Command Ops: Battles From The Bulge takes the highly acclaimed Airborne Assault engine back to the West Front for the crucial engagements during the Ardennes Offensive. Test your command skills in the fiery crucible of Airborne Assault’s “pausable continuous time” uber-realistic game engine. It's up to you to develop the strategy, issue the orders, set the pace, and try to win the laurels of victory in the cold, shadowy Ardennes.
Command Ops: Highway to the Reich brings us to the setting of one of the most epic and controversial battles of World War II: Operation Market-Garden, covering every major engagement along Hell’s Highway, from the surprise capture of Joe’s Bridge by the Irish Guards a week before the offensive to the final battles on “The Island” south of Arnhem.
When a unit is moving in Road Column formation, it will gain movement bonuses from roads (and for non-motorised units, tracks as well) on its path.
When it is moving in any other formation, it will not receive any benefit from roads or tracks
From the COTA advanced game manual:
Set Frontage to 2000 and Depth to 1000.
By setting the frontage and depth we ensure they stay close to the road but not on it.
This will avoid traffic jams when 1st Arm Bde moves up the road.
But there are no more informations about traffic jams...
Can someone explain what will happen when you get a traffic jam ?
How many units (or soldiers) have to be on the same road spot to get a traffic jam ?
And what about motorised units passing slower (foot) units, any slow down effects on them ?
Just had a look at the BFTB game manual and it also says nothing about traffic jams.
Can you imagine a road just like a bridge where the units have to move one by one and cannot be together at the same spot at the same time ?
So if motorised units using the same road as foot units then the motorised units cannot pass them ?
So you should have in mind to have a free road for motorised movement at any time so tank units for example that are reinforcements can move to the front lines without getting stuck behind slower foot units ?
OK the congestion code works like this. First it gets the friendly concentration data at the next location you intend moving through. Then it checks to see if the pers, guns or vehicle thresholds have been exceed. If not, no modifier is applied. If one or more, it determines the adverse modifier by dividng the threshold with the number of pers/guns/vehicles actually present. This will produce one or more ratios. It takes the worst or minimum ratio and restricts this to between 0.5 and 1.0 ( ie 50 and 100% ). For advance guards the minimum is 0.75 and for main guards it's 0.625. The resulting modifier is then applied to the speed. Now the thresholds are pers = 150, guns = 6, vehicles = 16 which roughly amounts to one company/bty.
In other words it assumes that you can freely move through another company but anything greater than that and you have a problem.
How often will a company/bty occupy a single location/hectare? They seem to be around 2-3x that length on a road, or occupy 4-9 hectares when deployed.
Is this taken into account when calculating density/congestion?
So for example, having a motorised company passig a foot company means no problem.
But a motorised battalion could not pass the foot company without getting some movement interference.
And i assume a motorised company could pass a foot battalion without a problem too ?
For example look at this situation:
A Inf Bn (foot) moving using a road.
A armoured Bn will soon use the same road and pass the Inf Bn, will this cause them to slow down (traffic jam) ?
I mean like Lieste said, the Inf Bn is not "on the same spot" like you see...just like the armoured bn will be.
So most likely you get a company passing a company...an entire Bn will not be on the same spot passing a company while moving i think.
Hmm, actually a meant a Bn unit (think Artillery, Supply etc) vs a company or platoon unit. In each case the unit footprint is roughly proportional to size, so density isn't changing a lot (except between road column (dense), the rest (moderate) and mob (loose)). Your diagram is a series of companies passing another company.
Hmm, that itself means that routing units never cause traffic jams, but anyone who has seen the snarled mess that comes from panicked flight of an undisciplined mob suggests they should jam themselves
Could you please give me some rules of conduct about that ?
When will you get a traffic jam ?
What to do to avoid this ?
What units can pass each other without having to slow down (for example a bn passing a company)
In game. Not sure - I only ever see any sort of noticeable congestion near crossings - I plan to go into some of my common maps and strip highway etc from inside many of the towns - the roads are typically narrow and constricted - that might 'help' hinder things a bit...
IRL, most routes would be designated single way, and it would be unwise to attempt to mix columns on the same route - it can also take a long time to push needed units up alongside a stalled column/provide supplies to the lead units on a single route. Much infrastructure and personnel is needed & assigned to managing traffic... Maybe, you could run a foot column and a motorised column at the same time - the foot column keeps to the edges but few roads are sufficiently wide and well graded to allow two-way military vehicular traffic. Because of the bulk of many military vehicles, it is sometimes difficult to even pass a stationary queue of traffic... in a way, I'd say that the road should normally be available to only one moving motorised unit and 'up to' two units of any type (ie 1 mot & 1 foot, 1 mot & 1 stationary mot, or two foot) at any one time. This per-cell. If the terrain is unsuitable to bypass (eg bridges, bad going) then one unit must halt, both/all replan/re-org and then one may move. The second unit must wait until the first is clear before it can commence movement etc. Where a bypass is possible, then one unit remains on road, halted while the other(s) deploy. Then the first can resume. Once clear, the deployed unit(s) can reform onto the road and move, so long as thhe route is now clear.
One problem with the road/routeing that exists at the moment, is that the rigid road columns for a single unit do not actually follow/lie on the road - the larger the unit, the less likely it is that the head/tail of the column will be anywhere near the nominal route. (Just IMO, but these should be junked, and multi-point/multi-cell road formations that actually trace the road cells would be very useful - perhaps this will be less relevant with platoon sized multi-part formations in the future, but currently it makes it difficult to operate large (mot) formations near any threats, to successfully target the moving formations on roads with air/artillery (only the middle of the unit is necessarily anywhere near the road/target point) etc.
What would be 'useful' is roadblock/crater 'units/tiles' that cause the 'same' movement issues until cleared/bypassed by engineers (or more slowly by any unit).
If the column must remain fixed, rigid, then it would still be beneficial to use two points of contact with the road, one at the column head, one at the column rear, rather than a pivot in the centre...
To minimise the problems arising from the movement of the formation, I would think this rigid body would 'grow' from the icon with two supplemental 'movement anchors' one at 1/4 full depth, and one at 3/4 full depth. Ideally the unit would sit 'on' the road, the lead anchor would proceed, with the icon mid way between it and the trail anchor. Once the anchors were half the column length apart, the trail one would follow the lead.
In an ideal world, the icon would be locked to the road - it could be displaced to one of the anchors, but then judging the extent would be harder - with a kink at mid-point if required (or offset from the footprint if not possible). When leaving column/the road at the end-point, the front anchor would stop, the trail one close to it. Unexpectedly leaving the route, due to traffic jams/fire/changes in orders etc, the two anchors should move towards each other, and cohesion plummet until a re-org. The route blocked by the formation is then the 'bit' which has been passed by the lead anchor, and not yet passed by the trail one. (A kinked column would allow road length to remain more consistent with curved roads, but would require more coding than just offset anchors).
I've not really seen much trouble with jams - but I like to separate units to protect them from artillery too... low density helps with both...
I would expect IRL that most military routes are 'busy' most of the time (what with supplies, liaison vehicles, medical/casualty collection vehicles etc), and it should take coordination to open a window for the movement of major formations or pieces of equipment.
Once you've done that, it should be reasonably smooth, but several large, uncoordinated formations trying to pass through each other is a recipe for chaos.
