Adding Body Armour to the Infantry Units

[Spacedragon]

Forgive me if this has been addressed before, I am returning to SP2 after a long absence (the lsat version I played was original SP2, way before WinSPMBT was created).

I've noticed the lack of body armour on the infantry units, how does one go about adding it or is it implemented via a different mechanism such as higher morale values etc? I would assume one increaes the "survivability" rating?

[Mobhack]

Yes it has.

You don't add body armour to infantry units, not modelled. Adding armour values to infantry will create oddities as infantry is an unarmoured class to be engaged with HE.

Body armour reduces medical injuries, it does not make your guys "invincible". The guy who would have been dead, is now critically injured, and off to hospital for long-term care, and probaly will be invalided out. He is still a casualty for the battle/game purposes.

If you want - increase infantry toughness a tad for the side which has body armour issued perhaps. (You could then edit all leg units and delete a move point for the effects of lugging the weight http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Same with AT gun shields, not modelled, same reasons. AT gun is an unarmoured class to be engaged with HE weapons.

Cheers
Andy

[harlikwin]

Wouldn't it be nice to add local toughness paramater for soft units that would be mobhack editable for each unit rather than the global 100%etc paramater http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif please, pretty please.

One could model a great many things this way.

[Mobhack]

No, since that would need a completely new game engine, for the new parameter, and to check for it in a zillion places, and to find any unforseen knock-on effects, if added to the code. Plus it would make all scenarios, campaigns and so on toast.

Not going to be done. A soldier with a flak jacket s still a "casualty". He may be off to hospital with his legs blown off, but he is still alive where maybe he would have been dead without it. That affects him and his family perhaps in the real world, but the game effect is the same, one man is no longer able to contribute to the current battle.

Andy

[harlikwin]

I didn't realize the code was that badly written. But I suppose its old so it makes some sense.

[troopie]

I wouldn't call it badly written, but the base code is ten years old, and written for MSDOS. It's a wonder that it works as well as it does. To add body armour, and the ability to fire from within vehicles, more unit classes, bridgelayers and all the other goodies that we seem to want, would take a whole new base engine.

troopie

[harlikwin]

Well right, however I Will point out the "power armor" and the like currently exist and are not being fielded, yet. But in 10 years or for hypothetical future conflicts (game goes to 2020 right?) There are sort-of ways to model it at present, but in general they sorta suck.

So I think if there were any major improvement/rework to the game engine I would put this as a priority.

[Irinami]

Power-Armor: Turn off Breakdowns and make them tanks. Alternately, try infantry with armor ratings, not so sure if that would work though.

[harlikwin]

You can't do the infantry with added armor. Messes up the game. What I was doing with my dirtside2 mod was using a fixed icon (#of men never changes) and just making each PA suit = 4-5 men so a full power squad would have like 20 guys, the rationale was it was like hitpoints. Not really a good abstraction, but the best I could think of.

At this point I don't recall if the motorbike thing worked or not, it might have been an earlier (dos) version that worked. Also you can just give them infantry movment so breakdowns/terrain won't be much of an issue (you can of course up the speed if you like or add water movment)

One of the alternative methods/approaches is obviously to treat each suit of PA as a vehicle (jeep etc) And have a few types you form into a 4-5unit squad. The problem with that is the huge amount of micromanagment.

That being said, the 2 perspecitves on it are, the vehicle method, which I think is great/fine for heavier "mecha" type armor (ala mechwarrior or whatever) since your number of units is relativel small and the units are presumably tank/apc equivalent. And for this approach SPMBT works fine. The problem comes in with the mini-power armor (whats currently being developed), wich will persumably use heavier weapons, move at higher speeds than heavily loaded conventional infantry and also carry much more balistic protection than conventional infantry. All of which except for the the protection aspect can be modeled currently.

Essentially all that I would like is some decent way to make one class of infantry more survivable versus others in game (new infantry class?). i.e. reduced effects from small arms fire or HE shells. Most of the rest of it is currently pretty simple, i.e. change speed/weapons.

[Listy]

Heh.. Power armour fun again.

I used Motorbikes for mine and used the multiple "hit points" system you described first off. Then when I was working n ome Starship troopers MI I used a light scout helo as a single man.

There was another thing I worked out which would work better than the motorcycle version... It's just been so long ago I can't remember what it was.

[harlikwin]

I looked into my Dirtside mod this morning. I found that I was using armored motorbikes for PA. But I tried to run a scenario and i couldn't get it to run for some reason. I do recall the PA working at some point tho.

Did you make the 40k mod? Thats the one I was basing my stuff off of.

I can't imagine a scout helo working well at all.

[Listy]

Yeah the 40K mod was mine. However I need to re-work that quite heavily at some point.

Actualy for Cap troopers the helo works well.

[harlikwin]

So I'm curious as to the Cap trooper thing, how did you get them to not run away? Just armor them alot?

[Listy]

I can't remember... I think I only gave them a point of damage, assuming that a signle hit would destroy or cripple the trooper.

Tehir small size (2 IIRC) and good all round armour (again i nthe 2-3 range) meant that it was tougth to hit them, and hard to pentrate when you did. once however you did get through the soft squishy human died.

[RecruitMonty]

Why not just edit the survivability of the unit in question.

[Mobhack]

Would work OK - if it happens to be a vehicle class you were editing.

Cheers
Andy

[RecruitMonty]

Not necessarily. I edited the survivability rating for a one man infantry unit, with a unit size of 0, from 0 to 1 then 2 then 3. Each time the effects of the hit decreased. We are talking survivaility at 70-90% hit probability. So not just vehicles by the loks of it.