The_Capt

Make sure your GPU is running CM and not an integrated graphics chip on the motherboard. This makes a significant difference. As GeorgeMC notes this may be worth a trouble ticket as The Citadel is probably the biggest battle in the game, especially on setup (once the zone is removed it should speed up) but in testing it runs at workable frame rates on computers over 5 years old. So something is definitely going on here with your experience.

Bring in the French and we have 1812 Redux!

Guilty as charged on this count and proudly so. The Soviet campaign is. by-design, for advanced CM players; if you are playing it you are already in a smaller group of devotees. This is why I had no compunction on taking the gloves off and leaving them off. I also fully expected some to be downright angry...and that is ok. If you can finish it with a win, particularly March or Die, well that puts you in truly rarified air in my books. That all said, it is still very realistic and built pretty much straight from Soviet doctrine, with abstractions of course. You are totally correct in the recon compression, originally I had it as the 30 min window right out of the manual but the feedback during testing is that is made the front end really a drag and kinda boring (which CM should never be), so we compressed it for shock factor. We tightened up several other scenarios in the campaign as well for that reason. Hey, when you get to Alsfeld, send screenshots. I haven't seen anyone make it that far yet.

So my suggestion is you start here on this thread: A lot of western literature on all of this, which as Combatintman points out was not only pretty accurate in the day but has been validated post-collapse. There is always going to be some western bias but here history really helps. The Soviets were a product of WW2 and by the end of that war, their tactics may have seemed all human waves and mindless charges but if one pulls up a level in altitude you can see a lot of intelligent design going on here. The Soviet doctrine was never a "mindless horde" they just worked at a different resolution. As was noted, they knew their force was going to be largely conscripted in depth so they built a system that made that a virtue, it is really smart. They basically got over the tactical-horror of losses, accepted them as par for the course and instead focused on operational and strategic maneuver to end the war quickly, resulting on overall lower losses strategically. This is why an FSE may feel very important to a player (and probably to the Soviet Bn commander too) but in reality it was a fire-and-forget peice of ammunition..in fact if one unpacks a Soviet Division, it was also a "one-way" formation. Scenario design is tricky as one cannot force a player to play it a certain way, all one can do is encourage through things like; initial placement, scenario length, environment and mission briefings. The Soviet Campaigns were never designed to be played first (there are plenty of warnings) so they are not really an introduction (that is what Cpt Miller's excellent tutorials are for). But we knew that players, predominantly coming from the west, would likely default to western tactics, which are more cautious and "elegant" - makes sense for a quality over quantity force - so the first Soviet Campaign scenario is designed to be a bit of a jolt...and apparently it is working. This is not the last time in this campaign that the player will be thrust into an awkward tactical starting position but high mass with a lot of momentum is going to do exactly that. As we learned though, once a player makes the transition to Soviet-type problem solving successfully, CMCW becomes a whole new experience which I can only hope most enjoy. I personally played through Scenario one multiple times and on my last go through, I managed to kill all of those lead M60s and took a single T62 and 2xBTRs as losses. The best part was figuring out how to do it!

Thanks and very glad you enjoyed it. That is not a bad point, I think we can amend the mission briefing. As to the tac map, lemme check but if you keep going the follow on forces fall more in line with the Tac map. The thing with the Soviets is that at a tactical level they were pretty much committed from the word “go”. As a Bn commander you would not really have the FSE pull into those woods and carefully prod for enemy contacts (that is more the CRPs job). Force preservation is very important but so is momentum, that is the Soviet dilemma both in the game and historically. But Soviet force preservation is different than US definitions, losing 30% is not out of the ordinary..again so long as you can keep momentum. We can look at giving the player more of this in the briefing so it feels a bit less like a “gotcha”.

No, the FSE shows up as intended. The short answer is “Soviet doctrine”, the FSE is designed to basically “recon in force” and will follow up a CRP quickly and in force to either 1. Defeat the enemy in contact, 2. Piquet the enemy, if they cannot defeat them, so the follow on forces can attack or bypass. In the first Soviet campaign scenario the FSE is going to come straight down that road with momentum based on the enemy they are facing and overall operational context, it main mission would be to take Mansbach (the first objective)…and they are going to take losses. A lot of players have found the switch to Soviet tactics somewhat jarring but once you make the shift they can be really cool to play and a great challenge. How did you do in the US Campaign by the way? Very glad you enjoyed it.

OP...c'mon it was right there! "ZSU-23/4 Zuper Deadly !"

Yep, we didn't get these fixes in under the wire, so we will have to get them out on the next one.

Bil and I once bandied around an idea of recreating the War of 1812 in a dystopian future, Invasion America would nicely link into that concept. Unfortunately that one is not currently on the books...but a lad can always dream.

Just to follow up. In the interim, players can simply open these scenarios in the editor and purchase a Soviet Air controller team for Head to Head play.

Ok, that one is on me. The air support works in the single player campaigns but of course this will be an issue in H2H. Will get it fixed.

Gotta be honest, the video gave me flashbacks to the first time I saw CMBO. Nice and clean interface. The level of abstraction will be key.

Hey don't get me wrong, there is room for improvement within the game for fire support. A FPF mission or FPF TRP makes very good sense and they definitely did exist in the context of the CM games. (Although, frankly the gunners can get in line behind the engineers in regard to in-game improvements) And there are exceptional circumstances where a fire mission system like this could happen, problem is how much do we invest in these more niche scenarios? A tactical formation may the main effort once in its entire history, and then it would be looking at a deliberate assault scenario. In that scenario the "go" would likely come from the guns themselves, not the other way around. Keep in mind that in the west maneuver warfare as concept did not even exist before CMSF in the CM timeframes (CMCW can almost see it but it was still a few years off). This runs into a developers dilemma trying to cover as many possible scenarios as possible in the time one has to develop the game. I have had this argument with the BFC guys for years wrt military engineering; however, now having been on the other end, I totally get their point. As cool as explosive line breaching would be in the game, its actual use is exceptionally limited (without getting silly). We had the same argument for FASCAM in CMCW: do we want to spend months on a feature we might see once or twice? I would argue that outside of CMSF (but even here the game is a lot more near-pear than say operations in Afghanistan over the last 20 years) almost all CM titles are going to see the vast majority of fire support in scenarios as I have described previously. For CMCW we did a lot of research on combat support in the timeframe and although I do not argue that US/Western artillery could operate as the OP describes, I seriously doubt they would be offered a situation where they would be able to use it. An AMC order did not exist at all in Soviet doctrine (in any war), the US/West would only use it rarely in peer high intensity fights (and then mostly only in a contemporary timeframe) which remains the core of CM titles. In the future, if the Azer-Armenian conflict is an indication, fire support might be entirely controlled at the operational level or conversely made virtually organic for a set period of time. I think the jury is still out on that one, which is a major problem with building in-the-future games, namely accuracy. Anyway, CM3 might make all of this so easy that we can get every possible variation imaginable but for now, most Combat Support will likely remain an 80% solution. But c'mon, we got freakin cluster munitions!

Well, yes, I suppose I am saying that, or they might be dead in 25 mins. Any guns above battalion mortars would be swinging wildly across the battlefield with more calls for fire than they could ever support. While at the same time hopping like a strung out frog to avoid air strikes and counter-battery. The situation where they could sit and wait for one tactical unit to say “now” and be able to actually deliver would be extremely rare. I actually think CM is too forgiving in permanently assigning fire support to a tactical formation (at least in the historical titles). In reality they could be pulled away or lost mid-battle. The situation you are describing is very common in our current fights. We own the space, the guns can be assigned for much longer and tighter because our opponents are largely uncons. This sort of fire support was also available in Vietnam and a lesser extent Korea, so there are historical theatres where it would work...but few and far between in most CM titles. Again, SOF missions would also apply but really still outliers. So yes, fully recognize it is a tool in the box. Just proposing that in a high intensity peer fight it would seldom be able to be used.

Well I would argue it means something as far as CMCW is concerned and we won't be seeing it in that title or that era because it simply was not, nor is not realistic in that timeframe. Was not "talking down" to be honest...was trying to educate but like most in the younger generation I am sure you guys have it all figured out and history offers you little (ok, that last part was talking down a bit). I had a boss a long time ago that said, "there is nothing more dangerous than a one war military"...he noted France after WWI as the prime example. The problem was (and is) that once a military becomes enamored with one type of fighting for too long they tend to only see the world through that lens; history shows repeatedly how this never ends well. Good hard won lessons become doctrine, repeated utility of that doctrine leads heavy investment and lost corporate memory of anything else...and then it all becomes dogma if things go on long enough. I suggest that you read up on the recent Ukrainian conflict or the very recent Azer-Armenian conflict. Both demonstrate that the speed and lethality of the modern battlefield has accelerated once again and I am not sure where that leaves our current tools but I am sure that it looks nothing like the wars we have been fighting since the end of the Cold War.

Well we like to think we have been "part of the team" for quite some time now (Bil and I were beta testers for quite awhile and they are definitely a key part of the whole outfit). That said, this time was definitely a different level of commitment but we are really glad that Steve et al took a chance on us. Right now we are focused on continuing to support CMCW as we roll from BFC early access to wide release under Slitherine. After that we will see. Nothing is written in stone just yet, but I can say we do have plans...and then a plan after that...and maybe one more after that.

We are on it. With luck it should turn up in a patch coming to a neighbourhood near you soon.

Do not take this completely the wrong way but you are a product of your time. Do not feel bad as I have to continually remind the current crop of officers at a staff college that they are as well. It is also my fault for not qualifying the context. You quote above speaks to where we are as modern militaries, completely overwhelming the current battlefields so that we can "hold a battery for 20 mins". Our current way of warfare, which is about 30 years old has now become doctrine...it is also very dangerous to assume all warfare will nicely line up with it. In a high intensity peer fight, I am afraid we are going to have to re-learn a lot of lessons the hard way and this would be one of them. In this case that battery of howitzers might be dead in 20 mins and any ideas of hold fire "on my command" will likely go out the window extremely fast once we are at parity or worse. So in context of the original posting, we are talking in CM (which you are correct has abstractions), so WW2, Cold War, fictional Syria (which is probably as close to the current thinking aligns), CMBS (to which we are not well aligned at all). In all but Syria any idea of bottlenecking calls for fire when they are 1) likely to be quickly overwhelmed and 2) at threat of being knocked out, is simply not realistic nor historical. Don't worry, there will be hard lessons for everyone (e.g. Air Supremacy), or maybe we will get lucky and it will be small asymmetrical wars for awhile longer.

Just to add to this, ASL V is correct, this is not how fire support works. Perhaps Coy mortars and maybe even Bn organic fire support (but that is a stretch), everything above that gets fed into a Fire Support Coord Centre (different countries call it variations on this) where call for fire are coming in continuously and are prioritized and executed as quickly as possible. The only exception would be for SOF but we are talking exceptional strategic missions. Now in the future, I have heard talk of completely automating fire support (in all its forms) and having something like this is much more possible, particularly when we are talking an entirely all-PGM inventory. In CM context this sort of thing would be beyond CMBS and probably into the 15-20 years from now timeframe (but there are differing opinions). Next step after that are accurate predictive models (so AI based C4ISR) that basically plots the fire before the tactical commander even knows he/she needs it.

Ok, thanks for this. We are going to follow up. Not sure how QB pricing is done, I expect it is an algorithm and looks like it needs a bit of tweaking.

But then you get paradoxical behavior in RL. Green troops do not know any better so they will blindly charge in, while experienced troops with tight communities have well established informal leaders and may very well simply disobey a really dumb order....like the kind players often give them (I know I do).

So on the AI plans, the last three options on the bottom (default they say "Mixed, Normal, No Dismount"), if you hit the "normal" tab, there are a series of ambush options with ranges. This needs to be assigned to a specific order though.

Well, not really. Scenario designers put reinforcements where they think the Soviets would have put them in the scenario. The shock effect is organic based on where the scenario designers also think the US would put troops. I mean there is a bit of drama at play here as well but nothing you are seeing is really unrealistic for a Soviet FSE/Advance Guard on the move to establish a breakout in the Fulda area. The player can crack this one successfully, even if they take loses. In the Soviet Campaign overcoming these types of tough challenges was kinda the theme. It is also why we suggested the Soviet campaign be played last, but players are free to play anyway they like. Way back when we started pulling the campaign together some of the old timers said "AI will never truly compete with a human player, the best you can hope for is a Draw". So we worked hard at building a campaign that challenges that assumption but still employs realistic doctrine on both sides. Some players might see some "gotchas" but hey it is all in the spirit of good fun.

There you go! I do think a some frustration with playing the Soviets is built into the learning curve adaptation towards Soviet style warfare, which seems to actually work for them in this title.

To get a real sense of the Soviet approach to warfare. The FSE is not some sort of mincing recon package, skulking around in the trees for hours. It is an opening punch that is going to come straight down that road and crash into the lead US tripwire. It can be done btw, testers managed to not only take Mansbach and wipe out those M60s but keep pushing up the mountain...now they needed a couple tries.... Good luck.