nijis

Having very similar problems. I entered the Soviet password and the game file disappeared. However, about eight hours ago I noticed that it had reappeared with the message "Please do not touch." It appears the tournament admins are on this issue.

Reduce, I would think. I'm not in the military (I was one of those much-maligned media folks) and I'm not qualified to say. I can say, however, that... 1) Based on the transcript, whatever the Apache crew thought was "reasonable certainty" has little to do with my understanding of the term 2) Most of the ground units in which I embedded, I think, would have recognized that civilians move about pretty regularly during heavy fighting, and might even try to peek around corners and/or rescue the injured 3) There seemed to be an awful lot of this kind of incident involving Apaches in eastern Baghdad 4) It could pretty easily have been me, either in the US ground unit that was thought to have been threatened by the cameraman, or in the Iraqi SUV that stopped to pick up the injured. I don't think my driver and colleagues would have let someone bleed to death, if we were passing by.

To address a remark made by angryson a few pages back. This is the problem, right there. If you prefer to blow away a group of people hanging at a street corner who may or may not have a weapon, to avoid making a mistake that may get one of your buddies killed, then you will fail at urban counterinsurgency, and you ought not to be in a country having the power of life or death over the civilian population. I was in Baghdad in 2007 too. And 2003. And 2004. And 2005. And 2006. The US military was a genuine bulwark against the worst depredations of the Jaysh al-Mahdi's more brutal commanders, and the Qaeda-affiliated branch of the insurgency, and saved a lot of lives. It also killed a lot of people unnecessarily. Some US troops I met were genuine heroes, and risked their own lives to save Iraqis. Others made it pretty clear that they didn't give a sh*t about Iraqi lives. Some commanders made a real effort to try to prevent the deaths of non-combatants. Others tried to cover up their units' deadly mistakes. I'd actually guess that the latter group were probably the more popular commanders, the ones who were perceived to really care about their men. It's not a question of not hurting anyone, but how frequently you hurt the wrong people. Put less of a priority on force protection (we ultimately had to do this anyway) and put even less priority on protecting the career of an otherwise good commander whose loyalty to his own men completely eclipses his obligation to the non-combatants in his AO. Care a little more about Iraqis, which in an insurgency necessarily means that you care a little less about Americans. More specifically, take the phrase "reasonable certainty" in the ROE seriously. If the only way that you can be reasonably sure that the device in question is an RPG is to let them take the shot, then let them take the shot. Most likely, it will cause no damage. You have to weigh the small possibility that hesitation will lead to your buddies getting killed, to the significant possibility that engaging will get Iraqi non-combatants killed. The life of an Iraqi cannot count for zero in your calculus. If it does, then you're a liability to the mission, and a threat to whatever unit has to clean up your mess after you and your buddies have rotated out.

"DU is only dangerous when You i.e. eat piece of it." Or breathe it, the theory goes. The danger is not the radioactivity but its supposed propensity to be vaporized by the high temperatures generated on impact. I'm not sure if tungsten has the same properties. "Here in Poland in WarPac times and PRL, many people have in their garage's hammers made from DU, and there were no problems." There wouldn't be, unless you fired the hammer through a sheet of hard armor, causing it to form an aerosol. "Oh please, stop with that BS from eco-idiots!" DU's effects are documented, albeit controversially, in peer-reviewed literature http://www.ehjournal.net/content/4/1/17 "In 2003 invasion and later, M829A2 and M829A3 rounds were used preatty rare, most common rounds used by M1 crews were M830 HEAT and M830A1 MPAT." Most battlefield DU in fact supposedly is fired by the A-10's 30mm autocannon. A-10s knocked out a lot of vehicles in 2003. "Besides this, in the war I wan't ammo that have extreme, possible lethality, I don't care about what next." Not these days. Post-war challenges in the defeated nation and recruiting issues also make a difference. Arguably, given the variety of tools at the disposal of the US military for destruction of enemy armor, the PR value of eschewing DU outweights its advantages in combat. I will grant you that undestroyed enemy armor, firing back at you, has also been shown to be a health hazard. I'm not sure this is the place for a debate on DU, but I did want to point out that the case against its use is not simply "eco-idiocy".

This may not the place to debate this, but anyway, here goes... If you think otherwise, cite one example from 1965 onwards in which a US unit has surrendered to the enemy, been destroyed, or has otherwise failed to achieve its objectives. This would depend on how small you want to go with "unit," or how broad you would go with "failed to achieve its objectives." According to the book, The Cat from Hue, the mortar platoon of Charlie company, 1/12, 1st Cavalry Division, was overwhelmed by an NVA attack on May 20, 1966. The book's description is largely based on the article, "Men facing death: The destruction of an American platoon" by SLA Marshall in Harper's Magazine (pay to download, I think). http://www.harpers.org/archive/1966/09/0015190 On a broader level, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, arguably failed to create a motivated and professional South Vietnamese military that could stand without a major US troop presence. (I don't know whether this was its official objective, but I would say that it was an implied one). [ June 10, 2008, 03:06 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

If the crew is conscript or green, I'd suggest that this behavior is probably realistic. Battlefield reports from the Arab-Israeli wars, as well as from the 1991 Gulf War, suggest that poorly trained armor crews perform very poorly. I recall having a conversation with an Iraqi tank gunner who had fired the main gun I think a grand total of three times in his military career. I don't know, but I don't think it inconceivable that a conscript BMP crew would not have fired their missiles at all before entering into combat. With this kind of "training," it is conceivable that a conscript or green vehicle team has simply forgotten how to fire their weapons in the panic of spotting an oncoming enemy, or omitted a key step somewhere along the line. Anyone who doubts this is possible should try to perform a mechanical task that he or she has never properly practiced while in the full flush of an adrenaline rush. I don't really have any hard data on what very poorly trained vehicle crews actually do in combat conditions -- and, I suspect that it really hasn't been studied very much -- so I'm speculating a lot here, but I submit that the combat record of Syrian armor in 1973 and Iraqi armor in 1991 speaks for itself. Imho, you should expect green or conscript vehicle crews to behave in a hair-tearingly frustrating fashion. [ June 09, 2008, 03:43 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

I think it's says al-Najda al-Nahriya -- River Rescue? But other than that, beautiful work.

Just to review, what specifically are the likely problems that could be caused by an orders delay?

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before, but given all the unexpected paths a unit can take between waypoints -- and given that the pathfinding may never satisfy everyone -- would it be possible for the game to compute the likely path in advance (assuming no new enemies or terrain deformation) and show it on the map -- possibly if the player hits a "preview" key? That way at least players will know in advance if a move between seemingly adjoined buildings will involve a quick sprint in the open.

I'm seeing what I estimate is a 60 percent hit rate for RPGs fired by conscripts at 2-300 meters. This seems much too high, given what I've read about the fighting in Baghdad and Nasiriyah during the initial 2003 invasion. I've argued before that weapons handling is too high in general for poorly-trained troops. These are soldiers who have taken the stocks off their rifles, who probably don't use their weapons sights, who might very well have never actually been to a firing range. The worst-quality Iraqi troops and irregulars were often almost completely ineffective in combat. My average losses in a US "Total Victory" in CMSF are higher than any engagement during OIF I of which I am aware. If BfS wants to maintain play balance, it could reduce the proportion of "Conscripts" to "Green" troops, assuming that the Syrian army is better trained. Or it could introduce a new quality level below "Conscript" -- "Untrained" or something to that effect. But for a system which purports to be able to reproduce any battle during the last century, the difference in effectiveness between the high levels of training and the low ones is far too small. As soon as I have time and access to the right sources I will try to find engagements that back these assertions up. [ September 04, 2007, 03:54 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

I think the status display only shows the casualty until he is evacuated, at which point it only indicates what the survivors are up doing.

Given that it's a Bradley having trouble with the waypoints, maybe the driver is chasing stray dogs... [ August 24, 2007, 11:20 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

In the interests of not glomming on the Arabs too much, I'd argue that any army's training deficiencies are going to affect its tanks more than its infantry. Also, Pollack makes the point that Arab armies were quite good at carrying out their orders -- ie, storming the Suez Canal -- when they had been well-rehearsed. They just weren't really trained to readjust on the fly. So hefty command delays I think would work really well.

I'd like to see poor quality units simply ignore orders! But I understand that other players might not... The long orders delays in CMx1 made coordinated attacks difficult. They don't seem to be as dramatic in CMx2. It wasn't the spotting so much as the accuracy -- or indeed, the ability to make the weapon fire at all -- that struck me as overrated. When you're undergoing an adrenaline rush, trying to do basic mechanical tasks can be difficult unless you've done them many times before -- and a conscript tank crew I would think would only have fired their vehicle's weapons a few times. I don't know how a T-72 cannon is fired, but I've would expect conscript crews to do the equivalent of forgetting to take the safety catch off, or putting the shell in the chamber. I doubt those are documented, but I'll try to find examples from the Iraq wars or the Arab-Israeli wars of poor quality armor being completely ineffective even at very close range.

Or they could be used as they were historically in the 1973 Egyptian and Syrian offensives -- as blunt instruments. Allow players to send them off on their initial attack with a very short orders delay, but any on-the-fly amendments would have them sitting in place for five or ten turns before attempting something new.

To a degree, but there's also poor marksmanship, minimal situational awareness, and other issues that come of putting raw troops into a complicated, noisy machine with limited visibility and pushing them into a highly stressful situation with virtually no meaningful training.

First off, I'm delighted with the game, even with its bugs. The battles are spectacular to watch, and I can run even the largest ones on my 2 GHz laptop with a GeForce 7600, albeit with the graphics turned all the way down. However, the game does not ring true for me in one key way. I can routinely pull off maneuvers with conscript- or green Syrian armoured units that are virtually unheard of in the entire record of 20th century Arab military history. For example, in the demo scenario, I was able to take three conscript- and green-rated tanks, all lone survivors of different platoons, and run them over the hill to take the attacking US forces in the rear. They were able to acquire Strykers within a few seconds of entering LOS, and hit on the first shot more than half the time -- even against a moving target. This is precisely the kind of maneuver that Arab militaries were unable to carry out throughout the Arab-Israeli wars. I realize that Battlefront is assuming that the Syrian military has improved considerably since then, but these were reserve armoured units, not frontline troops. Given that "conscript" is as low as you can go in the CM ranking system, I think it is fair to base the performance of Syrian conscript units on poor-quality Iraqi units, or the worst-performing Syrian units in 1967 and 1973. These were barely one step up from having been grabbed off the street and stuffed in a tank. One of my friends who was an Iraqi tank gunner IIRC had fired exactly three shells in training in his entire career. Conscript tank crews in combat are people whose systems are flooded with adrenaline, attempting to perform complicated mechanical tasks which they have performed maybe once or twice before in their lives, many months or even years ago. Back to the scenario. Thanks to poor communications, my Syrian tankers would likely have no idea that the Americans were on the other side of the ridge. Their commanders would be highly unlikely to take the initiative to attempt a flanking maneuver. And their crews would likely be far too flustered to fire at a stationary target, let alone acquire and hit a moving one. I need to go back and read my sources -- sundry books on the 1991 and 2003 wars, as well as Kenneth Pollack's fairly exhaustive Arabs at War -- but off-hand I can't think of any instances where Arab armored units (as opposed to infantry units, which were often much more effective) pulled off a successful flanking maneuver at the battalion/company level. Obviously, BF does not want to program a game wherein the Syrian player is limited to suicidal frontal assaults. Also, I think it's fair to assume that the Syrian military is training much harder and more realistically then it did in the past. The Syrians should have regular and veteran units, who fight just as effectively as US units with the same rating. But the lowest quality armored units, in my opinion, should be virtually ineffective. You should not be able to use them for the same tasks for which you use professional troops. They should acquire targets with painful, hair-pulling slowness. They should miss the broad side of the barn at point-blank range, particularly if the target is moving. They should have crippling orders delays to prevent them from taking advantage of the player's knowledge of enemy vulnerabilities. Give them an area-fire order against a building, and there should be a good chance that they should target the one next to it. (Actually this should be true of higher-quality forces as well). Even when the pathfinding routines are fixed, they should continue to use the buggy ones. This is a highly subjective assessment which is difficult to support empirically, but I'll go through my sources and try to come up with some examples that back my point. [ August 23, 2007, 02:19 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

Given that the modern Middle East is one of my preferred settings for wargames, and no other game that I've played to date has been remotely satisfactory, I would have snapped it CMSF as soon as I heard about it. I would have been intensely frustrated by the LOS and pathfinding issues, but loved it nonetheless. I agree with Redwolf however that I would have doubted that penetration was based on serious research, if we did not have the CMx1 series to go on. [ August 23, 2007, 02:18 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

Wisbech_lad and Mace are right to emphasize that there is a world of difference between different organizations -- particularly between firms like Blackwater, who really do justify the overused word "cowboy", and the more established (usually British-based) security companies. The latter are some of the most effective armed forces in Iraq, in my opinion. They tend to hire very experienced military professionals -- former SAS in many cases, with decades of counterinsurgency experience under their belt. In addition to their pool of experience, they don't rotate out like regular military units do, and thus tend not to suffer the near crippling loss of institutional memory that accompanies a battalion's deployment in a new AO. The individuals go home, but the organization remains. They're also there long enough to which Iraqis can be trusted, and integrate them into fairly high levels of decision-making, which again makes a tremendous difference in counterinsurgency. I don't know how they would fare if they had to perform regular military duties, like cordon and sweep operations, but for the jobs that they do perform, including ferrying people back and forth routinely to sites in some of the worst areas of the country, I would bet that they are among the most cost-effective forces out there. Some folks I've met from one particular US-based firm, on the other hand, were pretty effing scary. I don't know if they were representative of their entire company, but they did make me wonder about its hiring practices. As for the Aegis video, it's not entirely clear what is going on there. Some of the shots fired may be warning shots. At other times the vehicles really are behaving like a VBIED. The setting of the video to music is in somewhat questionable taste, but hey, that's Iraq. [ July 20, 2007, 05:03 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

Re the video, it seems like they might be covering for a suicide car bomb attack, providing suppression fire to allow the bomber to get closer. They wrap it up pretty quickly after the blast goes off, as I recall.

It's not just a jihadi thing -- it's the first line in the call to prayer which rings out five times a day, among other things. Depending on the tone, it can be anything from a gentle reminder (God is greater than whatever you're doing now, so drop your chores and and pray) to a battle cry (God is greater than the enemy). Obviously any game topic that has a resemblance to an ongoing war raises issues of taste, but if you're going to simulate contemporary conflict in the Muslim world and have voice acting, Allahu Akbar is pretty basic. I would be surprised if it had never been shouted by Mahdi Army RPG teams while taking down minarets of Sunni mosques that have been used by Omar Brigade snipers, or by Iraqi soldiers while watching F-16s pound the Soldiers of Heaven entrenchments around Najaf. I can't see too many atheists/lapsed Muslims having issues. Religious language is pretty ubiquitous in daily life. Most lapsed Muslims I know pepper their Arabic with religious expressions, sometimes used ironically, sometimes not. I think "Did you see that?" is perfect for situations where nothing is going on. Along with "I think that guy on the roof had an AK. If I see him again, can I light him up?" and the annoyed response, "If you're sure he's got an AK, you don't having to f---ing ask permission." At least in the first couple of days in the campaign. [ March 21, 2007, 02:23 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

Parts of the picture do look like they've been done over with smudge. The terrain also looks a bit mountainous for any part of Iraq other than the Kurdish areas. EDIT: Oops. Guess that was just an embankment. [ March 19, 2007, 03:35 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

As it happened, I was cooling my heels in a press holding tank with the author of the article when I saw the thread. She wasn't clear on whether the RPGs disabled the Stryker -- it may have been the IED, which in Diala apparently tend to be rather huge, presumably due to the presence of a rather large military base near the Iranian border. Another interesting tidbit is that the Stryker crews will often stick their bottled water around the sides of the vehicle as an anti-EFP measure. [ March 17, 2007, 01:39 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

No chance of allowing modders to create their own 3D doo-dads, I don't suppose? I can think of dozens of reasons why BFC wouldn't want to take the extra time to code this in as an option, but it would still be fun to try and model and texture all the bric-a-brac on the rooftops and streets around my Cairo flat in Wings 3D or something.

Last I heard Egypt just assembled its M1s from parts that were manufactured in Amreeka, although they may be making some locally now. I would not expect the professionalism of the Egyptian military to be particularly high in anything other than short-term, well-rehearsed operations (such as the 1973 crossing of the Suez Canal). Their training is supposed to be quite choreographed, and there's also the vast social gap between the officer corps and the conscipted and largely uneducated recruits. From what I've read about Desert Storm, the US and British thought the Egyptians moved extremely slowly towards objectives that were essentially undefended. This may have improved in the past 15 years, however. The likelihood of such a war I'd say is quite low. Keeping out of economically disastrous armed conflicts (as opposed to debt relief bonanzas like GW1) is probably the single top priority in President Mubarak's foreign policy, and I expect that he would make sure that any successor also shared that priority. I would also rate any sort of Islamist-backed coup to be extremely unlikely, as the only opposition with any mass backing, the Muslim Brothers, are an extremely cautious lot. On the other hand, we don't really know who will replace Mubarak, and new Egyptian presidents are known for taking the country lurching in new directions. I'd definitely buy a game on the topic, although I suspect that Battlefront won't make one, alas.