[Cross]

Hey John,

I agree that excessive use of z-fire bogs down the game.

Ten Vickers did fire continuously for 12 hours. Each gun fired 100,000 rounds, which is over 6,800 lbs of ammunition per gun. Which is again my point, let people buy ammunition dumps/transport if they want to shoot z-fire for the entire battle.

We could argue back and forth about the various merits and weaknesses of the Vickers and the MG42, but excessive z-fire could be addressed by reducing ammo for all HMGs. Personally, I’d reduce the MG42 ammo a lot more than the 500-600rpm weapons, for the reasons already given.

Rifleman would always carry extra ammo for their squad LMG (total LMG ammo would be 600 for a US section, 1000 for a British section, and 1150 for a German section) but I’ve never heard that other units would carry ammo for HMG sections; unless you’re talking about transport and supply units?

ATM we have a 3xMG42 crew of 9 with 270 SP ammo units.
If we use a 1.5 second burst (30 MG42 rounds) for one SP ammo unit then that’s 600 lbs of MG ammunition! That’s the maximum a horse and cart can carry (the horse alone could manage 200lbs).

That said, I recognize that mortars in SP carry more ammo than they should, and I think that is where RightDeve has a point about subjective game balancing. But mortar ammo still has to be used with care in the game, where MG ammo can be fired off with reckless abandon with complete disregard for fire discipline, and causes too much z-fire. Most players won’t waste much mortar ammo on z-fire.

Creating defensive and offensive MGs might help the situation slightly, but I wouldn’t have defensive MGs with more ammo, better to have mobile MGs with a lot less ammo; and or make MGs more expensive. Or just give all MGs less ammo and buy ammo supply for defensive positions.

Another thing that may help is to change triple MG units to only two or even one MG per unit; and as a bonus the MG crew sizes would then be more realistic.

Perhaps another idea would be to have z-fire (for infantry and MGs) cost more ammo units.

FTR, I do like the new accuracy for z-fire. It’s more realistic.

cheers,
Cross