Time to Open a Can of Worms - Weapon Data in OOB's

[Suhiir]

Could do either - but...
Adding more accuracy doesn't cause the effect I'm looking for.
I want them to have somewhat more accurate and most importantly longer ranged fire.
As to Fire Control, not for individual weapons. Looking at the OOB's it is used (quite well) to represent inherent weapon stabilization. i.e. a tripod mounted machine gun is more accurate at any range then a bipod mounted one.

Quick story or two
Grenada - 1983

The US Army had to borrow M16 ammo from the Marines because their "suppressive fire" doctrine caused their units to run low on ammo. The failure was obviously in the logistic planning, BUT ... both Marine and Army troops carry the the same basic individual ammo load. The army of course went thru theirs far quicker due to doctrine.

In another instance an Army platoon ran into a Marine squad (do to some shifting of phase lines they wound up in the same place at the same time by accident). Since neither side knew about the other they had a little blue-on-blue action (no actual casulties tho as I recall). The Army platoon leader called back that he was under heavy attack by a company strength unit (due to the accuracy of the incoming fire) and began to withdraw. The Marines began to assault the Army position having suppressed it with their more accurate long range fire. About this time someone noticed both sides were American and the firefight stopped.
The Army guys absolutely could not believe that few rifleman could generate that level of accurate fire at that range.

[thatguy96]

Suhiir said:
In another instance an Army platoon ran into a Marine squad (do to some shifting of phase lines they wound up in the same place at the same time by accident). Since neither side knew about the other they had a little blue-on-blue action (no actual casulties tho as I recall). The Army platoon leader called back that he was under heavy attack by a company strength unit (due to the accuracy of the incoming fire) and began to withdraw. The Marines began to assault the Army position having suppressed it with their more accurate long range fire. About this time someone noticed both sides were American and the firefight stopped.
The Army guys absolutely could not believe that few rifleman could generate that level of accurate fire at that range.

Immediately what I want to know from this story though is what is "that range." I'm also confused as to how a unit commander would determine possible opposing strength by accuracy of fire rather than volume of fire. I would think the key would be the volume of the fire, maybe worse by its accuracy, not just the sheer accuracy for it. Maybe that's just my lack of grunt military experience speaking.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm generally against these sorts of manipulations of "common denominator" weapons, because I feel that then to create a certain across the board accuracy you'd have to create individual subtypes of all infantry weapons in all OOBs to properly handle elite forces with more stringer small arms training. I'm not saying that these changes might not be accurate (I really want to stay away from that debate as much as I seem to be going for it), but it just seems like something a game of this scale is not set up to handle.

[Suhiir]

These were (of course) incidents I heard about 2nd hand. But from what I was told the Army unit commander assumed a much larger number of troops was necessary to generate that many near misses. I don't know exactly what the range was when the engagement started but was told they were about 200m apart when it ended. The whole thing didn't last more then a couple minutes so I'd assume they were maybe 3-400m apart when it started.

I quite agree on the subject of across the board changes, why I haven't made any.
And yes, the only reasonable way to deal with things like US Army Rangers is to give them an Experience or Moral Modifier in the formations tab (did both as "needed" for Recon Marines and Navy SEALS).
I guess I'll have to disagree on the game scale issue, I'm of exactly the opposite opinion, I think a game at this scale is perfect for showing such differences. Any smaller and it's really man-to-man combat where units only exist to give the game a basic military structure. Any higher level and you're talking about units where only organization and size matters not the particulars of the troops.

[DRG]

This is why we keep the OOB's on a short leash. It's inevitable that people start looking for ways to give "special abilities" to their favourites.

The USMC already has built in added morale and experience ratings above the "Stock" USA numbers for any given decade which makes them more effective than "normal" army troops. Experience can range from +5 - +15 and Morale can be between +5 and +10 higher on average, again, it depends on the decade. And that was done years ago to make them " More special"

And this isn't good enough for you ?

Don't F**K around with the weapons stats or you WILL screw things up.

CORRECTION: The USMC "Experience" ratings in the game can range from 0 - +10 NOT+5 - +15 above the regular Army as I wrote above. When I checked the code last night I checked an old set of numbers the game no longer uses. The "Morale" range I quoted is correct in the game though.

Don

[Suhiir]

Thanks Don, I knew that.
But as we agreed many months ago there is no hope of my work being used for anything official.

[MarkSheppard]

As for your story; there's a reason the Army has emphasized heavy weight of fire when doing suppression; they found out in World War II fighting against the German Army that one of the biggest problems they had with brand new riflemen coming out of basic infantry training was that they had been trained in the States to emphasize accuracy; e.g. to fire at identified targets; and this was useless in the real world; where you did not see clearly identified targets. It took a lot of time to break the new arrivals of their habit of waiting for a target, and instead to randomly fire in the general direction of the enemy.