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Weapon tests for Combat Mission

Bulletpoint said:
This is very surprising to me. What changed about it?
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In v4.0 (and in v4.02, if I opened a save made in v4.0) I could put my firing team with binoculars at 600 m and fire. They would never lose sight of the target. But once I started making new scenarios in v4.02, this was no longer possible - at 360 m and above the units started intermittently losing sight of the target when the target took cover. At first I thought I changed something in the way I set things up (after all, it's been 2 years since the first series of tests) but eventually I realized that this is the new way of things in v4.02. This is why the results end at 312 m.

Bulletpoint said:
True, but my own experience is that a LMG42 is very unlikely to hit running targets at 300m+. In a recent PBEM, my opponent charged a single team across open fields towards me, and I had 3 different LMG teams ready at ranges from 300-400m. They fired for several minutes without hitting anything.

Anecdotal evidence, I know, but matches my experience of playing this game for years... The LMGs seem to be more of a force multiplier within rifle range.
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Can be, definitely. LMG42 has about 0.14 kills per minute at 312 meters. Three teams will have about 0.45 kills per minute. And let's say foxholes give 50% protection at long range, so that's 0.90 kills per minute. With this chance it is perfectly possible that they don't hit anything for several minutes.

Bulletpoint said:
But the MP44 fires single shots at longer ranges... you meant the MP40?
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Yeah that was inaccurate but I did mean the MP44. I could get it to open fire at 390 m at an exposed target, more than most other rifles. It fires in semi-auto mode but it still fires with a high RoF. But I should add that this part of the tests was much less systematic. Once I'd set up the scenario, I'd let one target unit walk across the map against a firing team. When their status changed from "spotting" to "aiming", I measured the distance. That's all.

Bulletpoint said:
Another nugget:

"With the Area Target order, occasionally all four target troop unit members would be hit before the end of the 10-minute test"

I find it a bit odd that this game allows you to clear out foxholes by area fire.
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I forgot to address some of your points. This was rare, but when you do 500 test runs, it does happen. It is also likely that you spend half of your ammo without hitting anything.

Bulletpoint said:
Marksmen seem to have the same chance of hitting their target regardless of distance. Their accuracy even seems to increase with distance.
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Correct. They spend more time aiming when the target is far away, but their accuracy does not decrease (in fact it seems to increase slightly). At least not up to 312 m.
I did not test Marksmen at longer ranges - I don't really know if they could be affected by the spotting problems like other units. At some point I decided I've done enough tests :)
 
OK so I've been thinking more about why foxholes seem to offer more protection at close ranges. You wrote that it might be due to targets ducking more at close range. I'm not sure that explains it, since I find that troops are actually cowering less when getting fired on from closer than about 100m.

So here's another idea:

We know that in CM, getting hit by a bullet does not always mean the soldier is killed or wounded. There is some "saving roll" applied.

If lethality is a function of distance not only because more shots miss at long range, but that the energy of the bullet is also taken into account when doing that check, could it be that foxholes simply work by setting a maxium ceiling for bullet energy?

Let's say the game assigns a value between 0-100 for each bullet that hits a soldier, depending on bullet speed and weight and possibly type. For troops in foxholes, bullets faster and heavier than a certain amount will be taken down to let's say 50. This value is then fed into the calculation to find out if the hit soldier survives, gets wounded, or dies.

So if the target is farther away, the energy of the bullet is already lower, so taking it down from say 70 to 50 doesn't help as much. But at close range, the bullet energy is close to the maximum of 100, so capping it at 50 would be a big help for the defender.

Does this make sense?

A way to test this (and I'm NOT saying you should), would be to repeat the foxhole test with a .50 cal. I'm guessing you'd get different results than for the Garand - the foxholes would provide a bigger relative difference in protection at longer ranges.
 
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The final calculation could look something like


Probability of getting killed (when physically hit) =

Projectile energy (mass x velocity, capped if in foxhole) * projectile type factor (pointy 1.0 /blunt 1.2 /hollowpoint 1.5)

Divided by terrain modifier (ground type, buildings, tree type and density etc.) * stance bonus (prone gives more protection)


I'm sure I made a mistake somewhere, and I was always rubbish at maths, but I hope at least it gives an idea about what I'm trying to say.
 
Bulletpoint said:
OK so I've been thinking more about why foxholes seem to offer more protection at close ranges. You wrote that it might be due to targets ducking more at close range. I'm not sure that explains it, since I find that troops are actually cowering less when getting fired on from closer than about 100m.

So here's another idea:

[...]

Does this make sense?
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Could be, I don't know.

If it's really clear that foxholes give more protection at close than at long range, I'd say that is something worthy to bring up with someone that can and wants to create a ticket for it (beta team etc).

Whatever the explanation, it's not logical.
 
Bulletpoint said:
A way to test this (and I'm NOT saying you should), would be to repeat the foxhole test with a .50 cal. I'm guessing you'd get different results than for the Garand - the foxholes would provide a bigger relative difference in protection at longer ranges.
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I think this could be done - I'll see if I can set up a test this weekend.
But it won't tell us much about close ranges because the M2 HB versus unprotected troops at 40 m will be a massacre. Even with foxholes it can be finished in 10 seconds. The limit is here how fast the gunner can turn the gun to hit 4 targets.
 
Drifter Man said:
I think this could be done - I'll see if I can set up a test this weekend.
But it won't tell us much about close ranges because the M2 HB versus unprotected troops at 40 m will be a massacre. Even with foxholes it can be finished in 10 seconds. The limit is here how fast the gunner can turn the gun to hit 4 targets.
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I'm sure there are more factors that go into the kill calculation than in my little example, so it could be there's some other factor that cancels out the cap in some value. For example, projectile cross section could be used as a multiplier too, to give bigger munitions a better chance to defeat dug in troops.

But all this is wild speculation. If it doesn't take up too much of your weekend, I'd like to see the results. I totally understand if you had enough of testing for now.
 
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So, this chart shows M2HB results next to the Garand. They depend a little less on distance, except for the 40 m part. There, I think, the MG gets the 4 kills done so quickly that it doesn't matter much if the target is in foxholes or not. On average it takes 26 .50cal rounds to get a kill at this range with foxholes, 20 without.
It was good to see that the target troops did not try to run/sneak away even from the M2HB when they had no protection, so the tests could proceed.

Foxholes.png
 
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Drifter Man said:
So, this chart shows M2HB results next to the Garand. They depend a little less on distance, except for the 40 m part. There, I think, the MG gets the 4 kills done so quickly that it doesn't matter much if the target is in foxholes or not. On average it takes 26 .50cal rounds to get a kill at this range with foxholes, 20 without.
It was good to see that the target troops did not try to run/sneak away even from the M2HB when they had no protection, so the tests could proceed.

View attachment 20513
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Seems to me the .50 gives the complete opposite results of the Garand...
 
That's right - less relative protection at close range, as I expected - because when the target is flooded with 300 .50cal rounds per minute at 40 meters, foxholes don't matter much. It's mainly about how fast the gunner can turn the gun at four target soldiers.
 
So the conclusion is that the .50 results show data more clear of the cowering effect, because it's a more powerful weapon, so it becomes more about hitting the target or not? Whereas the Garand spends more time playing whack a mole?
 
Also because it's an automatic weapon, so the target is repeatedly at close range before having time to cower.
 
My conclusion is that foxholes give about 55-65% protection at range, and at close ranges different things happen for the M1 Garand and the M2HB... another reason for the low protection against M2HB could be that the machinegun often kills 1-2 men at the start of the test before they even have the chance to take cover.
 
Drifter Man said:
My conclusion is that foxholes give about 55-65% protection at range, and at close ranges different things happen for the M1 Garand and the M2HB... another reason for the low protection against M2HB could be that the machinegun often kills 1-2 men at the start of the test before they even have the chance to take cover.
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What if you started the test with them already hiding?
 
Stafford said:
What if you started the test with them already hiding?
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I think they will do much better. Especially since "hiding" seems to offer better protection than merely "cowering" - at least in some artillery tests I did. I think it reflects hiding troops having taken a bit more time to find a good place to hide. Notice how when you click the hide button, it actually takes a couple of seconds for the whole squad to enter hiding.
 
By the way, I also tested foxholes VS artillery. I used 105mm against a whole company of troops. The result was that - while not hiding - the difference between being in foxholes and being on open grass was so small that I could not be sure it was not statistical uncertainty. Troops would cower, but that seemed to provide almost no protection even when they were on top of foxholes.

However, when starting in hiding, losses were significantly smaller. I think at least cut by half - can't remember the exact numbers now.
 
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