Matrix Games Forums

Hi Miguel - so I do believe but i got the Matrix Slitherine NDA too late on friday to do owt about it. So presumably sometime in the new year.

valdn - I like to see stuff like that too but that;s all abstracted I believe.

ORIGINAL: vladn
From a Command Ops point of view, this battle would appear on the map as a clash between companies, leaving all the details somewhat behind the scene.
Is there a way to see the movement of platoons/squads with an additional zoom level, for example? I wouldn't even think of giving orders directly to squads, it would be overwhelming given the number of units, but it would be interesting to see them manouver.

CommandOps simulates "entities" or units which represent a group of individuals and vehicles acting in a coordinated manner in the battlefield - you can see the details down to the smallest entity in the scenario OOB. Usually, for line infantry, Coy is the smallest size of forces on the map. Nonetheless, you'll see that sometimes armour and fire support elements (such as infantry guns, AT forces, etc.) are broken down into platoons.

We're discussing how to introduce in Command Ops 2 a more realistic and accurate representation of the footprint of units - right now they're boxes. Such a model of a force deployment has obvious problems, most notably for forces in the Road Column formation. And indeed, such 'realistic footprints' would have to take into account what are the elements of a given unit actually doing.

Regarding what you can do on Command Ops 1:

The level of detail to model the forces is left to the discretion of the scenario designer, who has to negotiate current limitations in the engine. For instance, if one wanted to model forces in such a way as to have infantry squads and tank sections as the smallest unit, the granularity of the terrain grid - 100 x 100 meters at the moment - would probably make the effort quite useless (since the terrain wouldn't be detailed enough so as to accomodate those units in a realistic manner). On the other hand, 100 x 100 is adequate - in my opinion - to handle platoons as the standard 'smallest unit size'.

Besides terrain fidelity, the other problem that might arise is one of performance. Command Ops isn't very computationally demanding at the moment, indeed, but increasing unit counts by a factor of 10 (such as would happen if one used platoons extensively) could convey slowdowns of up to a factor of 100x of certain critical computations under certain conditions.

So, if you want to experiment, I invite you to use the Estab Editor and from the Estabs provided, rework force structure so to use platoons as the standard size, and see how far you can get with your machine [;)].

ORIGINAL: skarp

I'd like to hear more about the fixes and more about how widely the issue went. For example playing Axis in Assault on the Sauer I've been having dreadful trouble dealing with m18s, Stuarts, HTs etc even in conditions I would have thought favourable to infantry.

Just as a preparation of what will be in the upcoming patch notes, here are some of the problems we found with the Anti-Armour model which are now fixed (and have changed the game quite radically in some respects):

[*] Vehicles in mixed formations (i.e. Armoured infantry, Cavalry Squadrons, etc.) were being allowed to take fire from a longer range than when they engaged the enemy (that is, they're considered to be deployed 'behind' the infantry and now this is done consistently).

[*] Marginal penetrations resulting in outright destruction too often (Lieste proposed a simple model that didn't give the 37mm Recon gun a disproportionate killing power at longer ranges).

[*] The ability to use terrain for cover depends now on crew training and experience.

[*] Reworked targeting routines so "most threatening" targets are called first. This assessment depends on crew training, experience and fatigue.

[*] Accuracy of direct fire weapons was being affected by height differences too much, now it gracefully increases or decreases with the angle between firing and fired units.

[*] We introduced the possibility of target overkill (i.e. unless a vehicle brews up, it's still considered a valid target).

[*] In some circumstances, not all shots fired (and hitting) were checked to see if they were penetrations (this affected high-ROF weapons).

[*] Green crews will now be exposing their vehicles sides and rear more often, than more experienced crews do.

fantastic