Levinin

This!

I can't agree with your scenario at all. The soldiers would all go to ground or to nearest cover if close enough and return fire from there. They won't take the time to return even semi-accurate fire through sights before doing that. There is no way they can be quick enough to line up before enemies already on their flank and bringing weapons to bear open fire with effect. Get down, get in cover, or die. See kind of footage, as soon as shots are heard everyone is down and behind the tiny bit of cover there is. The guys here are then looking out trying to find who to shoot back at and are perfectly capable of doing that accurately. In fact might be a better example. The marines are kept down for a bit but they are definitely able to return accurate fire and get themselves and the new crew out.The reason they go to ground is that if they stay standing they are pretty certain to be shot. The only effective suppression effect needed is being killed if you don't get down or in cover and don't manage to return accurate fire yourself.

Hope is not a strategy or a tactic to rely on. No one puts rounds down range aiming to be within a metre of the enemy. If you see those 3 guys you shout and run for cover then shoot from cover. No way do you take the time out in the open to shoot at them. And you are.right, the key phrase is being shot at, not being shot near.

Yes, suppression fire is for when the enemy is in cover. If they are not in cover suppression is not the objective, accurate fire that will kill them is the objective. Yes, if they are in cover shoot to suppress. This shooting however needs to be putting rounds close enough to the cover so that if they peep round they will be hit. Otherwise they have the space to move and it is not suppression. We seem to be in agreement on every practical point here. Suppression fire is indeed different to inaccurate fire. It needs to be accurately placed close enough to cover to keep the person behind it down and not give enough room for them to move away or poke their head up. And my perspective is that if this accurate fire is present there is no need for an effect because the suppression will be real. I.e. if under fire we don't find cover asap we are dead. And in that circumstance thinking "I'm not really going to die IRL, might as well just stay up and shoot back" won't work because the player will die and fail and have to respawn and try again. It is possible to say that people will abuse the respawn but that is no reason to add in an effect which affects gameplay so much and moves it further from a simulation.

but there is no such thing as a suppression weapon, only killing weapons. And it is about who is more accurate, reacts faster, does the right things and is cooler under fire. You should always shoot to kill when the enemy is out of cover. if you're not accurate enough to kill and you're not in cover yourself you will be killed. Wanting a mechanic to make up for inaccurate fire is an unnecessary intrusion. ---------- Post added at 14:59 ---------- Previous post was at 14:55 ---------- Clearly I was giving an example of what would happen with a suppression effect in place. I want it to remain without one.

No, if you're a bad shot and, in shooting first miss with that initial burst, and the enemy turns round and kills you with a single shot to the head then become a better shot or - radical suggestion - drop prone or find cover to shoot from behind before taking that first shot. With suppression the scenario is: Fire first with a burst. Just need to get approximately on target. Enemy suppressed and therefore can't shoot back accurately enough to kill you. Use suppression time to correct aim and kill enemy. That my friend is an arcade game mechanic.

That's not it though. Suppression isn't suppression unless it is accurate fire. Fire in kind of the general direction of someone won't do the job. On an MG the right way to use it is to fire 3 or 4 round bursts at rapid intervals at people or, if they are in cover, close as possible to the cover. That way person hiding knows if they pop up they will almost certainly be hit. If the person in cover sees all rounds hitting cover or a few yards away, or well over their heads, they have a hole to get out of that crappy position. Either flank, withdraw, advance, or shoot the MG. Games like BF3 people haven mentioned earlier in the thread need a suppression effect because the player can take a few hits and then auto-heals soon after the contact. So in fact the suppression effect includes the first couple of hits on the player. It can be expressed as an aura around the player, bullets passing through the aura trigger the suppression effect and the closer the shot to the player the more intense the effect. Hitting the player is most intense and of course after a few shots to the body ultimate suppression i.e. death. In arma it is possible to get single-shot kills so it is therefore necessary to find cover if shots come in. What is needed is for the opfor and PvP to be accurate enough to actually suppress, not some random effect. Nothing to do with roleplay as some suggest, just good old fashioned "you're dead if you don't find cover". That's all the suppression effect we need. Of course some people might think it more fun to have the effect but know the enemy can't shoot well enough to actually kill them so there is plenty of time to run to cover or run away or charge the MG. To me that is way more like an arcade game than just knowing you are dead if you don't fight from sufficient cover.

"If a bullet land a metre away" No that is specifically not what I am saying. If a bullet lands a metre away you find cover. But not because of that bullet, because of the fact that the guy with the rifle is probably correcting their aim and is likely to hit next time. What i'm saying is, make the AI accurate enough that they do hit next time so it is impossible to stand and pick people off. if you are 90% sure your opponent will miss it isn't suppression is it?

This seems like an odd discussion to me. Suppression IRL doesn't happen as a result of the noise of the bullets/shells whatever itself. But from the real possibility that one of them is going to kill you if you stay where you are. So to avoid the "plink plink" people complain of just make AI accurate enough to punish that with player death and not allow this "plink plink" without being in cover. If the AI isn't that accurate then it isn't suppression. E.g. if I stand 10 yards from you and fire a mag into the air way over your head it isn't suppression, it's firing into the air. If the AI can't shoot accurately enough to actually kill you then hey, it should be possible to stand in the open and pick them off. And the AI shouldn't be soldiers. And if it happens in PvP because people are not good shots then again, should be fine to just stand and pick people off. So rather than add crazy effects that mess with the screen improve the accuracies and force players to take cover and fight from cover or die. You know "pinned down" doesn't mean "I have bullets going 10 feet above my head" it means if I put my head up it will definitely get shot off. If that isn't the case I should be moving position to advance, flank or withdraw.

If you are right about the speed that is very fast even over flat terrain carrying a full battle pack. It's ok for a very short sprint burst maybe but is too fast for a sustained run. Elite athletes carrying nothing manage 20kph over 10k run, 22kph over 5k run. Good club runners (still faster than most soldiers) may manage 16kph over distance carrying nothing. So to have us run over terrain at 16kph with full pack seems rather spectacular to me.

Very interesting. I made some small experiments and created a scenario where a rifle squad attacks and another defends and repeated for each side. The attacker always wins no matter which side attacks or defends, although I was not scientific enough to see which units made the kills. To me it seems that defending units don't understand their terrain enough to defend positions. I then thought, maybe defender didn't have enough notice of the attack and were ambushed so I put a defending unit further out to force a small action before main attack but result was the same. Attacking AI always wins regardless of opfor or bluefor.

Thanks I'll have a look at those. Actually not a good thing if the AI does too much thinking for itself, it's behaving like a bunch of badly disciplined troops who can't take direction. They'd fair much better if they did the flanking instead of attacking head on :-)

Something I'm realising is that a bunch of tactics are not truly possible with the AI as is. I have an editor mission where there is a central OPFOR on a hill. I have a blue rifle squad engage front and a second waypointed with "hold fire" to go right and flank on the hill the other side of some rocks at fast pace and then cut in to engage. That doesn't happen at all! The AI just all engage fairly centrally. It looks as though the AI won't move under fire to take up a flank even when told to hold fire and move. They either move forward engaging as they go or try to do that and get shot to pieces.

Ok, so it is pretty cool that we now have a number of prone-type positions including sitting. It would be great if the AI would use them! Especially on the down-slope where it currently looks like they are gravity defiant - facing down the hill with only their legs in contact with the ground, bent backwards at the waist aiming up across the hills. Very impressive in yoga maybe but kinda silly in battle kit shooting a rifle.

The problem I have with the argument that the only way to simulate recoil management is to make it hard to manage is that all the stances are simulated at a button press, as are a large number of other things, and stance is a large part of recoil management. The point is - why make recoil in particular so hard, and so much harder than IRL? Why isn't running simulated more closely for instance? Maybe we should have to tap the z and x keys to take steps in the game? Why should the game decide when the left foot moves? At the end of the day, if recoil on modern rifles was still like on an SLR then fine I could understand such a vicious movement. Auto was taken off them even for the military because it was too hard for soldiers to control. But with modern weapons it's just not true that it's really hard to have a weapon on full auto and control it after not much training at all. I'm pretty sure I've spent longer learning to manage recoil in this game (and I'm a long way from success) than soldiers take IRL to manage it with their SA80s or M16s.