The_Capt

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.

Interestingly this matches what we are seeing in-game. Although the balance of capability at the tactical level is far closer than we expected, at least in the timeframe of the game (79-82), it is incredibly hard to attack US forces over prepared ground. As we build NATO force in I do not see this changing. I agree that a rational war was not likely to break out, but sometimes war is not rational. I think there was opportunity for human error, misunderstanding and paranoia that would have led down the dark path.

LOL. The crap we used to worry about...

So wargaming and the military have a long and weird relationship. It has been employed as a training tool, operational research and simulation tool, staff operational planning tool and a predictive analytical tool (to a lesser extent so far). I say weird because in just about every one of these roles wargaming has had it proponents and its detractors. The proponents tend to be in the objectivist school where warfare can be broken down into its core components and scientific theory can be applied to give hi resolution results. The other camp is the subjectivist school where warfare is a human artistic venture that can never be distilled down to a core ruleset and as such wargaming is a useful tool at best and distraction at worst (this crowd also tend to be in charge and very often ignore wargame results when it counters their own instincts - the history of war is littered with cautionary tales here). So what? Well most western militaries have accepted an uneasy truce with simulation/gaming. They are willing to invest in training as the cost savings and accuracy of what it can do here has been well proven (someone ask @Bil Hardenberger). They are willing to accept operational research...to a point as whenever one is talking about military capability and it value OR will only go so far. Militaries are closed cultures with sacred norms (seriously, get in a discussion about the future of tanks with and army guy) so OR will always be taken with a grain of salt. On operations we have the crux of the matter. The Operational Planning Process has a wargame stage embedded within it but it is more of a staff check to acid wash COAs and pull out key deductions as opposed to predictive analytics. One day, it is likely that predictive analytics will be employed on operations as they are happening but first they will need to be of much higher resolution than what we see now and then they will have to actually demonstrate competitive advantage. Once that happens we are at the edge of Enders Game, thing is most contemporary professional military thinkers have a sense that it will happen, the major question is "when?".

I was not speaking in abstract, but from personal experience. Same goes for helicopters.

Hey Jim, Welcome, and you have my sympathies, trust me. These are a good bunch for the most part but like any bar there is always a few "guys" who just gotta be. So have you tried CMCW by any chance?

Ya so I can see the reason for the question and the short answer is, well "yes, you can pick off a helmet sticking above a cupola shield at short-to-medium range. As has been noted the old human skull is silhouetted nicely and is a curved structure on top of a bunch of straight lines (idea there to re-design the crew helmet). Hitting a 1 foot target at 200m with a modern assault rifle is not sniper work, 400m is approaching just bad luck (unless a test is showing that it is happening all the time) but is not crazy. Couple things to note: - Pixel crew commanders do not behave as per RL. We had a pretty decent method of just sticking the head over the lip and moving around in dips and peeks, or using the gap above the MG. One did not ride into a fire fight with one head held high and rigid, so that is an abstraction. Unlike dismounted infantry, I am pretty sure the game treats the crew like static targets once the vehicle stops moving. - You can't hear sweet FA in a running M113 with that helmet on. You have radio ear pieces built into that thing, which is always chattering especially in a fire fight. Sure there is a little toggle to allow you to hear outside sounds but then you can't hear the damn radio as well. So getting shot at is less a dramatic experience as one might believe. More often than not the first indication is someone on the radio saying "hey you are being shot at" because they can see the fire or tracers. So if anything were to be tweaked it is likely to add movement to the crew commanders head, even a few inches of movement would reduce likelihood of getting hit. But until that gets modeled, well unbutton with care.

So 215m is well within effective range of the AK-74, 415m may be pushing it. As to “ducking”, Hollywood has done realism no favours, I can’t see the first video but those bullets are travelling faster than sound so you are dead at the “crack” and not the “thump”. One can only duck if they miss the first burst and the brain can recognize what is going on, more veteran crews will react faster while green troops will literally stand there wondering what is making all the holes.

Well any game can only be historically accurate at the start of a scenario. Once the player makes the first move the scenario is no longer accurately going to recreate what really happened, that would be reenactment and documentaries do a better job of that . This is why the WW2 vs Cold War “what if” does not make any real sense as all games are “what if” once someone starts playing them regardless of time frame. So in CMCW we used period units with highly accurate organizational research and the in game modelling. We also looked at the terrain as closely as we could for where the most likely battles would occur. So on the first turn we are as accurate as we could get on maps drawn from the actual terrain it would have happened on (e.g. for Eiterfeld on the Soviet Campaign we used an actual write up for a war game distributed back in the 80s as a battle was likely to happen there). This is really not that much different from the older titles except they often have real battlefields to pull from where we had to do best guess. Once the metal starts flying and players start playing the games are effectively the same overall abstractions of reality. But each to their own.

Heh, no we have other issues, not the least of which we are a nation everyone wants a piece of, too few people on too many resources. In our case we have employed a parasitic strategy where we link up with a friendly empire and essentially become a vassal state, UK first, now US. It is smart, if unpalatable for many (so we lie to ourselves), as it trades our national resources for security at a pretty decent exchange rate. Internally we have got as much baggage as anyone else. Look, every nation on earth is like every family on earth...we all got issues. Dragging this back to the game, national strategy directly influences military doctrine and employment. In the USSR it was one of "big scary dog, which will attack if 1) we are really afraid or 2) see a chance to get away with it." Either way, in CMCW we went with Soviet offensive doctrine because it simply made sense in context of the game. Now if you want to do a campaign or series of scenarios based on a fictional break up of the Soviet Union leading to civil war or forcing a Western intervention a la Coyle's The Ten Thousand, hey go for it. The strategic context is plausible at least and you would get NATO offensive action in the region. We considered it but we were already "what if-ing" and didn't want to stray too far from history and the actual forces that were postured to fight on the most likely battlefields of the day.

I honestly think the Soviet believed that the best defence was a good offense. I think their efforts were focused on the global spread of communism and their own power on its back but they were not going to employ WW3 to make it happen as it would have likely been the end of it all. Of course in CMCW we are "what if-ing" the start of that dark path in a game. A path we definitely got close to but I am also glad we never took.

Well the guy did invent the American version of political warfare and with respect to the USSR and Russia, he probably saved us from bumbling into a nuclear holocaust. It was Kennan that championed the overall grand strategy of containment as opposed to outright confrontation, which was brilliant in the day. He started the idea of a choke hold which the US finally landed in the 80s. I agree with the assessment that Russia is always "about Russia", one could hold a mirror up to US foreign policy on that point. As a nation it is essentially the leftovers; all the parts no one else really wanted. That is harsh but true, not Asian, not European and definitely not Persian or Arab. All the bits people really did not want to bother with got pushed into a confederation that has only ever functioned when authoritarian rule is in place. It holds itself together through strongmen and paranoia (another lesson the West could draw from) and this is historically consistent from the czars, to the communist party, to whatever Putin and his crew are. The Soviet Union (and Russia) need the West (as you note) as the external thing to keep it together internally. That and the WW2 instilled doctrine of the best defence is to bleed out your opponent on someone else's soil kind of underpin the whole Soviet/Russian enterprise. Finally, your point on the Cold War battle of "isms" is also on point and that is what is different from today with respect to Russia at least. This was an ideological conflict with both sides seeing themselves as bringing light to the world, on one side democracy and the other communism. This made for an interesting wild card as it got layered on national baggage on both sides. The Cold War was definitely a game and both sides knew it but it also got scary sometimes.

Ah, ok so we want to switch to contemporary. You see all those orange dots labeled "Russian troops in occupied territories", ya think there is an ongoing trend here? A trend that might just lead the West to thinking that Russian intentions are a little less than defensive? Again the West is definitely not on the side of the angels all the time but the entire USSR/Russian addiction to invading things gets everyone on edge, which may very well be the desired effect but don't come on an internet forum and insult everyone by saying "oh no, they are being totally forced to do so because the mean old West". As to nukes, well what do you think is keeping modern Russia at bay right now? That, and economic actions which would cripple it. But we have to put up with these temper tantrums for a while yet, apparently.

Did not want to forget this one. I have never heard of a conventionally offensive plan in the West for Europe but that does not mean one did not exist. The issue here is one of posture and not planning. The NATO war machine was defensive in posture through and through. It did not have the numbers or capabilities to even come close to a reasonable strategic offensive in this theatre. It would have seen us trying to attack a numerically superior force with shortening supply lines while ours got much longer. The West had watched Napoleon and Hitler try it and fail gloriously so there was little to no appetite to take that one on. Which hits the final nail in the "US/NATO were planning to invade and take all our goats" theory; political will. There is no way the West could have convinced all the NATO states to even get involved, it would have broken the alliance to even try. Hell NATO could barely hold itself together on a good day let alone propose dying in numbers to attack the Soviet Union. Instead the US went the other way, outcompete and out spend, something they were very good at and the communist system was not or at least the Soviet version of communism -the jury is frankly still out on the Chinese system. The US buried the Soviet Union in a contest it could not win and in fact fractured the the entire thing while trying. I argue the USSR broke itself trying to sustain strategic offensive options. If the USSR had simply said "ok we are defensive only" they could have buttoned up and spent a lot less and maybe survived for another 50 years...but that is my personal theory and would need a lot more time and study to prove.

No it doesn't...what do they teach you kids in school these days? Pointing out obvious biased and subjectivity does not automatically make one bias and subjective...what kind of logic is that? You keep coming back to the nukes, which is a totally separate discussion but let's have it. You own numbers demonstrate that the USSR was not content with a defensive set of options. Nuclear deterrence is not a question of one-for-one. All one needs to do is demonstrate that you have enough second strike capability to destroy an opponent and you have successful deterrence. The USSR had 600 nuclear weapons in 1960 and almost 10k in 1985..why? Well the West had exactly one card to play. Based on conventional capability (remember all those Soviet tanks, guns and divisions) the West was very concerned that it was going to lose and had to have second/survivable strike capability to keep nuclear deterrence in play. The Soviet Union which already had the conventional superiority was chasing strategically offensive options not defensive ones. Of course the whole thing got farcical towards the end as both sides had enough to wipe each other out several times over. So no, not "defensive only" by a long shot. We had an aggressive empire which had actively tried to expand on the periphery for years, that already had conventional superiority in Europe chasing nuclear parity, if not superiority. How does any of this smack of "defensive in nature"? I argue the "brainwashing" is occurring at your end because I am willing to fully admit the West and US were doing the same thing globally. The West was very offensive strategically, plenty of evidence to prove that one particularly in other dimensions of power; diplomacy, economic, information and definitely culture. In the Europe, however, they were militarily defensive only because that was all they could afford to be. In short from the western perspective the only thing keeping the Soviets at bay was the nuclear equation, which is a very precarious position to be in. What is demonstrating your obvious bias (and agenda) is the fact that I will argue both sides, while you stick to Soviet "lambs and doves" armed with more tanks than god almighty as the victims here based solely on the fact that the USSR could not get its act together with respect to nuclear weapons...and it sure tried.

And now we get to why I find the OP questionable in intent. @dbsapp has demonstrated, repeatedly, this pro-Russia/Soviet line. Sure the Soviet Union (and now Russia) are totally innocent of any offensive actions and are totally defensive if you are willing to forget: - 55k tanks and about 50k tubes and rocket systems all pretty much pointing West. Anyone with a basic understanding of military force ratios can see that those are offensive postures. They had actual plans for western invasion scenarios. If the Soviet Union never was intent on a European invasion then why all the hardware? Just cause? - Proxy Wars in just about every corner of the globe - and no, they were not all started by the US/NATO - the crushing of any dissidents or counter-narratives, a trend that continues to this day. - A long history of invasion - Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, of course, Afghanistan. The West is not innocent of these either (we call them interventions) but both Russia and the Soviet Union were (and are) egregious in the "near abroad" by any standards. - The hybrid/grey/espionage/subversive actions that were endemic of the Cold War and again are still with us today. No sale. I am not saying we in the West are a clean as new driven snow, far from it but the whole "we are only defending our poor huddled selves from the nasty West" is so laughable as to be trite. The Soviet Union was a great power and like all great powers was interested in keeping that power at all costs. It was not an innocent grass roots movement just "trying to save the children from the US", it was a massive war machine capable of, and clearly demonstrating intent to throw down if it had to or if it saw a clear strategic gain to made. The fact that it could not keep up is a bitter pill to swallow but try a larger glass of water. The Soviet doctrine in CMCW is built on what we understood it to be based on decades of research, spying and analysis. Unless someone can some up with direct and substantiated Soviet era primary sources that differ, I am very untrusting of any counter-narratives coming to light in this current strategic environment.

And we are just getting warmed up. Seriously, it is all good. Play them all. WW2 has that deep historic roots and the birth of all arms while the modern titles are a spectrum of heightening lethality, range and pace. And then CMSF is one of the truly hybrid warfare simulators on the market.

Well if that is true - and the collective ability for humans to believe pure fiction is well established - then we were probably closer to the end than we gave ourselves credit for. In CMCW we took nukes off the table in order to avoid the Deus Ex Machina of tac nukes (and the game does not model them beyond unplugging your PC). Maybe Soviet tactics make sense if all one has to do is drive over blasted ground all the way to Paris but then why have so much mass? Unless they were thinking counter tac nukes (freakin madness), either way pulling this back to OP all I think CMCW is doing is demonstrating the weaknesses in Soviet tactical doctrine. What is hilarious is we get nearly as many complaints that the US is at too much disadvantage, which maybe is pointing at some holes in western doctrine as well. And I have no doubt there are abstractions in the game engine that wander from RL, every game in existence does. So the truth probably lies somewhere in between but as @Probus aptly demonstrates in his recent Chaos thread, it is a helluva lot of fun trying to find it.

I never really bought into this to be honest. I mean I am sure, like NATO, some hawks in the Soviet machine thought a limited nuclear war was possible or somehow tac nukes, which were definitely part of the plan, would blow the holes they needed and somehow not trigger an escalation. However, I find it difficult to believe the political grown ups believed for a second that once someone started throwing nukes around, the entire game would not be up. Maybe in the 60s but by the late 70s the nuclear triad was in full force and the simulations all showed the same outcomes. Regardless, at the tactical level the observation stands even with nukes…a whole lotta hope as the primary course of action at many levels with respect to a Soviet attack. A NATO attack, while I am sure some hawks again believed it, trying to get NATO onside with offensive action was a fever nightmare. Even Cold War NATO was like herding cats and trying to get an agreement for offensive action, for a force not even built for it, without some extreme forcing function (like a violent fall of the Soviet Union) makes about as much sense as that 2012 Red Dawn when NK invades the US (poor Chris H).

As to artillery performance in CM vs RL, that is tricky. I have run tests and have seen numbers that mirror some RL data but that is one rabbit hole I have not gone too deeply into. Here is one very technical document we dug out during research https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a131493.pdf If I am reading this correctly (but most tests were vs BMPs), killing armour vehicles with arty is a lot harder than a few screenshots from the internet might suggest. I may have time to run some more test to see just what in game performance offers but a lot of variables at play here.

Interesting question, although I am suspect of the intent behind it. Regardless, the bigger question is whether Soviet tactics would have worked at all. At the operational level the theory was centralized controlled maneuver, which worked in WW2 but was a serious leap of faith in the much faster and comms denied battlefield of the 1980s. Air power is the other issue as without air supremacy those long lines of logistics were never going to work. At the tactical level the idea that mass would beat quality was also weak and built on hope. The idea that massed arty would smash all-mech forces of NATO was a serious leap. It takes a well shaped, dense piece of exotic metal to kill a tank, metal fragments from HE can damage it but would not likely sweep away NATO formations. I would argue that CMCW is accurate (with caveats) in demonstrating the weaknesses of Soviet doctrine at the tactical level (jury is out on operational). Every Soviet campaign scenario gives the Soviet player at least 2:1 advantage and in cases 3:1 and better. But they show just how hard it is to “smash” through well prepared and sighted terrain that your opponent has owned for over 25 years. Arty may be a little weaker, testing is probably required and this is not a new issue, but you will note that engineer obstacles for NATO are no where near what would have been employed in RL so I am betting it evens out closer to RL when the “most effective offensive tool for the Soviets” is blunted along side that of the most effective defensive tool for NATO. So what? I personally think the Soviet theory was broken. It worked in WW2 but they were not keeping up with the times and would have been seriously crushed in late 70, early 80 which would have likely led to nuclear options being employed and inevitable escalation…let’s be grateful it never happened. CMCW is only demonstrating the weaknesses of the Soviet approach, which is what a simulation should do. Now all that said, we have players who have clearly mastered the Soviets, @Grey_Fox and his series of the Soviet campaign definitely show what can be done to with the Soviets in the right hands.

That is a tough one. The best solution I have seen was to amphib across the lake up the middle and short hook your tanks in up that road along the lake. This one has been beaten but is tricky. @Ultradave tested that one and beat it, perhaps he can assist.

We don’t know what the actual stats are for in game, BFC keeps that pretty close hold. I have run a few tests and am seeing T80s able to penetrate and KO the M1 in the front turret at 500m with BM22, so I do not think based on what we have been able to glean that the in-game M1 frontal armour is too far off the 400mm KE.

Sigh, oh how I have missed this. No, it is not an "absolutely game breaking asset" [aside: when did this become a thing? Back in the day, if a game was hard you found a way to beat it, not run to social media and declare it "broken!! OMG...END OF DAYZ!!" Whatever.]. So if the M1 105mm version is rolling with about 400 KE then the BM 22 which has penetration at point blank range of 440mm (http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/index.php?title=3BM22) is going to be challenged at range to penetrate the M1 frontally. What is interesting is that the US appears to be more afraid of HEAT than KE, which given all the Soviet ATGMs makes sense.

Yes, please do. One more question, what was EW set at?