How do I get my vehicles to properly fight back?

[BoogieManFL 1]

A routine problem I have in Arma 2, is my AI controlled vehicles/gunners very often do not properly engage enemies. From time to time they do very well, but most of the time they are really slow to react, if it at all. For example not 5 minutes ago, I loaded up an APC with 20 dudes. Was moving to take a town, I hear enemy APC left 500 meters. It's a BMP2. I say, target that APC. The turret swivels. Point at it, does nothing. (no manual fire) We start getting drilled. It shoots one grenade. Then we got shot again, boom, whole APC and team dead in the space of 6 seconds.

Earlier, I was the in a tank. Going through Chernogorsk, we encounter another enemy tank. It comes around the corner exposing it's side. We saw them first. This time I am driving. I stop the tank. I wait. It slowly turns it's turret and blows us away. Our gun was pointing at it the whole time. The gunner had at least 8 seconds to toast it before it even was pointing at us.

This occurs ALL the time. I've tried different commands like free to engage, open fire, etc. The ONLY way I can somewhat reliably function is if the tank has another human player, or if I'm the commander and put it on manual fire. However, this makes the MG gunner do nothing on his own so he can't react to approaching infantry. Infantry squads do pretty good, it's just AI vehicle mates.

This is getting very frustrating. How can I fix this?

[Earion 1]

From my personnal experience, when a human player is in a vehicle with AI, he is the de facto commander (even if he is sitting in the driver seat).

For some reason the gunner won't shoot unless explicitly told so, you need to give him a target (TARGET THAT BMP-2, use right click on target or TAB or target menu (2)) and tell him to fire when he is on target (OPEN FIRE, radio shortcut 3-1)

You do not need to select a particular unit when issuing orders (in fact do not select anyone)

Now, this behavior can be frustrating and it might be quite bugged, so guys in the community made some mod so that vehicle personnel will automatically engage targets, both infantry and vehicles without the commander having to order them so. These patches can be found in the COWarMod mod compilation for instance - which brings a lot of more or less good stuff along.

If you want I can try and pinpoint the exact mod that changes that behavior

---------- Post added at 02:05 ---------- Previous post was at 00:10 ----------

You could try zGuba's Gameplay Mod's

Old, but AFAIK it works.

---------- Post added at 02:27 ---------- Previous post was at 02:05 ----------

Or... aigunnertouseallweapons_ai_c_pvpscene

Remember to use the latest beta patch.

[BoogieManFL 1]

That second one looks pretty good. I'm going to give it a go, thanks for taking the time to help me. It's greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Upon launch it says it need "A_crane_02" ... How could an AI tweak possibly be reliant on what sounds like a map object? I am using the latest beta patch as well.

EDIT2: I fixed the issue by using a launcher program and telling it to load Combined Operations instead of just Operation Arrowhead.

Edited March 18, 2013 by BoogieManFL

[jeandelamarquise 1]

Hi,

Do you try to put your squad in engage mode ? Try to do 3 and 4 after selecting them. It works for me.

Bye