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vic said:
I tried something like this a while back (DOS ver).
I tested pretty extensively and here's what i found:
4. the game doesn't look at the number of MEN in a hex when calculating casualties (i.e. no regard to target density). it appears as if UNITS check to see if they are in a hex that has received fire.
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Vic, as an ex-Camo member, this is the one thing I can tell you you're wrong on. I'm not saying that the differential is as big as it should be (or that it's not) but it's definitely there. If you want to check it out, set up a nice empty map test with hidden fire turned off and buy A side with MG and direct fire arty (or whatever) and B side with a measured mix of something like 12 man, four man, and sniper units, and shoot at all of them an equal amount. You WILL knock a lot more casualties off the big squads than the little guys, and you WILL hit them more often.
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vic said:
3. with more units, the 360 degree, all-weapons-are-used opfire thing is just unworkable. one unit moves and gets drilled by tons of opponents. one spends a lot of time watching opfire. likewise firing a unit ("pulling the trigger" during the player's phase) resulted in a deluge of return opfire.
the bad thing about all this opfire is that the game doesn't model "real time" well. it doesn't look at fire recived IN TOTAL and then assess damage. it lets units "pile on" sequentially. e.g. three four-man squads firing rifles should have the same effect as one twelve-man squad...but they don't. the three four-man squads will produce more casualties and more suppression because fire effects are calculated after each "round" is fired. three four-man units can get in (typically) a total of 18 "volleys" where the single twelve-man unit gets in 6.
vic
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These sorts of modelling issues are the meat, and the part I'm not positive you could tweak without Andy's help. You've been around a while, you remember how many times Camo has tweaked the code to get the outcome of infantry combat to come out right.
That part is math: it's an abstraction, a set of interlinked formulas that give a result as close to what (Camo and the community think) real results were.
That reality is different for the lower level of abstraction and lower scale of a fire-team, rather than squad, level, game. I know Andy did some serious testing on this for the MBT game, looking at differences between modern infantry tactics and WWII tactics.
I think a fire-team (rather than single man, skirmish level) mod could be made to work, and work well, I'm just not sure it could get better than half-decent without Don & Andy's help.
I'd like to see something like that, because while I like the way the current games work for battles of maneuver, I think a fire-team scale WWII game at, say, 10-20 meter hexes, would work much better for city fighting, and maybe (not my thing as much) for other close-terrain work like woods and jungle fighting as well.