Matrix Games Forums

Hi!

Having spent some hours testing the game out, there's a few things missing that I think are critical. While the game offers an excellent way to show how firepower, manouverability and in-direct-fire should link together, it has couple of quite serious faults. These faults tend to be more pronounced closer to the current date. Here goes:

1. There is no way to have your mechanized infantry move in unison with their supporting APC. This is critical to the function of the whole unit, and must be corrected. As it stands, the AI sends in their wheeled APC's to be slaughtered, and their infantry gets slaughtered on the way, way, way back. As a player I tried to micromanage this so it would work as it should work, and even after some serious tweaking with SOP's and "short/fast" pathfinding couldn't make it work.

2. Defending tanks must be able to find hull down positions, and manage them efficiently. A defending tank on ridge, (on NATO side atleast) would be efficiently trained not to stand still in a position and fire at the enemy. This fast manouvering must be a critical key element in the effiency of said units. [Disclaimer: I'm a reservist platoon leader of 2A4 Leopards in the Finnish Army, and we atleast got thought that, and then some more.]

In general the game is sort of a dream come true for a man who played Steel Panthers when he was all of 12 years old, decided this is the shit, and went on and got himself a platoon of tanks.

(So the part of the header you couldn't understand is Armoured Brigade in finnish, also happens to be the name of the garrison unit that trains mechanized troops in Finland. Yeah, this tries to be a shameless attention grab for the Devs.)

Hi there, yes I agree, AB is a great game...

Regarding point 2, don't forget that you can chain commands using the Ctrl key, the orders delay for each way-point counts down at the same time, so you can setup a delayed reverse way-point to move your tanks out of danger after they have fired a few shots with no orders delay... works well for me...

Hope that helps

I agree mech infantry behavior needs some fix. For some reason AI dismounts troops from taxi when they are being shelled by artillery or sniped from long range. But I'm not sure if any commander would order their forces to dismount in the middle of the open without any meaningful cover... I would order to discharge smoke, get smoke cover, and order drivers to move fast to safe place and then dismount.

Regarding AI's shoot and scoot, I also wrote similar thing fb.asp?m=4725601 I wish they find some way for AI to perform such shoot and scoot and other tactical mobile defense behavior.

ORIGINAL: einssi

1. There is no way to have your mechanized infantry move in unison with their supporting APC. This is critical to the function of the whole unit, and must be corrected. As it stands, the AI sends in their wheeled APC's to be slaughtered, and their infantry gets slaughtered on the way, way, way back. As a player I tried to micromanage this so it would work as it should work, and even after some serious tweaking with SOP's and "short/fast" pathfinding couldn't make it work.

I'm not quite sure what is the issue we're talking here. If the formation flag is used to control the formation then the units do move together. Is it that you dismount while the formation is moving, and they don't reorganize before the next waypoint?

2. Defending tanks must be able to find hull down positions, and manage them efficiently. A defending tank on ridge, (on NATO side atleast) would be efficiently trained not to stand still in a position and fire at the enemy. This fast manouvering must be a critical key element in the effiency of said units. [Disclaimer: I'm a reservist platoon leader of 2A4 Leopards in the Finnish Army, and we atleast got thought that, and then some more.]

If you see the green arc or the unit is dug-in then it's a hull-down position. There are several issues with making the vehicles move automatically between different positions on our maps that are made of 30-meter cells. For example the Soviet tank reverse speeds are so slow that it can take them an extremely long time to reverse from a cell to another cell.

In general the game is sort of a dream come true for a man who played Steel Panthers when he was all of 12 years old, decided this is the shit, and went on and got himself a platoon of tanks.

Steel Panthers has definitely been one of the inspirations behind this project.

(So the part of the header you couldn't understand is Armoured Brigade in finnish, also happens to be the name of the garrison unit that trains mechanized troops in Finland. Yeah, this tries to be a shameless attention grab for the Devs.)

Here's hoping that one day AB will be used as a training or simulation tool there