Commanderski

That would be a good idea....🙂

That would be a good idea....🙂

Two points of view (ATGM operator and drone) of the same episode - Stugna-P hit Russian or DPR tank near Pavlivka, Donetsk oblast, where Russians try to attack: 
 Enemy tank got a missile, but was lucky - the crew could extinguish fire, but the second missile has exploded the tank - throwing into the flight enemy driver
In short, Russian operation for capturing of Pavlivka and Vuhledar has been developing in this way (according to Russian point of view)
Day 1: yo-ho-ho! We surprised theese Ukie-pigs! Our heroical DPR troops advanced on 3,5 km, we already mop-up Pavlivka, Ukies can't bring reinforcements - our arty controls all ways from Vuhledar! Soon Pavlika will fall and we will go to Vuhledar!
Day 2: we have seized southern and south-eastern part of village, Ukies risist yet, but their resistance haі been weakening. Now Russian marines in action! High Command offered a Hero of Russia for those company commander, whose company will burst first to Vuhledar!
Day3: well, we seized almost all village, but couldn't yet push Ukies behind the river (it divides Pavlivka on more larger southern and lesser northern part). This is unfair - damned Ukies sat in Vuhledar on the dominant height and adjust own arty, we can't supply troops because this and because damned mud.    
Day 4: either we will produce 122 mm ammo, or all country will produce zinc coffins. For two days of fighting for this damned Pavlivka our Marines lost more people, than for all First Chechen War... Our offensive was premature and unprepared. This is unfair! Damned Ukies wait for suitable weather to atatck in that time we attack, when theese damned rains and mud! Why our commander didn't attack Vuhledar from flanks and directed us to assault Pavlivka!
 
Real situation from UKR side (according to Pavlivka settlers): in day 1 DPR pushed our troops from gardens SE from village and took two farms on S and SE. On day 2 they could seize several houses in SE part. Day 3 - clashes, no advance. Day 4 - UKR troops pushed enemy back from SE of village and likely from farms. Gardens, according to loclas, now is grey zone.  

Russian BTR-82A carried AT-mines on the top and something happened...
 

 

BANG!

as far as I know there are no benefits to preorder.  Some of us just do it because we can, I suppose. 

Armor (M10 TD) in the hurtgen. M10 textures by Aris, bits of tweaked for some wet looks.

with Reshade

and some pic from the net

who has those muddy dirt roads again? @Lucky_Strike

Thanks! I´m now getting closer to what I´d like these maps looking for an appropriate "green hell" feeling. Funny thing I´d @Worghern´s mod on my HD long time but didn´t bother with it since my WinXP days. (was too much of a strain for my old puter) Also forgot it wasn´t all winter and included really nice autumn stuff as well. Could almost plug that into FB without any change. 😎 Beside my "fake terrain" texture tweaks that make steep wooded slopes playable. Though CM pixeltroopers hate these. 😅
Also made the pine needle texture somewhat darker overally. What I need checking is some the terrains doodad textures for which I need something looking like fallen off pine tree branches and such. Imagine lots of trees bursts (or heavy storm) and a less tidied up looking pine forest on the ground. Pity that without appropriate shaders we can´t make CM terrains looking really wet. Skyrim and Fallout 4 have such nice FX like these i.e.
a well known hurtgen forest pic for comparison. Though it´s more mixed forest type likely at northern end of the forest and maybe GI´s of The Big Red One advancing here.

Btw. once FB CW module is available you´ll see the Tommies having a nice trip into Reichswald as well. Looks would be very similar (without the hills and gorges).

In Ukraine the age of persons, liable for military service in wartime is 18-60 years. Many of theese aged soldiers in army jokingly named "diad'ky" (eng. "uncles") and say that "diad'ky are towing all war on their shoulders". Yes, many of them served recently in Ukrainian or even in Soviet army, but this was many years ago and their value not in this. Many of theese 40-45-50+ men are from villages and small towns, where no enough comfort life like in big cities, but hard handwork in agricultural enterprises, on their farms and on their homesteads. Yes, often theese men are addicted to alcohol and have only basic shcool education, but they used to be in hard conditions. They can do everything from anything. They can coock without field kitchen, they can repair any vehicle without special repair unit, they can dig and build blindage without sappers and then made from it not dirty hole, but something like this:   
Many of modern "city generation" - IT, office employees, used to comfort life, which for example can be cool coders or managers, but often can't hammer a nail stright (because they have a money to hire an "uncle" for this), just would be loss at this war without theese "uncles". They are mainstay of infantry, armor and artillery. Youngers maybe fight more effectively, they more capable in command, tactic and application of new toys like drones, but "uncles" give them own experience of real life and skills. 

Multiple choice question.
A. For Hell to freeze over.
B. Christmas.
C. For "It'll be ready when it's ready" to arrive.

Thats why WW2 German Infantry (non-motorised) Battalions/Regiments had horses issued to their Commanders - you can see a lot further from horseback! 

The Franken-Csaba progress continues thanks to @Lucky_Strike and Mark's superior skills at the PS joystick.
I am adding Hungarian crosses and license plates. I waited for hours down at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to get the damn tags. Insurance papers and my war vehicle license. The lady had it almost all done and THEN said she was going on break and I must return after lunch. DMV joke. FRANKENCSABA  hahaha I have to alter the SdFkz222 MG to be a water cooled looking MG. I had to swap the sides of 2 weapons on the turret,  cannon goes to the left, MG goes to the right. Messing with the crew spots. Effing with the hatches the best I can. Still gotta make vehicle crew uniforms for Hungarians! Fun stuff. Work in progress.    EDIT: I might mess with editing the fenders. I will grab the low hanging fruit to push it more towards a better Csaba look. Am I 100% making it a Csaba? No way man. It aint worth it to me. This is a hobby and I see @NPye staying up until 4am doing stuff. I have to bloody ask where the actual BFC people are. It seems the fans can crank out the content but BFC still has bunkers that shoot wrong for every title. I don't run a business so I guess I work for free here. But BFC must carefully plan the 15 minutes they budget in to have somebody on the clock to do a small 3D change? If SOMEBODY was paid to make those bunkers then it should be warranty work and be done for free and released in a special email. You do not need a big release and activation headache process to give us the corrected files. Very depressing.  

Rare footage of UKR naval forces in action - UKR medium landing ship "Yuriy Olefirenko" (pr.773, NATO Polnochny-С class) shelled from Ochakiv or Mykolaiv area Russian troops, deployed on Kinburn spit
Eight theese ships were designed and built in Poland in 1971-72, so as weapon they have uncommon for Soviet army 140 mm MLRS - Polish analog of old Soviet BM-14 MLRS, designed specilly for export purpose. 
Pr.773 has two launchers per 18 rockets each 
"Yuriy Olefirenko" - single landing ship, remained in UKR Naval Forces after 2014. In June this ship was under MLRS strike in Dnipro-Bug estuary, allegedly strike was conducted from Russian big landing ship, but rockets missed
 

Played through (a slightly edited) Getting Ugly. Likely would've been a bloodbath if the Germans hadn't done the old "immediate counterattack" schtick one times too many. Made a little vignette of the final attack. Read it here:  Springboard: A Red Thunder Vignette AAR (rinaldiaars.blogspot.com)
Some of my favourite shots from the blog:

Consolidating behind Chernverka.

Aftermath.

Dying hard. 

Another video of mopping-up of Russian positions in tree-plant after arty strike. Survived Russian has thrown grenade from own blindage, but it hit at obstacle and fell back to blindage
 

Messing about with trying to create a generic muddy looking landscape for all the WW2 games - I started in RT. Replacing a few textures at a time to try and figure out the mod tags (that's another story 🙄). Anyway I've gotten to a point where I think I can make it work across ALL the WW2 titles for ALL locations and ALL seasons/weather (excepting snow for obvious reasons - though slush might have to be thunk about separately), using one generic set of ground textures to look really muddy - think Spring Awakening in RT, Hürtgen in FB, Anzio bridgeheads in FI ... you know the kind of thing.
So I was just looking at some of the textures in FI, checking how the tags work when I noticed that the generic ground grass (and ground grass yellow) texture tile looked different than in other titles (BN and RT, haven't checked FB). Further investigation shows that the Italian terrain uses a higher perceived resolution of grass tile than the other titles. Grass is one of the worst texture tiles IMHO, it is a complete blurred mess at anything close up, only really resolving into a texture when looking down from quite high up, and it looks really poor next to a nice sharp AFV for example. This may not be an issue for many folks, but I like to play down in the long grass so I find it irksome seeing the ground texture. The reason that grass tiles look so blaah is because each tile is stretch across 50 x 50 m2 that's 2500m2 - to represent the texture correctly would require a tile of 20480 x 20480 pixels - the existing stock tiles are 2048 x 2048 pixels.
Many modders have tried to improve the grass texture over the years but really there's not a lot of point as they all just end up looking either nasty at low level or weirdly out of scale from up above, this is not a reflection on the modders but rather how the game handles the texture. However, it seems that the game engine is not so equal as I thought, and that with a little tweak from on high we could have a higher resolution. I don't notice any particular hit on my GPU/frame rate with the alternative tiles used in FI so I wonder why this hasn't been implemented across the other titles? It's not like we would need to redraw maps, or anything like that, as it's an engine based change affecting how much each tile is stretched or repeated within a specific area of terrain. Plenty of the other tiles occupy much less relative space, that is, they are stretched less and repeated more often. Here's some images from RT and FI for you consideration. The ground grass tiles have been replaced with a different texture that I was considering for a sodden ground grass texture, the doodads are the same in both games (from my Hedgerow Hell mod 😉)
First RT from ground level, as close as possible ...

Nice grass shame about the boat race ...
Now FI, same distance:

That's better - notice how the blurring doesn't jar so much, it all just melds together better IMHO.
Now at camera Level 1 ... first RT ...

It's all kind of floaty ... Now FI ...

Again, IMHO the grass doodads seem more attached to the ground.
This is a matter of taste for sure. There are plenty who will not care, but for those that do, self included, it would be nice if all the games were created equal in this respect.
 

Russian TG reported that damaged minesweeper is "Ivan Golubets" (project 266M, NATO Natya class)
Minesweeper has a hole in the hull and cought fire. Also one USV hit sub nets and booms obstacle in Yuzhnaya bay

I am happy to see more folks are involved in Blender to make CM mods. @Lucky_Strike @RockinHarry
I am ATTEMPTING 2 new Blender Mods to make some vehicles for my CMRT Hungary Mod.
39M Csaba Armored Car

43M Zrinyi Assault Gun

 
 
 

This is a smoke in Kamyshovaya bay, where usually military ships don't stand, but there is oil depot 
Though Russians already recognized that after combined drones and USV attack (8 UAVs and 6 USVs) were damaged minesweeper (the hull was damaged by shockwave) and radar of "Admiral Makarov" frigate was hit with fragments (screen of Russian naval-related TG)

PS. One more photo of explosion in some bay

PPS. The attack was conducted in the anniversary of "Novorossiysk" battlesip destroying on 29th Oct 1955 - former Italian battleship "Giulio Cesare" was blown up probably by Italian diversants on mini-submarine directly in the bay of Sevastopol. This was biggest disaster of Black Sea Fleet, which took 617 lives 

I must say that my current life is a paradise compared to what it was at the end of February, beginning of March. Then, in the current situation with electricity, I am daily exposed to artillery shelling and air bombing. I was in my apartment and just moved away from the window, when a 152-mm shell fell right in front of my window, at a distance of about 100 meters. They threw shards of glass at me, later I found one of the shards in my apartment. Miraculously, I didn't come back. But this is a trifle. It all happened so suddenly that I didn't even have time to get scared.
Air bombardment of senior artillery. When you sit in the basement and hear the rapidly growing whistle of a Russian jet engine. With this blood in your veins, you literally freeze with fear, you understand that now he will drop bombs and, perhaps, you will find yourself under the rubble. When the FAB-500 bomb explodes a kilometer away from you. A building in the basement that literally shakes like an earthquake.
But I experienced the greatest fear when, in the conditions of street fighting, I traveled from Irpen (I had the stupidity to wait until the last, hoping that the Russians were not going to my city, because the bridge to Kyiv had already been blown up). As I was walking towards the bridge along the main street on the next street, literally 200 meters away from me, a heavy firefight broke out. I saw tracers flying across the intersection that I had to cross to get to the bridge. I waited until the Russian turned the fire in the other direction, and with all my might ran across the intersection. Despite this, thanks to adrenaline, I had more energy than ever. I ran a mile and a half with large and heavy bags. Normally I wouldn't be able to do this.
 

Gotta love it....
Russian TV: "Hey Ukraine, you missed a few"
Ukraine: "OK, no problem, thanks!"

Necessity is often the mother of invention. It de-mines, trenches and can be remotely operated. What will they think of next? 😎
 
 

Improvised HMMWV-based tank destroyer )
 

After yesterday strike at fuel train in Shakhtarsk Russian TV showed reportage how local firemen heroically rescued dozens of tank-cars. Today next three HIMARSes hit the same station where theese resqued tank-cars remained standing. As result of strike next portion of tank-cars were set on fire with fuel tanks of fuel depot on this station. One missile also reportedly hit deploymnet place of "Dizel" tank battalion near railway station, also causing fire.
This second strike took place about 8 hour ago, this fire is burning to this time
 
 
 
 

Reading about the Wessex Division right now and it strikes me how often Artificial Moonlight is mentioned in the later campaigns. I wonder if this could be a good inclusion in the new FB model, maybe even as just another "weather setting".