Bemused wrote: Mon Jan 19, 2026 7:47 pm
Not a lot mind, but an improvement. Although you can't see it in this picture, there are enemy infantry units in the two hexes NE of 5/A/1-11A. I watched this unit carefully and he got 1 hit with the 8 rounds fired of the Chain gun. Doesn't seem great to me, given that there is an infantry unit adjacent to him in open ground and another in a hex with one or two trees two hexes away. Neither are visible in the game, but in real life I find it hard to believe that the US unit would not be firing on those hexes, given that they know there are enemies there.
Every time a unit gets a chance to fire, the AI for a unit does an assessment of what potential target is the highest threat to it that it can meaningfully engage. So in this case it's going to be a lot of it may not see the adjacent small unit, or if it can, that adjacent small unit is a much smaller threat (that it maybe doesn't have good odds of hitting).
Bemused wrote: Mon Jan 19, 2026 7:47 pm
This got me thinking about the firing behaviour of units in general. In this play through I have noticed that the units firing are predominantly those moving and those firing "defensively". For example, unit A moves and takes fire from unit B; unit A fires back at B. Friendly (to A) unit C might be sitting right beside enemy B but will tend not to fire at them. I'm not saying never, but it is rare. Take this case:
https://imgur.com/a/AqLeE5a
The highlighted unit sat there for turns, adjacent not only to the visible Sov unit, but also to another one adjacent and to the north (also adjacent to 3/C/1-11 A). Over the course of I think about 4 or 5 turns, they didn't fire a shot at the infantry sitting in the open. This brings me to another issue with the combat in the game. Units positioned in Overwatch are much less likely to fire than those moving (on the same side). This makes zero sense to me. Developers may argue that this is down to range and scale - perhaps infantry can only fire at 0 hex range (not what I am observing) but I have seen this with the Bradley's cannon. The unit (Bradleys) in the first picture was also sitting there for turns with plenty of infantry nearby who would "appear", exchange shots with moving enemies and disappear, all the while with the overwatching unit mostly uninterested.
In this case, your highlighted unit is just 4 dismounted soldiers (2 sections of 2 guys each) that lack any weapons with long enough range to reach into an adjacent hex. These cav scouts are mostly there for the Bradleys with the dismounts just there to pull security. Infantry firing into hexes further away than their own are usually doing so with a machine gun, larger ATGM system, or automatic grenade launcher. Moving units tend to be more likely to shoot since they are both more likely to have targets and are already exposed and subject to return fire that is highly threatening. That is, your lone squad/SPAT subunit might choose not to shoot if it is unlikely to score a kill and is likely to get killed in return. By contrast, if that same lone subunit is moving already, it's probably going to be killed even if it doesn't shoot, so if it has a target it is more likely to shoot. WRT your first image, and Bradleys not shooting, we would need to see the save to give a more thorough answer.
(note, when I say more likely I do not mean in the sense of an RNG roll, though there is some of that, I mean in the sense of how likely the circumstances are to be descriptive of one situation vs another. Some situations are far more likely than others.)
This is not to say you are not witnessing a bug, just that it is difficult to pin down definitely that it is a bug because there are legitimate calculations that can yield this result. If you ever suspect a bug, making sure you hold onto the autosave is always a good idea, it is often one of the greatest tools for us in fixing the problem.
