HerrTom

Uh huh...
 
Mord.

I forgot how insane the MK 20 RH-202 was... Each Marder is practically a Shilka Lite!  Makes those "preserve" objectives very hard when your autocannon fire rips floors apart with ease!

Yup I agree it definitely does.  Since making video compared to screenshots I've really noticed how wonky infantry movement still is, even after BF's patch.
In other news, I got a new microphone.  Be sure to tell me if you miss the fishbowl effect! 
Why 7 minutes?  I thought I found a nice breaking point compared to the 5/10 minute points I had before.

Thank you for your service.  I bet you have a lot of interesting stories from back in the day.  The good news is, the Brad never went to immobilized.  It un-bogged and drove off to complete its mission.  I think the small stream of feces running down the center is what made it bog.  
 
Fulda Gap would be cool.  
My hope is that the last release for CMFB will be an equipment pack introducing Soviet forces/equipment into CMFB.  Call it meeting on the Elbe River or something.  Then the US, Commonwealth and Soviets would all be in the same Combat Mission game.   No BFC created scenarios would be needed.  Just an equipment pack of already designed equipment ported over from CMRT.  Scenario designers and mod creators could do all kinds of cold war, neo-colonialism stuff.  Patton goes east 1945, Fulda Gap 1948, Korea, Suez Crisis, etc.    
I hope the effort to profit ratio would be favorable enough for BFC to make this happen.

I forgot how insane the MK 20 RH-202 was... Each Marder is practically a Shilka Lite!  Makes those "preserve" objectives very hard when your autocannon fire rips floors apart with ease!

Seen, I'll post over there. I checked and armour is not a mission type in any of the other titles!

NATO uses the following fuze settings: Proximity, Time, Point Detonating and Delay, in common jargon for missions those are VT, Time, Quick, and Delay.
Those fuzes can be used with different times of shell, but generally carrier shells (smoke pots and illum) have time, WP is PD, and HE can have any of the other types.
There is not anti-armour 155mm shell in NATO inventory besides DPICM.
To neutralize armour in indirect fire you would use HE Quick or HE VT. HE Delay produces fewer fragments, and as you noted a direct hit will kill armour anyways. Since you can't ensure a direct hit with unguided indirect fires, you want to produce fragments to wreck antennas, optics, external stores etc etc.
He Delay is a great for targeting structures or fortifications though.

I had posted a thread on this earlier too. Consensus I saw was we don't know, but think it's delayed fusing.
 

These Tactical Problems designed by Todd Justice ( @ScoutPL ) and myself are designed to give small scale (Platoon to Company (+)) and short (around 30 minute) games for two players to test and explore tactical solutions to unique situations.   
They are Head to Head only in order to provide the toughest challenge.  Each side in these scenarios is designed to provide a challenge, though some sides may be tougher than others, refer to the scenario complexity ratings for the difficulty rating for each side. 
 Post your solutions in the comments section for each scenario, or on the Battlefront forum.  We might in the future add AI to each side of these scenarios based on the best submitted solutions for each side.
Links below:
PBEM Tactical Problems Introduction PBEM Tactical Problem 01 - A Rifle Behind Every Tree PBEM Tactical Problem 02 - Strongpoint! (Coming Soon) PBEM Tactical Problem 03 - The Last Hundred Yards (Coming Soon) It had always been my intent to provide Tactical Problems like these on my blog to allow you to learn and  test tactical situations.  Please leave your feedback below.  I would suggest that if you have an AAR or a solution to one of these scenarios that you start a new thread and post a link to it in this thread to keep spoilers to a minimum.
Bil

So I've screwed around a bit with roll20, as an alternative to the forum or Google Docs. Here's the link if you want to try it out:
https://app.roll20.net/join/3974528/dmgl5w
I'm curious if you guys are familiar with this platform, or if you prefer more traditional mediums (forums, google docs).
Main advantages with it is that is a more visual representation of the operational layer with the ability for players to interact with the map, including measuring distances, editing their TO&Es, drawing orders and/or writing them in the textbox. Also this thing supports RNG elements very well, if that's what people want. Lends itself well to the more RP heavy "Matrix" format.
Here is a strawpoll for the preferred CM title:
https://www.strawpoll.me/16929097

A mounted infantry attack with smoke screen on a heavily suppressed ridge.   

Smoke, isolating part of the ridge.

Infantry area firing while riding. 
 
View from knocked out Soviet bunker.

Dismount!

Interesting short article about current Russiantank tactics as used in Syria and Ukraine. 
https://sputniknews.com/military/201807041066049372-russian-armor-tactics/

The idea is to make a turn-based (WEGO) operational layer campaign here on the forums (or potentially a different platform like roll20). It will be on a square or hex-grid graph of a map -- depending on game and theatre. You will be able to make your own units (companies or platoons) and move them around once per turn. Whenever two units (or more) on the map bump into eachother, the GM will post parameters for a Quick Battle you can put into your game and play out. The player (s) then would report the results of their Quick Battle and the operational map would be updated accordingly. A turn can be a week, or bi-weekly, to allow everyone to declare their move, play their Quick battle and report their results on the forum.

I had this crazy idea while messing around with my roll20 RPG campaign. Instead of making a character sheet, one could make a company/platoon sheet. Recently I saw a lot of people wanting an Operational Layer and someone even mentioned a system that they came up for themselves. It's all still very much in concept phase. At first, I was thinking the campaign should be cooperative and all enemies be managed by GM and be played by AI in-game. Though, I'm sure a lot of people would like to play OPFOR and provide an opponent for those who do not enjoy sparring with AI.
I'm curious what you guys think! Interested? Not interested? Comments? Concerns? Ideas of your own?

One of you is bound to win 

First, a quote from:
https://balagan.info/soviet-order-of-battle-and-doctrine-in-the-cold-war
 
This quote is unsourced, and I'm really curious if it's accurate. 

Still, I've been trying to understand Russian infantry doctrine in CMBS. Reading The Russian Way of War: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/Hot Spots/Documents/Russia/2017-07-The-Russian-Way-of-War-Grau-Bartles.pdf

This cleared up a number of issues for me, especially in how the platoons are supposed to operate.





The interesting part to me is the split into manoeuvre and fire teams (with a single LMG), making the squad more similar in practice to WW2 Commonwealth or German mainline army, rather than Panzergrenadiers or modern US rifle squad, with symmetrical fireteams that can cover each other. Notably, the BMP and the fireteam are supposed to be set up in cover and concealment, when they dismount at all. Much is made of the BMP's inability to spot when the dismounts are out - but I would suggest that this is because they're dismounting a little too soon - the BMP gains protection through firepower, and for that the squad stays mounted until necessary. In practice, and especially against Javelins, this might become necessary far sooner than intended, but that's the point where theory hits reality.

In CMBS, BMP motor rifle platoons have two spare slots in each BMP, for a total of six seats - this can and should be used with the "Add Specialised Team"  feature to add:

AGL (2 men)
AT units (2 or 3 men, depending on the type of ATGM chosen)
RPO (2 men)
Air Defence (1 man)
Engineer (breach team) (4 men)

(If the armour is not massed centrally, then the correct armoured support for a BMP Platoon is one tank, if any).

This is crucial, I think. I've been playing some CMBS PBEM recently, and I've been really impressed with the power of these attached units. RPOs in particular have impressed me - they haven't been killing vast numbers of Americans  by themselves, but they've been excellent at winning firefights in urban terrain. Every time I fired off one of those it felt like winning, since the return fire slackened off considerably and helped gain fire superiority.

So, Syria.

Syrian BMP units have nine man squads, with two LMG. This means that the platoon does not have the additional space for attached units, and the flexibility that provides. It also means that they don't have the two MMG's that the US platoons have, and form a huge part of their tactical flexibility.

So you have a platoon that looks like it's made up of US-like symmetric squads, but doesn't have the flexibility that goes with that. I've heard it said that the Syrians do not use fireteams in reality, but I don't have a source for that either, and it doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

The Syrian mech inf. company does have a weapons platoon with four MMGs, an HQ and a forward observer in two BMPs. the FO is clearly there to manage the Company mortars (mostly 120mm), and presumably in CMSF 2 we'll get an on-map option for these, with transport. Four MMGs would mean that you could parcel out two MMGs to the two up front platoons (assuming your basic two-up formation), so perhaps that's the point? The FO then could be in a position to support both in-contact platoons, or could directly support one of them. The HQ unit also has a radio, so you could have an FO and a worse version of an FO, perhaps.

So, assuming that the initial quote is correct - "A captain at one of the war colleges wrote a paper identifying the Arab armies as using classic Western Style warfare"  - I can see that being a sensible outcome from the squad and platoon organisation - you can operate the Syrians much like a US platoon, albeit one with mostly Soviet-era kit, and generally poor training.

No true Scotsman would make such an argument!

NATO Operational Combat in Europe or something like that? I forget that particular one, but I like a couple of others  
Nuclear Weapons - Either player, feeling his position is hopeless, may overturn the game table. He forfeits the game, but we hope he enjoys losing so spectacularly. Use of tactical nukes: if one of the players resorts to the use of tactical nukes, spray zippo lighter fuel over the game and set it to fire. The effect is comparable to reality.
 

I have completed my first iteration of these icons, please download them and give them a try.  
There are two versions:
War Movie Mode Icons - these are brighter so they look better when playing in War Movie mode.
Standard Mode Icons - (the @domfluff Variant) these icons are saturated versions of the original and look superior to the in-game screenshots I originally posted.
Note:  There are two vehicles, the British Sultan and Spartan that are not working right now.. but this is a BETA version.. I will update the links when I get the issues ironed out.
Standard Mode Version:


War Movie Mode Version:

Finally completed the Icon Key.. hope this helps:

There was an old computer game "Balance of Power" where you had to counter USSR Cold War aggression (playing as the US), and of course, implement your own diplomacy and aggression (military advisors, combat troops and such). If a nuclear war started at some point, you lose. Doesn't matter who escalated or started it. You lose. Decisive defeat. Good concept. You either did it or allowed it to get to the point where it happened. It was really hard to win because the Russian AI was very aggressive and wouldn't back down in a lot of cases. Invoke the Monroe Doctrine and try to force them to get their 150,000 troops out of Nicaragua and you are likely to start WW3. I lost a lot. Didn't find the magic formula of diplomacy, pressure (just enough but not too much), and luck. 
In the case of the real world it took some coincidences, timely turnover of Soviet leadership, and luck to avoid WW3.
Speaking of which, just finished reading "1983" a couple weeks ago. Good book, well researched with some recently declassified info. Having lived through some of what he writes about, it's even scarier reading about it now than it was at the time being there. Incredible how close we came to turning the Earth into a little cinder ball. Not just once either. 

All they need to do is make a trailer with this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxeWuwOXHbE
I picked up Flashpoint Campaigns on sale yesterday, still haven't tried it out.

From the other side of the battlefield...

Syrian mechanised infantry assault an imperialist German Headquarters unit caught unawares.

NATO Operational Combat in Europe or something like that? I forget that particular one, but I like a couple of others  
Nuclear Weapons - Either player, feeling his position is hopeless, may overturn the game table. He forfeits the game, but we hope he enjoys losing so spectacularly. Use of tactical nukes: if one of the players resorts to the use of tactical nukes, spray zippo lighter fuel over the game and set it to fire. The effect is comparable to reality.
 

NATO Operational Combat in Europe or something like that? I forget that particular one, but I like a couple of others  
Nuclear Weapons - Either player, feeling his position is hopeless, may overturn the game table. He forfeits the game, but we hope he enjoys losing so spectacularly. Use of tactical nukes: if one of the players resorts to the use of tactical nukes, spray zippo lighter fuel over the game and set it to fire. The effect is comparable to reality.
 

Your 2nd item is a paraphrase of the rule I was referring to.