Quote:
Originally Posted by c_of_red
AFAIK, helios don't see things ( observe, search) as well as leg units. Sort of between a ground vehicle and a leg unit. Or at least that is the way the original SP2 worked. Not sure if that was changed or not during the port to windoze. What little testing I have done says 'no', but an 'expert' told me I was wrong. I think it is confusion created by the term 'spotting'. which in the real world means seeing something but in the SP world it means calling artillery and nothing else. I suppose that helps keep the confusion level down, at least if everyone is aware of the jargon.
A thread at the blitz went past the post limit on this topic. It seems every SP player ( about 15,000 on the 'net, and growing) has an opinion on this topic.
No absolutes in SP. I like to 'hide' my FO's, 2-man scouts, sniper teams and snipers. By hide I mean find a hex with concealment (cover is better, but sometime Mars isn't that helpful), redline your weapons and stay quite as a mouse at an Ally Cat convention. I have had enemy tanks park in the same hex. I have had AH's hovering over an FO while it called in arty.
So you never really know how much of the enemy you are seeing at that moment. Nor do you know how much of your force he can see.
FoW.
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Yup, if you "redline" your weapons it's actually fairly easy to keep units hidden. In fact since I use the CD version I spend a lot of my set-up time assigning ranges and fire limits (via the armor min/max and unit type settings) telling my units who they're allowed to shoot at and when.
And yes, helos are HORRIBLE at seeing (not spotting for arty) non-firing enemy units. But I've found them very good at seeing those units that do fire.
One thing that undoubtedly effects this massively is that I've modified my non-transport (i.e. Light Attack, Attack, and COIN) helo formations so that they have a bonus to their experience and sometimes morale.
My reasoning is very simple. The "best" helo pilots are the ones that fly the attack helos, "average" pilots fly transports.
Given that I play the USMC 90% of the time I'm not playing a pre-set scenario the base morale and experience is already 80 so adding 8 (a mere 10% increase over the base) to this virtually guarentees vet status to my helos. Yeah, the unit cost goes up slightly, but supposedly the game balance isn't effected because the total unit cost for each side doesn't change...I will have less units in terms of total numbers then I would have. So far my testing and experiments are giving me pretty much the results I want and expect.