domfluff

If you're consistently getting wiped out by the soviet artillery, I'd suspect you're not using the foxholes efficiently (managing which units are hiding is really important). Foxholes do a really good job of keeping the force combat effective. You'll suffer losses, but you generally will keep the squad/platoon together, with any relevant weapon systems. Cold War is unique for CM in having an aggressive, capable Red force on the attack. This kind of dilemma is pretty much what the artillery exists for - do you try to tank the hits and hold a forward position, or decamp, which is all the artillery is really trying to get you to do - neither option is palatable, so it's a question of minimisation and least-worst choices.

I'm not really with you on needing to up the values - Huge lets you take an entire combined arms motor rifle BMP battalion, with a tank company and all the supporting assets, with some change. The danger of increasing the values is that they will increase for everyone. Obviously an actual custom setting would be the preferred solution, but that's an addition. I do agree that QB in general could do with a more fundamental rework. There are some design ideas which are possible without adding vast amounts to the game, and it does feel like something which is a low priority for BF, which is a shame. I think I understand why - the majority of players only ever play singleplayer, and a QB AI is never going to be decent, except by accident sometimes, so it's probably correct that it's a lower priority than some. The campaign maps exist as master maps in the appropriate folder. It's not all that hard to make them into QB maps, and I firmly agree that this would be a good idea. That sounds like a reasonably simple project to do, even if they're done with no AI plans. I might start giving that a go. My suspicion is that the best way to play CW PBEM will be to do a Soviet Battalion on something that's perhaps at least 2kmx2km, and ideally more. 2km x 4km is more than enough - that's the size of the first mission in the Soviet campaign.

These are great, thank you

It's not a CMCW thing, but it'll be a lot more apparent there because the maps tend to be larger, and also full of trees, which are the most obvious symptom.

Yeah, the whole recon process is compressed in this scenario - the FO wouldn't typically accompany the combat recon patrol at all, for example, but this uses a combination of an on-map FO, the recon platoon and pre-battle intel to compress the 30-ish minute process into 10. There are obvious compromises to that, and (as before) I'd argue that this isn't a great introduction to the Soviet campaign, since it's asking a lot from the player up-front. Really cool scenario though.

How do you mean? You can set rounds to arrive immediately, or at 5, 10 and 15 minutes. The FSE arrives at 10. Start the barrage at 5?

Great stuff, thank you.

It's also worth mentioning that the doctrine as shown in Cold War matches up the listed sources, which match up well to those written in the last few years. I don't think there's any room for doubt that this is presented correctly. It's obviously always possible that a given implementation in a scenario could be off base - that kind of issue has always been endemic to simulations, whether it's down to the understanding or ability of the arbitrator/designer, or the limits of the sim itself. But no, CM:CW does not represent the Soviets as mindless hordes, and nor did the period field manuals. Suggesting that they might does a pretty big disservice to a lot of hard work across the board.

The sources are referenced in-game and in the manual. A good list are mentioned in the Tutorial scenarios and the thread on the same here. In the specific case of this scenario, I dont mind the FSE spawning in LOS of TOWs. You start with both artillery and pre-battle intel, so you do have the tools to deal with this, to some degree. The combat recon patrol would only have up to 30 minutes time to find the enemy, which is somewhat compressed here, and reflected in the btr platoon and the pre-battle intel. One thing implicit in this very limited time frame is that you will not spot everything, but you can and should call in artillery missions with perhaps a five minute delay. It's harsh, certainly, and perhaps not the best introduction to the Soviets, but I'm happy with it as a doctrinal meeting engagement, in less than ideal circumstances.

The deaths following penetrations are not surprising - there's not a ton of room in a Soviet tank, and almost everything you're going to hit is going to be ammunition in the autoloader, which isn't going to end well. The main issues the Dragons have in practice (aside from failure rate, correctly reflecting the difficulty in firing the thing) is that it has a 1km range. As with any ATGM, there's a huge launch signature. That means you're exposing your position and having to keep exposed for several seconds, whilst being firmly in a range where the opposing MBT can easily destroy you. If you miss, you die. If you fail to kill the target, you die. Further, the MBT can lethally engage you at ranges well beyond those which you can engage them - 2km is nothing special here. The advantages are ubiquity - the US platoons have three Dragons and five MGs per platoon, so there's one per squad in practice. That's a really nice capability, but it's not the primary capability of the US (the Dragon is not a Javelin). Ranged firepower should be based around a combination of TOW and MBT. Active Defence doctrine had the unit decamping when the enemy was in range of the medium antitank weapons (i.e., Dragon). That means that Dragons were not supposed to be the primary tank killers, but instead a volley of Dragons might be the signal to get a move on and get back into the transport. In general, M47 Dragon is "fine". It's a valuable capability to have, but it's not something you can rely on, and it doesn't need to be.

Good stuff. Yeah, that all sounds correct to the accounts, including the failure rate.

Assault is still, usually, worse than doing the same thing manually, but the best way to ensure a constant volume of fire using the Assault command are multiple waypoints with target orders at each point - that way the teams will open fire at each halt, and won't need to re-acquire targets by themselves.

You basically never want to be moving whilst under fire - if you are, you're in for a bad time. Under 100m is point-blank - if you're caught whilst moving at that kind of distance, you're dead. The faster you move, the less time you'll be exposed, but the less your guys will react with fire of their own. Fast then is "get there no matter what" - if you *must* charge across a short open space (e.g., a road). then this is probably the thing to do. Any move like that is likely to suffer casualties. A Move order will get upgrades to a Quick order when under fire, so all that would do is make it more likely for them to see the enemy first, and increase their exposure time - Move is probably not a great idea here.

Whilst it's certainly not realistic, I do think there's some scope for this kind of thing. The tabletop game Force on Force had a Cold War Gone Hot scenario book, which divided its scenarios into the situation as feared (more or less the scenario in CMCW), the situation with what we know now (so, lower-key scenarios, including things like US special forces as advisors fighting Soviets in Afghanistan), and then a section of scenarios which replicate films - so Red Dawn, Doctor Strangelove, Ice Station Zebra, etc. Obviously the latter are going to be pretty silly, and probably not suitable as a formal BF release, but it wouldn't be out of the question for user scenarios.

Good to see you back Womble

(Third possibility is that you can trigger off another order starting - that's mostly useful for co-ordinating the movement of different groups together. The order that's triggering off could itself be on a trigger, so this could go quite a few layers deep).

You're pretty much always better off splitting squads. The reason not to are mostly that of cognitive load - splitting a three squad platoon down will give you at least 7-10 elements to control, if not more. That will obviously scale up. In woods? Sure. The difference there is that sight lines can be very restrictive, and you want your elements to be in LOS to each other. That can mean, sometimes, that not splitting is correct, just because they need to be that close in the dense foliage.

So, it's a different topic but: There are a large number of problems with the implementation of air in CM titles - to the extent that, as things are now, I suspect the game would be better for (reluctantly) removing air assets entirely. Since CM is really a platoon-level game, there's no need for 9 lines, dogfighting or similar additional content - the basic "call for fire" behaviour is pretty reasonable. Artillery performs well, with a decent amount of abstraction, so calling in aircraft similarly as off-map support as they currently do is a reasonable abstraction/compromise, I think. - The aircraft behaviour is identical to that in the WW2 titles - random directions and multiple strafing runs. That's fine for a WW2 aircraft, but doesn't work for this kind of high-threat environment. If a fast mover could dump all of it's ordnance on a single pass, that would be the quickest fix to this behaviour, and would probably be the "simplest" fix. - Speaking of the WW2 titles, CAS is far too accurate and co-ordinated. There are a handful of attempts to do this in the real war, and they're notable because they are significant exceptions - and even in most of these circumstances they failed, to at least some extent. - So, modern titles. Jets. Jets could have a much larger operational area - perhaps the whole map, and operate as a "delete" button. They could be point-targeted (e.g., lased) or just allowed to roam and deal with targets of opportunity. The intention for jets would be that they have a single, devastating attack, but that's all you're going to get out of them. - Helicopters are different. At some point their behaviour was changed, and they became significantly less useful. In CMSF 1 and CM:A. helicopters will do multiple strafing runs over a couple of minutes - perhaps three over two turns. That means that it's possible to use a helicopter as if it was an off-map vehicle, supporting an attack by suppressing an enemy position or the like. This would naturally make it extremely vulnerable, and that's not a bad thing. It would be good if there was a distinction between stand-off ATGM attacks and strafing runs, with the latter accepting more risk. - One fundamental issue that aircraft have in CM is a lack of decisions. Especially in multiplayer, aircraft are a very binary, very random thing. You choose whether to take aircraft, and you choose whether to take AA assets. Assuming you both make the correct choice blindly, the end result is something entirely out of your control - you might kill the aircraft, or you might not, and there's very little you can do about it. That means that your investment in points for buying aircraft is entirely speculative, and likewise the investment in air defence - it's an entirely random process, free from any kind of thought or nuance. Reverting to a CMSF 1-like system for helicopter strafing would go a long way to fixing that for rotary craft. Jets are pretty much always going to be that way, but making the choice between a wide area of effect (possibly just the whole map) or reserving the thing for a point-targeted strike would be at least some kind of choice. * In terms of just removing air entirely: I think you could make a good argument that aircraft should be nowhere near the WW2 titles. I also think that you could fudge away aircraft in the peer conflict scenarios as being in too hot an environment. That mostly leaves CMSF as somewhere where they are actually needed. I do think that losing air in Cold War and Black Sea wouldn't be ideal - it's a bit hard to Airland battle without the Air part, for example.

It is interesting how few Soviet accounts mention them though. It's also been suggested that those kill rates were based on self reporting by the mujahideen, with successes being met with more weapons and funding, so there would be an incentive to massage those numbers. Both sources there have the obvious issues. That doesnt mean that the Stinger wasnt significant - it's certainly a real AA capability - but it's quite possible that the systems importance has been overstated.

In the Dollbach heights campaign mission, my two Stingers accounted for 3/4 of the Hind kills, with the four M163 only accounting for 1 between them. This didn't happen straight away, mind you, but they did keep the Hinds away for the most part. Even in Cold War, the US air defences aren't great. Giving the Mujahideen Stingers in Afghanistan is a massive upgrade from their previous anti-helicopter weapon, which would be the RPG-7. The impact of Stingers in Afghanistan is not actually entirely clear. There is some controversy as to their true effectiveness - the narrative of them being the scourge of the Soviets seems to be mostly a US one, as I understand it.

Direct conversions from wargames (I've seen ASL done, I've tried a few Combat Commander ones before now) can be a little suspect - not least because they're not real terrain. Indirect conversions can work better - I've done some Force on Force scenarios before now, which are usually the wrong scale for CM, but the core concepts can be worth doing.

Honestly, I think CM needs scenarios to an extent that more maps is best, regardless of whether this is taking someone else's work. This, after all, is the whole point of the Master Map concept. It's obviously polite to credit the original designer. There are maps that exist without scenarios - aside from the master maps, there are others people have uploaded for that purpose. Map sizes are very variable. You can get a good idea with regards to unit frontages, but there really isn't a standard size, and frontages differ based on period and doctrine. A German infantry battalion in attack would have a 1km frontage (implying perhaps a 1.5 km wide map, but that does depend on terrain), whereas a Commonwealth attack of the same kind might be half that.

Honestly, there's a number of things that would make Quick Battles more of a thing, but they're presumably not the main focus of the game. - Custom points - Having the Quick Battle Forces match the Scenario Editor TO&E, and include all of the vehicles and teams that faction can access (Uncons in CMSF get the short end here, where their "single vehicle" choice can only ever be a Taxi). Those are the "easy" ones. (None of the following are stuff I think are actually plausible for implementation, but just some thoughts) For the QBs to be a more competitive system would require a more extensive rework, I suspect. I think there's actually something to be said for a *more* restrictive system, where you can select plausible formations and their supports, but can't fully customise them. Possibly not as the default, but as an option. Then you start getting into the more extensive system - formal support for mirrored battles, perhaps, or a bidding system for selecting sides. Points-buy as a concept is inherently flawed (and always has been), but there aren't many attempts to get away from it. DBA goes down the "more restrictions" route, and replaces points with the concept of representing each army with exactly 12 units, in historical proportions. Bidding is an easy way to push the problems of balance and scale onto the players, but it's not all that common in approach - Combat Commander has a blind bidding system which generates a battle and attacker/defender pair based on your selection of force size - in that instance, platoon/detachment/company.

Actually, checking that, it's a little more complex than that in implementation, but still. You have: Terrain Objectives - Occupy (Must have at least one unit in this objective at game end, and no enemy) Destroy (Must destroy) Preserve (Must not damage) Touch (Must touch) Exit (Must exit the map. Points here are not earned, but instead the other side earns them if they do not exit) Unit Objectives - Destroy (Points for killing, partial points for damaging) Destroy All (Points for killing only) Spot (Points for spotting) Parameters - (Set Friendly/Enemy and a percentage threshold to reach, and how many VP you score if you meet that threshold) Casualties Condition (morale, fatigue, supression, wounds) Ammo You can also just assign a flat value to one side or the other. Victory is: V = ( Side_A_VP + 10) / (Side_B_VP + 10) Draw: V less than 1.25. Minor Victory: V less than 1.75. Tactical Victory: V less than 2.5 and 30% of potential VP earned. Major Victory: V less than 4.0 and 55% of potential VP earned. Total Victory: V equals 4.0 or more and 80% of potential VP earned. Ithikial has a really good spreadsheet on Bootie's site to work this out.

Basically, it's a guide. Actual scenario design can and should vary wildly, but it's not a bad place to start.