LongLeftFlank

Ah, dear old Fremont, "Center of the Universe". Are they still doing the outdoor cinema up there? Like the "Svejk" animated gif, too.

Surrealer still, my friend Vince met Eddie (the guy in the p*** business) online while playing Unreal Tournament. Vince is a venture capitalist, which means he collects obscene amounts of money for putting together deals and then has most of his day free to game. The same goes for Eddie, although his business model is somewhat more .... labor intensive (and yes, he does help out on the shop floor occasionally -- of course we asked). Alas, I have not as yet been able to interest Vince in CM (too much thinking involved).

Speaking of Ostfront footage, during my stag party last year, I found myself at 3 AM in an *ahem* -- leather-themed establishment on Delancey Street. The protocols of this forum do not allow me to describe the full proceedings, or how we came to be there ("This is my friend Eddie. He's in the p*** business.") However the basement dance floor was filled with smoke, strobes, techno-industrial at 120 decibels, and, running in a continuous loop across a full wall of video screens..... 1943 Ostfront footage. So here's us, 4 Canuck MBAs in black tie at a Manhattan BDSM club, smoking Cohiba Churchills and dancing in a drunken haze with an Amazon goddess whom we dubbed "Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS" (at least, we think she was a she), while Mark IVs and Tigers roll across the steppe. My souvenir of that night is one riding crop, slightly used. All true, I swear on the grave of Leni Riefenstahl.

No disrespect to the bravery of the GI noted above, but that "fanaticism" could also be a manifestation of overconfident but green troops. As many veterans noted, they pulled "brave" stunts in their first few days in combat (e.g. in BoB the sergeant climbing a tree at Brecourt Manor to fire on entrenched enemy MG) that they'd never have tried subsequently once they knew the real risks involved. But perhaps motive -- fanaticism, esprit or simply plain ignorance -- doesn't matter so much.

So, my Lords, if I may summarize The Argument: PROPOSITION: Nomadic/pastoral cultures (e.g. Cossacks) are morally (select one) BETTER/WORSE than settled/agrarian cultures (e.g. Amerika) because.... THESES/ANTITHESES: a. Noble, freedom-loving Cossacks never built gas chambers, much less napalmed slaves at Wounded Knee, or (ultimate abomination) dreamed up IMF/WTO b. Ignorant, stinky Cossacks wouldn't have faintest idea what gas was unless goats they stole passed it during intimate moment, much less invent railway timetables, napalm or sulfa drugs Discuss. Also, accusations of Nazi-fanboydom or good old fashioned Byronic romantic pastoralism seem a little half-cocked at this point. Nobody in this thread has either defended those fine humanitarians von Pannwitz, Kleist and Vlassov, eulogized the poor martyred souls of the First Division, or damned the perfidy of Gen. Alexander and the Argylls. Indeed, those subjects haven't even been brought up in this increasingly weird but strangely fascinating Plato's Cave of a forum. So let's everyone take a deep breath and step back from our goats, stolen or not....

I correct myself. The desant took place in 1929, although the VDV didn't exist at that time as such. The first airlanding formation wasn't stood up until 1931. At the 1935 Kiev maneuvers, the spectacle of desantniki parachuting in battalion strength from TB-3 bombers, together with glider landings, impressed the German observers enough to set up the Falschirmjager, whose exploits in turn led to rapid imitation by the Western Allies. Seem to recall the Germans saw rather a lot of other things at these particular maneuvers that left a deep impression them.... most notably the BT-5 fast tanks. Kind of a World's Fair of the blitzkrieg, although I've never seen anyone other than the always suspect Suvorov (Razin) give it much notice historically.

Yes, my Kazakh friend explained that to me. But they don't take umbrage at the name, nor the association. Apparently her people (she is a quarter Russian though) have their roots in three different Khanates who became quite peaceful and settled over the centuries. Rather than resisting the Russians (Czarist and later Red), they more or less welcomed them in, in sharp contrast to the Turkics (Turkomans, Tajiks, Azeris) who were still creating major trouble in the 1930s. BTW, according to the history of the Soviet airborne troops (VDV), the first recorded vertical insertion op took place in 1932 when Red Army troops were airlanded on the Steppe to cut off a Tajik "basmach gang".

I know there's been some kind of running gag among the CW mob on this board relating to the Bren tripod. I just haven't ever been able to surface the original thread. Any hints? Is it really worth it?

Will Relative Spotting extend to friendly units as well? (i.e. I'd like to see potential for friendly fire in poor viz/close terrain).

Yes, barbarism is relative. Ask Kurt Waldheim. (No, don't. He'd just lie anyway). Cossacks occupy a colorful middle ground between the conventional and settled Russian Slavs and the Tatar/Mongol and Turkic horse peoples who still occupy the bulk of the Eurasian steppe. And they share the same characteristics of most clan-based groups with weak ties to lands, kingdoms and kings -- military prowess, tactical mobility, opportunism, fickleness and tendency to pillage the more settled peoples they encounter. Who naturally fear these people as barbarous and perfidious. While Russian nationalists prefer to downplay the fact (e.g. Nevsky), for about 2 centuries the Dukes of Muscovy and Kiev were little more than tributaries of the Khanates of the Golden and Blue Hordes. Cossack tribes likely served in the Hordes, then switched over to the Russian dukes as it suited them. Very likely though, their roots lie even deeper in Slavic history, as vestiges of the hordes who rolled west over the German lands (who had previously displaced the Celts, etc., etc). "Cossack" and "Kazakh" are essentially the same word (and the latter definitely make no secret of their historical and racial connection to the Khanates).

Brilliant allegory! But (wait for it..............) ..........whose grass mod did you use?

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Crew dismounts/bugouts/remanning is not a feature I'd have prioritized from a gameplay perspective, but then again.... As has been noted many times before, if CM2 is going to be at all realistic as a combat simulation in a 2007 world (i.e. next year!), keeping friendly losses to a minimum -- vehicle crews included -- will be a prime Allied victory condition, regardless of what others may exist. For the other side, killing more than a handful of "white meat" in a single engagement will deliver a strategic victory (i.e. on CNN) no matter how badly they're mauled otherwise. So otherwise suicidal actions become quite rational for them, just as some of the more aggressive and risky Allied tactics become unavailable to us. ....Unless the storyline posits some new terrorist attack that outrages/desensitizes Allied public opinion to casualties.

Agreed -- it should be an option only. IMHO, level restrictions are best suited to infantry close assaults in close terrain: MOUT, forests, or night actions. I haven't had good results with AFV-focused scenarios.

I liked that book too, except that it seemed like nearly ALL the military participants he interviewed on both sides all seemed to be trying to stress what great fans of Western civilization they were and how much they risked to save the abbey. Parker did finger some of them as BSers, but I got the sense that the others were doing a little halo polishing too, with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight. Freyberg also got kind of a bum rap too, as a bullheaded brute deaf to reason who insisted on the bombing.

You'd know a lot more than I would on this, but if I'm not mistaken, European armies went to war in 1914 still expecting to win decisive battles with (a) bold maneuver, followed by ( massed musketry, followed by © cold steel; as opposed to the artillery murderfest that actually transpired. So one way to look at the ammo load is 2 bullets a day in the positional warfare that actually occurred; the other is the intended 29 days of grand maneuver followed by that epic Waterloo the generals dreamed of in which each Tommy could "give 'em ten rounds rapid, good and 'ot" up to five volleys worth, and then "in with the bayonet". And that would show the Hun proper. Tangentially, my memory is hazy on this, but didn't the British up their ammo loads for the Martini-Henry rifles after ammo ran short during well-publicized "decisive actions" in the Zulu War, Khartoum, Omdurman, etc? Forward, he cried, from the rear, as the front rank died...

.... A little hint here, when playing Iron Man rules, popping smoke becomes a VERY useful way of marking a location for all to see.

In lieu of trying to program the AI to deliver a level of functionality for our units that it can't do without annoying the hell out of us with utterly dumb/suicidal moves, perhaps an "Iron Man" FOW option would allow the following: (a) You can ONLY watch the turn replay action through the eyes of the CO unit (at view level 1). i.e. he's the only one who gets the "big picture", assuming that he's picked a good OP (see Radike quote above). If the CO unit is destroyed, panicked or routed, you can keep playing, but your battle direction is hosed. ( During the orders phase, you can tab through all your units, viewing through their eyes at level 1, use the LOS tools, and give them orders. You'll be able to see the target lines and get basic info about their status and who's shooting at them, but that's all you really have to go on. If you want to issue orders to move to an area not yet in LOS, you'll need to eyeball it as best you can. ( The command lines are disabled -- you see only a message onscreen saying you're in/out of command. © The real kicker is this: if friendly units are in LOS, you won't be able to skip to them (and ID them) by clicking on them with the mouse. All you'll see with the LOS tool is the appropriate unit symbol and "Friendly Infantry Squad" or whatever, with no further identifying data. Generic low visibility unit symbols or "sounds" commands won't differentiate between friend and foe, so you have the possibility of "blue on blue" area fire incidents. (d) Location labels are disabled. You need to rely on things like hill shapes to navigate and estimate your position relative to other units. Better yet, only HQ, crack/elite infantry and vehicles would be able to see the compass, so at night, your units would REALLY be in the dark. (e) To further sort out the "Iron Men" from the "Plodders", you could also place a time limit on the length of the orders phase to limit your ability to piece together your overall situation by tabbing through units repeatedly for hours each turn. The CO would still be able to view the movie as many times as (s)he wanted to provide the strategic perspective, but you'd have a max of, say, 30 seconds per green unit, 45 per regular, etc. (playtesting will determine the right durations). If you took longer with one unit, it'd be at the expense of the others. As suggested by ATW and LTCW above, these rules would change the tactics in the game to a far more realistic and dramatic, seat-of-the-pants, keep-it-simple-stupid basis, complete with patrols lost in the woods, blue on blue fire and other issues. All the above would be readily programmable within the CM1 engine (and presumably within CM2 as well). Sorry about the ASL rulebook length post here, but I've used the above rules for some time while playing the computer and it's been very satisfying and challenging for me.

Amen to that. I'd love to see it as a FOW option. Re the "commander's eyes only" view, it would probably be asking a little too much of the AI to make all decisions for the troops unless you also had a game feature where you could give units a general set of orders for the battle and then let the AI follow the plan until first contact with the enemy dictates otherwise. There's a very vivid account in "Across the Dark Islands" (Floyd Radike) of the 25th Division commander personally overseeing a hill assault on Guadalcanal from his OP: 'You can move over, Lieutenant, because I am going to share your position with you. I see you picked out the best observation on this line....' It looked like I had half the division headquarters on the reverse slope of the ridge.... A sniper round snapped pretty close to our position. The general handed the phone to the operations officer and turned to me. 'Get a machine gun,' he said.... The general pointed to the southwest and said, 'Set up the gun to cover that wooded knoll over there.'... The general gently pushed me aside and lumbered down behind the gun. I was going to ask him if he knew how to fire such a weapon -- and remembered in the nick of time that he had written the gun's manual. He looked over the sights and let a few bursts fly into the knoll. I followed the tracers that found their target. 'Did you see that, Lieutenant?' 'Yes sir.' 'Well, every time you hear them snap off a round from that knoll, you spray them with bullets. Get enough ammo.' There was more talk on the phone, some of which got very salty.... "Look Mike, the charts we've got don't match the terrain, so sending coordinates is no good.... OK, now tie a handkerchief around your left arm and move into that clearing so I can see you."

Yes, I know a Navy SEAL who felt that the whole "load bearing work" concept in SOF (i.e. teaching trainees to hump 120 pounds on 10 mile marches) was utterly pointless and stupid. His slogan was "pack light, eat lousy, remember your feet; cache the rest." Carry only what you need to survive. The type of combat his unit trained to do (keeping in mind that combat wasn't necessarily the point of most SEAL ops) was bump and run... (a) blow claymores ( fire 2 clips from 50 meters back in the woods then © fall back so return fire just hits your empty scrapes. Then set a new ambush down the trail or simply disengage. The premium was on mobility and stealth, not sustained firefights and massive ammo load.

Heard several mentions of John Keegan on this thread. Keegan is one of my favorite historians, although like SLAM he's never served under fire (although unlike SLAM he has been very up front -- pardon the pun -- about this fact). However, similarly to MAF, the Face of Battle formulates basic hypotheses -- models if you will (without much sound numerical data to go on, much less firsthand interviews)-- relating to what each battle "must have been like" for the P.B.I. involved in each classic battle, and what kinds of physical activity and behavior created victory and defeat. e.g. at Agincourt, the rugger scrum in the post-archery stage of the battle among pikemen and archers and surviving horsemen crammed together and virtually immobile in the mud, a far cry from the Olivier vision of knights charging home at full speed, lances leveled, or even the mass kung fu swordplay depicted in Braveheart (and every Hollywood film since, excepting the otherwise mediocre Alexander). Since the participants in this and most of the other battles in FOB are deceased, the accuracy of Keegan's hypotheses is unlikely ever to be reliably tested, or challenged. And all this is to say: hypotheses are acceptable historical method in the absence of data, but not when you have hundreds of after action interviews available. While not disagreeing with anything people have said above about Marshall, I continue to honor him as a groundbreaker who drew popular attention to what was happening at the "sharp end" of combat (as opposed to the command, maneuver and victory through airpower level). His work made it respectable for better-informed thinkers in the US military to devote careers to studying ways to improve infantry firepower, equipment, etc. at the sharp end. Think of him as the Bill Gates of military science -- a pitchman who hogged the credit and had some real dumb ideas (WYSIWYG), but saw the big picture potential of the concept and got the ball rolling. Otherwise, the Marines might well have splashed ashore at Da Nang still bearing Garands, BARs and M1919s.

SLAM was in essence an amateur management theorist of (roughly) the same generation as Peter Drucker and Abraham Maslow, applying pre-1940 Taylorist scientific management principles, plus some behavioral psychology to the battlefield. I give him due honor and credit for being a pioneer in this field, without however overstating the value of his actual work. Like most other productivity models I've seen, his model identified the correct drivers for his area of interest -- infantry firepower -- but did not accurately portray the relationship among them: a. overestimates impact of the drivers of interest on overall performance (victory) while ignoring or minimizing complex confounding variables (e.g. artillery) b. overestimates benefits of increasing productivity (enemy body count) c. does not develop actionable recommendations for doing so (elan, aggressiveness) Scientific management was great for getting beans and bullets to the GI's; it was -- and remains -- lousy at modeling, much less improving the performance of complex tasks (infantry tactics). Oh, and most business productivity models I've seen falsify their data too. They pretty much have to. If you read SLAM's later works, e.g. A Soldier's Load and his evaluation of weapons in Korea, his central message seems to be less "how to micromanage the GI" than "how can we on the home front give him the tools that are most useful to him and not load him down with useless junk?" And this is a worthy question, today as well as yesterday (think body armour).

My worry is that China will go through a "feeling their oats" phase of more aggressive nationalism roughly parallel to that of post-1870 Germany, although I'm not suggesting that 21st century Chinese and 19th century Germans are the same, or that this is inevitable. However, whenever I speak with educated Chinese mainlanders at length, even ones who like and admire the West, I always find a certain sense of grievance and entitlement buried under the politeness. It goes something like: a. China is now standing up, no thanks to you Westerners who kept us down for hundreds of years (long and awful story about opium follows). Well, OK, our current growth IS fueled by your willingness to buy stuff from us, but that's just because our domestic demand hasn't ramped yet and you're too lazy to do make goods as well as we do. b. We have 1/4 of the world's population, but Westerners also shut us out of the chance to control the 1/4 of the world's landmass/resources that are rightfully ours. We were shut out of the New World and Southeast Asia (except as coolies) and shut out of Siberia totally by the Russians. So what type of future behavior does that imply, as China becomes steadily more formidable both economically and militarily, but that (partly imagined, partly real) feeling of being "dissed" lingers? I didn't say that this would make any kind of economic sense, but aggrieved nationalism seldom does. And the stakes are a lot higher this time. The post-unification Germans had a similar compex -- fear of foreign meddling, feeling of being sneered at by snobbish French and English, feeling they'd largely been shut out of the rush for colonies, etc. And in answer to those who have faith in the old globalization canard that "No two nations with a McDonalds have ever fought a war" (also factually inaccurate, since Belgrade had 2 McDonalds in 1995), recall that the elites who shelled and machine gunned one another in the muck in the Great War all loved much the same music, art, literature, cuisine and fashions.

My vote for a sci-fi mythos most likely to be compatible with the CM engine, would be Starship Troopers (a la the Heinlein book, not the bowdlerized Verhoeven film, although I might make an exception for Denise Richards) The MI suits were, of course, the most interesting "characters" in the book (a point the film totally missed), giving each individual infantryman the mobility of an Apache, the armor/NBC protection of a MBT and the firepower of.... well, mininukes, missiles and handflamers. What was best about Heinlein was that he made a bigger attempt than most authors to remain true to his futuretech premises once he'd laid them out. So his armor wasn't some kind of magical Superman suit -- the materials, energy sources, fuels, control mechanisms, sensors, countermeasures, etc.-- all had limitations that cunning Space Lobsters could exploit.... hence, you'd have futuristic strategy and tactics instead of just another boring robotech shooter or generic "tanks and casters" MMO game. Question, btw: would the Borg be able to use "Borg spotting" in a Star Trek module? Huh dad? Huh?

I've always found the best cure to the "God" command issue in CM1 is to restrict all unit views to level 1 throughout the game (a la the airborne drop scenarios) + strict time limit to plan moves. In my experience, this really forces units to go for the objectives and enemies immediately in front of them, as they generally would in real life. It also really ratchets up the challenge of playing vs. the AI.