Profile of Hannibal

The bofors really suffers from UKF's general design.
It comes early, so counters are not as numerous, therefore it can't have enough range to really lock down an area and must stay vulnerable to the one PaK on the field.

At the same time, UKF has no real mortar unless you want to spam emplacements, forcing a defensive faction into the offensive if your Bofors gets barraged.

Similarly, there is no late game arty, so no chance defending it in the late game from ATGs.

Also, the veterancy is very odd. Vet3 gives you 50% more HP. This is huge, but you'll never get that far since the only way to vet is if your opponent is a huge idiot and feeds his men into it.

Maybe the Bofors should work more like a heavy ATG with a rotating gun that requires setup. Defenseless from the sides, but useful to the front.

Yeah, now that you say it the length measurement method surely is kind of the poor man's solution to frame-counting... albeit it did at least prove that the size of the in-game model seems to be roughly equivalent to that of the hitbox.

I've been thinking about your suggestion to reduce the number of rounds used for probing the dimensions of the hitbox, and you're definitely right that 5000 is way over the top. In theory, 100 sampling shots should give a standard deviation of +/- 5% in the worst case (50/50 chance of hitting) - not too bad for a rough estimate for sure. Upping the number to 500 would cut the standard deviation about in half and shouldn't be too taxing time-wise either, so maybe that's a good compromise between accuracy and effort. I'll try to set up some measurements later today and see how reproducible the results are and how well they line up with the visual estimates.

However, if Vipper is right and the hitboxes can be measured via the map editor, this would of course be even better!

Map editor would be great, although these would probably also only be estimates. What good is it seeing the hit box when you can't really reference it that well? Although maybe a speed mod or something would help in that regard.

Anyway, I played around with the numbers. Running 500 shots should give you a 95% chance of having less than 15% error for smaller tanks (assuming those are only ~2m wide which would be in line with your 24% hit chance of a PaK40 on a T70 that you estimated), ~7% for mediums (assuming ~5m width) and about 4% for larger vehicles (assumed ~7 meters).
1000 shots improve these numbers to 11%, 5%, 3% for small/medium/large vehicles.
5000 shots improve to 5%, 2%, 1%.

But again, this means that in 95% of the measurements, you will have LESS error than this and be closer to the actual value.

yes, in that case the t70 drives to the other side of the map, knowing there are no threats for it whatsoever and can chase off harrassers
meanwhile your pak gets swarmed by 4 cons because now the sov player knows
when it gets repositioned, he drives the t70 back in. voila wehr gets pushed off

the alpha strike of the pak should have 95% chance to hit

I mean, I can also make up a story about the MG42 suppressing the Con squads, while the Grens faust the T70 with the PaK finishing it off. Voila easy win.
Does it prove anything? No, no it doesn't.

A normal Ostheer build are 1 MG, 3-4 Grens, a pio and usually a 222 when the T70 arrives. The Soviets have 4 Conscripts, 1-2 pios and then finally the T70. Maybe they were forced into Guards or an ATG themselves to counter the 222.

If your PaK gets swarmed by 4 Conscripts, you left it undefended. That's all. As I've shown you, your PaK hits most of the time, realistically probably 3 out of 4 shots unless you set it up with a tractor or something in the line of fire. Most of the time, you hit the T70 and it has to retreat and repair. If you lose the game because of a single miss with all of main line squads having 20 range snares available, that's on you.
Which is further proven by Ostheer having decent win rates across all modes, being down in 3v3 and up in 4v4.

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Took me quite a few reads to actually get what you're doing to test the length of the vehicle. I had to laugh a bit to be honest, it looks like the poor man's equivalent to analyse the velocity by analyzing frames in a video. At the same time it is super creative.

Anyway, the way I thought about this initially was closer to your second suggestion. Basically count how many shots have missed and how many hit with a modified unit (0 accuracy, 0 horizontal scatter, no impact etc). Based on the scatter angle and the ratio of hit shots, you should be able to estimate the length. Are you really sure you need so many repetitions? By gut feeling I would have assumed that probably 100 would already be at least okay, although I have not tried to estimate this with a calculation.

However, I had a second idea:
We could take a bunch of standardized vehicles (0 accuracy etc as above...) that just differ in their scatter angle. Each will then shoot at a target at fixed distance. If the scatter angle is too small, all shots will hit. If it is too large, there will be misses. At range 40, each 1° increment in the scatter stat would correspond to 0,35m in vehicle width. So depending on how the angle increments are set up, it would probably be possible to nail the width down by 0,2-0,3 meters.

On the other hand, I think your second method is probably more straight forward. I'd just take less shots, should be good enough. Especially if you can cross check with similarly sized units. If the test gives you similar results for the P4 and T34, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

As to the ROF being a bit off for some units, I used an old formula to calculate the average time between shots that might be somewhat inaccurate, especially in light of what you dug up recently in your ROF thread. I don't think the deviation is too great (maybe a frame more or less here and there), but I'll probably try to update this in a future release...

Or are you specifically talking about the delays in the 'Head-to-head' tab? These are randomized between the theoretical min and max values on purpose to give the sim a more realistic 'feel'.

Yes, I was mostly asking about the head-to-head tab. If you'd have taken the average reload time, it could make the difference between consistently shooting 0,1 seconds earlier than the opponent which would lead to a clear victory. The randomization doesn't solve this, but at least will give some more realistic picture of the real variance.

This is very cool stuff! Will be more helpful since people will rather user a table calculation program rather than Python where I cobble my stuff together. I'll have to have a look soon when I find the time!


Since I assume you referred to this calculator in the "Ostheer accuracy" thread, I have a question:
How did you get the 24% scatter hit chance in the PaK vs T70 match up? Don't you need some value for the vehicle size in that one, or at least the width of the T70? Since we don't have that, what did you take as a substitute for estimation?


EDIT:
The only thing I noticed at the moment is that some ROF times are a bit off? Units like the Panther for example fire a bit faster than they are in game.