I wondered if anyone can provide some info on this. The manual is fairly vague and says that if an enemy unit in sight expends APs then OpFire has a chance to occur. Is anything affecting this 'chance' or is it pure roll of dice?
Another thing, are there any guidelines on how a target for OpFire is chosen. I know there are per unit and global OpFire settings. But say if number of valid targets is in sight then again is purely random thing? I simply wondered if my control over OpFire was limited to what is in the OpFire dialog.
Pawel
That's pretty much the deal you've got.
It is perfectly possible your enemy will test your op fire with sending out his less valuable units first, and after you've exhausted your action points then charge in for a kill.
Your op fire will be targeted against units that move, if you have many targets, but none of them uses any of their action points, your op fire will not fire.
First of them moves, he possibly gets shot at, here's where the die roll comes in.
Mind you, digging in will cause op fire as well. On the other hand, some units such as snipers may be able to sneak in without causing op fire.
There is a good discussion on op fire in the document Jason has put together, it is in the Manual folder of your install. It mainly has to do as figuring out the proper values for each type of Op fire in the dialogue though.
Hope this helps.
Thanks. This assured me there was no black art knowledge I was lacking.
One thing which always puzzled me was some 'randomness' of the target selection I occasionally observe. Say I have an enemy unit in LOS, and there is a new unit moving in the same hex ( i.e. hidden before), and the fire is sometimes used for the stationary unit rather than the one spending APs. Is it something to do with stack order or is it random as well, ie. One of the units spends APs so a roll dice is used to determine which one is hit ( provided both are viable OppFire targets as per settings).
Thanks
My observation is that when I have a unit occupying a hex, and another unit moves in, the moving unit may trigger op fire (the die roll again) but the fire very often targets the first unit already in the hex. Not sure, but I suspect this relates to the op fire setting of the firing unit; if it is set to fire only at hard targets, it will fire at a hard target moving in, ignoring soft targets. If on the other hand it has the default setting, the movement into the hex may draw its fire, but it will target the unit already in the hex or (if more than one) the unit on top of the stack. I would guess it is NOT a random selection of which unit is hit by the op fire. This suggests a useful tactic of course.