Profile of MMX

Interesting, but I'm not sure if it has any practical value. It probably does mean you shouldnt let your snipers wander near any squads being actively shot with "Focus Fire: False" weapons, though. Other than that, i dont believe there's a way to actually make use of this information in-game.

well the getting-suppressed-through-walls-by-accident part is worthwhile to know for sure.

Welp, after reading the posts I missed I think we can all agree that this engine determines collision by reading the cards, black magic a using a pair of dice all together...

now it is finally all beginning to make sense, haha.

interesting stuff... i always found flamers to act a bit weird on auto-attack; sometimes they seemingly do no damage at all even though the animation indicates the poor guys at the receiving end take a bath in liquid death and everything around them gets burned to a crisp.
usually what hannibal described solves this for me:

As I said, walking just a little closer fixes the issue for me.

but apparently there seems to be more to this than i thought. also, if elevation is really responsible for the odd behavior, does this extend to other AoE weapons as well?
in any case, great detective work so far guys, hope this mystery can (and will) be solved!

How it is flawed really? Consider amout of muni you are paying for both abilities, then consider amout of models you need to lose to get either new osttroopen or cons squad.
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i think you misunderstood what i was referring to (or maybe i misunderstood your post). i'm not saying these abilities are fine as is; in fact they're far from viable atm considering cost and timing, which is one of the main reasons neither RC nor RI see much use these days. what i intended to point out is that the main argument a lot of people seem to have against these abilities is that somehow you need to lose entire squads to get any use out of your munitions expenditure. this is just not the case since you can easily drop enough models during the 60 s time window the ability is active (which will usually be long enough to cover several engagements) to get at least one squad in return. i've been using RC in 1v1s quite frequently in the past and while getting a free squad may not always be possible, it happens more often than not if you time it right.
are these abilities too expensive? is the duration too short? are there better ways to provide a manpower equivalent than giving unvetted squads in exchange for munitions? these are all worthwhile questions to ask and there are countless suggestions of how to improve RC and RI (like the one by Olekman below, for example). but saying these abilities have no place in the game because losing stuff in coh2 is against its design philosophy is flat out wrong in my opinion.

I don't know how the firing angles are calculated exactly, but I know that when a projectile has is_artillery set to "True" - which basically means that it travels in an arc, not in a straight line - the value in projectile_ext/speed seemingly doesn't affect projectile's velocity at all.

Now, bear in mind that everything below this line is my guesswork.

Before any calculation is done, all projectiles have the same velocity (value unknown to me). The game checks every angle (between 0 and 89, I think) whether the projectile will land at the target. Depending on firing_angle_type, it will either check from highest to lowest angle (high_angle) or from lowest to highest angle (low_angle and lowest_non_collide_angle, where the latter also checks if there are any shot blockers or terrain in the way). When it finds a suitable angle - search immediately ends, that's the angle it will use, the projectile is fired. However, in case there are no angles that land right on target, the game adds an increment to the initial velocity of the projectile dictated by the projectile_ext/artillery/speed_increment. It then once again checks all angles for one that will land on target. If there are none - repeat the whole process.

There's also speed_distance_multipler variable, which according to description is "Additions to the initial velocity based on distance to the target ms per metre ie inital speed modifier x distance to target". Almost every projectile in the game has this set between 0.1 and 0.3, but Sturmtiger and AVRE have them at -5. I haven't tested this thoroughly yet, so I'm not sure whether it actually affects anything.

wow, thanks a lot for the comprehensive answer! this is pretty much in line with what i've been able to deduce from the description in the editor so far - minus one elemental part: the projectile velocities. it never even occurred to me to check this, but if these are in fact different from the values given in projectile_ext/speed that would explain why my calculations were always a bit off...
if it's the same for every artillery projectile it might even be possible to figure out the exact value for the muzzle velocity experimentally. will give this a try for sure!

anyway, thanks again for the info, this was incredibly helpful. and lastly:

Glad you found it informative and it's not just me venting to the void.

don't worry, although i can personally relate to this sentiment very well i can also assure you that there are a lot of people who appreciate this kind of content, even though feedback is usually somewhat limited. i guess one of the reason posts like this tend to kind of stay under the radar is that it's a lot easier to chime in on a balance discussion than it is for more technical topics.