LongLeftFlank

Thanks for the clarification, but you might consider thumbing down the ad hominem attacks a bit.

UKR test prototype of individual solder multishot anti-FVP weapon

 

What we're all REALLY waiting for of course, are the 'spinners'.

I have some firsthand experience with umm, incoming mat. 
New Yorker also did a piece on it in 2003, reprinted below for those interested.
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=russian-teaching;aa8fa082.03
"In the Soviet period," he says, "the status of the high lexicon was devalued-words such as 'fatherland,' 'motherland,' 'truth.' In the context of Soviet ideology, these words acquired a negative resonance, not only for the general population but also for Party propagandists. In this situation, obscene words began to function as markers of authenticity."...
[Zhirinovsky] responded to my questions about mat with an impassioned speech: "This is our living language! Who has decided that mat is just bad words and deviant vocabulary? They're rejecting the language of the people. Obviously, part of the vocabulary of mat was created in the prisons, but then haven't we driven the entire population through the prisons? This language has become the norm!"

Is anyone here subscribed to the sarcosaurus substack/feed - The daily emails are pretty in-depth on current situation on ground .  https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/

Whoa, everybody settle down.  I don’t think anyone believes in war winning platforms anymore.  If we can inject them into the UA to sustain current capabilities that is a great idea.  But as we have seen with numerous platforms and equipment, none really changed the course of the war.  Together they ensured the US stayed in the fight and frankly right now that is what they really need.  The closest things we have seen to game changers are HIMARs and UAS.  HIMARs were able to go that last mile - UA C4ISR could see (being linked into western ISR) but could not reach.  HIMARs and other deep strike allowed for targeting much deeper than before.  This did cause operational effects as the RA scrambled to shift logistics and C2 nodes, while getting hit.  One could argue the RA failure of Summer ‘22 followed by massive gains that fall were enabled greatly by these systems.
But then the RA adapted, and although has to live with this new constraint, have continued to operate.  No point in getting all worked up.  F16s are not a bad idea but what we don’t want are F16s but no artillery ammunition.  Many of us have been saying - C4ISR, Precision/Fires, Unmanned and Infantry.  Try everything and anything else but do not get those four wrong.  And right now we are starting to fail on that Fires pillar.

Building on Freyberg's point, I'd like to see some incremental features that make the game less 'fiddly' and micro intensive.
(The below comments focus on infantry, as I don't play the tank shooter scenarios much -- for me, AFVs are taxis and gun platforms).
1. I'd love to be able to assign Formation Orders to platoons. These are point/area objectives or phase lines, set more or less like plotting artillery missions is done now. Once assigned, the sub units will move on those objectives and continue to do so so  for as long as they are in good order/ unpinned, or not overridden by me.
2. In issuing Formation Orders, I can also give choices akin to the existing AI logic: e.g. advance aggressively/cautiously, set up an ambush at the objective, etc.
3.  I then hit go and watch my plan unfold (and then not survive contact with the enemy). I can intervene, or not, when and where I choose. I can also cancel the formation orders and issue new ones, but as with Artillery these may take a lot of time to process depending on a bunch of factors.
4.  As it is now, we have to set and then tweak long chains of orders and routings, subunit by subunit. These are either obeyed slavishly, with no deviation for self-preservation until they've hit the point of panic, or just dumped, after which the unit sits there until I notice. So even a modest company scale action just seems to drag on and on and on while I cycle through every freekin counter to see what it's doing. Which after a while gets tedious numbing, even for an old time hex gamer like me.
Yes, you can certainly just lasso and Zerg rush clusters of units around the map on Quick, dispensing micro in exchange for a bloodbath, but why not just play Starcraft?
6. I get that TacAI is hard to program, and you get unintended consequences like the infamous 4.0 bug. And I don't mind my pixtruppen skulking for a while, especially rattled, exhausted or green troops with poor leaders. But it would be nice for formations that aren't too badly beaten up to revert to their orders on their own after a bit without me doing it all again.
.... Failing the above, I'd at least like my troop icons to give me some 'hey, I need some micro here' feedback, beyond just blinking at the moment they're under fire. Just for example: 
- regular coloured icon = unit is in good order, has orders active or is shooting
- translucent icon = unit has no active orders (i.e. needs micro soon)
- red background, unit is Pinned or worse (i.e. needs micro NOW)
All the above is FWIW, and I make no  demands here.

Like the C̶a̶d̶i̶l̶l̶a̶c̶ Thread overturning in slow motion, down a cliff, on television.

 

Folks,
I am not here for a debate.  I have seen computers from the very first degree programs and NYC having 3 IBM 360s with RJEs, punched cards, and assembly through today.  For those who are in the CS field, then you are the first to know that AI ~ 2015 and beyond is not CS.  It is an entirely a new field.  Only, the general public erroneously conflates CS and AI.  AI is modern alchemy where emergent properties has truly shown that the reductionist top down engineering thinking that many of us were trained in is but a single way to approach things.  Alchemists they may be; short on the formalism of Shannon, Turing, and Goddel long on guess work, but they are getting results.  And these results are having a huge impact.  * Mathematicians kindly call them "experimentalists".
CMBO was breaking new ground.  Taking our once BG hobby (I never was one) from the early isometric maps in SMG by Sid Meier and the early psychological states of CC by Atomic to break new ground.
CM has largely been CPU bound and single threaded.  Thus, in 2024, most of us are seeing CM hit the single threaded clock speed/RAM speed wall while other cores sit idle.  With regards to videos cards ... GPU/VRAM is largely idle.  Getting CM and many games to multi-threading load balanced is a hard problem.  But post processing using the AI abilities of graphic cards is mainly another step on the rendering pipeline which is quite doable without tearing apart the existing game engine.
How is AI fundamentally changing our world?  Productivity is sky rocketing.  There is a race to leverage it.  This is just one of many tech cycles I have lived through.  We are in the frontier gold rush phase.  The other day I counted more than 100 ventures doing RAG and TALK WITH YOUR DOCS using variants of LangChain, Semantic Embeddings, and Vector databases.  In 3-5 years, like any tech cycle, only handful of those 100+ firms will exist and be among the standardized recognized solutions.
The console/PC game industry is going to be pulled along into the same cycle.  Those with IP and a market position are ideally suited to be the survivors.  Or if they let momentum and sloth make them feel secure, then be among the shake out victims.
I like CM and the innovation that BTS/BFC brought.  I would like to see it weather the AI storm.
Well, I am going to drop off the discussion now.  Time is limited and I retired to play games and not debate on forums.  Implied here is that I might be old.  Yes, I am old.  The view that age is a handicap is not a global view among all cultures.  Some cultures actual recognize that seniors bring something to the conversation.  Tik-Tok on, folks!  I am going to play myself some CM!

Oh, oh I'm sorry, this is Abuse....
Ah, don't let these grumpy old cranks put you off! 
Exploring possibility space is just fine IMHO, so long as the substantial gaps to meaningful implementation are also appreciated.
****
https://openai.com/sora
(LinkedIn commentary): If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, and long-horizon consistency, all by some denoising and gradient maths.
I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of synthetic data using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be!
Let's breakdown the following video. Prompt: "Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee."
https://cdn.openai.com/sora/videos/ships-in-coffee.mp4
- The simulator instantiates two exquisite 3D assets: pirate ships with different decorations. Sora has to solve text-to-3D implicitly in its latent space.
- The 3D objects are consistently animated as they sail and avoid each other's paths.
- Fluid dynamics of the coffee, even the foams that form around the ships. Fluid simulation is an entire sub-field of computer graphics, which traditionally requires very complex algorithms and equations. 
- Photorealism, almost like rendering with raytracing.
- The simulator takes into account the small size of the cup compared to oceans, and applies tilt-shift photography to give a "minuscule" vibe.
- The semantics of the scene does not exist in the real world, but the engine still implements the correct physical rules that we expect.
Next up: add more modalities and conditioning, then we have a full data-driven UE that will replace all the hand-engineered graphics pipelines.

This particular quote: Casualty ratios tend to equalize in urban areas is highly suspicious. It is an exact quote from a less well-known RU military reporter aka propagandist. The RU military reporter used the phrase to cheer up his viewers after admitting that prior fighting outside of urban areas resulted in a 1:10 loss ratio in favor of UKR. So, basically, Tatarigami simply repeats somebody else opinion without sufficient diligence.
Now, could it be true? Well, it depends. "Residential areas" that RU used to breach UKR lines are not urban areas. They are all village-type areas. Look at the map

They breached the village-type area. But they were significantly slowed down in semi-urban areas, so they preferred to advance on to an open area instead. They have not reached real urban area and they failed miserable attacking Koksohim. 
So, proper way would be - in terrain not favorable for infantry infiltration (be it open fields or any terrain sufficiently prepared and manned against infiltration for a prolonged period of time) RU tactics of meat assaults mostly fail. In terrain favorable for infantry infiltration, they mostly succeed given enough time, bodies and glide bombs. 
Since Avdiivka is Putin order the local RU command gets priority in receiving bodies and glide bombs. Hence the success after several months of miserable failures.

On the topic of rotation and casulties, situation in Zenit and Avdiivka overall. 

Today's Perun has a good high-level overview of the Chinese military that is worth a listen for anyone interested in the China  / Taiwan / US situation.
Also has the wry observation that China is modernising its navy partly to be able to protect its international trade, which it is very dependent on economically. Particularly with the US, Japan and Korea. But the main geopolitcal threats it sees  to its international trade are from the US, Japan and Korea. So it is trying to build a navy to compete with those countries in order to be able to protect its trade with the same countries....
 

Yes, there's a fundamental category error here in the utter failure to distinguish Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly fighting for their nation and elected government, from Iraqis or Afghans who overwhelmingly defer to their local tribal or religious leaders, who in turn decide which flag to salute, or not.

Yes, there's a fundamental category error here in the utter failure to distinguish Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly fighting for their nation and elected government, from Iraqis or Afghans who overwhelmingly defer to their local tribal or religious leaders, who in turn decide which flag to salute, or not.

Yes, there's a fundamental category error here in the utter failure to distinguish Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly fighting for their nation and elected government, from Iraqis or Afghans who overwhelmingly defer to their local tribal or religious leaders, who in turn decide which flag to salute, or not.

Yes, there's a fundamental category error here in the utter failure to distinguish Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly fighting for their nation and elected government, from Iraqis or Afghans who overwhelmingly defer to their local tribal or religious leaders, who in turn decide which flag to salute, or not.

Yes, there's a fundamental category error here in the utter failure to distinguish Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly fighting for their nation and elected government, from Iraqis or Afghans who overwhelmingly defer to their local tribal or religious leaders, who in turn decide which flag to salute, or not.

An' I said, “Litterin'.”
An' they all moved away from me on the bench there, an' the hairy eyeball an' all kinds of mean nasty things.
...Til I said, “*And* creating a nuisance.”
An' they all came back, shook my hand, an' we had a great time on the bench, talkin' about crime, mother stabbin', father rapin', all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench, an' everything was fine.

Yes, the smell of hair on fire is getting a little thick in here, innit?
I mean, if the thread regulars want to agonise over the fall of the Republic in the context of Ukraine, maybe look at something more directly relevant than microplaning DJT's latest excretion?
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-happened-to-the-us-machine-tool