The_Capt

Ok, that is weird. Has anyone run some test on this? Or has an screenshot.

Can you point me at the thread where you cited this? I have seen this report and, ok, we can take it into consideration, at least it is a start. Not sure what to do about the rest of this, but at least you are starting to use facts. Hint: it is bad habit to simply discount facts that do not agree with your viewpoint as "propaganda", not without a fair amount of proof. Isby is a pretty well recognized author on the Cold War, we used his Armies of NATOs Western Front and Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Union. We can be critical thinkers of course but once these things become polarized, well we are back to simply arguing past each other. I mean I am suspect as to that CIA report (it was actually done by US Army MSAA) but ok, let's take a another look at why they thought the T62 had advantage. You are going to have to back that up of course. I will read this piece, left me wondering whose 2500 tanks were destroyed, I get incomplete estimates from Israel but if it was 1 for 1 then I am pretty sure that would be pretty hard to hide. Absolutely, on this we agree. Training, doctrine and leadership have more to do with superiority than individual equipment, but this started as a "T62s are blind, CMCW is broken" argument (by someone, not saying who). I already offered a multi-sub system approach to the match up, which included much more than hard factors, but it did not seem to resonant based on the feedback. At the tactical level the Soviet system is definitely unique and proxy wars show it had little success in conventional conflict (in unconventional no one seemed to see much success). Let's unpack Iran-Iraq war a bit and see what comes up. Don't need a PHd thesis, but if you go back on these exchanges you are going to see that you have used very little outside information to back up your arguments. You appear to be employing a large amount of confirmation bias here without really citing anything that proves your points - here that Soviet tanks were better at spotting than they are represented in the game. Again, "what evidence?". Sure we have some anomalies, every game has them. I ran a lot of tests with T72s and T64s: So did other people, none demonstrated "totally blind Soviet tanks" but that is not what you wanted to hear. And here we are again now from the other angle looking at history, which also shows that T62s were not the best but also not the worst and the casualties UH received are probably not crazy...and again you don't want to hear it. Look we have taken customer feedback very seriously for CMCW. We saw the old M113 night vision bug, there is something going on with T64 armor that needs a look, the AT 6 on the Hinds is "broken" absolutely no argument there and recently the low-to-zero effect arty fragmentation has on tank systems. All brought up by customers, with really good in-game and RL data we could use. They are all being reviewed (we fixed the M113 bug). I have played CMCW a lot, kinda came with the territory. And there have been times I have been frustrated with my T62s and they can drive one to distraction BUT I have not seen any evidence, in-game or in RL, that would lead me to think that a really cramped tank, with T-55 optics and a one-way radio is going to perform much better than it does and history, from what we can glean appears to back me up on this. But I am open to being wrong. Lastly, if you read only one part of this post let it be this. Stop telling us "its broken and wrong" because that point is not really been proven and start telling us what you think "right looks like". If we fired Steve and put you in charge what would Soviet tank spotting look like, and very importantly "why?".

I would love to see a rematch with T64s or T80s but this wasn’t all tank on tank action, those US TOW did a number as well. I think close range is worse for some tanks as the degrees of visibility shrink the closer one is to a target. At 200m one is looking through a straw. And before anyone thinks I am a T62 basher, let’s not forget about that gun. I have seen a T62 kill an M60A3 from the front at 1200 meters, that 115 smooth bore is no slouch on the battlefield, once you actually get it sighted. Interestingly the I am getting the sense that the T62 is a better defensive tank which may lend weight to the idea that no one was ever really planning to do it, but history is filled with examples of unintended or accidental wars.

Ok, we are done here. So far we have not seen one wit of research or citations, even internet deep from you nor personal experience that points to you being in any position to judge. Right now an average wiki reader is well ahead of your demonstrated knowledge level. So you wanna whine and moan citing yourself as a leading expert on what you know, go for it welcome to the internet. Personally, I am pretty sure I have forgotten more about the Cold War than you, having spent years researching for a game we actually published. Come back with some facts or do not come back at all. It was the noted "lack of high powered optics, thermal sights and fire control computers" that I was highlighting. Hell the 1972 version didn't even have a laser range finder. In "M60 vs T62 - Cold War Combatants - 1956-1992" by Nordeen and Isby they also point to the Gulf War, more specifically the USMC M60A1s in Desert Shield/Desert Storm along with the Six Day war. Results were very lopsided but the authors attribute training as much as anything "The results of the two kinetic tank were both tremendously one-sided. Both at the Chinese Farm and in the liberation of Kuwait, Israeli and US M60A1s wiped out large numbers of T62s with minimal loss, with only a single possible M60 loss to a T-62." (pg 134). Now I am starting to wonder if we have OP'd the T-62 based on in game results but authors have cited "training and doctrine" as the single biggest issue in these examples. For CMCW, I think T62s definitely perform better than they did historically but one has to consider that Soviet crews would be much better trained particularly on the front end of a western offence. But I do not think for a moment that the ratio would have been 1:1 in any standard engagement - interestingly UH saw 4:1 losses in his game. In our Beta AAR, I saw 1:6 to 1 losses but I also had a troop of T64s so they obviously made a difference. My bet is that for trained, motivated crews 2-3 to 1 loss ratio for T62s makes sense, hell Soviet C2 and radio doctrine alone puts them at a significant disadvantage.

Ah, well and of course UH and Rice agree with you...wait a minute can you point to the timestamp in the video where they do? The Soviet T62s did get pretty mauled due to spotting abilities....just like they did in the Gulf War: "The lack of high powered optics, thermal sights and ballistic computers of Iraqi tanks compared to their adversaries made the T-62 and other Iraqi armoured fighting vehicles extremely vulnerable and unable to retaliate against Coalition vehicles. The Iraqi 3rd Armored Division alone lost about a hundred T-62 tanks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-62...wiki no less, how hard is it to look up freakin wiki?) Oh wait there is more: "The turret also cannot be traversed with the driver's hatch open. Although the tank commander may override the gunner and traverse the turret, he cannot fire the main gun from his position. He is also unable to override the gunner in the elevation of the main gun, causing target acquisition problems." "The tank uses the same sights and vision devices as the T-55 except for the gunner, who received a new TSh-2B-41 sight which has x4 or x7 magnification. It is mounted coaxially with an optic rangefinder" And because I think amateur hour is finally over: "As might be expected, the authority of the platoon leader is even more restricted. He is not authorized to transmit on the radio except in an extreme emergency or to request support. This communications posture is consistent with his role, which is to lead his platoon in the execution of the company mission. He does not have the responsibility to translate his superiors' mission into a platoon mission. The noncommissioned tank commander monitors and complies with his superiors' commands and follows his platoon leader in the execution of the company mission. Since he is not issued a map, he has limited capability to relay targets of opportunity to fire support units." (https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm100-2-1.pdf) So when one does game engine design one goes down to the sub-systems of each vehicle in question. You then assign values to each of those sub-systems based on the available historical data that get incorporated into the design. So for example for the T62 we could have: Optics (see the target) - roughly inline with the T55, post WW2 but barely. Noted historical poor performance in Gulf War. Targeting (shoot and hit the target) - noted issues between gunner and crew commander, no targeting computer system Crew Conditions - a brutally cramped and ergonomic nightmare Command and Control (ability for target hand-off by others) - very limited by doctrine and training. Ok, let's stack all that up and weigh it against one loud opinion on the forum who has not bother to post a single fact to back up his opinion...hmm.

Oh yay, another thread hijacked by @dbsapp , yet again without any proof beyond the same stamping of feet demanding that “Soviets must be able to see X”. In case it hasn’t sunk in we are not going to redesign the game because “you think so”…seriously go play something else if this is causing you so much grief and sleeplessness. As to players who make Soviets work, here is yet another video: As to the original post, I really enjoyed UH’s play thru and post game analysis, I thought it was first rate.

Muphry's Law strikes again..."Warts and All".

Pro: it never runs out of gas Con: if it gets hit, it will irradiate a grid square

I am guessing here that "axial position" is above and below the round? This would make sense with those dead zones. Ok, back to topic, here is an outstanding example of making Soviet tactics work:

I kinda wanna see how long we can keep this thread going. I mean BFCElvis will come and and shut it down eventually but damn it, I am cheering for this little guy.

Well it is nice to see a good review. As to comments section, man the Beatles nailed it:

Ok, so these videos pretty much seal it as far as I am concerned and confirm what I suspected. So for CMCW (CMBS is another matter but they are on the same engine so I am sure it will have impact): - Right Tool for the Job. So in both these videos I see that 1) these HE shells are at ridiculously low angles of attack, well outside what is reasonable for indirect fire, 2) they are optimized for what HE is designed to do and that is cause blast and frag damage 90 degrees from the nose of the shell, and 3) they can barely penetrate 20mm of what I am assuming is straight steel (not composite) and does not penetrate 70mm of hull steel (kinda hard to tell as it is a cut away test). Even in PGMs HE munitions like Excalibur are designed for precision strikes on fixed targets, not tanks, that is why they use GPS and inertial guidance. For moving targets you need something like a Copperhead which has a HEAT warhead or any number of those types of munitions. - The Hollywood myth. Big booms and light are actually a highly inefficient method of kinetic force. This is why it took ridiculous amounts of energy to kill vehicles with IEDs. That big boom is wasted energy and why shaped charges were invented. A 155mm HE round coming in at a high angle of attack, say higher than 45 degrees is going to blow off most of its energy into the air at something like R3 bleed off. Fragmentation is going to splash off the roof or hull, you can actually see it in the first video. It is possible for a 155mm to crack open an M1A2? Sure, but the odds are likely so small that modeling that feature in game is a waste of time, may as well add lightening strikes and shark attacks. I get that a lot of people think Big Boom = Instant Death, and for APCs and lighter skinned vehicles (like human beings) there is truth to that but for a tank, which is specifically designed to counter metal moving at it faster than the speed of sound...not so much. - What is the Problem? Since we built and shipped CMCW, I have learned that the process of finding an actual problem is not a simple or straight line. We wind up with a lot of opinion, even our own, anecdotal experiences (often our own) and often contradictory evidence. Rarely do we ever get a definitive study that put the entire thing to bed. So what we wind up doing is navigating an observation and narrowing it down to some core issue that is far less dramatic than people think. So what I think is happening here, and we are going to follow up on, is that fragmentation and blast HE damage on external sub-systems is a little anemic. This does not mean that "Artillery is fundamentally broken!!" or any other hyperbole, it means we should probably be seeing a bit more secondary damage to things like gun systems and tracks. My sense, based on studies we could source, is that cluster munitions are about right. If you do tests with US DPICM you see a lot more sub-system damage, which makes sense. HE should be doing less than DPICM but more than it is doing now, on tanks in particular. So we are talking a tweak here, if you are looking for tanks exploding into fireballs when hit by HE, go play "War Duty, Medals of Thunder - RTS version...clickity, click-fest". There are numerous titles out there that will fill a deep seated explosion/chaos lust...go ahead, we will still be here and it will not hurt our feelings. We will take this back for review and see what makes sense; I make no promises but we are reviewing it. Finally, I did notice someone concerned about an artillery tweak effecting play balance, well it might but in CMCW we did not build for play balance when it came to artillery, or anything else really. We started with what doctrine tells us X unit should have and then added or subtracted for context. We did really not test the scenarios and campaigns and add or subtract support assets based solely on balance. For example, if you play the Soviet campaign, you should see what an MRB should expect as support assets for an MRB on the offence (giver or take). Air assets are probably where we had the most swing as they are not doctrinal but there we almost always used operational context to determine that equation. So what? Well whatever changes, if any, with HE artillery vs armored vehicles it may result in changes to balance, but remember those changes will effect both sides. So it is more likely that we will simply see a more lethal battlefield for all parties. We would not go in and change scenarios and campaigns at this point because the underlying doctrinal-based design has not really changed. Anyway, thanks for the feedback and hopefully we can see some tweaks, particularly with the v5 engine coming out.

I am not convinced a 155mm HE round would “totally destroy” an M1 even with a hit on the top (a HEAT round being a different story of course). 155mm HE is not designed to penetrate armour so a delay time fuse might just have the round break up, a point detonated fuse is going to splash the tank but again likely not penetrate and an air burst will also splash but may not penetrate. Blast is definitely an issue but those beasts can absorb a lot, IEDs showed us that. But all that said, I do agree that a PGM 155 HE should be doing external damage. The gun, optics and stabilizers are all likely to see damage on a point blank hit. A hit on the ground right adjacent to the tank should definitely hammer the tracks.

Well I think you may be onto something wrt fragmentation of airburst, and maybe ground burst. Having seen what can happen in RL, it does look anemic vs tanks at least. Cluster munitions, particularly the US DPICMs are showing a lot of sub-system damage (HMGs etc) but they are modelled individually.

Well the problem is that I am not sure everyone is getting your results...know I am not. So for ground burst "general" sustained heavy fire from 2 x Btys (1 x 152, 1 x 203), after 20 mins: So that is 6 KO'd M113s, 1 x Mob Kill M60 and 2 other M60s with degraded tracks, optics and gyros. Same test with airburst/"Personnel": That is 6 dead M113 (again) but the M60s did get off pretty much scot free (1 M60 had slightly pinged tracks). So you may be correct that sub-systems on tanks (not APCs, obviously) seem pretty immune to airburst but not ground burst. Is this the issue?

I said "battle-field game changer", not "win the war". That is another conversation. To win the war, if it was even possible, it takes more than a Wunderwaffe, it is a strategic shift they would have had to make before the war started. A lot of "ifs" have to fall into place to make it work, which of course did not happen, but are not outside the realm of plausible fiction. IF Germany had made a conscious decision to shift to a consolidating defensive posture once they had achieved (reasonable) objectives in a Russian invasion. IF they had invested into defensive technologies earlier and with significantly more resources and were able to produce them in mass numbers. IF, IF, IF. Now there is also no evidence that Wunderwaffe cannot make a strategic difference, look to Gulf War 1991 and the projected losses versus what actually happened, but they are not a single weapon but more entire strategies which produce those weapons (Air-Land Battle) that give the massive advantage. I disagree that the Russians were some bottomless pit of resources and manpower, that is a myth that lives to this day. They were human and determined but not an invincible monster. ATGMs would have shifted the battlefield significantly, more significantly than the Tiger or the heavy tank series. Would it have "won" the war? I doubt it would have by the standards we normally apply to victory but it could have altered the terms of the outcome. But again, this is so much bigger than a single weapon system. For example, enfranchising the people's Eastern Europe, many who had no love of Stalin or the Soviet system would have made a major impact on that front; arm the eastern Europeans as opposed to oppress them. The problem again is that in order to do this, we are no longer talking about Nazi Germany and the causes of the war in the first place.

I am not a WW2 tank expert by the standards of this forum but in my opinion the Germans went the "wrong way" in their armor and anti-armor development; however, they likely had no way of knowing it. So for a nation that contributed to a revolution in military affairs (and jury is still out on how much) with respect to armored warfare, it is fair to say they lost the strategic bubble about mid-war. The obsession with heavier and bigger tanks was 1) a large drain on shrinking resources and 2) a dead end from a strategic production point of view, and 3) limited tactical value because of point #2; in short a major strategic mistake. There was no way they could see it, they needed a forward thinking genius, which they may have had but he either died or, was ignored (they usually are). A genius who could see the answer was not to build better tanks but simply take away the advantage of the tank itself from your opponent. If Germany had invest all that effort and brainpower in ATGM development, much earlier, that may have changed things at a strategic level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrstahl_X-4). But in order to do that you have to completely abandon the idea of offence and build for defensive superiority, which was not going to happen. In short the German military and political bodies were trapped in a strategic prison of their own making. In CM, imagine taking AT 7s or the Dragons of CMCW and putting them in CMBN or RT but only for one side. With functioning ATGMs en masse (remember that first gen ATGMs would come out only ten years after the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_guided_missile#:~:text=The Malkara missile (from an,missile in the late 1960s.) the infantry/armor relationship would fundamentally change. Infantry units now had man-portable tank killing systems that could reach out to +1000m but off-set all the vulnerabilities of AT guns (mobility, accuracy, concealment, logistics and signature), that is a battlefield game changer particularly if you opponent lacks the same technology or an ability to defeat it.

Damn, I thought this was a book on how to become better addicted to combat (games)gaming...so disappointed....

Fair point, as much fun as it is to poke our resident nationalist troll... To be fair the exclusion was gay and women bashing.

Really, given your pro-Russian/anti-Western track record you think a shot at a national leader (as awkward and ham-handed as it was) was just innocent banter? Seriously are they teaching you guys this in school now? Take a shot, make some fuss and then pretend like you did nothing and everyone is "imagining things"; things like 100k troops parked on the Ukrainian border. My point on democracy is that by taking a shot at JT you clearly do not understand how they work or the role of politicians in this country at least. You seem feisty today, new orders come down?

Again, so far off you don't even see it, can't even see it. Hilarious. This is like Axis Annie telling us that "the Statue of Liberty is kaput!". "Your Tim Hortons is substandard in the production hot beverages!" (Yep, that is showing us alright). Ok, well enough of this OT stuff back to "why the Dutch should be in!"

It is a test to be grown up, for sure. I think we can all work together to ensure we do not disturb Elvis on this sacred day.

LOL, you clearly do not understand how democracies work if you think this is going to get a serious reaction.

Well it didn’t seem to bother the Taliban or any number of people we have been fighting for 30 years or so. This sort of stuff, along with the role of women or LGBTQ, is always a loaded subject but I can say that for most modern militaries all that stuff we were so afraid of and some were willing to die-on-a-hill over became the least of our worries. History has shown the “little things” as big concerns it is endemic in peace time armies, once you get into real fights it all just fades. Of course we are coming out of all that, so we can go back to arguing about boot blousing et al with the comfort no one is actually trying to kill you.

Not much more but there will be hints dropped along the way. I will say that we are not looking at 4 years until the first CMCW DLC, much less than that.