The_Capt

Can you quantify this? ISW seems to think it is about 1000m https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-2-2023 Russian forces intensified ground attacks in the Kreminna area on February 2. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Ploshchanka (16km northwest of Kreminna), Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), Chervonopopivka (6km north of Kreminna), Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), and Kuzmyne (3km southwest of Kreminna) in Luhansk Oblast.[25] This is notably a higher number of reported repelled attacks than is typical in the Kreminna area. A Russian milblogger claimed on February 2 that unspecified Russian airborne elements with the support of the 144th Motorized Rifle Division and its 59th Tank Regiment (20th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) pushed Ukrainian forces back by one kilometer near Kreminna. This "D" also looks more like a meatgrinder. The ISW report for 2 Feb is good, looks like the RA is being pushed into "one last push" to secure the Donbas by March, which may suggest why the UA is holding back. Unless they decide to launch a spoiling attack somewhere else.

Spent time on Steel Beasts as well. For the Soviets, as far as I can tell: 125mm - not much change as the BM22 and BK-14M cover off the entire time period. They do lose the AT8 before 1979 though. 115mm - biggest change as they roll back to the BM21 vice BM28 100mm - goes from BM 25 to BM 20. None of these are overly dramatic. The Chieftain looks like it may have an ammo challenge on its hands with that APDS round, the L23A1 does not look like it came online until 1983. The L7 105mm will be firing the M728 (already in game) as it was basically the same for both UK and US versions. On the Leos it will likely be the M735 or DM23. And of course all the HESH and HEAT rounds. Oh my this is gonna be good.

https://wotinspector.com/en/webapp?targetVehicleId=57937,34898,30547,23892&mode=xray.armor&platform=pc No idea how accurate this is but like Steel Beasts the hardcore WoT players tend to be as obsessive as we are - and before anyone asks, no this is not what BFC uses in their modelling, their engine pre-dates WoT. To be honest I strongly suspect suitcase deals in underground parking lots are where the guys get their in game modelling data. Regardless, the Chieftian looks a lot like a NATO T-64 type situation in the making. Quite a beast. Now the fire control and targeting will be the thing. And of course that changed within the time periods we are talking. Oh and absolutely T-80 country…feel the flavour.

Think it depends on setting, because on mine you did it. Typical, upper management comes in just in time to cut the ribbon....

It wasn't personal. It was the amount of work. These are entirely different equipment fleets from a cold start. I personally would love to see how the French Forces would have stacked up against the Soviets, in fact it is the logical aftermath from the Fulda Gap campaign. But the level of effort it would have taken would have added years to release - and Bil H is not a young man.

Folks, we have a whole lot of plans for CMCW...we plotted out an entire franchise. However, how much of it that will ever see daylight is a continual negotiation with reality. We are only going to be able to go so far on CMx2, and then we will just have to see what CMx3 looks like. Bil H, Cpt Miller and I are committed to this ride for as long as it lasts, but much will depend on sales and BFC bandwidth - small company, big dreams. So one step at a time. The fact we got green lit for a Module so quickly is a good sign, and we exceeded expectations as far as base game went - we were expecting CMA and got a lot closer to CMBS response, it put our baby squarely within the "inside club" of the modern era titles, hell we were a Charles S. Roberts nominee! (Even told my mom...she totally did not get it.) So beyond BAOR...we will see in the fullness of time. And maybe Bil and I have got other ideas...maybe.

Well considering that these things move at about 120 kph (max) based on wind speed, I am not sure “scramble” is the correct term. I know that people have been looking at high altitude balloons for operational ISR and GPS replacement systems. Their ability to stay up (persistence) and remain at high altitude and stand off from an AO starts to make sense. I am sure someone will even try and stick a weapon platform on one of these one day but you get into payload limits etc. As a strategic penetration ISR platform they are just silly in my opinion. I am sure people are going to try them out, maybe China is in this case; however, the fact we picked up the vehicle and could “scramble” is just a very visible demonstration of my point. A LEO satellite moves as 17000 miles per hour and can be the size of a shoebox. Very High altitude unmanned systems can be built for stealth and speed, or long endurance. Very High altitude manned systems can also be built for stealth and speed, and carry weapons with human agency onboard - see Top Gun 2 (aside: weirdly the plane Tom Cruise flew in the first half hour is the more likely one to be used on the dramatic end mission). Cyber exploitation cannot be ‘seen’ at all and has to be detected by other means. So a big, fat, highly visible and extremely slow moving balloon is a terrible platform for strategic ISR. With the satellite threat it is not like one can leave your “sensitive sites” uncovered anyway. And the reaction time to something flying at the speed of a good Cessna at the strategic level is in days, so if you need to reposition something well you can break for coffee. But it will get everyone excited and maybe isn’t a bad way to poke NORAD. Beyond that, well there is the entertainment value.

Well there are about a dozen possible explanations. It is a weather balloon of some sort. It is military and experimental but went off course. They are simply screwing with us to see what happens. Or maybe it isn’t even Chinese. This thing has a whole Foo Fighters feel to it given that everyone is a bit edgy.

Man these guys definitely have something for balloons. So 1) slow…glacial compared to a LEO satellite, 2) highly visible with radars - big *** bag of gas, 3) at mercy of winds. For operational ISR and GPS back up sure. As a strat ISR platform…man I am not entirely onboard.

Oh dear a highly visible piece of 19th century technology! Wait while we slowly hide our sensitive stuff under the obvious hi tech counter…the tarp.

We definitely have plans for the Red team but are keeping those close to our chest for now. Gotta leave something for the build up.

Well that is a loaded question to be honest. Bil H will no doubt chime in but a few factors came into play as I recall: - Resources. We can take a really good shot at BAOR and not cripple ourselves in development for years - along with the other BFC titles. The core team is pretty small and we were looking for a quick, but solid, follow up to the main game. Germany would have been a lot more work, as would any other NATO nations, and the French were just a non-starter. Those modules will take much longer, particularly in vehicle modelling and artwork. BAOR had a lot of new vehicle models but much more manageable in the timelines for a first DLC. - Locale. The Northern Plain was actually where the most likely Soviet Main effort was going to fall. Hate to admit it but Fulda was a bit of a sideshow in the overall Soviet plan. It made sense game wise simply because the largest market for the game is the US, and we had a lot of details on this fight - US research is a dream as they put everything out there, Canadians are a nightmare. That said we really wanted to do the northern plains from the start and historically that is BAOR or the Germans. - Expertise. We had experts on both UK and Canadian orbats right out the gate, which made research a lot easier. I joined in 1988 and had a lot of my old battlebox stuff to pull from and some old timers I still know from up the day. On the UK side we had similar expertise. - Timeframe. Late 70s, early 80s is really the “tipping point” of the Cold War. It was when the doctrine and equipment of both sides was pretty balanced, each offsetting the others strengths and weaknesses. Before this you get the nuclear armies, which were just nuts. And after you get the western advantage leaning into overmatch and then we start to look a lot like CMSF or BS. - Straight up cool factor. So how would the UK done against the Soviets? Canadians are fun because they mix European and US kit. You wanna know how a squadron of Leo’s would have done…well let’s find out. Not saying the other nations are not interesting but when you add everything up it just made more sense to do BAOR next and they would be fun to play. As to “how will they play”…totally honest…no freakin idea. We also had no idea on the main game. It wasn’t until I played those first few scenarios while we were early in did we see that we were onto something. BFC doesn’t balance for gameplay or market. They literally plug in the data from research and then throw it at each other in game. The balance is almost entirely emergent. When we do up scenarios and campaigns there is always a level of balancing that goes on but this is macro stuff like force size and enablers. For CMCW we were amazed at how little balancing we had to do. I designed the campaigns and scenarios based on doctrine on both sides and basically how they would have gone into a fight with each other. The fact that these led to tightly balanced fights that require deep understanding of what each side can do was all pretty much emergent design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CF-104_Starfighter Gotta be honest but this thing never really made sense to me. Was built for high altitude fast air to air interception but we stuck air to ground attack radar on the thing and rolled it into CAS. For the Canadians in Germany in the time period we are talking this was about it as far as fighters went. As to “limited” well it could carry about 4000lbs of ordinance and had the radars to target then, so not an A10 but from everything I have read a competent CAS aircraft. Of course even back then aircraft did not necessarily follow strict national support lines. So you could have US aircraft supporting Canadians and vice versa. UK CAS is going to be interesting but I am not the one to unpack that one.

That is straight up attritional warfare of the old school. Echeloned human waves - sometimes supported, other time not is a straight up “we will trade 30 of ours for 1 of yours”. Discipline is also extremely old school as well, basically you are shot if you don’t succeed, and this includes getting wounded. They only thing missing is to put suicide explosive belts on these guys and you have Fedayeen, but insert Russian nationalism for Islamic extremism. The major problem with this approach is that it is a road to nowhere. Unless you have held back a breakout force that can exploit a breakthrough, you can crack the line but never exploit it. It does not sound like there is effective integration between Wagner and the RA so how do they expect to actually exploit a breakthrough?

You do. The Canadian Army went to a 4 CMBG structure in 1976 that pretty much endured right up until we pulled it out in ‘92. No state secrets here on what we are looking at.

I have 8 different unit types that with timeframe variations (early-mid-late) come to 18. But how many actually get put into the game is a different answer. When we do TO&E research we always go long and then cut back to fit resources. So do not be surprised if there are fewer in the end. That said the more mainstream ones like Mech Bns and Tank Regts are obviously going to be in game.

Tell me about it. They are scrambling to try to look relevant to this problem set - along with some others - in my neck of the woods as well.

So maybe the whole "German reluctance to send in big loud stuff" had a bit more nuances than many thought? I mean the answer from the west is "whatever" but this nonsense might actually sell to the Russian public.

Bottom falling out: Russian economic damage gets to a point that it can no longer effectively prosecute this war. Now whether that comes from conative erosion at a political/social level or a hard economic collapse is secondary to the main issue - although not irrelevant. If the Russian people can live with option A, so be it, but at 1980 Soviet levels the current Russian economic framework will not function - it would have to adopt a far more totalitarian economic model than it currently has in place (see North Korea). Then we get into the question of whether such a system could sustain a war at this level in competition with the western economic system. If the Russia people truly are sheep and are willing to put up with Putin as their bear-riding-god well then we have to be ready for the long haul in all this. We are then likely talking Cold War levels of resistance and proxy conflicts, and some of them took decades. I think the major problem with the west right now is that we are addicted to a status quo that is gone. We all want this to "just be over" so we can go back to watching whatever crap is on tv, and arguing about ourselves with ourselves over stuff that in the grand scheme of the human enterprise really does not matter. That ship has sailed. We are entering into a era of collision, the Great Peace of the post-Cold War era is over and we might actually have to be ready to make some real sacrifices in order to ensure we stay on top of things. And if one of those sacrifices is a ten year commitment to a long war in Ukraine to keep whatever Russia turns into inside a box, well ok that is the deal. I personally do not think that it will come to that but strap yourselves in because the next big conflict is likely just around the corner.

Ya the problem is with your victory threshold. You need a "tactical victory" to advance on to Mission 6, if you finish the game below that it kicks you out into a Draw at the point you are in. So I would either replay or go back to an earlier save. You really want to play Scenarios 6-8, they were some of the best we did and 7 is a monster size-wise.

Economics is not my area of expertise but from what I can gather large economies do not move and shift in timescales that most humans operate within with respect to personal finances. 9 months is a blink of an eye when one is talking about a large economy - the fact that almost every voter in every democracy is completely ignorant of this fact is a significant problem. Economies do dramatic things like collapsing but the pressures to create these dramas take years to build. A large economy has a weight and momentum all it own, so major shifts and trends take a long time to manifest. A micro-example, I lose my job. Well ok, I do not lose my house the next day. In fact if I use my credit cards I can actually look like I have more money than I did when I was working. I can cut spending, sell off stuff from the basement and even do some light stealing. I can do odd jobs on the side, some of them less than pleasant. But to my neighbours the lights stay on and I look like I am doing fine. 6 months to a year later the bottom does fall out and I run out of credit, bank shows up and there is a lot of drama. That is just personal finances. Unlike a country I cannot print money or manipulate interest rates. So Russia is making bank, but the economic damage being done to it is deep and broad in scope. For example, given that they just basically stole a lot of western corporate assets, how long will it be before Russia sees western investment? https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/russia/foreign-direct-investment It is still selling oil and gas but it has severely damaged its major market - Europe. So what? Well the Russian strategy was for this war to be over well before now. Well before economic impacts could fully set in. Western resolve was supposed to split and fade because who wants to take the economic risks in protest of an already lost Ukraine? But it did not turn out that way. Russia made some terrible assumptions and bet the farm (literally) on them. Someone mentioned that the “West is not the whole world” true, we are about 2/3rds of it when it comes to money: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-94-trillion-world-economy-in-one-chart/ Russia can and will continue to “make things work” but wars are ridiculously expensive and on one side we have the richest countries in the world all making relatively pretty modest donations while Russia has had to go “all in”. This is one of the most one-sided proxy wars in history based on economic power. Russia is extremely isolated and vulnerable, getting worse everyday. So it can prop up the ruble, sell oil and gas on the cheap, cut standards of living and social services - and it will make it work for some time. But the bottom will fall out. This is not sustainable in the long term. And with every warcrime and day this war drags on Russia is digging a deeper hole for itself. We are talking years, possibly decades before renormalization with the West is possible. China and India are not invested in Ukraine, they could care less. So they are going to take advantage of the situation and milk Russia until it bleeds. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD So before we start freaking out because the ruble is up, let’s just make sure we understand what is really going on with the Russian economy on a macro scale. And finally, even if Russia doesn’t suffer one bit. All the sanctions do not work and it can sell oil and gas to the Mole People for diamonds. Russia has an economy the same size as Canada which is not small but is not large enough to wage a war of this scale in glorious economic isolation indefinitely. And even if it did, our pockets are so much deeper - the only thing in question is “how deep is our willpower?”

So Perun did a really good video near the start of this thing on how the value of the ruble is more complicated than the simple exchange rate. Stuff like interest rates and some of the propping Russia did is going to cause much bigger problems down the line. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/currencies-ruble-vs-dollar-russia-vladimir-putin-western-sanctions-oil-2022-9#:~:text=The ruble has rallied since war in Ukraine began&text=Both those commodities are valued,rate means it's losing money.

Where do people get these analysis? https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/currency https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/impact-sanctions-russian-economy/ I am no economist but there is little good news for Russia on the economic front. It has done all sorts of twists and machinations to try and keep its head above water. Stuff like strapping itself to Iranian banks, which is just not a good idea given the instability in that country right now. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/world/europe/iran-russia-banks.html I mean what could possibly go wrong? I don't think Russia is on the verge of economic collapse, but I do think we can see it from here. I do not think the data shows that Russia has gone all "haters gonna hate, shake it off" either, as it burns it customer base.

I am very interested to see how the Canadians fair to be honest. The Leopards came aboard in 78 (although there were smaller number integrations earlier) and before that was the Centurion Mark 11. Game timeframe is set 1976-1982…so some good assumptions to be made there. As usual we aim to be as excruciatingly accurate as possible, particularly for the mainstream vehicles and weapon systems.

So now we are talking about the harsh calculus of the game. From all accounts it looks like the UA has lost about 1/3 to 1/2 of what the RA has lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#:~:text=Excluding the Russian and Ukrainian,of the foreign fighter casualties. I kind of trust the Ukrainian Government numbers, they are not likely exact but Ukraine is still a pretty open society - and currently has a lot of foreign contractors and observers on the ground - trying to hide losses well above those they are publicly declaring is going to be much harder than in Russia. As to "why doesn't the UA pull back?" Well I given what happened at Severodonetsk last summer, I do not think this is "not one step back mentality". I think it is pulling the RA in close and trading attrition towards an advantage. It is brutal calculus but if the UA can kill 6 Russians for every loss in a local area, it sets them up for follow on offensive operations later, while straining the RA logistical system as it tries to keep up with the losses. This is what we think we saw at Kharkiv, and Kherson to some extent. So Bakhmut and its locals look like an attrition strategy in motion. Now whether or not it can be turned into an offensive strategy is a really excellent question. I think a really big problem a lot of westerners are having is that the UA is employing an attritional strategy - we have largely abandoned them in our doctrines. But we could very well be totally wrong-headed here and attritional warfare is back with a vengeance in the 21st century, for a lot of the reasons we have discussed here (e.g. death of mass). Whatever the UA is doing, it has worked very well so far by any measures. The question, which we cannot answer, is who breaks first? Given the shoring of western support and the signals coming out of the political level in Ukraine, my money is still on them.