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CMBN - Detecting and Marking Mines - Amended

Kandu

Kandu

FGM Colour Sergeant
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The observations that I reported yesterday about detecting and marking hidden mines were based on a single trial. This morning I performed a more carefully controlled and extensive trial which has resulted in the need to amend yesterday's report. Yesterday I reported that there was a difference in time to detection between agricultural and non-agricultural terrain. That needs to be corrected. Today's observation using Wehrmacht, regular, normally motivated, with leadership '0', suggests that detection times appear to be the same for all terrain. It appears that in most cases the mines are revealed in the same one-minute turn provided that the pioneers actively crawl exactly over them. Lying still nearby may or maynot result in detection after a few more minutes. Some terrain, notably gravel and cobbles may? be a bit more resistant to detection. I am unable to discern the degree to which a random factor, positioning of the pioneers, or mobility of the pioneers interact. The possibility of a random factor appears to be less important than the mobility and positioning of the pioneers.

I assume that German veteran, crack an elite troops and SS or Luftwaffe will perform the same since you cannot do better than 'same turn' detection.
I have not tested green or conscript types nor done extensive testing on Allied troops, which did not perform as well during an actual scenario.
 
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Thanks for testing things out.

It's funny that in my ten years of playing combat mission, I never realised that you need to crawl into minefields to detect them. I thought the point was to move the engineers next to suspected minefield locations and let them sit there for some time until they spotted the mines, then mark them. Always thought that moving into an unmarked minefield would be very dangerous.

But I guess it makes sense that crawling in this case means moving very slowly and carefully through the terrain to find what's there. However, it seems a different logic from when you mark them - that's done from the outside, and then they only crawl into the minefield once it's safely marked.
 
@Kandu I just realized there are two commands in the hotkeys .txt file. A "Mark Mines" command, and a "Clear Mines" command. Maybe the latter is specific to the mine flail from CMBN?
I saw this in the CMCW .txt file so maybe it was just copied over without regard of it actually functioning ingame. I will assign fresh keys to this and test it when I remember.
 
WOW! That's a revelation to me! In all these years I have never examined the hotkeys and did not know there was a "clear mines" command. Must test it later today or tomorrow. And yes, it is also there in CMBN. So I tried it and moved the letter 'J' from target briefly to clear mines. Then loaded up my test scenario and it does not work. I suspect that in the current game engine the "clear mines" function has been omitted even though there is space for an unused button on the commands panel. If I am not mistaken, it was possible to clear mines in the original release or maybe it was the Combat Mission first Series.
 
Ok, I had to find the answer to my own question, so I decided to test if troops will detect mines while walking along a road.

So I set up a simple test: 2 regular paved roads (1000m), 10 AT mines on each, with a long distance between them.

3 teams of 4 engineers (one a team leader) on each road. Walking along one team after the other. Counting the amount of mines found after each test. Ran the test three times, so this just gives a rough ballpark figure.

Results: In total, 47 minefields were found. Divided by 6 runs = 7,83 mines detected on average.

Since each run was made by three times, that gives each team a discovery rate of 2,611 mines.

This means that as a rule of thumb, a regular +0 team of 3 engineers plus 1 teamleader has about 25 percent chance of detecting a minefield on a road while walking over it.

If you send three teams across the mine, they have a combined probability of about 75 pct that one of the teams will detect the mines. Results in the test ranged from a low of 2 cases of only 6 mines detected to 1 case of all 10 mines being found.

So if you want a close to 100 pct chance of clearing a road by walking engineers along it, you need at least 4 teams of 4.

I don't know how experience, weather, and mines on other terrain types than road would affect the result.
 
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I now ran the same test again, this time using the HUNT command to see if they would be better at spotting the mines this way.

To my surprise, they performed much worse.

This time, they found only a total of 30 mines, giving an average of 5 mines or exactly 50 pct detection chance for three teams, compared to almost 80 pct. using MOVE.

Or only 16,6 pct chance of a single team to spot a mined location, compared to more than 25 pct. using MOVE.

Also, the engineers did not stop moving when discovering a mine, which I had hoped they would - this would make it more useful for spotting AP minefields (if they walk into AP mines using MOVE, they will immediately start running if one of the mines explodes, which leads to disaster).

The only way I can explain this is that HUNT is apparently a command where the troops focus on spotting enemies, not looking at their feet.
 
Bonus test: Same setup, but this time I moved all mines one square so they were not on the road but on the grass just beside it.

Result: 0 mines were found, even after walking the troops back along the road, in effect running the test twice.

Either it's impossible to spot mines by walking straight past them, or the chance is extremely small.
 
Kandu said:
Thank you for that, Bulletpoint.
Click to expand...

Thank you, too.

And here is some more testing I just did:

Will darkness and fog reduce the chance of spotting mines? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be "no".

I only ran one test of this, but had the same guys walk over the same mines, this time not in noon sunlight, but at midnight and in light fog. Could not see any difference in amount of mines spotted.

Does troop experience affect the chances of finding mines? There seems to be only a small effect.

I changed them from regular to vets, and observed no difference. Then bumped them up to elites, and again not much difference. They now found 80-90 pct of the mines compared to about 75 pct. for the regulars. So one elite team would have 30 pct chance, compared to 25 pct for the regular team. But only ran these tests once, so these numbers only give a general idea.

When lowering experience to conscript, they seemed to find fewer mines. Only half of the mines on each road compared to 75 pct for the other experience brackets.

So the rough chance of one team to find one minefield:

Conscript: 16 pct
Regular: 25 pct
Elite: 30 pct.
 
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And more testing just because now I already set up the test and want to know:

Can regular infantry also find mines, or is it only engineers?

Answer: yes, they can, but they are not good at it.

This time, I ran the test three times again, using regular US infantry. Only the leader team from each squad was used, giving me again 3 guys with rifles and 1 team leader, so same number of troops and composition as in the engineer test.

On average, three such teams walking over 10 minefields only find an average of 2.333 mines, which we can divide by 3 = 0.777.

In other words, a single team of regular US infantry has a 7-8 pct. chance of spotting an AT minefield by walking over it. Compare this to the 25+ pct chance for the engineers.
 
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I also wanted to test if they would find mines easier while crawling than walking, but it couldn't be tested easily as when crawling, they want to crawl in the grass (to maximise concealment I guess). So I couldn't keep them on the road without adding lots of extra waypoints. Which would mean they would spend more time at certain locations, maybe giving them more time to spot mines and thereby skewing the results.

But I did get a feeling that they spot mines better while crawling, as pretty much all minefields were spotted in this test, with the caveat that I did a bit of herding to keep them on the road.
 
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So, in conclusion:

If you want to detect mines on a long road, the fastest way to do it is to send a vehicle or two down the road and see if they blow up. I personally don't like to do this, as it feels gamey.

Tests show that you can also spot the mines if you have at least one platoon of engineers and send everybody walking along the road. One full platoon of engineers should give you almost 100 pct chance of finding any AT mines. If you only have normal infantry, then as a rule of thumb you need three times more of them, so instead of a platoon you need a whole company to walk down the road.

If you suspect there might be mines at a specific and limited location, for example around a bridge, then the best way to find them is to move your engineers fast to the general area, and then have them crawl around any suspected squares.
 
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Nice tests, it confirms with what I had remembered either by reading in the past or by experiencing it myself. Hunt doesn't work great for mine detection. So move or slow. Engineers/pioneers are much better at detection compared to regular infantry.

I forgot whether it improves chances if you give a lot of waypoints density or not, and weather pausing helps the chance of detection. I vaguely recall that it doesn't matter much, but that could be wrong.
 
how does the flail tank work in cmfb? i had one to use in my current pbem battle and it was supposed to lead the convoy towards a bridge...guess what?....it blew up on a mine on the road, KO'd the tank instantly and killed all the crew! it wss on a hunt command which i assumed meant it would advance with caution? Never saw the flail work either, not sure if there is any animation for it.
 
Guardsman said:
how does the flail tank work in cmfb? i had one to use in my current pbem battle and it was supposed to lead the convoy towards a bridge...guess what?....it blew up on a mine on the road, KO'd the tank instantly and killed all the crew! it wss on a hunt command which i assumed meant it would advance with caution? Never saw the flail work either, not sure if there is any animation for it.
Click to expand...

Use the 'clear mines' command.
 
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