Infantry Coordination with PC. No RMB options in Mission

[Japo32]

Hello.

 

I am trying to reproduce this into the last update of SB. I think I could when this video was released, but now the infantry don't move and the vehicle continues its way.

 

 

There is a way of doing it, It is creating the motion previous to the START of the mission in the MAP window. There, I will have the option "pickup the route if..." (don't know if that is the exact way in english as I do have the menus in spanish). That option will make the same behaviour as in the video, BUT in real time, when I inside the mission, right clicking over the route line, that option won't appear, and that will make that the units won't behave same as in the video with infantry coordination. 

What I am doing wrong to not have that Line right mouse click "engage route if..." condition window? (also only appears in map previous to start the option "retreat if..." Not in real time mission.

 

Edit: Checking other posts, it seems that the conditional routes only appear in the pre-mission planned time? If that is the way it has to be and those conditional routes menus don't appear in the mission time, what we can do to do the same as in the video? 

Thanks

Edited July 6, 2020 by Japo32

[Jartsev]

1) Ability to set 'Embark if...' and 'Retreat back if...' conditions  is available in mission editor and during the planning phase only, and those  options  cannot be accessed during execution phase(e.g. after green 'Start' button was clicked). This is how it works for about 15 years or so now.

 

2) If you need to coordinate movement of dismounts and their vehicle during execution phase, then  waypoint, where troops are are going to dismount, should not have tactics set, and route originating from this waypoint should  have slow speed enabled. If speed is higher than  'slow', then vehicles will ignore dismounts; and the same thing happens if waypoint has  some battle position tactics enabled and user gives command 'Proceed' or 'Resume route' to a vehicle.

[Japo32]

Ok.. I see the 2 point is working! thanks! 

Curious why something that is inside the planning phase is not then int eh execution phase... but anyway.

[Ssnake]

It's, well, a design decision that's ultimately subject to opinion. I figured that trying to come up with structured statements that would follow Boolean Logic would occupy too much of a user's attention when there's usually a lot of things going on, and would subject to an effect very similar to target fixation. These embark conditions etc. are heavily "system 2" driven (following D. Kahnemann's terminology), which is the equivalent to "heavy work" for the brain. But tactical decisions, I believe, are mostly System 1 driven - gut feelings, a sense of the situation that factors in more elements than you can easily name. And you need to develop the System 1 for tactical situations because a. you're working from an incomplete situational picture, b. you're working under information overload and under time pressure. The precious few bits of reserve capacity for analytical thought processes should not be consumed by the simulation's user interface, ideally.

 

You may disagree with that design decision, that's cool.

But I hope that the answer above at least illustrates that we didn't make these decisions on a whim.

[Gibsonm]

12 hours ago, Japo32 said:

Ok.. I see the 2 point is working! thanks! 

Curious why something that is inside the planning phase is not then int eh execution phase... but anyway.

 

Another thing you can do is create the routes in the planning phase and store them off to one side.

 

Then during Execution you can copy and paste them onto routes being taken by units. Once "pasted" you can adjust the length and orientation of the route:

 

 

On the map we have a Marder Platoon.

 

The Platoon currently moves to Waypoint 5 and will move to Waypoint 6 if told to "proceed". You don't need this, its just a safety measure to ensure you copy and paste the stored route before the Marder's get to the end.

 

Off to the left are an "Assault" version and an "Engage" version of the dismounted Attack / Clearance.

 

Process:

 

1. Start the scenario (Marders begin to move)

 

2. Select which one of the stored options you want to use.

 

3. Right Click on the route (not Waypoint 1 or 3).

 

4. Choose "Copy route" (if you had a group of routes it would be "Copy route chain")

 

5. Click on Waypoint 6.

 

6. Select "paste" the route should appear.

 

7. Right click on Waypoint 6 and select Troops Dismount.

 

8. If the Marders have yet to arrive at Waypoint 5 you can select it and set the tactic to "none" so they don't stop.

 

If its working correctly the Marders arrive at "5", you select "proceed" for them to continue, they arrive at "6" and the troops dismount, then the Marders follow the Infantry as the complete the trip on the newly added route.

 

You can do something similar with conditional routes but the condition you set in the Planning phase, can not be changed in the Execution phase. For example you could have an conditional route of "embark if ... Unit is 3A". You wont get that to work if you paste it onto a route be used by 10A, since the copied route will be looking for 3A.

 

Hopefully that helps?

 

Copying prepared routes 4_167.sce

Edited July 7, 2020 by Gibsonm

[Japo32]

Thanks for the tips. They are well appreciated.

No, I am not saying and never thought that the decision had no reason to not include those options in the mission stage. But it is only a shame not to have them. SB planning is really very complicated to do it all from begining, so the more tools we have the better. But I can live without them, of course, specially with the tip you put in your last post.

Edited July 7, 2020 by Japo32

[Gibsonm]

@Japo32 Just a follow up.

 

The default activity ends up with the Platoon fixated on one place:

 

 

Both the Platoon on the left and the Platoon on the right are converging on one point.

 

However, you can (with some care since you are giving the units new orders as they are moving) select one squad from each vehicle and give it a new route in order to spread the frontage out:

 

 

The Platoon on the left is a control and is still converging.

 

The Platoon on the right has one fire team per vehicle allocated an assault command to spread the frontage out. The vehicles are keeping station with the other fire team and maintaining that supporting function.

 

Note: If you are replicating an Assualt command you need to adjust the speed on the new routes to slow as well or this half of the Platoon will arrive well before the vehicles and the remaining dismounts.

 

Using this approach you could have all the vehicles and half of the dismounts assault one location and the other four (in this case) dismount units move off on a different task, without breaking the vehicle /dismount relationship in the Assaulting half.

 

Copying prepared routes 4_167.sce

 

[Apocalypse 31]

On 7/6/2020 at 5:49 PM, Ssnake said:

It's, well, a design decision that's ultimately subject to opinion. I figured that trying to come up with structured statements that would follow Boolean Logic would occupy too much of a user's attention when there's usually a lot of things going on, and would subject to an effect very similar to target fixation. These embark conditions etc. are heavily "system 2" driven (following D. Kahnemann's terminology), which is the equivalent to "heavy work" for the brain. But tactical decisions, I believe, are mostly System 1 driven - gut feelings, a sense of the situation that factors in more elements than you can easily name. And you need to develop the System 1 for tactical situations because a. you're working from an incomplete situational picture, b. you're working under information overload and under time pressure. The precious few bits of reserve capacity for analytical thought processes should not be consumed by the simulation's user interface, ideally.

Be honest: Did you really apply a Kahneman concept to this design decision or are you just saying that?

[Ssnake]

I did apply it, although not consciously. The thought processes laid out above were as they were. Thanks to Kahnemann, which I only discovered years later, I can now formulate the process in a more concise manner. Before that, I would have called system 1 "guts" or "instinct" although we all know that it can be trained with experience (which is what Steel Beasts attempts to do, if you play scenarios conducive to building relevant experiences). And we all KNOW that "thinking hard" (=system 2) is, well, hard, and takes longer and tends to absorb all your brain power/attention.

 

I mean, many of us have been instructors in the army at one point or another. And if you took that role seriously (as you bloody should, since lives depend on adequate training) then you probably also learned a bit about what types of training work best for what kind of skill/activity. Where it's the perfection of body activities armies figured out more than two thousand years ago that drill based training works best, wether your service weapon is a pointy stick or an M16. As army guys we call it "muscle memory" which is of course absurd since muscles have no nerve cells that could store information, but it gets the point across that it's all about memorizing motions until you no longer have to think about them. Because thinking is slow.

So, Steel Beasts is heavily leaning towards the cognitive skills spectrum. But even here there's the distinction between analytical thought processes (what you might do a lot in a staff officer's role) and "experience", the ability to sense a tactical opportunity, to develop a simple plan for a tactical move on the fly and to quickly give the necessary orders. I'd bet you a lot of money that successful military leaders, even if they conduct a maneuver in text-book manner, do most of it based on "instinct" and "experience". Analytical thinking has its place when there's considerably less steel fragments in the air, and that's where a lot of tactical training at military academies (sic) is focused on. But at the platoon level, decision-making needs to be snappy. And Steel Beasts was tailored for the platoon level.

[Apocalypse 31]

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

I did apply it, although not consciously

HA. Nice try

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I'll bite, since meta cognition and thinking about thinking is such a wonderful topic that is understudied and underappreciated. I would also recommend a great book that follows Kahneman and Tversky - to include some incredible military journeys: 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Minds/dp/0393254593

 

 

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

I'd bet you a lot of money that successful military leaders, even if they conduct a maneuver in text-book manner, do most of it based on "instinct" and "experience"

One must be a scientist to understand art. Boss Ross was a scientist first. He understood chemical mixtures & reactions, pallets, brush types, material types and their reaction with paint. He understood techniques; when to press hard or softly, how certain brushes required certain movements and their reaction with material.

 

I had a former boss that demanded his Majors be scientists. He would say "I didn't hire Majors to be artists - you haven't earned that right yet. Commanders are artists"

[BlackDeath]

Not exactly the same topic but still infantry & transport related;

I am pretty sure I once saw a "Mount" option somewhere but I am not able reproduce it;

how to embark troops not affiliated to a transport, be it (empty) chopper, truck or pc ?

 

Both trucks and chopper are empty in the exemple below, infantry group is 6 people strengh and would fit into. I deleted both squads related to the transports.

Edited July 8, 2020 by BlackDeath

[Gibsonm]

 

16 minutes ago, BlackDeath said:

Not exactly the same topic but still infantry & transport related;

I am pretty sure I once saw a "Mount" option somewhere but I am not able reproduce it;

how to embark troops not affiliated to a transport, be it (empty) chopper, truck or pc ?

 

Both trucks and chopper are empty in the exemple below, infantry group is 6 people strengh and would fit into. I deleted both squads related to the transports.

 

Given the "attach to" option I take it these were taken in the Mission Editor.

 

In that case "attach" the squad to the nearby transport asset (Truck / Helo) and it will then be linked to it, like "organic" passengers.

 

During Execution, if you click on the Helo in the 3D view and select "mount" (I think that's it) you'll see a list of nearby units that it can load (attached / organic or not).

 

In this way for example during execution an APC can mount any ATGM team and resupply it (maybe not entirely accurate as every APC doesn't carry reloads for every ATGM type). The APC and ATGM don't need to have had a pre-existing arrangement.

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by Gibsonm

[BlackDeath]

19 minutes ago, Gibsonm said:

 

 

Given the "attach to" option I take it these were taken in the Mission Editor.

 

In that case "attach" the squad to the nearby transport asset (Truck / Helo) and it will then be linked to it, like "organic" passengers.

 

During Execution, if you click on the Helo in the 3D view and select "mount" (I think that's it) you'll see a list of nearby units that it can load (attached / organic or not).

 

In this way for example during execution an APC can mount any ATGM team and resupply it (maybe not entirely accurate as every APC doesn't carry reloads for every ATGM type). The APC and ATGM don't need to have had a pre-existing arrangement.

 

Thank you, it works fine, I was looking from the infantry side 

 

From the vehicle option menu => Load troops.

 

Here are the happy folks

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by BlackDeath

[smithcorp]

That command is a lifesaver for grabbing orphaned dismount teams and getting them where needed, and resupplied.

[hoggydog]

On 7/7/2020 at 5:20 AM, Gibsonm said:

 

Another thing you can do is create the routes in the planning phase and store them off to one side.

 

Then during Execution you can copy and paste them onto routes being taken by units. Once "pasted" you can adjust the length and orientation of the route:

 

 

On the map we have a Marder Platoon.

 

The Platoon currently moves to Waypoint 5 and will move to Waypoint 6 if told to "proceed". You don't need this, its just a safety measure to ensure you copy and paste the stored route before the Marder's get to the end.

 

Off to the left are an "Assault" version and an "Engage" version of the dismounted Attack / Clearance.

 

Process:

 

1. Start the scenario (Marders begin to move)

 

2. Select which one of the stored options you want to use.

 

3. Right Click on the route (not Waypoint 1 or 3).

 

4. Choose "Copy route" (if you had a group of routes it would be "Copy route chain")

 

5. Click on Waypoint 6.

 

6. Select "paste" the route should appear.

 

7. Right click on Waypoint 6 and select Troops Dismount.

 

8. If the Marders have yet to arrive at Waypoint 5 you can select it and set the tactic to "none" so they don't stop.

 

If its working correctly the Marders arrive at "5", you select "proceed" for them to continue, they arrive at "6" and the troops dismount, then the Marders follow the Infantry as the complete the trip on the newly added route.

 

You can do something similar with conditional routes but the condition you set in the Planning phase, can not be changed in the Execution phase. For example you could have an conditional route of "embark if ... Unit is 3A". You wont get that to work if you paste it onto a route be used by 10A, since the copied route will be looking for 3A.

 

Hopefully that helps?

 

Copying prepared routes 4_167.sce 99.88 kB · 2 downloads

 

 

This is genius! 

 

One of the things I love about SB is no matter how long I have been playing, barely a week goes by without me learning something new. 

[Gibsonm]

6 hours ago, hoggydog said:

This is genius! 

 

One of the things I love about SB is no matter how long I have been playing, barely a week goes by without me learning something new. 

@hoggydog Glad you found it helpful.

 

I expanded the idea a little further down covering how you can reduce the "convergence on dismount/debus" issue.

 

The downside of created them "off map" are that you need to:

 

a. Create them every time.

 

b. Plan ahead and "pre-position" commands that you think are relevant for the execution phase.

 

But I guess that means you can tailor the ones you create for the task at hand.

 

Edited July 14, 2020 by Gibsonm