Matrix Games Forums

I've been around for a while now, and I've finally decided to ask this; what exactly is 'special op fire'? From my experience, it generally means 'you miss'.

Eric Maietta

It means that you get a chance to fire all or your main weapons of the unit.
So if you have had a couple of opertunity fires with your tank and are now just down to MG's opp fires then it would allow you to fire your main gun.
Works the same with infantry when they are suppress.

Thanks for the explanation Gary!

Eric Maietta

Originally posted by Gary Tatro
It means that you get a chance to fire all or your main weapons of the unit.
So if you have had a couple of opertunity fires with your tank and are now just down to MG's opp fires then it would allow you to fire your main gun.
Works the same with infantry when they are suppress.

So this mean that if my suppressed infantry fire this way the chances are very low?

It means the last man in a Red platoon can still knock out your Tiger with his last bullet.

It's a functional exercise in alternate realities. A turn-based game assumes reality is turn-based. Since it is not, then there are situations where you would have reacted differently if the game were real-time (and you were able to control each unit simultaneously). Thus, the game gives you the opportunity to say "what if I had fired now?" It gives you the benefit of a doubt, thus allowing your troops to run 13mph, fire away until their fingers are numb, and then fire more than they "can" because, had the enemy been moving when you were, you would have fired earlier. Thusly your soldiers are moving and firing in what you might call borrowed time, which of course all soldiers are living on, so it makes perfect sense.

One of the big complaints about Sp1 & 2 was a tactic called soaking off. In it you would shoot at an enemy unit until it ran out of shots and stopped shooting back. Then you would move to an adjacent hex and use those 99% 1 hex range hit numbers to kick a little bootie. This was judged to be 'gaming the system' by a certain segament of the original steel panthers crowd. So when mods started coming out that was one of the first things 'fixed'. I never had a problem with it because I used combined arms techniques and would put another unit next to the target with a range set to 1 so when my opponent moved up next to the first unit, he would get a real nasty suprise. But some folks never figured that out. So when the first cammo group mod came out every unit got an extra shot at the start of the opponents phase of the turn. This just ment you needed one more shot when soaking off to get your target to run out of ammo. So when matrix came out with WaW 2.3 they changed the programming to allow an unlimited number of shots. This led to things like a 75mmpak 40 taking 37 shots in one opfire session at my Bt-5 Battalion in one game I played. So then matrix cut back on the number of shots, or at least the chance of getting an extra shot and called it special op fire. But what is best is they made it a scalable variable so you have a dial and can cut it down to 30% The better your troops experience wise, the higher your chance of getting another shot. It is a very good compromise. Nobody is happy, but everybody can live with it. Now if they would just have crews bail out at 99 supression like infantry squads do.
T.

Thanks for the informative background info Tomanbeg!

Eric Maietta