Infantry?

[Dutch Owen]

This is a solicitation for ideas.

We can simulate just about any kind of ground vehicles. But something big is missing. Soldiers. Personnel. Infantry!

In the SE Asia theater the Communist side had little in the way of armor (although they had plenty of trucks) until the very end of the conflict (post 1972).

How can we simulate infantry?

My ideas so far as that we define a type "Infantry" for an invisible or barely visible "vehicle" which moves very slowly, has a fairly large radius, and comes in sizes ranging from "Squad" to "platoon" to "Company" and has a number of men assigned to it. When such a unit is attacked it takes damage differently than a true vehicle. Damage is number of killed or wounded not a percentage as a vehicle, although that number could be translated into a percentage of total effective strength. Perhaps an infantry unit can have a special attribute called "formation" or "posture" that would determine its damage mitigation. Such formations could be "spread" or "dug in" or "marching".

One thing we can't have is hundreds of individual soldiers running around as separate simobjects. We have to abstract this in reasonable, realistic some way.

Another thing I don't want to see is whole units wiped out by one bomb unless it's something like Napalm or cluster bombs and it's a small unit with a near direct hit.

Your thoughts?

Dutch

[hajolippke]

How is this done on other Sims? I speak of tank sims like "Steel Armor" or any other "older" sim. I think even DCS only has single soldiers (usually with a MANPAD), and there may be reasons why it hasn´t been done on even current and up-to-date simulations.

Don´t want to discourage you, but it seems like the fact that you mentioned - several hundreds of simulated soldiers - is something you can only have in dedicated sims from a shooter perspective. ARMA or similar.


HAJO

[StuB]

One thing that will make it a bit easier is that, with the exception of the big air-mobile operations, most of the land battles were between platoon or squad sized units.
Also, since most of the fighting was in the jungle, or on the edges of rice paddy's or villages, it was difficult, if not impossible, to see individual combatants from a fast moving airplane.
Aside from the fast movers though, anyone flying low and slow in a helicopter, or as a Forward Air Controller would definitely need to see a bit more detail, but I think a very basic, low detail model would suffice.
It would be nice if the models at least had animated legs though, since it would make it a bit easier to notice them when they are moving and you are flying by.

I suggest initially, starting off with squad sized infantry units and seeing how it works out. Even a small unit like that would move in a formation, so you could sort of treat them like a AI flight.
If there is a way to have them become invisible if they are in the jungle, that could help with frame rates.