Bahger

Good advice, sburke, many thanks.

Well, at least you got to play with yourself, Thewood1. (Sorry, sorry...)

There's branching in CM campaigns now? Outstanding!

Womble, you are right, as usual; I failed to mention that I am letting the game choose my forces for me in a couple of quick QBs that I am playing just to shake off the rust. So it's my fault I got a battalion-level, long-range recon vehicle in a little mech infantry skirmish.

They are a PITA in DCS A-10C too. They range to about 20,000ft. You can take them down by flying NOE and using Maverick from max range but in CMBS I suppose it's a matter of spotting them and killing them with arty.

This is HUGE to me. In ten years of playing CM games sporadically I never knew you could assess FOV from a planned waypoint before the unit gets there but I saw ChrisND do it in one of his playthroughs and now it's confirmed here. It will take a lot of the -- often fatal -- guesswork out of my movement planning, enabling me to maneuver with more confidence and precision.

Yes, but it's full of systems that are not implemented in the game, so for the time being it is limited to being what's known as "colour". Maybe one day they will include LGBs that can only be directed by assets like the Armored Knight.

Wise words, IMO. It is a little frustrating to have a big, vulnerable wagon that cannot carry troops nor implement the function for which it was built and I can only hope that my opponent also has to deal with an equivalent piece of redundant equipment or our force allocation might be a little unbalanced as a result, especially in small-scale battles where every vehicle counts. Michael is right, though, the kind of operational recon for which this wheeled brick was built takes place at a higher command level and on a bigger battlefield than this game was designed for. To leverage it, we'd need an operational-scale battlefield sim; I haven't played one of those since the sadly missed Decisive Action.

Ah. And it has no passenger capacity for ferrying troops so it's basically a big, dumb .50 cal platform...

I am wondering how to use my Armored Knight. According to the manual it has all sorts of goodies such as laser equipment, special targeting software and a Fire Support Sensor System (FS3) but would I be wrong in saying that this kit is used to guide munitions like LGBs that are not yet modeled in the game? Does it have something as simple as a periscope, so that I can get a bit of an edge in scouting over the brow of a hill or in a wheat field? How exactly can I leverage this recon vehicle in CMBS combat as presently configured?

Superb info, many thanks.

I've looked in the manual but some of the questions I had after being given a QB meeting engagement map bisected by a river are still unanswered so I am throwing myself at your mercy as usual and with thanks in anticipation: - Is it safe to assume that all US vehicles, tracked and wheeled, can ford shallow water? I assume this because I do not see specific ford capable or non capable specifications for individual vehicles in the manual's vehicle description appendices. - How can I tell how deep a particular body of water is and from that, deduce whether or not it is fordable? - Are all infantry capable of fording? - Are there map cues, such as route lines from units, that will tell me whether ot not the unit can cross any body of water? I figured I had better get the answers to these questions as I am going to be at a great disadvantage if I believe I can only cross a river over a bridge when I could be fording it.

^^ My mistake, you can shoot precision rounds with mortars, they are just somewhat less accurate. ^^

Well that's encouraging.

I don't think you'll get it with mortars either. I can confirm that I used precision artillery in a QB yesterday (120mm Paladin).

I would love to see the Israel Defence Force in CM but it's probably a hot potato and I must admit that I do not know what they might be doing in Ukraine. And any implementation of the IDF in CM would have to be historic (1973 would make a lot of sense) as the CM engine would not be best suited to the kind of asymmetrical warfare they seem likely to face in the near future.

Maybe they are designed to perform more effectively the smaller the search area. It would be interesting if a dev or beta tester could comment. Meanwhile, using them to cover wide areas in my last battle, I don't think I can recall them being reaponsible for a single spotted vehicle. However, as I mentioned, my AI enemy was operating a pretty static defense from very well concealed positions in forested terrain, so being the attacker was a bit like facing a series of ambushes. I am happy to give the UAVs the benefit of the doubt in this instance but would expect them to have thermal detection capacities as this is what they appear to have on Fox News.

I am very glad that UAVs are not overpowered as I am sure that they are no more all-seeing in real life battles as they are in CMBS's. For example, ChrisND emphasized in his video playthrough that they can see vehicles much more reliably than troops. However, do they not have thermal capabilities? I have found that they can only spot vehicles on the move or in the open and that you cannot expect them to see vehicles in trees or other forms of top cover. This would seem to suggest that they cannot pick up a heat signature from a vehicle with a running, or recently shut-off engine. It is quite possible that these limitations apply only to the mid-sized UAVs that I have been issued with and that the bigger ones are more all-seeing (within limits of their own). Can anyone comment?

Well, this was not a Pyrrhic victory because the toll inflicted on my force was not disastrous in military terms (13 KIA out of 43) when set against the scale of the victory but there was avoidable attrition, once when I ran a FISTV down a reverse slope with insufficient recon and another when I tasked a Bradley to duel with a stationary T-90 when I should have been patient enough to realise that the tank would remain stationary while not under threat in order to occupy a victory zone, and I had a spotter nearby who could direct a precision round onto him. In retrospect I did not need to expose my M3 but on the other hand it took four agonising minutes for the arty to fire the round and if the T-90 had decided to do a bit of marauding around my flank I would have been in real trouble. This dilemma in itself represents the high level of real-life decision making at tactical command level presented by the game

Fair enough. This is valuable information for the intermediate player (i.e. self) who aspires to play the game well. Thanks!

Well, my reasoning was that a wider arc would encourage a bigger sweep of the turret and therefore a greater likelihood that the gunner might not spot the target in time if he had been commanded to monitor a wider field of view. A 180 degree sweep might have entailed him having to yank the turret back about 90 degrees if he did not spot the target on the first sweep and ended up with his gun pointing in the direction that the M1 was travelling before he could haul it back; this might have delayed his shot just long enough to let the nearby T-90 cover that ninety degree angle and get a shot off. I calculated the target arc on the basis of the maximum total distance of turret traversal required to sweep once, or even twice if necessary, across the narrow lateral area, i.e. the "keyhole", that the tank was going to encounter when it exposed itself to the area containing the T-90. You may be right, Womble, this may well be faulty technique but it was based on minimising margin of error. It was certainly a close-run thing and next time I will give the target arc order earlier in the tank's movement across the keyhole so that he's lined up more promptly. It's interesting that the T-90 responded to the threat (a sound cue I think) by attempting to present a frontal aspect to it. While this is good doctrine, it must surely have slowed him down. I would have thought that a traversal of his turret in the direction of the threat would have given him a better chance to get the drop on me, even at the risk of presenting a more vulnerable aspect.

Most war games, including the average-to-good ones, enable the player to rationalise his losses even -- or in fact especially -- when he wins, because it is often possible to blame some or most of them on "game" issues such as faulty LOS mechanics or "cheating" AI. The very rare truly exceptional war game does not allow this because player losses can only be attributed to player error such as flawed tactics, impatience or bad judgement. Without a doubt, IMO, Black Sea falls into the latter category. In my last QB, leading a group of Blue armour (mainly M3s with a single M1A2 SEP) in the attack against a Red group defending with mainly T-90s, I won a convincing Total Victory on Veteran with ten minutes to spare, having killed all nine enemy tanks and the single "tank killing" vehicle. In almost any other game I would have been gleeful at this result, especially if relatively inexperienced at playing it. However, in this battle, because I was unable to lay off the blame for a single loss of mine (four Bradleys, too many) on iffy game mechanics, I felt the way a r/l commander would, i.e. I experienced a painful sense of responsibility that made the victory less sweet. This is a huge tribute to the game. I lost two vehicles to very high quality enemy AI and the other two purely to player error on my part. In my own mental AAR, therefore, I blamed myself for at least two of these losses and IRL I would have found it particularly difficult to write letters to those next of kin. I felt determined not to let this happen again, and not just to win next time but to do so with at least 25% less attrition. I have never felt this way, including in previous CM titles. Even in Steel Beasts, a very good sim, I have "rewound" the game when I've been sure that a tank in my platoon or company got killed because bad AI pathfinding led it somewhere I hadn't directed it to go, or an AI TC did not see the attacking unit first when he had the superior relative position on the battlefield. In the eight or so hours I've played in CMBS, I have never yet been able to rationalise failure as the result of being "gamed". Considering how many complex calculations a game like this has to make in order to be consistently realistic, this, I think is the ultimate tribute I can pay to the developers of a superb title. It's why I abandoned CMSF in the first, difficult months of its release and why I will continue to play CMBS for several years to come. ChrisND and his team deserve tremendous kudos.

Thanks, Womble, valuable advice.

Well CM should at least have a forum of its own under Land Combat on the SimHQ forums. I will see if I can get them to do that and to commission a review of CMBS, which I think is by far the best game in an already very distinguished series.

Thanks, Nerdwing! It was a risky move at such short range and blind. However, I felt I had insufficient time to bypass the tank if I wanted to get within striking distance of the final objective and I had no infantry, no Javelins, no precision artillery shot in this instance, and terrain limitations on long-range spotting against well hidden, mainly static defenders inhibit much decisive use of TOW.