Close Combat
A lightweight redesign of several common game mechanics to adjust the nature of combat to one akin to an older style of strategy game and, in my opinion, more representative of real combat. This is very different from the typical "realism" mod in which weapons are extremely accurate at long ranges and firefights are over in only a few shots.
I desire to keep this mod lightweight with fewer added features but will take thoughts and ideas on balancing further.
General changes and reasoning –
Weapon accuracy overall reduced via penalties for movement and aim time. All units take longer to aim to achieve full accuracy and will spend more time aiming before firing, depending on weapon type, stance, or presence of stabilizer for vehicles. Real life firefights involve far more missed shots than any modern game would detail. While not as immediately gratifying and difficult to portray in video games, reduced rate of killing allows more time for tactical and strategic decisions to be made and better reflects the extended and confusing firefights that occur in real life. Some older games like the original Faces of War (predecessor to Ostfront), Project Reality, Close Combat, and Red Orchestra, for example, have gameplay mechanics that attempt to replicate this better, while practically every modern game does away with it in favour of gameplay "accessibility" and instant gratification.
Stance affects accuracy more. MGs require prone or cover stances to have maximum accuracy, and their fire power and kill rate stands out more.
Damage is increased and locational damage to body has much more impact on health loss. More damage for head, less for arms and legs.
Reload speed is reduced across the board. Soldiers have to aim longer to become accurate and will additionally space shots out more. Overall, there is more time for maneuvering during breaks in fire. While firefights last longer and soldiers miss much more, ammo consumption speed is balanced by their aiming time and slower reload.
Bullet velocities increased to real values minus 5% to account and average for drag over distance, which is not modelled in-engine.
Bullet damage is Joules muzzle energy * bullet diameter * bullet weight in grains, adjusted and rounded to nearest game-read values. "Stopping power" is a mysterious number that has many different formulas attempting to describe it. This is one of the more common ones.
A physics-realistic explosive force calculation that is universally applied to all explosives, rendering TNT filler equivalent as the primary determinate of damage and range. The power of TNT filler is its cube root and lethality drop over distance is calculated as the inverse of the scaled distance, (1/Z^3). Additional damage that does not falloff so rapidly is also added to represent shrapnel. Vanilla uses a static damage/energy amount that is separated in 2-4 waves over strict distance, lending to less realistic explosive effect. It also uses a different calculation for every range of mm shells, which imo is overly complex without good reason.
Vision changes to units with fewer ways to become spotted, enabling more fog-of-war and ways to remain undetected, even while engaging. Units do not magically share vision with each other unless nearby, which further increases time of engagements and reduces the effectiveness of vehicles that do no have cupola view. Spreading your squad individually about a large area (as is common in multiplayer) means they no longer share vision with each other. This also slows down combat and increases survivability specifically for infantry.
Ranges mostly increased. The GEM engine is limited in how much information it can provide, and draw distance is limited as well. Real life ranges for engagements span multiple ostfront maps in some cases and representing this in game while maintaining optimal gameplay is difficult. With the vision changes above, units behave more realistically when range is increased as compared to vanilla vision settings, but some more tuning is likely needed.
Melee combat damage is reduced and more skill dependent than vanilla. Soldiers will also engage in melee combat more frequently and may use their primary weapon in conjunction if able.
Infantry movement speed is reduced and stamina has been changed to be a much larger pool that recharges at a much slower rate. No more speedy soldiers whipping around and dashing about. Leaving cover is more penalized. Logistics transport and halftracks become much more useful. AVOID DOUBLE CLICK ORDERS UNLESS IN COMBAT for best stamina conservation, or else soldiers will be too tired to perform well.
Vehicles that have stabilization now have noticeably better mobile accuracy than those that do not. For example, most shermans, stuarts, comet, some early war german vehicles are buffed while panthers, firefly, and some russian tanks are nerfed, compared to vanilla.
Compatible with any sound mods, graphical mods, most other gameplay mods.
Not compatible with unit overhauls, new unit, new vehicle mods.
I personally recommend Battlefield and Oldboy’s Command Structure.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
