Strange Occurance
 

The tank at hex 46,28 fired at an infantry squad in hex 46,29 which retreated into hex 47,29. The strange thing is now the tank has a retreat status. Nothing has happened to give the tank that status.

Save file attached.

Re: Strange Occurance
 

It was fired on by infantry---numerous times--- and had at least one Hand grenade bounced off it and it has enemy infantry in the adjacent hex.....how is that "Nothing has happened to give the tank that status."

??

Anyone can see that in replay

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/attac...1&d=1520116467

There is NO "bug":doh:

Maybe you need to turn up your message delay and animation level

Re: Strange Occurance
 

It got fired at lots of times by the nearby enemy infantry, probably causing suppression, and the section it fired at was at 1 hex, so it may have had a "firer panicked" morale result (can happen for exchanges of fire at 1 hex or less) and that may have tipped it over the edge. Its morale and experience is not that great, and it is fighting infantry inside a wood, after all. Tanks in woods are uneasy when enemy infantry are known to be close by and they need to take a morale test.

Try to rally away the bad morale, if it has rallies left.

Re: Strange Occurance
 

Let me write more slowly and distinctly.

The tank fired at the adjacent unit and caused it to retreat. This was just prior to my doing the save. If all the prior action had given the tank a retreat status then it wouldn't have been able to fire at that unit and make it retreat. BUT nothing happened to the tank between that shot and the save, so how did it get the retreat status?

Re: Strange Occurance
 

It fired at enemy at 1 hex, Then it likely got a "firer panic" result as I said above. It failed the test and took a hit to morale.

Re: Strange Occurance
 

....and I will reply more slowly and distinctly in kind.

every action in the game is cumulative and every action has an effect on a unit good and bad. There were a lot of shots made from different infantry units on that tank and every action like that builds or reduces suppression. In this case all we can do is guess as we don't have saves for every action ( nor could we ) but I have seen numerors times over the years a tank or infantry unit seemingly on the ropes and then they make a good shot that has a real effect on an enemy unit that raises it's moral threshold and suddely what was a scared marginalize unit is now effective.

What happened in your case could be just the opposite.....there was lots of fire from different infantry units, it was in woods so it had poor visibility, it was probably buttoned up and it takes a shot at it's nearest tormentor and that does not force the enemy away and the game runs what amounts to a morale check on your tank and it fails...... and it retreats......it's that simple but ALL of your posts come from the position that there must be a BUG becasue something happens you cannot explain.....well I just explained it. If that's not good enough there are other games you can try

Don

Re: Strange Occurance
 

Oddly enough & I would never have thought of it as a design feature but this is one of the things that sets this game apart from the crowd & works very well in an IGOUGO format.

Its the exact opposite of chess you can predict the likely outcome so have a good idea how you expect it to go but you have to adapt when the unlikely event happens because it will.
You got one extreme the other one that catches you out is the heroic rally thought he was out of the picture & suddenly raring for a fight full shots and little or no suppresion.

Always remember 2 squads and an APC herding a routing infantry company, easy meat die quick when there broken doesnt mater that I am fast moving to keep up. One unit goes from routing to heroic taking out a couple of my men then the APC. Next thing 3 other squads have had enough and are back in the battle suddenly its me thats in trouble.
Its not a bug its a bit of design brilliance no other game seems to manage it.

That damn ATGM team that decides if I am going down you are to and regains his shot is a more common oh heck moment.

Re: Strange Occurance
 

John

IMHO the fundamental reason SP is still popular and played 20+ years after it was first released ( besides the fact we have updated it 52 times! ) is the random factors built into the game so it's not predicable.... There were a host of randoms built in when we got the code and we've added more and refined many that were there and left more than a few alone as well.

The game has never been " Do A then B to get C".....not a chance of that happening. In fact it's not the least bit ABnormal to save a turn....play it, reload the save, play it again and get a different result....ESPECIALLY after a re-boot when the game picks up new random numbers to use... NONE OF THAT IS A "BUG"...its the game....it has always been the way the game works---- there is always a chance of a " John Sedgwick" result just as there is always a chance that your dead-on-sure-thing shot will miss or fail to penetrate.....it's the unpredictability of results that keeps it from getting stale and NONE of it is the result of "bugs".......yes.... we do find bugs and when people report them we fix them but this one is NOT a bug. ( as BOTH Andy and I have said ) It's perfectly normal game behavior.

Re: Strange Occurance
 

As Don says, this game is not a form of "military chess" like some wargames can be. You can figure out that if you do A and then B, the result should be C most of the time, but result C is not 100% guaranteed.

Morale tests get taken for various things, including (most probably in this case) engaging enemy at 1 hex or less ("firer panic" message if spooked).

In addition there will be a generic situational morale test at end turn. This takes things like suppression, isolation from friends, how many casualties your platoon has, how many of your platoon mates are retreating or worse, whether you are in contact with a higher leader, whether you are a tank in woods with enemy grunts nearby and all these sorts of situational modifiers into account. So at end turn, some units will so well on morale test and deplete suppression, most will stay as-is, and some will get spooked.

Unlike in say ASL where you had to go manually trough game phase 2.3.4.5 End Turn Morale Test, then apply rule 1.2.3.4 Tank isolation and rule 4.5.2.1 situation 1.2.3 (Commander opens a "Dear John letter";)) the morale tests are all done in the code and the results are shown as they fall (e.g. some unit decides to run away).

The end of turn morale check could be what this one failed. Difficult to tell really since the save game is the usual sort of save one gets from a "bug complaint" i.e. the save is post event so one cannot repeat the action the user performed trace the code via the debugger, and perhaps only run through the game's replay function - which does not log all messages, just key events like who is firing at what.

A post event save merely shows that an effect occurred. For debugging, one wants a save from just before it happened, and information from the end user on what precisely was done to make the event happen. (Then of course the event wont happen when running in the debugger, as it was a once in a blue moon which was also a Thursday type of thing:rolleyes:).

Re: Strange Occurance
 

.....because, as I said, the game picks random numbers at startup so you are not going to get 100% the same actions happening the second time through even with a pre-event save......that "blank screen bug" was a PITA as it would only happen at seemingly random times and was not reliably repeatable. For a combat bug it's even worse but the event reported here is NOT a bug. It's the result of all the actions that happened to the unit that turn. If it had retreated one hex then blew up.... THAT would be a bug.