would have affected the vehicles' abilities to drive through gaps?

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Not 100% certain, but this might have to do with turning radius.

As far as I can tell, turning radius while stopped isn't modeled in CMBN. When you give a stopped jeep or armored car a face order, it rotates in place. Wheeled vehicles don't need to drive ahead or reverse to turn in the game.

Besides, this issue appears even when the vehicle should not be turning at all. Which is what makes it annoying; I don't mind having to line vehicles up myself to cross gaps. I do mind when the vehicle ignores my perfectly lined up waypoints, turns for no reason, and then blocks the half-dozen vehicles lined up behind it.

This issue has certainly been brought up before, but I don't know if BFC has confirmed that they've found the relevant bug in the code. The Tiger bug was probably different, since this one seems to appear even when the vehicle in question has never been under fire.

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All that makes sense. It does look to me like it's something to do with turning radius. And it seems like the halftracks have a really large turning radius, which causes them to do all kinds of crazy things even when one plots a path with only gentle curves.

I think this might be a case where the simulation simply has to make use of bit more abstraction or fudging. That's what happens with barrel elevation/depression limits, if I remember correctly...? It would be a nightmare having the AI deal with that, so it's left out. Same thing with turning radius. If the AI can't be made to deal with it, then leave it out or make it less restrictive. In the big picture, vehicles turning on a dime is way less unrealistic than having them dance the hokey-pokey every time they need to pass through a narrow opening.

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