ScoutPL

Not sure what sort of detail you are looking for, then again this all seems pretty obvious to me, having lived/breathed it for so long. I lose sight of the fact that I tend to spend the majority of my life in a very small subculture (military) and that there are billions of people who have no idea what we do on a daily basis. The US military (and I think most militaries, if not corporations these days) use a very formal After Action Review (AAR) process. It doenst matter if its a week long battalion exercise in the field or a platoon in a virtual simulator. You can find all sorts of documentation on AARs by simply googling them and US Army. For a deeper analysis look up FM 7-0 which explains the Armys training philosophy and how to plan training events https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CD0QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gordon.army.mil%2FSAMC%2FDownloads%2FTrainingtheForceFM7-0.pdf&ei=vdxeU72NA6nNsATijoGwDQ&usg=AFQjCNFuQB7saT06jWAIj7PH-vH428w--g&sig2=5MKHdC8xX-zSbch6LI60IA&bvm=bv.65397613,d.cWc I think you might be looking for more educational or business applications of wargaming but you'll have to look elsewhere (probably an entirely different website) for that. ;-)

OK, thanks for looking that up. How about taking the time to look up the ratio of attached tank battalions in a more maneuver oriented battle? I apologize if my earlier statement about tanks being rare in urban fighting somehow ruffled some feathers. I still think its an accurate statement. We can quibble about to what degree, but I dont much see the point. What if I just say your right and I'm wrong?

I mentioned artillery use in a pre-bombardment mode. As in lets pound Stalingrad/Cassino/Aachen/Brest for a day or two before we send in the grunts. The minimum safe distance for artillery and even most mortars would require you be blocks away (and therefore out of LOS) to most targets. Your pics are pretty. Does that pile of rubble block movement?

Practically all of the cities mentioned above were cleared by US Infantry Divisions. None of which had organic tank battalions. Attached tank battalions were rare for city fighting, especially when compared to fighting in more open terrain. On the Eastern Front I was thinking of German Pzr and Pzgr units that were tasked to defend urban centers. I would have to go dig out the books to bring up specific examples. And when I say stripped of vehicles I am mostly talking about the mobile infantry losing their HTs and trucks. In no way was I trying to insinuate there were tank crews defending Belgrade on foot, for example.

I wouldn't consider Arnhem an example of what I am talking about at all. Examples of urban areas being isolated by maneuver before being seized: Cherbourg, Brest, Rennes, Argentan, Aachen, Nancy, Metz Those are just the ones I can think of in 1944.

Another real limitation of the game system is how it handles rubbling buildings. The most obvious is the buildings all collapse on themselves in neat little piles. In reality it was much different. If you rubbled the buildings along a street you would quickly find the streets on all sides blocked to vehicular traffic, forcing you to rely more heavily on your infantry. This is why commanders eventually learned that when attacking urban area it actually made things worse to conduct a pre-bombardment with artillery or bombers. Any rubbling just favored the defender. It made it easier for him to dig in, camouflage his positions, street maps became useless for navigation, and it severely limited the use of vehicles (both offensively and for resupply). There are also plenty examples of large brick and concrete buildings taking massive punishment without collapsing, again forcing the use of infantry as the primary means of seizing the terrain. In CM the buildings totally collapse rather quickly and do so in neat piles. One of the few shortfalls of the game in my opinion.

I would put my MGs covering the open ground where they will do the most good. Putting them in an "ambush" position where their range and covered arc is severely restricted negates their advantages (superior range and rate of fire compared to most infantry squads). That being said I would move them often like every minute when in contact in a WEGO game, one at a time. This would effectively reduce you to one gun firing at a time so you might want to only move when the enemy seems to be gaining fire superiority on a particular location, but that's hard to judge and react in time in a WEGO game. That is all based on the premise the enemy has no armor. If he has anything that can lay down suppressive fire outside of your BZ range than you cant defend forward. Set up kill sacks behind the bocage for his infantry and hope you have a BZ team that is good enough to get a kill on the first shot.

Interestingly, we almost had a diplomatic crisis on our hands toward the end and it significantly impacted our operations. Essentially the Canadian casualty rate was so high their government was threatening to end their involvement in the coalition. Since they were our only armored force (outside of the host nation) their new restrictions inhibited our ability to transition to the offense and push to the Arianan border. Another interesting point was the enemy's ability to keep our aviation assets (particularly our AH-64s) limited to operating in our rear areas (which still had significant insurgent activity) due to their air defense umbrella. We (the USAF mainly) reduced their big radar systems but it was the smaller MANPADS systems that took our biggest tank killer off the table. We could gain superiority and reduce the threat for specific operations but it required a lot of staff work.

Which is why on any battlefield you will find the defender trying to turn them (urban areas) into fortresses and the attacker attempting to avoid them as much as possible. Unless your boss is a charismatic maniac named Adolf Hitler. There are numerous examples on both the Eastern and Western fronts of the attacker using maneuver forces to isolate urban areas in order to reduce them later. Usually with pure infantry divisions or armored formations that have been stripped of most of their vehicles for one reason or another.

Just a pet peeve... Most of what the folks here are advocating reflect units that are extremely costly in Rarity points. For a reason. If you and your opponent agree to leave rarity unrestricted and cherry pick at will, you will have a battle of uber weapons that really has nothing to do with actual conditions on the battlefield. For a more realistic, demanding approach (if that is desired), keep the rarity points low and fight your urban fights with lots of infantry and very few vehicles and specialized weapons. Which is the way they were fought historically. An added benefit is it forces you to get better at fire and maneuver rather than building demolition.

You are probably reading articles that are written by gaming industry experts, which is like reading reviews of car audio systems written by car industry experts. They know the basics but will tend to use the terms they are most familiar with. When it comes to digital wargames the gaming industry has four categories: Real time strategy, Turn based, First Person Shooter and Squad Tactical. Since you can play CM in real time most want to stick it in the Real Time Strategy category. Even though most RTS are resource gathering based.

Go to my tutorials (in my tag at the bottom). I use CMSF as a model but the method is the same. I lay out a step by step process based on the US Army's Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) only simplified for a gamer. Also check out Bil Hardenbergers stuff (tagged in the stickies on the CMBN forum). I am sure there are others out there, but these are the two that I know of that are aimed right at CM. If you just pick up a field manual you will get lost in the jargon and acronyms and have difficulty applying it to CM.

I havent looked at Steel Beasts in years but it was my understanding back then that it did a pretty poor job of simulating infantry/engineers. Has it undergone some upgrades? Not a knock on tankers but its pretty easy to create a sim with some depth when you dealing with 14 entities (armored company) vs 150 (infantry company).

JohnO- I doubt we ran into each other in the halls but its possible. I am the day battle captain for the 82nds Div tactical CP (DTAC). As a 57 I was pretty involved in the planning of the WFX but when the rubber hit the road I had to move over to the mission command side of my job. A great exercise from where I was sitting, we learned alot, though someone has to tell your leadership to drop the iranian horde scenario when you are dealing with light infantry divisions. We tried to make the point a year ago when planning started but that enemy tank corps kept working its way back into the scenario. Without the Canadian armored battle group to take it on the chin for us, it would have been Market Garden all over again.

Why bother with a sim to feed your sim? A simple map exercise with CM adjudicating contacts should get after what you want. Unless you are wanting to portray all of the logistics issues that might pop up after extended play. In my experience its way to easy to bake a giant cake and then realize about halfway through it that you and your mates just don't have an appetite for it. Best to start small, say a division (actually, division is still considered the tactical level) attacking across a front defended by a brigade, with players down to the BN level. Twenty players or so, including your bde and div commanders. Or you could just go with three (two opponents and a referee). A referee would be essential to keep up with unit movement, contacts, fire support etc. None of which gets after the real challenge - who is going to design all of those scenarios?

I am a Simulation Operations Officer with the US Army. (Yes, there is actually such a career path in the US mil now.) I just recently made this transition and am getting my feet wet, having spent 15 years in the Infantry prior to volunteering for a change. A few points based on my knowledge and experience so far... I went to a SimOps course with Dr. James Sterrett mentioned in the PC Gamer article, as well as a few other online articles he has been interviewed for. A very knowledgeable scholar who was always eager to share his thoughts and experiences. If you could make direct contact with him (most likely through CGSC at Ft. Leavenworth) he is probably one of the most knowledgeable about the use of gaming in the classroom, particularly to train field grade and senior leaders. From a big Army perspective, off the shelf gaming products rarely meet the needs for training, for a number of reasons. Probably the biggest is the ability to tie into our digital systems. The Army has spent the last 10+ years developing a wargame (called WARSIM) that is fully integrated into our battle command systems, sustainment systems, and fires system. This means we can set up a brigade or division command post and all of our digital systems that we use to track and fight a battle can be stimulated by the sim, so that the maneuver guys, the fires guys, and the sustainment guys can all look at the same "picture" and see the same things in the actual real digital systems they use every day. Not something you can do with a software based game that 99% of the time is developed as a single player wargame. Another drawback to off the shelf games is that they often are severely limited in simulating the "full spectrum" of conflict. Take CM for example. No engineering capability is adequately modeled. A commander cant move onto a piece of ground and select his defensive positions and then dig them in, place obstacles etc and then suffer the consequences (or success) of his decisions. From an offensive standpoint there is no ability to use most of the minefield breaching and bridging assets available to the armies of WW2 or today. Fire support is adequate but still suffers severe drawbacks because the playing field is not linked to a map, a very important aspect for training soldiers to plan fires, targets and conduct calls for fire. The aspects of Close Air Support(CAS) and MEDEVAC are severely restricted or not modeled at all for similar reasons. Of note the Army poured a lot of money into VBS (Bohemias ARMA 2/3) in an attempt to address a lot of the issues raised above in a simulation and for the most part accomplished what they wanted. Unfortunately, the game requires individuals playing individual characters and does very poorly when trying to aggregate squads, platoons, etc. I was involved in an experiment to use VBS in the Maneuver Captains Career Course, giving each member of a small group control of a maneuver platoon. As a sim for vehicle platoons it worked fine (M1, Stryker, Bradley) because the game AI was very adept at operating those systems with little input from the player. But once you tried to get a squad to conduct a breach or move to a specific spot in a building for example, it experienced some serious and frustrating issues. This brings up another snag. Program contracting. Military contracts are often made for extended periods of time (years). And so this forces the Army to try to make the best of whats available. And the contracting process takes so long that by the time the program equipment (or software) actually reaches the user, its often outdated or inadequate to meet changing requirements. Hence the failed (in my view) attempt at turning VBS2 into a company level sim. Most sim center in the Army now have VBS2 suites that will sit up to a hundered players so you can train most of a company at a time. But it still isn't very efficient since you are basically conducting leader training and the individual soldiers aren't actually training with their systems (it would be more productive to send them to the range while the leaders of the organization trained in the sim.) Bottom line- the US Army continues to meet the training requirements through the use of sims and will for the foreseeable future. BUt there is a gap that currently exists for battalion and company level simulation.

Anyone else had three rifle platoons practically decimated by a rocket barrage in the first minute of a QB against the AI? Hopefully that sort of demoralizing occurrence will be EXTREMELY rare.

CMSF did a great job of simulating modern combined arms warfare with one significant exception, engineering. I am wondering if CMBS will be able to incorporate more of this vitally important aspect of the modern battlefield. I know there are issues with creating "manipulative" terrain tiles but if we can create shell holes, destructible environments etc, perhaps there are ways to replicate some engineering aspects. Specifically: 1. Mineplows 2. Mic-Lic 3. AVLB

Gamey jeep rushes and the industrial might of the United States to replace all of those burning jeep hulls due to the "reconnaissance" taking a little longer than "a few seconds" when the street happened to be blocked by a well placed obstacle and covered by a well placed machine gun. The extra machine gun of course since the others were covering the avenues of approach a professional might actually use.

Great points all Slysniper. Thanks.

ASL: "A modern US style by the numbers doctrinally sound recon of enemy forces prior to an attack on the eastern front would be the exception rather than the rule. Once the situation stabilized somewhat towards the end of August and lines became more static then you might see more pre battle intel." Another classic example of the value of using what you know of the terrain to make an estimation of how the enemy will fight and to identify pieces of key terrain that you think may become important as the "blindly groping for the enemy" unfolds. Characterized by the type of attack the US military terms a Movement to Contact. Practically every major campaign from WW2 (France in 40 and 44, North Africa except for exceptions like El Alamein, most of the Russian campaign, and Burma for example) were "maneuver campaigns" characterized with a lot of searching for the enemy with short, sharp fights when you found him. US doctrine doesn't focus on a need for accurate information before conducting planning, or even an attack. It is nice to have and every attempt should be made to collect all you can. But with limited collection assets (be it Predator drones or 2 man scout teams) there has to be a process in place to focus your reconnaissance efforts. This comes from your analysis of the terrain and what you know of how the enemy fights. What I am advocating here is an attempt to get players away from just throwing out a scout screen and bumping into the enemy in a random fashion in order to "develop the enemy situation." Good, well thought out analysis beforehand will do wonders for your game play. I know it sounds boring as hell, but if you spend as much time planning for a game as you spend playing it, you are getting to the right balance. If you want to sim RL of course.

H1nd: From the US perspective you are correct. Its just how we conduct that "reconnaissance" might not be what you expect. If there is time, and the situation will allow it, the platoon/company leader of an attack will conduct his own reconnaissance and do everything he can to avoid contact. That is extremely risky and takes a lot of time. But this is rarely achievable. The unit then has to move forward using movement techniques and formations that put the smallest element forward (toe in the water so to speak) while keeping the main element relatively secure and ready to pounce.

Womble: "I'm not saying you're wrong to try and drag a simulation out of the game, but if the specific example of the game omits data you'd expect to have as that putative company commander, your sim starts with a big hole in it, no?" No not at all. Recon data is never to be relied upon solely, particularly if its not real time. Anyone in a CM scenario who is defending can easily come up with two plans. One he wants to use and then one that he sets his forces up in so that when his enemy gets his little intel dump during setup he sees something else. Then in turn 1 he just moves everything to coincide with his preferred plan. Classic deception and very "RL". In any fight terrain is key. If you analyze the terrain thoroughly and look at it from the enemy's perspective and what you think he has to achieve, you can come up with a pretty accurate template for what he will do. Like I said earlier, actual data on enemy location and disposition is just gravy. You use it to confirm/deny your analysis of how the enemy will fight, not to base your analysis on. Bils use of recon pull is a looser variation on what I am talking about. He does the analysis on what he thinks the enemy will do and that's how he determines the areas he wants to look at. He then sends his forces forward, usually with a strong reserve centrally located. Once he starts collecting data he is confirming/denying his analysis. He then commits to a particular course of action with his reserve. Movement to contact right out of the FM. This is starting to sound like graduate level stuff and it probably is. I don't throw any of this stuff out there to say "this is how you win in CM." I am just sharing a particular viewpoint. I have an example of the sort of fight I am talking about in my CMSF tutorials. The scenario labeled "Cain and Able" involved a combined arms attack to seize multiple objectives with practically no intel before the fight. It illustrates recon push and the principles I am trying to desribe.

Womble: You bring up a style of play that has been debated since this game first came out. I think it goes back to the "game" vs "simulation" style of play. It sounds to me like you are using an operational style of advance where you are looking for surfaces and gaps in your enemy's defense (as a Division or Corps Commander would use his reconnaissance assets for) so that you can focus on the gaps in an attempt to dislodge him. And the bottom line is it works. Its just not what a company commander would do in RL. And for those of us who like to try to sim RL it would be a turn off. Just different styles of play essentially.

I am going to throw out a few more pennies... Please know that when I make these comments it is as an infantry officer, not as a CM guru. We are all familiar with the limitations of the game and that some players prefer to approach it as a simulation and others prefer to view it as a game. I don't have an issue with either outlook. That being said, my approach to the game is as a simulation. I am always looking for ways to expand my professional experience via the digital realm (actually, I recently changed my career path to Simulation Operations, so this has become my bread and butter within the US Army). The CM series, since its inception, has been the best game system I have found for simulating platoon and company, even Battalion fights. The only drawback has been they are all set 60 years ago with the exception of CMSF. When CM Black Sea comes out it will receive a lot of scrutiny from the professional military community, but I am sure BFC is already aware of this. Anyway... From a professional military point of view there is a hard line in doctrine between reconnaissance and actually closing with the enemy. Doctrinally there are units that are specifically designed and equipped to conduct reconnaissance and this includes all the major armies of WW2. I have written volumes on this in earlier threads back in the CMBO and CMBB days and don't want to rehash an old argument. If you are really bored at work today, feel free to search the archives and read how some very mature, grown men can be reduced to pure hissy fits in a forum. Once again, from a professionals point of view, by the time the scope of combat represented in a CM game is reached, reconnaissance is complete (from a doctrinal point of view). The recon platoon has moved up found the enemy locations and reported them back to the battalion. This is where the intel feed in the scenario design and QB setup interface comes from. If your recon was extremely successful you might set this at 30%. If it was not so great, perhaps 10%. This option is there because the game designers recognize that "Reconnaissance" would be complete before the actual game starts. However, there is a lot to be said for being cautious and not advancing boldly forward without some idea of whats ahead. This is where movement techniques, formations, and maneuver come into play. The idea of the movement to contact isn't necessarily to find the enemy and then come up with a plan. A plan should already be in place. Even without any hard intel to enemy dispositions you can develop a plan based on the terrain and the enemys most likely course of action. For a movement to contact a leader (player) can develop an entire scheme of maneuver based on march objectives that are tied to the terrain. The key is a strong, readily available and flexible reserve. That is achievable through movement techniques. Bil Hardenbergers tutorials give great examples of what they should look like in game. The underlying theme being that I don't just want to find the enemy, I want to be able to pile on and kill him before he has a chance to react to the intelligence that HE has now gained about YOUR location and strength. As soon as those two man scout teams make contact the enemy is gaining intel about your movements and the routes you are thinking about using. You have to commit to one route or the other as quickly as possible, before he has time to react to the same contacts. The way to do this is keep strong forces relatively close to your scouts. Actually, your scouts ARE PART OF your assaulting force. Its all the same formation. For another great example provided by Bil look to his AAR in the Red Thunder forum. He used his forward elements in Traveling Overwatch and each time he made contact with Elvis' units he was ready to maneuver against them and inflict serious damage. The other underlying theme here is before you start a game you should have decided on a main avenue of approach and a decisive point. Once again, this can be determined just by studying the terrain usually, any intel about enemy dispositions is gravy. With that in hand you can then focus your forces, weight your main effort, and overcome any resistance the enemy may throw in front of you. Even in fairly balanced CM games the attacker can represent a stick pin and the defender more times than not has to be the table cloth. Take advantage.