Fire control in fire teams

[KCB 10]

Using ACE mod and I am not sure I can continue using it if I cannot stop the soldiers from using ‘bust’ fire mode for engagements out to 500 meters. The team is out of ammo in 60 sec. is there a way to force the troops to use singe shot? A script? Anything?

I find fire control very hard to achieve. Try to use one fire team to engage at a time but the hold fire command seems to be ignored. May have to send my entire unit back to basic training.

[baddo 0]

I think 500 meters is too far away.

I've found controlling a team of AI soldiers strictly pretty effective when you know exactly where the enemy is and can approach them so that you are not spotted and can have a good line to shoot at them.

I just line them up, tell them to go prone, crawl closer, then make sure each and every one of them have targets. Then I tell them to open fire. The enemies are usually all dead in just a few seconds. Setting this all up takes time, but is very effective. It requires patience on your part to set it up.

Have you used an assault rifle in real life? 500 meters is too much. I mean if you expect them to hit their targets from that distance (not entirely sure if this is what you mean so please excuse me if I got it wrong). Your AI soldiers are not smart-enough to tell you they should get closer before opening fire. So they just follow your order to fire even though they are not effectively hitting the targets. A real life soldier would tell you it's not very smart.

I've used the RK-62 assault rifle in real life in combat training and I can tell you I would struggle to hit human-sized targets from 500 meters. Even more so if the targets are in prone position, of course. 300 meters is doable but 500 meters is not practical - it would mostly be about giving suppressive fire instead of trying to seriously bring someone down.

In Armed Assault I would advice you to get to something like 200-250 meters. If it's a dangerously open area then you can run close to something like 400 meters and then crawl the rest of the way to keep your squad alive and to keep the surprise element for yourself.

I'm speaking of original Armed Assault without any mods being used.

Edited January 2, 2010 by Baddo

[KCB 10]

I agree absolutely, your not gona hit anything at 500. such distances are only for suppression tasks with HMG. But my AI will let rip at 500 and once they do I cannot get them to stop. I have realized the trick is to ensure they are given the hold fire order prier to engaging, once they have engaged, hold fire command is ignored, that’s a little annoying as you seem to lose control at this point. Doubly annoying when your riflemen AI engage on bust or auto at such ranges and by the time I have worked out an approach to the targets im already getting “out of ammo†messages. Im using ACE mod and working on largely open desert based maps. I spent twelve years as a Brit Para so I know how it works in the real world. Guess I just need to spend more time getting to know my AI buddies and their odd ways. But the key here seems to be ‘hold fire prier to the shooting’. But im surprised some one has not dealt with the hold fire command failure by 1.9 ACE.

thanks

[wipman 1]

Hi, in the vanilla ArmA the AI also passes by the Hold Fire order, if the enemy have open fire on 'em... no matter what you tell 'em that they gonna shoot at the enemy AI, but most of the times they do it on single shot at distances longer than 250m. They also open fire if they spot a target at less than 50m no matters what you order 'em to do, ever that they don't enter in the "yeltsin pathfinding mode" that makes 'em act... "erratic". One thing that may work, could be to ever order your AI to Hold Fire at the begining of every mission so they just report back the contacts, place 'em under some casual cover and then alert the NME with a pair of shots or so and kill 'em like ducks. Let's C ya

[baddo 0]

I think it may have been intentional by the developers that the AI soldiers are not always completely obeying 'hold fire' commands.

I recall some developer talked about it in some forum thread.

I think the developers have implemented a "threat" system into the artificial intelligence to make it possible for the AI soldiers to ignore your 'hold fire' command in case they feel threatened-enough.

Fine-tuning that system surely is not an easy task. When does an AI soldier have a warranted feeling of being threatened-enough so he can ignore your 'hold fire' command? It may be pretty difficult to implement it in source code so that it appears as 'correct behaviour' to human players.