Vanir Ausf B

There's a two vote per day limit, if I remember correctly.

Interesting article from the armour magazine on Russian/Soviet recce in force tactics - useful for application at the CM level and very applicable  
http://www.benning.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/2018/Winter-Spring/2Grau18.pdf

Well, yes, sort of.  Keeping the tank treads aligned along railway tracks really requires a ground guide in front of the tank to direct the driver; not a snail's pace but certainly slow because the ground guide has to walk backwards in order to watch the tank treads and use hand-signs to signal the driver.  I opine that Battlefront should not implement such a feature.  Ground Guides usually disappear when in the vicinity of enemy fires  . . 

LMAO! You guys are so predictable. We made it to one answer before it devolved into off topic wars.
 
Mord: What's your favorite color?
Poster 1: Green
Poster 2: Fulda Gap!
 
Mord: What's your favorite food?
Poster 1: Pizza
Poster 2: Fulda Gap!
 
Mord: Who's your favorite porn star?
Poster 1: Fulda Gap!
Poster 2: Michael Emrys!
Mord: Steve, Emrys' made a sock puppet...
 
Mord.
 
P.S. Come to think of it, Fulda Gap does sound like a German porn actress.

Apple merely inherited Steve Job's contempt for gaming and gamers. John Carmack wrote a post about it a few weeks ago which is interesting.
Couple this with years of low quality electronics from Apple and I'd recommend everyone move on from Apple.
 

Some more examples of tanks, hit by HE ammunition. In this case - hit in the hull top in the place of driver hatch. There is no information what exactly ammunition types hit these tanks.

Yea, it was disheartening to see that happen.  I'm glad it's disabled.
The Kettlerian Universe is very different from how I perceive reality but I certainly respect John's passion and the wonderful nuggets he finds.  We would likely not get along face-to-face but he merits all the innate social courtesies I can offer as well as the respect of his humanity which is only right.  Viva la difference! 

In real life, so as not to crack a torsion bar or break track linkages when the road wheels snap back.  The rails are a raised surface; the rail-bed slopes away from them.  A tank needs to ease over such things if you don't want it's suspension to fail.

I have noticed it for tanks in general, not just the Panther. I don't feel it is particularly unrealistic. Any penetration of the gun mantlet is likely to damage something important.
 

The manual is wrong about that.
The Hide command has no effect on the visual spotting of vehicles.

Greetings! 

This is my first real attempt with the editor - which started out from this real-world Luftwaffe aerial shot I came across for the village of Golynki, west of Smolensk...



...which I stretched to fit more neatly into a CM-friendly grid, and came out with this map:





It is a 2000m x 1792m map, covering a few types of terrain: a peat bog in the northern half, a wooded area and the near-pristine village of Tregubovka to the southeast, and the larger village of Golynki to the soutwest, which has been largely demolished and abandoned under the German occupation. The map is divided in half by drainage ditch running north-south (both it and a secondary ditch on the northeast side are passable 'shallow ford' throughout), and has a major rail line running east-west in the bottom quarter of the map. 



At the moment, I have no data on any actions that took place here - all I learned is that this area was recaptured by the Soviets in October 1943 (I originally thought it was part of the CMRT timeline in 1944, but it is not so). 






It's a very detailed, handcrafted map - it may still need a bit of optimization as I went very heavy on the flavour objects (so the frame rate might drag down in certain areas, depending on your system). On the upside, it's very pretty in places





I'm trying to figure out what to do with it in terms of scenario - and since I have absolutely 0 experience with scenario building and AI programming at the moment, any help or advice would be appreciated! What would you like to see on this map?

At the moment, there is no AI and all the parameters, objectives, etc. are placeholders only. It's only really usable in the editor right now.

You may download my current WIP version of it here: 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hA9cr80cdMmHkGK8mhhbNgZz_LAefsyH

...or in the forum attachment.

If you have anything that you'd like to create on this map yourself, or use it or any part of it for your own scenarios - you're very welcome to do so (with credit for map given).

Thanks for checking it out! 
CCIP - Golynki (v01 map only).btt

God help us all if those "experienced combat soldiers" ever have to deal with an actual Russian force, Russia will be at the Rhine in 72 hours. 
As @Rinaldi has said, most NATO forces are in pitiful states, but Germany is singled out for being in an especially poor state. I'm pretty sure the spinning corpses of Frederick and Blucher could power all of Europe if they were to see the state of today's German "army."

The manual says the Hiding vehicle will "keep a low noise profile". You can debate what the could mean but it's important to note that giving a vehicle a Hide command cuts the range at which it can be heard in half rather than reducing it to zero.

We shall sweep the enemy before us!!!!

They are. Play a night battle in CM and it will become apparent very quickly.

They are. Play a night battle in CM and it will become apparent very quickly.

They are. Play a night battle in CM and it will become apparent very quickly.

In order for the test to say anything useful about spotting time the time to spot for each individual tank would need to be recorded rather than just recording the fastest time out of several dozen tanks. More generally, Combat Mission systemically undervalues cover and concealment for infantry. This has been known for more than a decade. Things have been tweaked a bit more towards reality here and there over the years but it's never going to be exactly realistic since to some degree it is a deliberate design choice (from comments made by BFC) in order to keep the length of CM battles from approaching that of real battles and because strictly realistic spotting would cripple the AI since it does not know how to identify and area fire at suspected enemy positions (which is what constitutes the majority of real world shooting).

A baby Abrams.

Below are the results of some experimenting with Unit Spot Objectives.  The experimenting was done in CMBS v2.1 Engine 4. Hot seat.  CM Engine Manual v4.0 page 88. 
Observations: 
Individual troops within a team are counted for spot VPs.
When dismounted a driver is counted separately from a vehicle for spot VPs.  
The editor will allow you to assign fortifications as unit objectives however fortifications will not be counted as unit spot objectives in the game. 
Units that are spot objectives are not required to use exit zones but they may. 
A unit cannot be both a spot objective and a destroy objective however you can have a mix of spot and destroy unit objectives in the same scenario.
When a side (RedFor or BluFor) has an exit zone all units that are destroy/destroy all objectives, that belong to that side, must exit or they earn points for the OpFor. 
Tentative contacts do not count as "spotted" for a spot unit objective.  Only confirmed contacts count.  
EDIT TO ADD:  The player will not be notified in game that he spotted a spot unit objective.  The AAR screen is the only place where the results of a spot unit objective will be found.  
EDIT TO ADD: Another useful link. 
http://community.battlefront.com/topic/121775-cmrt-campaign-kampfgruppe-von-schroif/?do=findComment&comment=1727393
 
1st Test Description: Ten Igla S teams (one troop each) were made unit spot objectives [U7] worth 100 points total. A RedFor exit was available.  None of the RedFor Igla teams exited.  Four of the teams were spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
 
Results: BluFor earned 40 points.
2nd Test Description: Ten Igla S teams were made unit spot objectives [U7] worth 100 points total. A RedFor exit was available.  Four of the RedFor Igla teams exited.  Six of the teams were spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Results: BluFor earned 60 points.
3rd Test Description:  Ten Igla S teams were made unit spot objectives [U7] worth 100 points total. Three RedFor trucks were made spot objectives [U6] worth 20 points total.  A RedFor exit was available.  None of the RedFor Igla teams or trucks exited.  The three trucks and two of the Igla teams were spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Result:  BluFor earned 20 points for the Igla teams and 20 points for the trucks.   
4th Test Description: Ten Igla S teams were made unit spot objectives [U7] worth 100 points total. Three RedFor trucks were made spot objectives [U6] worth 20 points total.  A RedFor exit was available.  None of the RedFor Igla teams or trucks exited.  Two trucks and five Igla teams were spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Result: BluFor earned 50 points for the Igla teams and 13 points for the trucks.
5th Test Description: Seven Igla S teams and one 3 man scout team were made unit spot objectives [U7] worth 100 points total. A RedFor exit was available.  None of the RedFor teams exited.  One Igla team and all three troops of the scout team were spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Result: BluFor earned 40 points for the Igla / scout team.
6th Test Description: Three RedFor trucks were made spot objectives [U6] worth 20 points total. A RedFor exit was available. After driving the truck into view of BluFor the truck driver dismounted. None of the RedFor teams exited.  The truck and truck driver were spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Result: BluFor earned 6 points for the truck.
7th  Test Description: Three RedFor trucks were made spot objectives [U6] worth 20 points total. A RedFor exit was available. A dismounted truck driver walked into view of BluFor.  None of the RedFor trucks/teams exited.  The truck driver was spotted by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Result: BluFor earned 3 points.
8th Test Description: RedFor foxholes were made spot objectives [U3] worth 20 points total. The foxholes were spotted & physically occupied by a BluFor scout team.  Cease fire was hit.
Results: BluFor earned 0 points.  Unit Objective “Foxholes” [U3] was not displayed on the AAR screen.
EDIT to add another test.
9th Test Description: One Igla-S team was made a spot objective [U7] worth 100 points total. A RedFor exit was available. The RedFor Igla team did not exit.  A BluFor scout team received a tentative contact for the Igla team.  Cease fire was hit.
Result: BluFor earned 0 points.
 

Another terribly busy week... just barely managed to watch @General Jack Ripper excellent video. It's a shame we can't work out the name of single privates. When I saw him being mowed down I remember jumping on my chair.
 
Thanks for that @Bil Hardenberger! Tthat's perhaps the highest praise I could expect. All those battle drills that you painstakingly curated in your Battle Drill blog are being put into (good) use
 
Over the weekend I will come along and post some pictures and video capsules to illustrate the overall (both at the macro and micro level) attack plan. Which was inspired by the following passages of a famous book:
The advice one finds on books (or booklets, or other doctrinal pamphlets) rarely can be applied verbatim. Rather than a method to do something, like drills are, they  actually are heuristics. That is advice compiled by trial and error by those who came before, which is expected to facilitate the work of others. They're the basic ingredients to guide the formulation of a plan, but not a template (necessarily). Figuring out when they are applicable, and how to get a handle on how their advice can be used with the resources at hand and negotiating the constraints the environment imposes is a hard problem. That is, you will rarely solve it entirely to your satisfaction, and very often, things will go very wrong because you drew the wrong conclusions, formulated the wrong plan and implemented it wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
 
I have almost always learnt something from the games I have played... and this one was no difference. If I manage to get 50% not wrong, I consider myself a happy man 

I would like to point that:
1). the tank was unaware about that sniper before the sniper opened fire, so the sniper was not spotted
2). when the sniper opened fire (one shot) the tank IMMEDIATELY knew the position of the sniper and returned fire.
This is unrealistic IMO.  Even if the sniper was not hidden well enough, finding the direction of enemy fire (a SINGLE rifle shot), scanning that area, finding the sniper (which under various conditions and backgrounds possible could be not trivial even using thermals) should take some time. Especially immediately knowing the direction of the single rifle shot is totaly unrealistic for me - in the other case, specialised "sniper detection" acoustic systems would be not needed !!! 
I believe that in some conditions (clear LOS is one I guess, range less than xxx is the second) the game engine automaticly  reveals position of the shooter to the victim. I've seen this many times. An enemy tank is taken by surprise by a side shot from 500m and if not killed outright, it immediately starts to rotate turret and return fire. Not a second of hesitation, thinking, frantically scanning trough vision slots. It always know position of the shooter and knows it the very second it shot.  Even if this mechanism is needed (as removing it would broke the game somehow) it should be modified to include a random 2-10s delay between taking fire and "detecting" the enemy and some (like 20%) chance to completly fail to detect the shooter. I tlk about detecting gunfire and automatic weapons sources now.
Detecting single small calibre shots is yet another matter. There should be very small chance they would be detected at all, and even then it should take some time (for troughly scanning the surroundings at _suspected_and_approximate_ direction of fire) and not 0.01s.