mine clearing not working

[Thexder]

I've now played (or tried to play) two assault missions in WinSPMBT. During both games I've encountered problems with mineclearing.

First game was Israel vs. Egypt 1973, an assault over Suez. Well, I was able to cross the Suez but my engineers just didn't clear the mines and dragon teeth on the other side of the canal. They were all "ready" and spent like four turns next to the mines without clearing anything. We were forced to end the game as there was no reason to continue if the mines weren't being cleared.

The second battle was Finland vs. Sweden 2005. My opponent encountered the same problem and we were forced to end the game. The funny thing was that in the same battle my own engineers accidentally cleared some barbed wire. How is this possible?!

It seems that the assault games are unplayable in WinSPMBT. It's very irritating to spent maybe tens of hours in generating the map, purchasing, deploying and moving your troops just to learn that the game is unplayble. I consider this to be the biggest bug in WinSPMBT, which is, apart from this, one of the best games I've ever played. I hope it will be fixed in the upcoming patch.

[serg3d]

There severel way ot of it:
1. You can turn mines off in the prefernces
2. You can use helo assault to fly over mines
3. You can use mine-clearing tanks. You have to put at least 4 mine-clearing tank (better put 6) before the mine hex to clean it in one turn. That is not counting move turn. Only tank at rest is doing cleaning.

[Mobhack]

Thexder said:
I've now played (or tried to play) two assault missions in WinSPMBT. During both games I've encountered problems with mineclearing.

First game was Israel vs. Egypt 1973, an assault over Suez. Well, I was able to cross the Suez but my engineers just didn't clear the mines and dragon teeth on the other side of the canal. They were all "ready" and spent like four turns next to the mines without clearing anything. We were forced to end the game as there was no reason to continue if the mines weren't being cleared.

The second battle was Finland vs. Sweden 2005. My opponent encountered the same problem and we were forced to end the game. The funny thing was that in the same battle my own engineers accidentally cleared some barbed wire. How is this possible?!

It seems that the assault games are unplayable in WinSPMBT. It's very irritating to spent maybe tens of hours in generating the map, purchasing, deploying and moving your troops just to learn that the game is unplayble. I consider this to be the biggest bug in WinSPMBT, which is, apart from this, one of the best games I've ever played. I hope it will be fixed in the upcoming patch.

Were your engineer assets unsupressed?

What experience level were they?

Those alongside the target hex - were they [/b]pointing at the target hex[/b]?.

Try the attached simple test scenario for engineer training (there is only an HQ on the OPFOR side).

1) move engineer assets towards target hexes and point them at the hex (Manual "Mines and Field Engineering", Note No. 2). press end turn a few times to see clearance in action.

2) Now, move assets so you have multiple engineers pointing at the same target hex, press end turn a few times, and see how the clearance rate increases.


Cheers
Andy

[scJazz]

It may be a bit premature but I think I may have found a bug in the mine clearing routines. The rules for mine clearing as we know it are...
1) Be in adjacent hex
2) Face toward the mine
3) Don't be suppressed
4) Don't fire weapons
5) Don't move around a bunch

The bug that I think I noticed involves saved games. Restarting a saved game (Iwo Jima Part 1 DOS SPWW2) yielded no mine clears until I had moved all units away from and back to mines. I am probably wrong. I'll work on finding out if I am right tonight.

[DRG]

scJazz said:
It may be a bit premature but I think I may have found a bug in the mine clearing routines. The rules for mine clearing as we know it are...
1) Be in adjacent hex
2) Face toward the mine
3) Don't be suppressed
4) Don't fire weapons
5) Don't move around a bunch

The bug that I think I noticed involves saved games. Restarting a saved game (Iwo Jima Part 1 DOS SPWW2) yielded no mine clears until I had moved all units away from and back to mines. I am probably wrong. I'll work on finding out if I am right tonight.

When you run your tests save the turns before AND after if possible and if you can duplicate this in WINSPMBT it would me more helpful than in SPWW2

Don

[scJazz]

DRG said:
When you run your tests save the turns before AND after if possible and if you can duplicate this in WINSPMBT it would me more helpful than in SPWW2
Don

Of course I could always run the tests in the Beta version of the WinSPWW2 release. All you have to do is send it to me!

[DRG]

scJazz said:
It may be a bit premature but I think I may have found a bug in the mine clearing routines. The rules for mine clearing as we know it are...
1) Be in adjacent hex
2) Face toward the mine
3) Don't be suppressed
4) Don't fire weapons
5) Don't move around a bunch

The bug that I think I noticed involves saved games. Restarting a saved game (Iwo Jima Part 1 DOS SPWW2) yielded no mine clears until I had moved all units away from and back to mines. I am probably wrong. I'll work on finding out if I am right tonight.

There DOES seem to be a problem but it's also seems to be a narrow series of events that trigger it. I saw it last night in a test save but Andy says his tests work just fine. It *IS* releated to saving the game though. Just starting it up and playing through won't trigger the problem and neither will starting up a save game then moving the engineers to new hexes to clear mines. If you do they will start clearing again.

We are looking at this now from a number of different angles

Don

[scJazz]

DRG said:
There DOES seem to be a problem but it's also seems to be a narrow series of events that trigger it. I saw it last night in a test save but Andy says his tests work just fine. It *IS* releated to saving the game though. Just starting it up and playing through won't trigger the problem and neither will starting up a save game then moving the engineers to new hexes to clear mines. If you do they will start clearing again.

We are looking at this now from a number of different angles
Don

I tested last night as I said I would.

The mine clearing bug occurs if...
The game is opened and a saved game is started where mine clearing units are already in hexes adjacent to the mines.

I'm attaching several saves just because I said I would and you asked but obviously your on top of it.

[DRG]

What I discovered in my testing today was the engineers would start clearing again after a one turn pause. I did have one test where the engineers just sat their looking at the mines for more than one turns but in that test they were clearing their own mines and that may be a factor to consider.

However, this goes a long way to explain whey there are conflicting reports about the bug. Anyone who sits down and plays a game right through will never see this. Anyone who plays PBEM or only has a short amount to time to play in any given day and makes a lot of saves will see this all the time. Anyone who is somewhere in the middle and may play a number of turns one day then have to save every turn for a couple of days for one reason or the other will see it seemingly inconsistently. Your tying it to the save game was the piece of the puzzle we needed. Thank you for that clue. It helped a lot. This is why we need as much info as possible when we get a bug report.

Don

[Mobhack]

DRG said:
What I discovered in my testing today was the engineers would start clearing again after a one turn pause. I did have one test where the engineers just sat their looking at the mines for more than one turns but in that test they were clearing their own mines and that may be a factor to consider.

However, this goes a long way to explain whey there are conflicting reports about the bug. Anyone who sits down and plays a game right through will never see this. Anyone who plays PBEM or only has a short amount to time to play in any given day and makes a lot of saves will see this all the time. Anyone who is somewhere in the middle and may play a number of turns one day then have to save every turn for a couple of days for one reason or the other will see it seemingly inconsistently. Your tying it to the save game was the piece of the puzzle we needed. Thank you for that clue. It helped a lot. This is why we need as much info as possible when we get a bug report.

Don

Looks like we found what was wrong in the save game process. (Being able to debug with real breakpoints beats the old DOS print to text file debug method no end ! )

Testing the fix out now.

Andy