AI machine gunners- has nobody told them MG basics?

[Satchel]

AI machine gunners are employing fire unbeneficial and incorrect;
AI machinegun soldiers are only ripping of single shots from their MG´s instead of doing 3-5 round bursts.....
, independant of range (no matter if 400 or 100m)- Machine gunners should never go below a fireburst, 3-5 rounds that is.

600m 3-5 round burst
500m 3-5 round burst
400m 3-5 round burst
300m 3-5 round burst
200m 3-5 round burst
100m and below shoot sustained stream of fire till target is neutralized, as long as the target is likely to be affected by fire, if it´s not affected by the initial opening volley of max 20 rounds, switch to next dangerous target, keep firing and switching till all enemies are dead or the machine gunner was put out of action. If multiple enemies are present the machine gunner should do quick target switching, to suppress the advancing enemy and slowing their advance.

Generally the closer the enemy is to a machine gunner, the quicker should be the succession of bursts.
While there may be a couple of seconds between 2 bursts at long range, there may be only split seconds at 100m between bursts.
As these are optimal values (3-5 rounds/burst) i have listed, but the normal soldier is no robot and likely to overshoot 3-5 rounds, you could probably add some random feature here, giving the gunner a range of 3-10 shots in a single burst, depending on his skill maybe.
A machine gunner shouldn´t spend all of his ammo on a single target, instead if after 20 rounds or so the target is still alive and unaffected, he should switch to the next dangerous target.
They should have two modes, suppress and point target engagement for single targets.
The machine gunner should fight Snipers and enemy machine gunners, or AT personal first with priority, before covering the rest with fire.

[AndyZ]

I disagree to your observation. I've seen machine gunner employing constant fire bursts not once (it was nice on Desert Island with tracers - just flood of fire ). I was even worrying about their fast ammo usage.

AndyZ

[Satchel]

Hmm, that´s strange, are you running 1.30?
I can only see them doing single fire, even when i place them directly in front of an enemy jeep........

[Mister Frag]

It also depends on the skill level of the machine gunner -- try setting it to the max in the Mission Editor.

[Satchel]

This is correct Mister Frag, i´ve just tested it.
But it is wrong nevertheless;
their ROF rises with skill, it´s either single shots(everything before full skill/ slider not fully to the right) or continious firestream with the M60´s actual rate of fire(Slider full on the right), but no fire bursts as they are teached everywhere....or is single firing an M60 and M249 in U.S. camps common procedure...i doubt it.
What happens here actually is a direct modification of the M60´s ROF, which is nonsense.
Apart from that i know actually noone using singlefire on MG´s, because there´s no such triggergroup for standard military MG´s, it´s very tricky to tickle of single shots on an MG3, also this makes the role the MG is in obsolete....it´s an support ***long range area weapon, to suppress and also to fight point targets.
A "fresh out of bootcamp" soldier, or my girlfriend firing an M60, would have the same ROF as a Veteran machine gunner of the NAVY SEALS, has nothing to do with skills, so the slider actually makes no sense as the AI either uses single shots with perverted rate of fire, or on full skill it just puts out continious fire in a single stream till a traget is neutralized, theres nothing inbetween. Also range doesn´t affect the "non stop" fire of MG gunners at highest skill, he uses it everywhere in all situations....it´s equally worthless to the single shot firing "everything below highest skill" machine gunner.
Why shouldn´t even the dumbest soldier be able to do a simple fireburst with an MG, or put out a continious stream of bullets....i don´t catch the logic behind that.
The only thing that should be influenced by the skill slider is skill (how accurate a soldier is) and not what ROF the MG has, or if a soldier can do firebursts.
After all triggering of single rounds of an MG is much much harder than pulling through a whole belt of 100 rounds in a single fireburst.
The way it is now it is terrible not only in regards of realism, please fix this.

(Edited by Satchel at 4:17 am on Nov. 30, 2001)

[Beagle]

Well...nothing more to say, satchel is right.

[LordZach]

Try the bradley. Even on max skill he shoots the 25mm semi-auto. Have to use manual fire.

[tlx]

Yep M60 machinegun throughput needs to be optimized. Easy to test on SP mission "Battlefield". Also remember M2 Bradley to fire single shots instead of rounds.

[Die Alive]

I've tried this last night. ***I got over 50 enemy running at me over a hill on desert (the hill on the north side of the island, near the middle), and maybe 200m away from the hill, i'm set up with 5 other MGs (I just wanted to slaughter someone last night). ***At first, I placed them with the lowest skill level, and it was pretty bad to see all these shots being fired but very few enemy actually getting hit.

Then I switched to full skill for all the MGs, and it was a glorious scene. ***Every enemy were being killed, but very soon, the MGs started to run out of ammo, seems like they were shooting constant fire but weren't hitting anything most of the time. ***I think I'd like to see a rate of fire when in lowest skill level, but instead of single shots, short burst and not long sweeping fire that doesn't hit anything most of the time.

-=Die Alive=-

[AndyZ]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Quote: from Satchel on 2:19 am on Nov. 30, 2001
Hmm, that´s strange, are you running 1.30?
I can only see them doing single fire, even when i place them directly in front of an enemy jeep........
[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>

Yes, I run 1.30 for CZ installed over 1.20 PL :cool:

I also made some testing after my last post. It depends on skill level. However I do agree now, that your suggestion about MGs behavior is right one

AndyZ