Other players experience with ground attack?

[HerrBree]

    Ill start off by saying that I personally think PWCG is fantastic and cant wait to see how it develops in the future but one thing that is really turning me off to it is the ground attack missions. After dozens of sorties I'm only getting a handful of mission templates(?) i guess you could call them. Any "attack troops" or "troop concentration" missions only yield a row of 5 Zis field guns. When im assigned to attack an airfield i arrive at the target to discover that it and the airfields in the surrounding area are already destroyed.  The same holds true with any missions targeting bridges, when i get to the target area all the bridges in a large vicinity are already destroyed. I have yet to be given a mission against any kind of convoy be it armor or transport and even when i get assigned AP weapons (AP 37mm, mk101/103) my target is always field guns. So my question is what are your experiences with ground attack missions? Am I doing something wrong? Is there some config function I am missing or is this all part of the progress of the mod?

 

Thanks everyone in advance!
 

 

 

[RedeyeStorm]

I agree with you. It is why I stick to the standard careers. You forgot to mention that half the time the targets are in forrests or in rivers. 
 

I do love the start and taxi stuff though.

[JGr2/J5_W0LF-]

Same here

My squad fly this PWCG every week and we love it, that being said so far its been all fighter sweeps and hitting artillery and airfields. No convoys or trains or escort missions no matter how I set the numbers in the settings I still get nothing but fighter sweeps and hitting artillery and airfields. Dont get me wrong Im sure theres bugs that are not seen or found as of yet and I know Pat is working on this app. Its still the best! I just hope in the new year we get the Rhine map with cold starts and some of these mission worked out. Im dying to escort bombers in PWCG.

 

Oh and one more thing I forgot the artillery are always hiding in the edge of the forests, hard to spot to be honest...lol

Edited January 4, 2020 by 361st_Bugsy

[PatrickAWlson]

PWCG allows you to scrub a mission.  If the target looks uninteresting then scrub it and generate a new one.  

Make sure that ground activity is at least medium density.  If you tell PWCG to use low ground density it won't generate much in the way of targets.

Target selection should focus on the more interesting types in the relatively near future.   Until then, see "scrub".

 

Per complaints about units in the forest ...  do you really expect the units to be nice and in the open all the time?

 

Per complaints about units in water ... yeah, I know that is a flaw.  To avoid that I would have to map all of the water somehow.  Unfortunately there is no way to determine what kind of terrain there is on the map.  This is an area where the official campaign may have an advantage as they probably have access to a terrain database.

[RedeyeStorm]

3 hours ago, PatrickAWlson said:

PWCG allows you to scrub a mission.  If the target looks uninteresting then scrub it and generate a new one.  

Make sure that ground activity is at least medium density.  If you tell PWCG to use low ground density it won't generate much in the way of targets.

Target selection should focus on the more interesting types in the relatively near future.   Until then, see "scrub".

 

Per complaints about units in the forest ...  do you really expect the units to be nice and in the open all the time?

 

Per complaints about units in water ... yeah, I know that is a flaw.  To avoid that I would have to map all of the water somehow.  Unfortunately there is no way to determine what kind of terrain there is on the map.  This is an area where the official campaign may have an advantage as they probably have access to a terrain database.

Hey Patrick,

 

The problem with units in the Forrest is that you cannot see them so attacking then would’ve be verry difficult. I believe that during the war the allies would use medium bombers to bomb the forrest. The real immersion killer is that, a. deployed field artillery would not work, b. triple A in the Forrest isn’t verry practical but c. your squad mates ignore the Forrest completely and successfully bomb the targets.

 

Especially point c bugs me personally.

[HerrBree]

Thanks for the reply Pat and everyone else. Pat, you pretty much answered my question. I just wanted to make sure i wasnt facing some perpetual bug/corrupted installation. Despite this i truely look forward to future updates as I finally got coop working with my friends so now PWCG is a must have.

 

As for units in forests and rivers, I havent noticed this in quite sometime but that might be because I tend to stay away from anything bomber or attacker related over Kuban for that exact reason Everywhere else I have to admit I thought it had been fixed I encountered it so little.

 

 

[Utopioneer]

On 1/5/2020 at 12:13 PM, PatrickAWlson said:

Per complaints about units in water ... yeah, I know that is a flaw.  To avoid that I would have to map all of the water somehow.  Unfortunately there is no way to determine what kind of terrain there is on the map.  This is an area where the official campaign may have an advantage as they probably have access to a terrain database.

Pat is this something I could help with? Could your code potentially support a file that has coordinates for water, and then apply a buffer around those coordinates where units aren't placed? Large bodies may need a polygon geofence, but perhaps rivers could be defined as a series of points and a buffer around those points?

 

If this is something that could be done, let me know what format you would need it in.

[PatrickAWlson]

36 minutes ago, Utopioneer said:

Pat is this something I could help with? Could your code potentially support a file that has coordinates for water, and then apply a buffer around those coordinates where units aren't placed? Large bodies may need a polygon geofence, but perhaps rivers could be defined as a series of points and a buffer around those points?

 

If this is something that could be done, let me know what format you would need it in.

 

If you look at the way I do front lines this would need something similar.  For every map a series of coordinates and orientations.  Based on that the code could be reworked to try to avoid those spots.

[Utopioneer]

On 1/6/2020 at 3:09 PM, PatrickAWlson said:

 

If you look at the way I do front lines this would need something similar.  For every map a series of coordinates and orientations.  Based on that the code could be reworked to try to avoid those spots.

Pat, I was trying a couple of different methods to see what I could efficiently accomplish. Could you support a mask whose pixel dimensions matches the map dimensions, or scaled appropriately to limit file size, and then do a boolean check against that for spawned units? The mask would be quick to paint and could easily be updated.

[Sogamg]

I have the problem where you start a ground attack or bombing mission and almost everything is already destroyed.

[jeanba]

I am playing a P47 campaign in september 1944, and I quite enjoy it.

I agree that having ennemy troups in a river or in forest may be quite frustrating.

The objective layout of the career is better: for instance, an artillery battery is not only made of guns, but you have sandbag protections, trucks, ammo dump, radio truck ... which is more immersing.

On the other hand, the mission itself is more pleasant : after some tuning, I have 8 P47 taking of, they are usually escorted and the escort behaves much better than in the career mode, the ennemy fighters do not chase you until your airfield ...

So the PWCG ground attack campaigns are more pleasant to fly.