Anthony P.

I can't imagine that it's actually intended for tank crews to have access to field telephones.

They do use their small arms if given an area target order, both when the mortar is deployed and firing and when it isn't (this was when I tested it in a test mission). Not so much in the actual mission where I encountered the issue. The problem is that I'm not able to narrow it down so that I can replicate it, which makes reporting it as a bug difficult.

In my case it's a non deployed mortar with several riflemen who won't use their small arms. I've tried having it suffer casualties and fire their rifles, suffer casualties and having fired its HE shells and then fire their rifles, as well as both but had them suffer casualties when not deployed. Neither method seems to replicate the issue.

This is fairly necro, but I came across this thread researching just this problem, and especially these circumstances are of particular interest. I too have a mortar team with one casualty which I'm trying to get to open fire with small arms (very minor OPSEC violation here should @Andrew Kulin peruse this thread). They've fired HE shells alright, they have riflemen (relevant since the range is >200m, so no SMG fire is possible), plenty of rifle ammunition and LoS to the target with an area target order, but they're positively refusing to use their rifles. I'll have a go at trying to nail down what the issue is.

Well, it's a broad analogy, not necessarily a good analogy. Experts with far more to their name than my meandering thesis view it as a better metric and from what I've learnt, it makes sense. Perhaps wildfires are a better analogy: wildfires/democratic backsliding is something which can affect different numbers of people, but regardless of how many or few it affects, they both need countering and counting in the same way (we're not counting the size of the wildfire in this example). Absolutely, this is perhaps the "size of the wildfire": if leading world players like the USA slide towards autocracy, that's definitely a larger issue than e.g. Hungary doing so. But the number of citizens here doesn't correlate with the relevance these countries have on the international stage: India had a massive population already in 1948 when it played virtually no role in international politics, for example.

It's a matter of perspective. 1.4 billion Indians reverting to electoral autocracy does mean more seen to the number of people (negatively) affected by democratic backsliding. But seen from the perspective of politicial science and democracy, that's "just" 1 state which has shifted towards autocracy. It's the state that's changed, not its citizens. You can view it like road safety almost: if a car with 4-5 occupants crash, that affects more people than if a car with just a driver crashes, but the focus is (and can only be) on the entities containing said people, i.e. the cars. It's also a relevant from the democratisation aspect. Democratisation spreads to neighbouring states according to many, regardless of size.

On the topic of democracy (democracy indexes, democratic backsliding and the like) I can actually contribute with more than my typical "expert amateur's" opinion since poli sci is my academic background. The Economist Democracy Index appears to be from 2021 (based on Norway's and Sweden's scores of 9.75 and 9.26 respectively). That year Switzerland dipped down below 9.00, which changed its colour in the map @The_Capt posted. It might be a colour vision thing @kimbosbread? Personally I know that my red-green colour vision is in the dumps, and I cannot make out any distinction what so ever between the colours assigned to 8, 7 and 6 in that map. That still places it as a full democracy though. It should be noted for the Economist Democracy Index's use of the term "Flawed democracy" doesn't mean that it's not a democracy, undemocratic or the like: In the case of the USA, this likely refers to issues such as voter turnout, gerrymandering, first-past-the-post and the virtual two party system, civil rights, etc. Emphasis on "likely" though, because the Economist Democracy Index is based on anonymous scoring from undisclosed experts, so no one can say with certainty what particular aspects influenced a state's scoring. V-dem is in my experience the preferred democracy index, notwithstanding any personal bias (it's from my alma mater). What makes the most difference (going by the examples cited here) though is how you measure democracy: Visual Capitalist choses to measure shares of the global poluation as opposed to number of states. This leads to statistical oddities/misrepresentations of the scale of democratic backsliding, since states are entities: if say State A and State B have become democracies whereas State Z has become an autocracy, that's a net increase in democracy, regardless of the fact that State A & B only have a combined population of say 20 million whereas State Z has a population of 1 billion. That's how Visual Capitalist arrives at the dire conclusion of "2010 Democracy: 50.4% vs 2021 Democracy: 29.3%". India alone being reclassed from "electoral democracy" to "electoral autocracy" is behind a not insignificant portion of that change: the number of people living in electoral autocracies increased by 1.76 billion between 2010 and 2021 (India's population today reaching 1.41 billion). The remaining net global population which has shifted from "liberal/electoral democracy" to "electoral/closed autocracy" is "only" 0.7 billion. I.e., one single country falling back into autocracy is behind a smidge over 2/3 of that shift. If we were to look at states instead (the typical poli sci method and arguably the more accurate measurement), we get this more positive picture: Between the end of the Cold War and 2022, liberal democracies have remained virtually the same, more than half the world's closed autocracies have gone the way of the dodo, and electoral democracies and electoral autocracies are tied at 32.58%: back in 1990, electoral autocracies were almost 30% ahead of electoral democracies, and a staggering 36.84% of the world's states were closed autocracies. Closed autocracies were by far the most common form of government in the world when the Cold War ended: today its the opposite, it's the least common. That was an argument against Visual Capitalist's measurement of democracy. Democratic backsliding is accepted among most experts, but there's not much certainty as to whether or not this will turn out to be a lasting development or if it's simply a symptom of many politically and socially underdeveloped/unprepared states which were democratised when the Cold War wrapped up simply having reverted to forms of government which are more in line for what could be expected of them. Edit: I was going to write a brief reply. Instead I wrote more here than I've gotten done on my thesis during the last two months combined. FFS...

"Today, only amateurs steal elections on election-day." Free and fair elections are impossible when the ruling party (ab)uses government power to fund political campaigning, banning the opposition from campaigning, and imprisoning or outlawing oppositions politicians from running in elections... or just straight up murdering them.

I checked if there were perhaps some AI plan which was bugged, but there's just the one and that worked when I started it.

I think MikeyD has a point

Yes, but not out of direct support of each other. Usually the platoon would be tasked with a mission which the squads would move and fight in concert with each other to achieve, so the opening post of "Panzergrenadier squads are awkward because a squad can't scout for itself as it moves to contact" means it's handled incorrectly in my opinion. Even if you could detach 2 man scout teams from their squads without lumping the remaining 6 men into a single team, that'd be a poor choice. 2 men scout teams are basically "there's a X% chance that those two will get rinsed by the first shots, but at least that'll give the rest of the unit time to fight back". That's a ratio which makes sense if they're scouting for a whole platoon (or larger units)... but if they're just scouting for their own squad? That means that you're putting 25% of a unit at risk of becoming casualties in the first few seconds to protect the rest of it. I'd say that that's just too large a risk to call sensible: mathematically it would be like using two entire fireteams or an entire squad bunched up in a single action square to scout for a platoon. If those two scouts become casualties and the rest of the squad survives intact (unlikely), that means you're now left with just 6 men to carry on with a mission. That's not effective. I think my main argument is that Panzergrenadiers aren't dismounted infantry. Landsers can have scout teams moving ahead of them into the attack, but Panzergrenadiers should be attacking well established objectives mounted up (preferably alongside Panzers). If something needs scouting in that scenario it should ideally be a platoon/company commander or someone else with shiny things on his shoulder peeking up above that rise before mounting up again. That's quite different from a two man scout team marching ahead of its squad or platoon as it moves to contact and on foot. @Centurian52: true, I rephrased that part to be clearer/more accurate. Ta!

Platoons were typically the smallest unit sent off to achieve anything on its own (there's a reason that radios weren't issued until you hit platoon level) in combat. While squads (and fireteams, if we want to go lower) wouldn't always move and fight in a literal line or always physically in a set other physical formation, they wouldn't move far away from the rest of the platoon, and certainly not away on their own missions. Squads might might have split up to fight in mutual support, but not (far) away from their platoons... especially not the Panzergrenadiers, who were meant to accompany tanks in breakthrough operations (e.g., a scenario in which tanks wouldn't have been sent off on their own either). Panzergrenadiers weren't meant for just any offensive operations, but for breakthroughs with the Panzer divisions. Hence they were quickly worn down in sustained combat, for much the same reason you're hitting upon even on this lower level: they are inherently quite small formations in regards to manpower.

What's "Driver team" (under admin)? I've never seen that one before.

There's no reason not to use scout teams with Panzergrenadiers. If you're sending a single squad off to, sure, you'll have problems... but is lone squads out on their own being vulnerable really a problem unique to Panzergrenadiers? Send a platoon instead and detach a scout team from one of its squads. You mention Normandy and the other Western front scenarios being an issue: true, but I'd say "fair enough" or "realistic". The issue is that in the West and Normandy in particular, the Panzergrenadier divisions were desperately thrown into the line instead of being kept in reserve to make up for the lack of infantry divisions. This wasn't what they were intended for and they suffered in attritional warfare, because manpower wise they were smaller units intended for brief and intense offensive operations, after which they would (read: should) have gone back into reserve to refit. As you've observed, a small eight man squad doesn't cope with losses or sustained infantry on infantry fighting as well as large 10, 12 or even larger men squads do.

I believe that German light infantry guns can also perform indirect fire missions on-map.