Is it just me?

[Narwan]

If you enage them from 200 yards distance you'd have a sizeable angle from left to right to 'cover' them all. It would be hard to get a bead on two guys at once, let alone hit more than one or two, with a single burst.

Narwan[/i][/b]

I didn't know that crew served weapons have lower hitting chance the closer the targeted squad they are. Learning every day.

Sorry for the confusion Vesku, that comment of mine was a description of how the game views the real world situation. It doesn't mean the game gives a penalty to fire closer targets, it's just that there is no 'grouping' bonus for firing from closer range. There's just the regular scale that applies to just about every type of weapon of hit chance increasing the closer to a target a unit gets.

A mmg firing from 300m will be more accurate than one firing from 500m, ie it will have more chance to hit the target with a burst. But a burst will usually cause just one casualty in the game. Those few times you'll see multiple casualties from a single burst show those exceptions where the mg was lucky enough to be able to get a group together. Could have been that a couple of squadmembers got together to confer at that specific moment or could be an enfilade effect allowing more than 1 men to be hit. But those are exceptional circumstances, not the rule.

Something you may not know about the game is that there is a range category where the probability to inflict casualties doesn't drop with range for the intial couple of volleys. That's not due to hit probabilities staying the same but a side effect of the suppression rules. If you fire from about 600m distance just about every volley will land in the target hex (exp matters greatly). It's not that likely to immediately inflict casualties but it is likely for the squad to become pinned, quite likely from that first volley. If you fire at close to 1000m, there's a good chance you'll hit a different hex than the target hex. While the splash effect of mmg fire can still cause suppression in the adjacent hex, that suppression is less likely to cause the unit to become pinned. If the target was moving, there's a fair chance it will stay 'moving' because it received no suppression at all. And now comes the interesting bit; the game use a three step hit resolution system. The first shot at target is at 1/3 max hit prob, the second at 2/3 hit prob and the third and subsequent shots at full hit prob (assuming you keep firing at the same target). Going from moving to pinned reduces the max hit probability by about half (ballpark figure).
So firing the second volley at 600m at a pinned squad goes at 2/3 of a max hit prob that's 50% reduced compared to the second volley at 1000m at a ready unit still moving. The reduction in hit prob due to increased range is of a similar order of magnitude. If you run a series of tests you'll see the loss rate of squads fired at from roughly between 500m and 1000m by 3 volley's of mmg fire won't be that much different. Once the squad at the longer range is pinned too the one at shorter range will get more hits than the one at longer range but until then...