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Water path finding and ATGM lethality


Stuuk

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Ultimately, even if we had perfect pathfinding, this opens the question whether certain formation orders actually shouldn't lead to mass drownings because they are leadership errors. To that extent Volcano is exactly right. But that doesn't mean that there is no room for improvement.

:)

SB Pro however IS NOT (and never will be) a carefree real-time strategy game where you just have to group a bunch of units and click on any spot on the map to have them move there on their own. Formations, speed, behavior, and spacing are all tactical decisions that require user attention - Mission, Enemy, Time, Terrain: They ought to be considered for every single route segment that you plot on the map because they are relevant for the way how your forces move.

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Hmm.. I've met a couple of tank drivers and although maybe not the brightest buttons in the world, I would question their willingness to drive a 50 ton chunk of metal into a river, with them strapped to the bottom of it - even if terribly hung over and ordered to do so by the PM stood on the turret.

I think the thread's served its purpose - eSim are clearly aware that the pathing algorithms could do with some work.

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Ah it seems I've upset the fanboys. Fine.. SB is perfect in every respect, the AI is infallible and the path finding was designed by Chuck Norris. Happy now? :)

It's not perfect. What people are saying is that by managing your platoons and making sure they are deconflicted at crossings, its workable. My tip would be to make sure platoons are not getting mixed up and have some spacing before reaching a bridge. If they get mixed together during the road march, not only will the road march be slow, but they will have problems at bridges. The bigger problem, IMHO, is the AI dealing with built up areas.

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Ah it seems I've upset the fanboys. Fine.. SB is perfect in every respect, the AI is infallible and the path finding was designed by Chuck Norris. Happy now? :)

Yeah, sometimes we arekind of protective towards our fav. sim ;-)

Pathfinding is not perfect, but it has been improving. (and my I say, the competition doesn't shine on that either :-P )

As the enviroment in the SIMs is getting more complex(=realistic), the AI will have a hard time finding its way trough it. Hey, DARPA pays huge sums for projects in outonomous vehicles...still there are far from a solution.

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Ah it seems I've upset the fanboys. Fine.. SB is perfect in every respect, the AI is infallible and the path finding was designed by Chuck Norris. Happy now? :)

No need to get flippant here. The issue of pathfinding has been brought up by everybody for quite some time, and in the past years we tried a number of approaches which, in retrospect, were doomed to fail (that is, to not completely solve the issue under any circumstance) even though we certainly made some progress.

We have hired a programmer now who has only three fields to work on - 3D characters, pathfinding and behavioral routines, and a third one. We are now very close to a point where we may implement a solution that is fundamentally different from what we did before, and which will probably solve the issue.

Like I wrote before however, stupid commands from the user shall produce embarrassing results. Finding a proper balance between deserved punishment and, shall we call it "smart buffering of slight user negligence" may turn out to be a bigger problem, not the least because it is largely opinion based - and there is a great variance of them.

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No need to get flippant here.

The comment wasn't aimed at eSim, you have all been very reasonable - it was more at Tacbat, who didn't add anything to the conversation and flew on in only to say how clever he is.

In any case, the question's been answered - you have people working on it, which is great. And, it's been reported before, in detail - again, great - didn't know.

So thanks for answering my question :)

I do appreciate your time!

I leave you with this brilliant photo of the mayor of Vilinus dealing with parking violations with an APC !

http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/03082011/74/mayor-crushes-illegally-parked-car-tank.html

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To set a few things straight,
  1. The vast majority of tank losses in Yom Kippur were still due to tank cannon fire. That the majority were lost to Sagger missiles is a myth that has been thoroughly defeated by all quantitative statistical BDAs of the time.
  2. The majority of AFV losses due to Sagger missiles in Yom Kippur were from the first three or four days. The Israeli army did develop tactics to deal with the threat within a week, after which the loss rate dropped considerably.
  3. The high initial losses to ATGMs reflect a number of Israeli weaknesses of the time,
    a) an over-reliance on tanks with too few armored personnel carriers for a true combined-arms approach against the missile threat
    b) an initial underestimation of the threat as such
    c) insufficient protection at the time (almost exclusively homogeneous steel armor)

Protection technology improvements were therefore only a single aspect of the whole suite of countermeasures. That being said, once that the warhead actually hits the armor, we're back to rather basic calculations which, according to all that I know, allow reasonably accurate predictions of the outcome as long as we're looking at a larger number of cases and not the individual incident. Statistics can't say much about individual cases, only about a large number of (sufficiently similar) cases.

Just to get back onto the ATGM debate as I think the water debate has run it course or degenerated which ever you prefer . Im not sure that the Sagger / Yom Kippur myth has been debunked. The Soviets claimed anywhere between 800 - 1000 tank kills during the war ("Well he would say that, wouldn't he?" slight misquote from Mandy Rice Davies) attributed to Saggers . The Israelis switched tactics . Nato adopted these tactics and then spent a lot of money investing in defence against them. Logic would suggest there was a real fear of these weapons. The weakness of the Sagger was improved so the tank crews couldn't see them firing and improved there tactics by firing them in pairs giving the tanks less chance to dodge them.

So my conclusion (and of course my opinion) is that they are not over done in SB there lethality is fine and although you may feel invulnerable in your Leo you aren't

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Logic would suggest there was a real fear of these weapons.

Well there has to be a reason everyone has chobham; reactive armour etc these days - and the reason has to be that ATGM's are scary.

So my conclusion (and of course my opinion) is that they are not over done in SB there lethality is fine and although you may feel invulnerable in your Leo you aren't

It depends what you're trying to model. For real soldiers using SB to train, learning that stuff you are fighting cannot kill you is probably a bad lesson.

Learning that everything can kill you makes you look first and jump second.

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