Moving Covertly

[ack-ack]

Is there a way to get your infantry to move by crawling on the ground, without ever standing or crouching?

I’m noticing that when I move units “covertly” and with the “stay hidden” button on, they will still get up from a prone position and sprint.

[Spud]

Not that I'm aware of, if you set them to move covertly/stay concealed via the orders panel they will crawl the majority of the time, although they will get up and sprint short distances, bounding one or 2 at a time. I assume they do this to slightly speed up travel and also to maintain some situational awareness. Once they make contact however, with these settings they seem more likely to stay prone or to take one knee rather than standing upright.

If you are trying to get them to move and want to avoid contact as much as possible try disabling all fire commands, bottom of the orders panel, this way if they spot enemies they won't reveal their position until you want them too, assuming they aren't spotted of course.

[ack-ack]

Ok…

I knew that using move covertly on assault commands would make them move in bounds, but I didn’t think they would still do it with the “stay hidden” command toggled.

It’s especially annoying when trying to position FOs to get good LOS on enemy positions without being spotted.

[dozzapot]

I miss a command like that to. For example, if a tank is disabled it should be possible for infantry to crawl up to it and lob a few grenades or whatever to try and finish it off but I don't find a way of them doing that without the machine guns taking care of them.

[Defiant Squirrel]

Originally posted by dozzapot:

I miss a command like that to. For example, if a tank is disabled it should be possible for infantry to crawl up to it and lob a few grenades or whatever to try and finish it off but I don't find a way of them doing that without the machine guns taking care of them.

I have seen infantry doing this, russians with molotovs in particular seem to do exactly that although, ya, not as often as i'd like, it could be one of those behaviours that the AI is capable of but there's no specific command available.

Troops staying permanently proned would probably be something decided at squad level, assaulting a tank with grenades or molotovs would be very small event when you look at the big picture of a major battle, would the Operations Commander know there was a tank there? or a squad of grenadiers 30 metres away? would the squad commander even try to contact platoon commander for orders in this situation?

In the heat of battle squads are on their own and must try to decide what is best action, they have orders and objectives but how they achieve? from moment to moment they must decide, if the game start to give the player control to do too much, well, ya this game becoming Company of Heroes style click race and it will lose so much that is making it unique and truly a great depiction of commanding an army in war.

So, ya maybe AI can be improved, no AI is perfect and like I say I see sometimes this AI doing beautiful things, like taking out tanks with molotovs, for me when i formulate a strategy and made some basic tactical decisions it is my pleasure to watch this AI trying to put into practice my vision, OK so sometimes they doing not so good, really mess up my plan, but sometimes, ya, they blow me away, with something like this cover fire withdrawal from enemy machine guns, nice laying of smoke screen and suppressing with APC I saw my SS Panzer Grenadiers doing one time, with no help from me.

That is the magic of this game.

[ack-ack]

I understand and admire the devs decision to take away certain tactical options from the player. This allows the AI to compete more with the player at the micro level, the level where player is going to have the largest advantage, and the level that can involve lots of unnecessary busy work. I’m totally fine with allowing infantry squads or even entire platoons to fight without any micro intervention - they can do this relatively well and I’m personally not all that interested in the small scale fire and maneuver tactics that this game has to offer (thats not what this game is going for).

However, there are still moments where you NEED to be able to precisely move units, especially your FOs - their ability to spot and remain concealed can be the single most important factor in a battle. Same goes for heavy weapons and AFVs. To have one of these units knocked out or destroyed, because it did something unrealistically stupid, is hard to deal with (I’ve rage quit a lot of battles because of this).

I can still bare it for now (can’t bring myself to return to the hell that is Combat Mission micromanagement simulator XD), however everytime it happens my patience gets knocked down another peg.

So far my greatest request from the Graviteam devs is more precise unit movement. Forget about new fancy units or operations ;).

[Technopiper]

Originally posted by ackack:

I understand and admire the devs decision to take away certain tactical options from the player. This allows the AI to compete more with the player at the micro level, the level where player is going to have the largest advantage, and the level that can involve lots of unnecessary busy work. I’m totally fine with allowing infantry squads or even entire platoons to fight without any micro intervention - they can do this relatively well and I’m personally not all that interested in the small scale fire and maneuver tactics that this game has to offer (thats not what this game is going for).

However, there are still moments where you NEED to be able to precisely move units, especially your FOs - their ability to spot and remain concealed can be the single most important factor in a battle. Same goes for heavy weapons and AFVs. To have one of these units knocked out or destroyed, because it did something unrealistically stupid, is hard to deal with (I’ve rage quit a lot of battles because of this).

I can still bare it for now (can’t bring myself to return to the hell that is Combat Mission micromanagement simulator XD), however everytime it happens my patience gets knocked down another peg.

So far my greatest request from the Graviteam devs is more precise unit movement. Forget about new fancy units or operations ;).

I agree with everything you say here. I'm not interested in seeing Panther, Tiger II, etc, etc. just yet. I rather see a more polished unit behavior first. The war is getting unfun by that time anyway. Kursk? What a boring mess! Panthers were horrible at Kursk.

GTOS is a tank sim at its core. But it places the player at the seat of a divisional/Task Force commander. You are not suppose to tell your men to "check your safeties" or "switch to Panzergranate 39". But the aritificial behavior needs to be improved.

Example: I setup an ambush with a Marder but when the enemies showed up it simply won't fire. I noticed there's a slight elevation where it stood. Ordered it to back up and BOOM it hit the enemy tank. The problem is that the enemy was real close (500 meters) and the Marder couldn't depress its gun enough. Backing up to flatter ground solved the problem.