The_Capt

Work pretty good on ducks and those little buggers can really move.

That was nuts. Like something out of science fiction.

Well you are as honest as they come, I will give you that.

Any chance you are a journalist? Game reviewer?

Ah gotcha. Agreed. I mean it was also Putin’s Birthday but sometimes crap just happens. Hamas does not need Russia and its sharing plans would have been a liability. At most Iran may have communicated something, but even that is a pretty big stretch. As to Russia pulling strings to make Hamas dance? Well, I would have to see some pretty hefty evidence to believe it.

I am confused. Are you saying there is a link based on operation, culture and regime? Or not a link in-spite of the similarities?

C’mon, seriously?! So those rural slaves had influence on their masters decisions on going to war? Just because a bunch of rich guys own country estates does not make a direct link to dirt farmers working those lands and foreign policy. Well before we embrace the “benign mercantile empires”: https://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0145 They were backstopped by taking indigenous peoples and making them free labour. War is not the fault of any one sector or level of human society. Any cursory review of its history shows this clearly. The “peaceful, noble savage bunch” say it was all “big city’s” fault. Now Taleb is going the other way and trying to blame “peasants”. Big money of course is the only way to go because lord knows we never went to war over money. Humans go to war because it is baked into the species. We have done it since the Dawn of our history and consistently found reasons to do it, even when it made no sense. Trying to blame it on a section of society is the weak thinking.

Ugh, can we not. Unless we can see some hard evidence that links these two events, then we are basically in “bio-lab” territory. A tactical counter offensive in Ukraine somehow linked to the largest terror attack in Israel’s history (might largest since 9/11) is just too much of a stretch with what we do know. It opens up the door to all sorts of pro-Russian, or pro-Ukrainian conspiracy theories that have no grounding in facts.

Well the Peloponnesian War kinda stands as a counterpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War Punic Wars don’t really fit either. Neither Rome or Carthage were really “Large countries with centralized identities” in the modern sense. In fact the entire theory kind of falls apart in the face of history. Large urban areas have been seats of power that rural “peasants” are forced to feed. Those seats of power have pretty much started most wars, at least external inter-collective wars. I mean farmers in France did not start WW1, nor did they set the conditions for it. Government in Paris did. To think that serfs in Imperial Russia had a vote in that country’s entry into WW1 is silly. In fact their “vote” was cast in 1917 to leave that war and embrace revolution. In fact the more one thinks about it, the less sense it actually makes. Commerce does not breed tolerance, it breeds dependence, which can turn ugly and be seen as a threat - See US/China relations. There are so many historical counter-factuals to that position it is not really even worth following up. This is just terrible deductive reasoning in action. A thesis framework never really tested. Just posted it online as hard truth. I really liked Black Swan and AntiFragile but Taleb needs to stay in his lane - gifted mathematician, not a student of war.

As someone who has done game design then you know that your own experience is not necessarily reflective of everyones experience. Take a look at the Cold War forum. A few people before you have come out not liking the Soviet campaign, or even Scenario 3 but it is not overwhelming by any stretch. In fact most of the feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive from the community we built the game for. And we do have some new folks getting into a whole new era of warfare they did not know about before. As to skill, well I beat Scenario 3 (after more than one try) and felt like I had to use skill. I even learned something about how the Soviet system could work in this situation. There is a counter-point, and based on feedback I know I am not the only one. So I read your points and do not even entirely disagree but as far as CMCW is concerned, but the core community has already spoken. We must be doing something right. Handholding is a plague on modern gaming. So much so the retro Rogue-like movement is very alive and well. For this community, spoon feeding post-game solutions or explanations kinda takes away from the community as a whole in trying to figure a game out. Go online and see how many videos have been made of folks playing CMCW. So I am not claiming CMCW or the Soviet campaign are perfect. But they are squarely in the red rings as far as the primary audience is concerned. Not going to mess around with that solution to much - if it ain’t broke don’t fix it…kinda thinking. As to market growth. Look, first rule of game design as far as I am concerned is the same as warfare - know what game you are in. CM is a niche within a niche. It will never, and has never gone mainstream. This is a point of pride for all these weirdos, some who have been with this whole thing for over 20 years. We welcome new gamers with open arms. This has to be one of the last non-toxic gaming communities left. But we aim to target the fan base. If we can do that and pull in some new interest, great. In many ways CMCW pushed the envelop of what CM can do. We used huge maps and large forces…that was a turn off for some. But we adhered to realism and authenticity. We made a game designed for the community, by members of that community. The only reason I got engaged in this discussion was that you seemed to infer that we did not do QA/QC and that is why you had a bad experience. Not how it went down. Deliberate design decisions. So when we get BAOR done, it will have an easier, middle and hard campaigns. Some scenarios bordering on unfair but a lot of real war scenarios are unfair. We won’t be dropping hints or suggestions…let the grogs grumble. But the right people will love it to death, and maybe some new ones too.

Thanks for this. Someone already tagged it for me, but now it is rising up my reading list.

Could not agree more loudly (we should start a podcast...seems to be the rage). The fundamental question every one needs to ask when seeing an phenomenon in this war is: What does this do to the options? Unless it shifts options in favour, or against a side, then it is likely "just an effect". Effects stack up eventually forcing decision (even negative ones), which are the roadmaps of options. But options are bigger than any tactical action or exchange...until they are not. So, and this goes for the "Ukraine fanbois" and "Doomsday Club", the question we need to ask every time we see something is the one above. Are Ukraine's options expanding, sustaining or shrinking? Are Russia's? How does "this" matter to those options? If we see an RA attack, well does it actually indicate an increase in Russian options spaces? Does the attack yield better operational options? Is all it doing is trying to sustain the options the RA already have? We need to stop seeing an event through narrow lenses of "killed" or "ground taken/lost". Past troop numbers and equipment. Is it decisive (in either direction)? Does it impact options? Here I agree with Steve. Avdiivka is the RA sustaining options, at best. The UA offensive has not yielded options expansion...that we can see. Have they eroded the RA enough that opening up another offensive is an option? I do not know. Evidence is that the UA operations have not yielded a fundamental shift in their options, but are they compressing the RAs? Have they compressed the RA military options to the point that Offense is off the table? I will leave that to you guys to discuss and figure out, but I do recommend keeping that lens and metric in mind before we make any sweeping judgements on any given event.

On convicts - Am I the only one who sees this as a bad thing for the RA? I mean when you are out of trained troops and down to hurling penal units at a problem most reasonable military analysis would see that as a systemic force generation failure. If the UA were down to this approach the MacGregors of the world would be making so much hay out of it 24/7. Yet when Russia does it...well it is sign of Russian resolve and never-ending manpower!

Just going to pull on this one here. So we knew from the start what audience this game was going to appeal to - I personally think that is probably the most important rule of design. We knew exactly who we were designing for from the start - the obsessively detail orientated grognard. If anyone else wanted to play the game, great, but the core audience was not the casual gamer. So this meant that our audience within this community already likely knew more about Soviet doctrine than we did. We decided very early on to focus less on hand-holding and more on realism over form, and let the customer pull the "fun" out of that. This is very niche market focus. So our core demographic is not looking at this scenario wondering what is going on, they already know that three battles in on this axis of Soviet advance is going to get pretty hard. They also are not looking for luck, they are looking for a realistic starting position and then the ability to see how they would fair within it - that is the "fun". Now of course we knew we could not make them all brutal so trade-offs were made and we scaled them to ensure we did not totally alienate. The Soviet Campaign was specifically designed to cater to the truly crazy type who would find this fun...you were warned. We put a LOT of content into this game - this on top of what CM delivers wrt editors and multiplayer options. So we did not feel bad about making the really hard campaign. *Spoilers below - read with caution* Now as to your experience, well you are making some pretty wide assumptions here. The first being that no skill can win this fight. That is not true. We beta-test every campaign and scenario and they do not pass until someone can beat them through skill. Our beta testers are one skilled bunch an they found this one challenging, we scaled it back quite a bit to balance it better. But they could beat it through skill. They came up with some pretty creative ways to do it but it can be done. My way, when I went through is what I typed up awhile back.. I went left. The only real cover exists far left or right. Left axis through the trees is a hard push but you avoid the Bradleys, while pounding them and has a lone US infantry platoon dug in which can be overrun. Once you do that you are behind the urban area and can advance outside of the killzone. The fact we dropped you right into a killzone at outset should be obvious, the challenge is to get out of it and still advance. So you did not find this one fun? Well there is a big ole editor and a bunch of master maps, go make one you do find fun. There is also a really large community that does this for you so I encourage you to explore it out. Just know we knew exactly what we were doing when we built the scenario. This is not a failure in QA/QC, it is the direct result of those processes. This was not neglect or laziness, it was deliberate. Scenario 4 in the campaign is also pretty hard, you are on defence on that one. 5 is more fun, we decided people needed a break. And Alsfeld is one massive game of smash face in a culminating battle - I found that one to be a blast but not too many actually get to it. So difficulty does not preclude "fun"...for some. And it was those "some" we were doing this game, and the Soviet Campaign in particular, for. If that ain't you, well no worries, lots of other content to go and play. A lot of really well balanced scenarios you can enjoy - (although I would really stay away from Valley of Ashes played from the Soviet side if you found this scenario "not fun", that one is brutal).

Oh absolutely. Grant showed the same thing in the US Civil War, you can be winning but still losing battles at the same time. The USSR was keeping up pressure and tempo and it cost them a lot of people to do it - they had the people and force generation system to back it up. Germany tried same but it was in backward trajectory that it never recovered from. Again we are back to option spaces. Battles, won or lost, only matter if they impact options spaces. Are Russia’s options spaces fundamentally changed in these latest actions…nope. Are Ukraine’s after months of offensives…I really don’t think so either, at least not yet. The only dimension that Ukraine could be expanding options spaces is in RA attrition but we won’t see those results until something breaks. One has to assume that the UA also has not suffered enough attrition to collapse Ukrainian options spaces or they would have stopped by now. So none of these actions have created operational, let alone strategic results as of yet. This is what Denial is all about really. I guess my main concern here is that overestimating Ukraine’s progress is just as dangerous as overestimating Russia’s position.

So much for exclusive…every nutter with a cardboard sign will be bogarting the brandy glasses.

Well Steve did a pretty good job already. I would say your view is definitely skewed. I am not sure this last RA offensive was “strategic” or “massive”. We really have no idea how hard the RA is “sweating” but did it occur to you they did this to try and project the narrative you are buying into? As to massed fires, well you do not cite a single source or fact in your entire analysis so it is really hard to follow up on what is essentially an opinion piece. Do you have stats on the levels of fires? Haiduk just posted some that show RA fires dropping, which kind of matches a lot of observations. Also I would offer you go back and look at Severodonetsk last summer, the level of fires there was surpassing WW1 concentrations. Do you have credible sources that show they exceeded this at Aviidka? My thoughts are that this is a local tactical offensive designed to demonstrate and signal that the RA is not solely on the Defensive…but the cost of this demonstration likely exceeds its actual impact. It shows the UA employing the same elements of Denial they themselves are facing, and they appear to be just as effective. We seem to be at a point where neither side is able to achieve operational levels of offensive success - no break throughs or break outs. In a war of attrition it is very hard without detailed inside knowledge to see breaking points. Back in WW2 Germany was doing counter offensives nearly to the end, even though it was clear they were broken at Kursk. In this war the UA currently has offensive initiative and has been trying to string a series of tactical offensives into operational conditions setting. We will see if they are successful. I guess my “analysis” is that the first tactical twitch out of the RA since last Winter does not merit the level threat that you have assigned it. I think some of your basic assumptions are skewed in RA favour - likely not out of support to RA but honest concern - and you need to revisit them. Further, you may want to provide some citations or links that are shaping your thinking so we can check them for ourselves.

Could be feinting or could be sizing up for something else. A crossing (or set of crossings) down in the Kherson sector could collapse the entire RA left flank. But…and it is a big one, you need surprise and sustainment. Surprise I’d damned hard in this environment. The build up of forces could get cover in urban areas but is really hard to hide. Then you don’t just cross once, you need to sustain a breakout force, which is dodgy until you can push those crossings out of gun range. Does the UA have this sort of engineering capability? Did we give them any? Or were we too busy rubbing ourselves over Leo 2s? These are not easy crossings - right up there with amphib on the difficulty scale. First sign is usually stuff like we see here, shaping - cutting nodes and connectors. Then airborne or airmobile drops along with infantry assaults come next. If the UA pulls it off, it will be the first crossing of its type since Yom Kippur (I think) and even that was not really opposed.

Can’t they hit the Kerch Bridge now? Storm Shadow and all that? Regardless, this would not be a bad idea. This is increasing friction. Would likely be temporary but if you timed it right, it could do some solid shaping. This is still in the space of “annoyance” as opposed to decisive, but it would create pressures. Ukraine is not going to lose the war if it can’t do this nor is Russia going to win it because they can still use Kerch bridge. Longer Range deep strike will create more options - which is a good thing - but they may not be translatable into decisions given some of the constraints and restraints.

Well that could be true. Depends on the formation. If an entire Brigade only has 45 armoured vehicles it really isn’t going to do much with them anyway. I mean if you have a break-in, you have no follow up beyond a bunch of guys running. In fact it really doesn’t make sense to attack unless we are largely being symbolic - which does make sense. Anyway, it is a Mech Bns worth, how that gets spread around or not varies.

Well yes and no. The problem with green lighting deep/strategic strike is gauging what you want it to do. If you want to harass or disrupt something specific, we could be talking a workable solution. If we are talking broad scale strategic corrosive warfare, well that is essentially a systematic campaign at things like Russian industry, energy and transportation infrastructure. Go down that road and I suspect things would spiral out of control quickly. The working theory is that Putin only has so much support for this thing - we were just talking about this. Start hammering every railyard, airfield, power generation and military factory in western Russia and he may very well get green lit for some really crazy responses. In many ways it could play into his hands. So from a US perspective it is risk vs gain. What are a few longer range systems really going to do? Ukraine would need a lot of systems to break Russia through strategic corrosion. Not as much as say WW2, but still a lot higher than anyone is comfortable to go with right now. So we are back to military operational victories in Ukraine strung together. Closest we came to strategic disruption of Russia was back when Priggy made his thunder run. But the poor dumb bastard fumbled to ball and balked, and we all know how that ended.

It probably was, but the vehicle loss count is at battalion level (eg 45 or whatever). A formation has around 300 F and A1 ech vehicles.pm give or take. Mauled the hell outta whatever went through there but it wasn’t the loss of an entire brigade.

Disagree with that last part. Ukraine has already PGM'd its way to a victory. Pushing the RA back to the point they can no longer conduct offensive operations is a massive victory. In fact it PGM'd a victory no one thought even possible. Reading the last RUSI reports and Russia is trying to copy Ukrainian precision indirect fires as a result of how well PGMs have worked out. (https://static.rusi.org/Stormbreak-Special-Report-web-final_0.pdf) The question now is how much can current precision offer? Can Russia come up with counters...they are working on it. The pounding of the RA to a lower energy state and keeping them there is one for the history books alone. My sense is that the UA needs to set conditions to switch this whole thing up for a game shift: manoeuvre. The RA is so degraded (as you note) that any effective manoeuvre would break them. Problem is, how does UA create conditions for manoeuvre? Well, I think it is happening in front of us - nibble and bite until your opponent thins out somewhere enough to make a go of it. That is a lot of frontage, and the UA can see pretty much all of it, so I expect there may be method to this madness yet. Or alternatively, we have gone as far as current levels of precision and erosion can take things? Or is manoeuvre essentially dead as we know it? You may be correct, the RA may be already corroded to the point that all they can do is throw troops in holes, and mines in other holes - but it might be enough. Ukraine would need to escalate to strategic corrosive warfare in order to break this, but that sadly remains off the table - might not for next major war. Or Ukraine needs to change the game. Question really is, "can they?"

Battalion. Not Brigade. Of course the loss of an entire Battalion is going to seriously impact its parent formation.

Heh, you guys were warned. The Soviet campaign is not to be taken on lightly. It was designed to be brutally realistic. If a player can pull “fun” out of it (and they have), well good on them. I think one has to be a special masochist to really enjoy some of these fights, but they are extremely realistic. We pulled straight from Soviet and US doctrines, and period plans. Eirterfeld is straight out of a staff wargame from back in the day. We knew the CM crowd was not “casual” to begin with so catering to the upper end of challenge was a design decision early on. I saw one video of someone actually completing the Soviet campaign, respect. So if you did not enjoy it, well that was kinda expected. The US campaign is much more forgiving. The NTC one is pretty kind as well. The Soviet one is basically the CM version of Punishment mode, especially March or Die. We knew this when we built and tested them. Trust me, we dialled them back off historical difficulty. Soviet tactical forces did not get a lot of time and space to plan, So if Div or Regt Recce failed, and by the halfway point of a fight they would, then lead tactical units - who by this point are 2nd ech - were going to be driving into a lot of fights that look like this one. S’ok to hate the Soviet Campaign…it can take it.