Infantry Survivability

[Muhail2]

The effect of both artillery and mg's on infantry is a lot bigger in peoples mind than it is in reality.

Never was under direct mg or arty fire myself. :happy:

the historical loss figures for infantry wouldn't have been as low as they are

As I have already said, there were almost no fights to death of equal forces in real life. Commander would prefer to fall back or request support in case of increasing losses.
And then, take a Kursk strategic operation for example. Were the sides equal? Almost. Was the fighting fierce? Surely yes, fanaticaly fierce in some cases. And the losses were great - with at least 200.000 only on German side, with some units almost annihilated in process. Almost every soldier out of 4 was taken out of action. That's the fighting we almost casualy have in SP series: aggressive, with a lot of firepower concentrated, little time to achieve objectives and with no extra reinforcments or support to rely on. And in SPMBT it should be even bloodier, I suppose, as the weapons are much more powerful.

Currently, infantry attrition rates from artillery, MG and small arms fire are quite believable in SPMBT. But!
In the recent test a platoon of 4 "Cherniy Orel" tanks advanced towards taliban infantry lying in the open ground. Fire was conducted from full stop with ranges from 300 to 400 metres. All settings were on 100%. 16 152mm HE-FRAG shells took a total toll of 5 casualties, and MG fire from NSV and PKT MG's inflicted 6 casualties. Second round of firing produced almost the same results with MG and HE fire incapaciating equal number of soldiers. Interesting to note that displayed accuracy for each (both MG and main gun) shot ranged from 78% to 85%... As the enemy retreated further (one squad was shot while running, with HE round taken out 1 and MG taken out 3(!) enemies) fire was conducted from 500-550 range and in two successive round of firing only 4(!) enemies were killed. Displayed accuracy ranged from 45% to 56%.
As for me, it completly ruins the tank role as a fire support vehicle.
Suppression is the other thing: both MG and HE fire cause nearly the same supression. But, from my experience, MG tend to actually wound 1 or 2 soldiers a round even when firing from extreme distances thus producing much more supression than the main gun does. Heh, I wonder why it was called "main" :)
Is it all right that 152-mm FCS-assisted gun is as effective as a HMG against soft targets? Same question applies to AGLs and autocannons.
It isn't even gameplay-wise: these tanks costs 2400 point which could be used to buy 3 rifle companies on trucks - a whole battalion with RPG-29s, capable of taking out a wide range of armored targets. Or 2 companies with TA-ATMGs with TI in each platoon...
Something should be done to vehicle-to-infanty accuracy.

Muhail2, If you want to make infantry more vulnerable, I believe you need to lower infantry toughness to 50% not raise it to 200%?

Yes, my typo. I acctually lowered inf. toughness to 50% and even 30%. Casualties are much higher but still they are caused only by some random shots. Which is bad, especially when a specops squad gets wiped out by a stray Mosin-Nagant shot from 400m. =\