Artillery vs Infantry

[companyteam]

Can e-sim please review the effect of artillery vs infantry? Unprotected or protected (in bunkers), it appears the effect is much the same - a concentration of indirect fire, of almost any duration, is effectively certain death to Infantry. As an example, in a scenario I just finished with, a whole platoon (less one man) was destroyed completely.

Comparatively, planning figures we use in training indicate that it would take 64 rounds of 105mm PD (or 48 rounds of 155mm) to achieve 30% destruction.

The "problem" with scenarios, then, is that the Infantry rarely get a chance to really get "into" the battle - if they're identified and targeted, they're out of the picture almost straight away.

I'd like to see either the protection of infantry increased (particularly in light of the fact that these days most dismounts/infantry will be wearing body armour anyway). Another thought - could we get an option of body armour added?

Anybody else have the same issue, or am I one of the few that care?

[Ssnake]

The plan is to switch from the current artillery model to a new one where you will have actual artillery pieces firing their ordnance. At that point we will have to review the damage model behind this.

As a general rule of thumb it seems that SB Pro currently underpredicts the effect of a single round but balances this out with a too high rate of fire. Then there are special effects like bunkers not being as effective as one would expect in their protection against artillery. So yes, there's still a lot of work to do.

[Ssnake]

Another thought - could we get an option of body armour added?

Yes, as soon as we are making the transition to polygon based infantry models.

[Koen]

The plan is to switch from the current artillery model to a new one where you will have actual artillery pieces firing their ordnance.

Ha ! Does this mean M109 & friends will be modeled ?

Wow wow wow.

Yes, as soon as we are making the transition to polygon based infantry models

Polygon based models: would mean a lot for immersion.

Planned for this summer's upgrade ?

Rgds,

K

[Ssnake]

No, that'll have to wait.

[companyteam]

I wouldn't have thought that the effect of the artillery rounds was underpredicted - just the opposite!

[Ssnake]

We made blast/overpressure effects stronger to balance out the fact that we cannot calculate the dispersion pattern of thousands of fragments which would be the prime effectors. Unfortunately overpressure affects the environment differently - a simple sheet of metal might provide protection against small fragments but a blast wave would ignore it.

So we always have to deal with some sort of trade-off between the different statistical abstractions simply because we have to make do with limited computation capacity in a real-time simulation.

[companyteam]

SSnake - thanks (?), so much clearer! I'll take it as read that you're looking at it..... Meanwhile, I'll just make do with "work arounds" as needed.

[Ssnake]

That interpretation of my words might be a bit too optimistic. We have every intent to improve things here, but no time in the immediate future (until July/August), so I can't guarantee quick fixes.