JasonC

Don't spend lots of time scouting. Don't bother to fix and flank, except with tank forces, who can do it at speed. But also don't just run infantry at the enemy or ignore casualties. That isn't Russian doctrine or how it actually worked, it is just a cartoon slander of their methods spread by the Germans, whomthought it made them defending against it sound all clever and also heroic for braving it etc. (A rather incoherent set of spin objectives, incidentally, but that is an aside).

The first idea is that any definite plan pushed will be faster than slow recon pull. The next is that the process of destroying the enemy really isn't that complicated - it is a matter of laying your ship alongside the enemy, as Nelson put it before Trafalgar. Meaning close aggressively with the enemy, brave what he can dish out to dish out as much as you can yourself, and trust in your strength to destroy him before he destroys you.

But that isn't a headlong charge. Above all, it isn't about movement in the first place, it is about firepower and punishment dealt.

The first infantry wave is fixing, but doesn't have to do it everywhere, or care too much about finding the enemy. Walking over your chosen route of advance will either penetrate the enemy and break up his defense, or he'll find you, and reveal himself stopping that. Let him. Then blow the living crap out of everything that reveals itself, with all your firepower arms. Tanks, mortars, artillery support - call down the wrath of God to avenge the first wave. All the first wave itself needs to do in the meantime is hit the dirt, take what cover they can, and rally as best they can. They did their part drawing the enemy's fire. Don't press. It isn't a race. Save as many of them as possible, by blasting the guys shooting at them and skulking them out of sight.

Then send the second wave. Not a new idea. Not a fancy razzle dazzle end around head fake double reverse. Send them at the spots your artillery and other fire support just blasted into the lower atmosphere, while the dust is still moving upward. They may occupy the places so blasted. Or they may draw fire from a new set of shooters, and repeat the experience of the first wave. You don't really care which. There is no rushing. You have all week. Everyone will get a turn before you are done, every bit of fire support you have will chew on something, and the enemy will need to shoot you all down and still have something left. If they don't, it may be in the bottom half of the clock that they start crumbling. Waves that have been out of the leading role are rallying the while, shooting back. You don't care how long it takes, but not because any of it is tentative or any part of the clock is quiet. Reuse the rallied early waves as fourth and fifth attacks. The whole point is to outlast them, to have the last rallied wave standing. Inexorable is the watchword.

Each wave doesn't bunch up. It isn't trying to run the enemy off his feet in one go. You only expose what it takes to make a serious threat to enemy position if he doesn't open up with a major line of battle. The ideal size of one wave is a numerical match for the defenders on the same frontage. You don't want to give them denser targets that make all their weapons more effective. Instead you want them to face trying to hold off the third wave with empty magazines and surrounded by blasted friends, worked over repeatedly by all your fire support.

They won't stand. Lean hard enough into them, back off for nothing, make no mistakes, and use every weapon in your force for its proper target - and they will go down. Trust your combined strength, believe it, press home and make it so.

No captain can go far wrong who lays his ship alongside one of the enemy.

Don't spend lots of time scouting. Don't bother to fix and flank, except with tank forces, who can do it at speed. But also don't just run infantry at the enemy or ignore casualties. That isn't Russian doctrine or how it actually worked, it is just a cartoon slander of their methods spread by the Germans, whomthought it made them defending against it sound all clever and also heroic for braving it etc. (A rather incoherent set of spin objectives, incidentally, but that is an aside).

The first idea is that any definite plan pushed will be faster than slow recon pull. The next is that the process of destroying the enemy really isn't that complicated - it is a matter of laying your ship alongside the enemy, as Nelson put it before Trafalgar. Meaning close aggressively with the enemy, brave what he can dish out to dish out as much as you can yourself, and trust in your strength to destroy him before he destroys you.

But that isn't a headlong charge. Above all, it isn't about movement in the first place, it is about firepower and punishment dealt.

The first infantry wave is fixing, but doesn't have to do it everywhere, or care too much about finding the enemy. Walking over your chosen route of advance will either penetrate the enemy and break up his defense, or he'll find you, and reveal himself stopping that. Let him. Then blow the living crap out of everything that reveals itself, with all your firepower arms. Tanks, mortars, artillery support - call down the wrath of God to avenge the first wave. All the first wave itself needs to do in the meantime is hit the dirt, take what cover they can, and rally as best they can. They did their part drawing the enemy's fire. Don't press. It isn't a race. Save as many of them as possible, by blasting the guys shooting at them and skulking them out of sight.

Then send the second wave. Not a new idea. Not a fancy razzle dazzle end around head fake double reverse. Send them at the spots your artillery and other fire support just blasted into the lower atmosphere, while the dust is still moving upward. They may occupy the places so blasted. Or they may draw fire from a new set of shooters, and repeat the experience of the first wave. You don't really care which. There is no rushing. You have all week. Everyone will get a turn before you are done, every bit of fire support you have will chew on something, and the enemy will need to shoot you all down and still have something left. If they don't, it may be in the bottom half of the clock that they start crumbling. Waves that have been out of the leading role are rallying the while, shooting back. You don't care how long it takes, but not because any of it is tentative or any part of the clock is quiet. Reuse the rallied early waves as fourth and fifth attacks. The whole point is to outlast them, to have the last rallied wave standing. Inexorable is the watchword.

Each wave doesn't bunch up. It isn't trying to run the enemy off his feet in one go. You only expose what it takes to make a serious threat to enemy position if he doesn't open up with a major line of battle. The ideal size of one wave is a numerical match for the defenders on the same frontage. You don't want to give them denser targets that make all their weapons more effective. Instead you want them to face trying to hold off the third wave with empty magazines and surrounded by blasted friends, worked over repeatedly by all your fire support.

They won't stand. Lean hard enough into them, back off for nothing, make no mistakes, and use every weapon in your force for its proper target - and they will go down. Trust your combined strength, believe it, press home and make it so.

No captain can go far wrong who lays his ship alongside one of the enemy.

Realistic does not mean huge.  Realistic does not require special conditions of five times as much clock time.  Green units, 30-50% more time, and less symmetric forces can all improve realism, but none is strictly required (you can have 2 out of 3 e.g.).  
 
As for loss tolerance, the game model issue is that rally is rather too rapid and too complete (which greens do help with, incidentally).  Another approach to that I will describe below.
 
There is also a scenario design issue of designers frequently putting too much into terrain objectives that are all controlled at start by one side - or similar effects with exit conditions - which basically force a push for complete victory.  The better design for loss realism is to have a moderate amount of points for terrain objectives compared to those potentially available from knock out points, and then in addition to spread the terrain objectives around, some being quite easy for the attacker to reach and hold.  So that a normal, probing or tentative attack outcome would split the terrain objective points, with perhaps the attacker getting 200 of them and the defender 300 or 400.  Not 500-600 to nothing, unless the attacker takes the entire field.
 
There is another way to enforce realistic loss tolerance levels by using global morale.  It requires the players to adopt the system and abide by it, rather than any change to the game engine or scenario design (though the scenario design should specify the details).  Each side is given a global morale level that is its "continue the mission" or "critical" level.  If the side's global morale is below its critical level at the start of an orders phase, that side must click the "cease fire" option.  Notice, either side *may* choose to prepare for cease fire, as usual - this global morale just sets an additional "must".  If the defender thinks he is winning, he might voluntarily choose it each turn.  If he then drives the attacker's global morale below its critical level, the attacker will be forced to choose "ceasefire" as well, the two will match up, and the scenario will end, then and there.  This represents a combat broken off, with the attacker ceasing his efforts to try again later or somewhere else or using different tactics or forces, or the defender retreating from the position.
 
This gives a much more realistic way of fighting, in the sense that the force must be kept tolerably intact, in reasonable morale state etc, or it simply will not continue the mission.  If the opponent doesn't want to let it break off, this still won't end the fight early - the other side just won't have picked "cease fire" in that case, and the combat continues.  If both sides are ragged out, however, the fight *won't* continue. So no fighting to the last man on each side, ammo exhausted, trading haymakers at 4 meters with the last dismounted tank crews, etc.
 
As for how to make more realistic scenarios, when I was designing actively for CM1 I took inspiration from operational wargames I was playing at the same time.  I would just log local battles to simulate (at greatly reduced, merely "representative" scale, of course) from the combats that occurred in the operational game.  Those tend to be rather lopsided and to feature combined arms relationships that are not symmetric or ideal.  So e.g. sometimes a full company of German tanks with a few recon infantry on motorcycles attack a pure rifle infantry defense, that has nothing more than a single 45mm ATG as AT weapon, and in open farmland terrain.  On another occasion, such a German force might be called upon to attack through a dense forest along a narrow secondary road, against prepared defenses including mines.  Very different tactical task, that.
 
The point is precisely to avoid any one formula as supposedly "typical", to say to heck with "play balance", and instead just make lots of varied situations that feature only this long suit against that one, in this type of terrain problem or another.  Both sides need to assess what they can actual accomplish in the situation in front of them - which may be only "die gloriously", lol.
 
FWIW.

Small arms fixation, rather silly.  70% plus of all casualties are caused by artillery fire, including the common medium mortars,  but heavily dominated by divisional artillery, where all the fire control and ammunition supply was concentrated.  Of casualties caused by bullets, machineguns are by far the leading cause, both infantry crew served and vehicle mounted.  Maybe 1 in 6 battlefield casualties were caused by all smaller arms combined, and perhaps less.  Those split between close range fire at broken enemies or very rapidly decided knife fights, and long range fire making up in time-extent what it lacked in specific lethality.  Meaning rifles taking isolated potshots for *hours* on end, whenever a target briefly exposed itself.
 
CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank.  That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.
 
Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy.  Artillery and mortars and tanks and such all plaster him at 500 to 1000 yards.  Then MGs, modestly supplemented by aimed rifle fire, mostly keeps him from getting within 200 yards - the MGs rather more effective in the 250 to 500 yard range envelope and the rifles and such kicking in from 250 down to 100 - with few ever getting that close.
 
When infantry does get that close to the enemy it is after the heavier stuff has seriously messed him up, to finish him off or force him to retreat or to take prisoners.  Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work.  In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close.
 
Armies went to intermediate rather than full power cartridges after WWII because they had found that infantry only has to deal with the 300 yard and under range, because heavier stuff in the combined arms toolbox completely dominates all fighting at longer ranges.  Everyone with a carbine caliber weapon capable of full automatic fire gave all the benefits of SMGs without their limited range drawbacks, while being fully capable out to the 300 yard mark, beyond which small arms fire was tactically irrelevant.  
 
To get a realistic sense of these things in CM, you just have to play realistic scenarios that make full use of the combined arms "kit", and that reflect the "never fight fair" lopsidedness of real combat.  When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons.  You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.
 
Fight in open steppe terrain and see how important SMGs are.  Give the attacking side 12 tubes of 105mm artillery with 100 rounds per gun and see how important SMGs are.  Give one side an SMG infantry company and the other side a Panzer IVG company and see how important the SMGs are.   That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies.  When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized.  That just wasn't the whole war.

Small arms fixation, rather silly.  70% plus of all casualties are caused by artillery fire, including the common medium mortars,  but heavily dominated by divisional artillery, where all the fire control and ammunition supply was concentrated.  Of casualties caused by bullets, machineguns are by far the leading cause, both infantry crew served and vehicle mounted.  Maybe 1 in 6 battlefield casualties were caused by all smaller arms combined, and perhaps less.  Those split between close range fire at broken enemies or very rapidly decided knife fights, and long range fire making up in time-extent what it lacked in specific lethality.  Meaning rifles taking isolated potshots for *hours* on end, whenever a target briefly exposed itself.
 
CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank.  That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.
 
Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy.  Artillery and mortars and tanks and such all plaster him at 500 to 1000 yards.  Then MGs, modestly supplemented by aimed rifle fire, mostly keeps him from getting within 200 yards - the MGs rather more effective in the 250 to 500 yard range envelope and the rifles and such kicking in from 250 down to 100 - with few ever getting that close.
 
When infantry does get that close to the enemy it is after the heavier stuff has seriously messed him up, to finish him off or force him to retreat or to take prisoners.  Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work.  In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close.
 
Armies went to intermediate rather than full power cartridges after WWII because they had found that infantry only has to deal with the 300 yard and under range, because heavier stuff in the combined arms toolbox completely dominates all fighting at longer ranges.  Everyone with a carbine caliber weapon capable of full automatic fire gave all the benefits of SMGs without their limited range drawbacks, while being fully capable out to the 300 yard mark, beyond which small arms fire was tactically irrelevant.  
 
To get a realistic sense of these things in CM, you just have to play realistic scenarios that make full use of the combined arms "kit", and that reflect the "never fight fair" lopsidedness of real combat.  When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons.  You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.
 
Fight in open steppe terrain and see how important SMGs are.  Give the attacking side 12 tubes of 105mm artillery with 100 rounds per gun and see how important SMGs are.  Give one side an SMG infantry company and the other side a Panzer IVG company and see how important the SMGs are.   That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies.  When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized.  That just wasn't the whole war.

Small arms fixation, rather silly.  70% plus of all casualties are caused by artillery fire, including the common medium mortars,  but heavily dominated by divisional artillery, where all the fire control and ammunition supply was concentrated.  Of casualties caused by bullets, machineguns are by far the leading cause, both infantry crew served and vehicle mounted.  Maybe 1 in 6 battlefield casualties were caused by all smaller arms combined, and perhaps less.  Those split between close range fire at broken enemies or very rapidly decided knife fights, and long range fire making up in time-extent what it lacked in specific lethality.  Meaning rifles taking isolated potshots for *hours* on end, whenever a target briefly exposed itself.
 
CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank.  That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.
 
Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy.  Artillery and mortars and tanks and such all plaster him at 500 to 1000 yards.  Then MGs, modestly supplemented by aimed rifle fire, mostly keeps him from getting within 200 yards - the MGs rather more effective in the 250 to 500 yard range envelope and the rifles and such kicking in from 250 down to 100 - with few ever getting that close.
 
When infantry does get that close to the enemy it is after the heavier stuff has seriously messed him up, to finish him off or force him to retreat or to take prisoners.  Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work.  In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close.
 
Armies went to intermediate rather than full power cartridges after WWII because they had found that infantry only has to deal with the 300 yard and under range, because heavier stuff in the combined arms toolbox completely dominates all fighting at longer ranges.  Everyone with a carbine caliber weapon capable of full automatic fire gave all the benefits of SMGs without their limited range drawbacks, while being fully capable out to the 300 yard mark, beyond which small arms fire was tactically irrelevant.  
 
To get a realistic sense of these things in CM, you just have to play realistic scenarios that make full use of the combined arms "kit", and that reflect the "never fight fair" lopsidedness of real combat.  When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons.  You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.
 
Fight in open steppe terrain and see how important SMGs are.  Give the attacking side 12 tubes of 105mm artillery with 100 rounds per gun and see how important SMGs are.  Give one side an SMG infantry company and the other side a Panzer IVG company and see how important the SMGs are.   That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies.  When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized.  That just wasn't the whole war.

Small arms fixation, rather silly.  70% plus of all casualties are caused by artillery fire, including the common medium mortars,  but heavily dominated by divisional artillery, where all the fire control and ammunition supply was concentrated.  Of casualties caused by bullets, machineguns are by far the leading cause, both infantry crew served and vehicle mounted.  Maybe 1 in 6 battlefield casualties were caused by all smaller arms combined, and perhaps less.  Those split between close range fire at broken enemies or very rapidly decided knife fights, and long range fire making up in time-extent what it lacked in specific lethality.  Meaning rifles taking isolated potshots for *hours* on end, whenever a target briefly exposed itself.
 
CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank.  That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.
 
Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy.  Artillery and mortars and tanks and such all plaster him at 500 to 1000 yards.  Then MGs, modestly supplemented by aimed rifle fire, mostly keeps him from getting within 200 yards - the MGs rather more effective in the 250 to 500 yard range envelope and the rifles and such kicking in from 250 down to 100 - with few ever getting that close.
 
When infantry does get that close to the enemy it is after the heavier stuff has seriously messed him up, to finish him off or force him to retreat or to take prisoners.  Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work.  In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close.
 
Armies went to intermediate rather than full power cartridges after WWII because they had found that infantry only has to deal with the 300 yard and under range, because heavier stuff in the combined arms toolbox completely dominates all fighting at longer ranges.  Everyone with a carbine caliber weapon capable of full automatic fire gave all the benefits of SMGs without their limited range drawbacks, while being fully capable out to the 300 yard mark, beyond which small arms fire was tactically irrelevant.  
 
To get a realistic sense of these things in CM, you just have to play realistic scenarios that make full use of the combined arms "kit", and that reflect the "never fight fair" lopsidedness of real combat.  When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons.  You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.
 
Fight in open steppe terrain and see how important SMGs are.  Give the attacking side 12 tubes of 105mm artillery with 100 rounds per gun and see how important SMGs are.  Give one side an SMG infantry company and the other side a Panzer IVG company and see how important the SMGs are.   That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies.  When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized.  That just wasn't the whole war.

Small arms fixation, rather silly.  70% plus of all casualties are caused by artillery fire, including the common medium mortars,  but heavily dominated by divisional artillery, where all the fire control and ammunition supply was concentrated.  Of casualties caused by bullets, machineguns are by far the leading cause, both infantry crew served and vehicle mounted.  Maybe 1 in 6 battlefield casualties were caused by all smaller arms combined, and perhaps less.  Those split between close range fire at broken enemies or very rapidly decided knife fights, and long range fire making up in time-extent what it lacked in specific lethality.  Meaning rifles taking isolated potshots for *hours* on end, whenever a target briefly exposed itself.
 
CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank.  That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.
 
Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy.  Artillery and mortars and tanks and such all plaster him at 500 to 1000 yards.  Then MGs, modestly supplemented by aimed rifle fire, mostly keeps him from getting within 200 yards - the MGs rather more effective in the 250 to 500 yard range envelope and the rifles and such kicking in from 250 down to 100 - with few ever getting that close.
 
When infantry does get that close to the enemy it is after the heavier stuff has seriously messed him up, to finish him off or force him to retreat or to take prisoners.  Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work.  In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close.
 
Armies went to intermediate rather than full power cartridges after WWII because they had found that infantry only has to deal with the 300 yard and under range, because heavier stuff in the combined arms toolbox completely dominates all fighting at longer ranges.  Everyone with a carbine caliber weapon capable of full automatic fire gave all the benefits of SMGs without their limited range drawbacks, while being fully capable out to the 300 yard mark, beyond which small arms fire was tactically irrelevant.  
 
To get a realistic sense of these things in CM, you just have to play realistic scenarios that make full use of the combined arms "kit", and that reflect the "never fight fair" lopsidedness of real combat.  When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons.  You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.
 
Fight in open steppe terrain and see how important SMGs are.  Give the attacking side 12 tubes of 105mm artillery with 100 rounds per gun and see how important SMGs are.  Give one side an SMG infantry company and the other side a Panzer IVG company and see how important the SMGs are.   That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies.  When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized.  That just wasn't the whole war.

Tree splinter lethality is extremely overrated. The increased lethality of medium to heavy artillery in woods, vs infantry without overhead cover, comes pretty much entirely from raising the height at which the shell bursts, not from extra secondary projectiles. VT fuse artillery is more, not less, effective. Because it gets the extra height, gets the right amount of it, and doesn't intercept primary metal shell fragments with tree trunks. If you were picking a VT height for 60mm you'd pick around 5 meters, not 30.

With much lighter rounds, I would expect trees to do more to protect infantry, especially taller trees. A 60mm round is quite weak as artillery goes, and its effective blast radius is considerable smaller than the height of typical trees. The shells are simply going to explode so high if they do hit a tree, that the direct blast will do nothing to men on the ground. Yes there will still be primary metal shrapnel, but you don't get nearly as many shards big enough to inflict serious wounds from a 60mm as from say a 105mm shell. Tnen many of those will hit trees on their way toward a man on the ground, etc.

Given the choice between discussing whether German armor doctrine was effective or wasn't, and discussing whether they wrote halt as they clearly did, or half as some fool on the internet guessed, the brilliant tacticans of this site spend 3 pages weighing in on the second "question". This is why I write for Board Game Geek these days, far more than this forum. Just saying...

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

Apocal - the mechanized corps fought like the tank corps, it just had a tank regiment with each of 3 motorized rifle brigades, plus a 4th brigade that was pure tank.  
They still fought like the tank corps fought.  They had as many tanks as a tank corps, with 10 infantry battalions in the formation rather than 6, and a marginally more infantry heavy mix, as a result.
 
This did not change their basic tactics.  It just meant where one of the sub formations was barreling ahead, it would sometimes have a thinner cutting edge of tanks and a longer trailing "shield" column of trucked infantry.  Though the tank corps portion would often be "on point" with exactly the same techniques as in the tank corps.  In practice, the extra infantry gave the formation greater staying power after taking losses in extended action, and a superior ability to hold the ground it took.    

The basic German defense doctrine was the one they developed during WW I to avoid being defeated by local concentration and artillery suppression, and it remains the basic system the Germans used in the east.  That tactical system has been called the denuded front, in comparison with practice near the start of WW I of lining continuous front line trenches with solid lines of riflemen.  Instead it was based around a few fortified machinegun positions, concealed, and cross fired to cover each other rather than their own front, in an interlocking fashion.  The idea being to make it hard to take out just a piece of the scheme.  Most forces were kept out of the front line to let enemy artillery "hit air".  Wide areas were covered by barrage fire and obstacles (in WW I generally just wire, in WW II plenty of mines as well).  Barrages and obstacles have the feature that they multiple in their effectiveness the more then enemy sends; his local odds does not help him, it hinders him or raises his losses instead.  The MG and outpost network is meant to defeat penetration by smaller enemy numbers, while barrages crucify their masses if they overload those.
 
Then the main body of the defending infantry defends from considerably farther back, and executes local counterattacks into portions of the defensive system reached by the attackers.  The idea is to spend as much prep barrage time as possible deep in underground shelters, and only come up and forward to mix it up with enemy infantry after they are mixed in with your own positions and hard for the enemy to distinguish and coordinate fires on them etc.  This also was meant to exploit the confusion that even successful attackers were generally in, after crossing the outpost and barrage zone described above.
 
That is an effective enough system, but it isn't foolproof.  The thinner front and separated strongpoint positions it uses are vulnerable to stealthy penetration, night infiltration e.g., rather than frontal attack on a large scale.  The local counterattack part of the doctrine can be taken to extremes and get rather expensive for the defenders, resulting in mere brawling inside the defender's works, and just exchange off with the more numerous attackers.  What it really relies on is the enemy being defeated by the artillery fire scheme and ranged MG fire over most of the frontage, so that the counterattack and brawl stuff only happens in a few exceptional spots, where the defenders have a safer route to the front, better information about where the enemy is, what routes are left clear of obstacles, and the like.
 
The main line of resistance, once hit, generally tried to solve the fire discipline dilemma by firing quite late, when the attackers were close enough to really destroy them, not just drive them to ground.  Harassing mortar fire and a few "wait a minute" MGs were all that fired at longer ranges, to delay the enemy and prevent them being able to maneuver easily, mass in front of the defenders safely, and the like.
 
At a higher level, the division's artillery regiment commander, divisional commander, or regional "Arkos" tried to manage the larger battle by choosing where to intervene in the outcoming attack with the weight of divisional fires.  They didn't distributed those evenly, or according to need.  Instead they would have a plan of their own, to stop the Russians cold in sector B, and just make do in sectors A and C.  They divide the attack that way.  Then shift fires to one of the break ins, and counterattack the other one with the divisional reserve.  The basic idea is just to break up the larger scale coordination of the offensive by imposing failure where the defenders choose, by massing of fires.  They can't do this everywhere, but it can be combined with choices of what to give up, who pulls back, what the next good position is, and the like, as a coordinated scheme.  The function is "permission" - you only get forward where I let you get forward, not where you want it.  If the enemy tries to get forward in the place the defenders "veto" in this way, they just mass their infantry under the heaviest artillery and multiple their own losses.
 
I should add, though, that those doctrinal perfect approaches sometimes could not be used in the conditions prevalent in parts of Russia.  In the north, large blocks of forest and marsh are so favorable for infiltration tactics that separate strongpoints with only obstacles in between just invite penetration every night and loss of the position.  The Germans often had to abandon their doctrine in those areas, in favor of a continuous linear trench line.  And then, they often didn't have sufficient forces to give that line any real depth, but instead had to defend on line, manning that whole front as best they could.  In the more fluid fighting in the south, on the other hand, the Germans could and did use strongpoint schemes.  The Russians got significantly better at night infiltration as a means to get into or through those, as the war went on.
 
Against Russian armor the German infantry formations also had a harder time of it.  In exceptional cases they could prepare gun lines with enough heavy ATGs well enough protected and sited to give an armor attack a bloody nose, but normally they were not rich or prepared enough for that.  Keep in mind that the Russians were quite good at tank infantry cooperation in their mech arm - by midwar that is, early they hadn't been - but lagged in the development of tank artillery cooperation.  Which is what tanks need to deal with gun based defenses efficiently.  The German infantry formations themselves tried to just strip tanks of their infantry escorts and let the tanks continue.  The Russians would sometimes make that mistake, and send the tanks deeper on their own.  That put them in the middle of a deep German defense that would know more about where they were and what they were doing than vice versa.  But that is really an "own goal" thing - if the Russian tanks just stayed with their riders and shot the crap out of the German infantry defenses, the Russian doctrine worked fine.
 
On a deeper level, the Germans relied on their own armor to stop Russian armor.  Brawling frontally with reserves, often enough, sometimes aided by superior AFVs.  Sometimes by counterattacks that sought to cut off the leading Russian spearheads, and prevent their resupply (with fuel above all).  That worked less and less well as the war went on, however, because the Russians got better at keeping multiple threats growing on the map, gauging defender strength correctly and waiting for all arms to consolidate gains, and the like.  There was also just less of the fire brigade German armor later in the war, and it had less of an edge in tactical know-how.
 
There are also some weaknesses of the Russian doctrine that the Germans tried to exploit.  It can be quite predictable.  You can let them succeed at things to draw them in, in a pretty predictable way.  The Russian mech way of attacking was at its best against infantry defenses, or vs armor against heavily outnumbered defenders.  If they pushed too hard at a strong block of armor, they could get a brigade killed in a matter of hours.  If you have such an asset, you can try to string the two together - let them hit a weak spot precisely where you want them to come on hard into your planned kill sack.  They aren't doing a lot of battlefield recon to spot such things, they are mostly relying on speed to create surprise.  If you let them think they just made a brilliant and formula perfect break in, they are apt to drive hard trying to push it home, and not to suspect that its is a trap.  But a lot of things get easier if you have a Tiger or Panther battalion lying around, don't they?

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

Given the choice between discussing whether German armor doctrine was effective or wasn't, and discussing whether they wrote halt as they clearly did, or half as some fool on the internet guessed, the brilliant tacticans of this site spend 3 pages weighing in on the second "question". This is why I write for Board Game Geek these days, far more than this forum. Just saying...

Given the choice between discussing whether German armor doctrine was effective or wasn't, and discussing whether they wrote halt as they clearly did, or half as some fool on the internet guessed, the brilliant tacticans of this site spend 3 pages weighing in on the second "question". This is why I write for Board Game Geek these days, far more than this forum. Just saying...

Put the AI on defense. It is much sounder in that role than it is attacking, and it is particularly bad at "puzzle solving" attacks, where just the right weapon must be used to deal with each successive defensive position. It doesn't do tool box combined arms. It does throw everything at em and hope something sticks. Also, the bigger the forces scale and the higher the ratio of force to space, the worse it will do. Keeping intervals and not bunching up and reinforcing success while starving failure are not in its lexicon.

JonS and Andreas - seconded (thirded, I guess, maybe more) - byte sized battles are the way to go for CMRT designers.  Give me one platoon and an interesting situation, or at most an attacking company up against only a platoon and a half (with corresponding trouble from task and terrain to balance the numbers etc).  Keep the tanks to a platoon on a side at most, sometimes just 1-2.  People will play those more and more often etc.  I know I will.
 
As for Macisles increasingly silly comments, show me the final result screen of your human game on anything like that scale.  Setting it up isn't playing it to completion.  We will wait (a couple years is my estimate, but maybe you play fast).  Your later posts all but acknowledge that even good design on that scale is a chore, and actually playing it (my opinion, not yours) would be about as fun as having a root canal.  In the 1980s SPI designers spoke of the mythical game "IT" - WWII played out with single man counters - any you are in the same silly situation.  If the command span isn't realistic and manageable for the player, the game isn't playable nor are the results ever going to be realistic.  My previous remarks on your first post in the thread, incidentally, did not say large CMRT games don't exist or aren't played by some, but ridiculed the notion that they are *more playable* than fights on the same scale in CMBB.  And I stand by that comment.  It was perfectly feasible to command whole platoons with two or three mouse clicks in a way that would actually make sense on the ground in that game.  When the same group has 10 counters that should each pay attention to the location of every window, saying it is *more* manageable to command them is ridiculous and it is nonsense.  Notice, no one was or is talking about the engine or the CPU, we are talking about the user's experience and the "CPU between our ears".
 
As for the issues being covered in the thread, yes the OP mostly wanted more coverage and also better QBs.  My comments were different, stressing the reduction in game scale - which is fine for those who want the detail or have tons of time to pour over every move.  The same, incidentally, applies to the editor and creating scenarios.  It is a fair comment that some CMBB scenarios were meh - it was so easy to make new scenarios in that system that lots of people tried it.  The polished results and beautiful maps of modern CMRT scenario design are definitely superior to the average CMBB user made scenario.  There are also 2 orders of magnitude less of them, because they are much, much harder to make.  Not just to make right, but to make at all.
 
No one has spoken about the weakest point of CMBB in my opinion, though, which was the AI.  I couldn't attack worth a darn, especially with infantry, especially against armor etc.  Scripting is certainly a better system and A* pathfinding.  You could "work it" as a designer by giving the AI a defending role with good siting of its weapons, or lots of armor and a numbers edge when it was attacking, or mostly continuous cover if it had to attack with infantry - but it was still subject to "stupid AI tricks".  This problem just didn't come up in human vs human, but it was a drawback to the otherwise great CMBB QB system (force selection was also bad - pretty much had to use "allow human" even for the enemy, which eliminated force composition surprise etc).
 
A better QB system, faster scenario creation, pre-populated AI scripts that the designer could edit but doesn't have to roll from scratch - those are things CMRT could use improvement on.  Personally I'd love to see those plus the up a step size, semi-abstracted units again, but I don't seriously expect that.  In the meantime, anything that can make it easier for CMRT players to have more small scenarios is useful, and especially ways to make such themselves more rapidly.  That's the feedback here - make of it what you will.

Macisle, re battalion scale engagements being overwhelming in CMBB but readily playable in CMRT, because you can split down to 2-3 man units - um, sure. We believe you. We really do. Sliced bread and everything. We are also really, really stupid.

I've played 4 scenarios of CMBB so far this weekend.  I last played CMRT last November.  The OP has a point. 
It isn't actually the QBs and time frame that make the difference for me, it is the game play and scale.
I freely admit that CMRT is more realistic and that it is visually much more immersive.
 
But the level of micromanagement needed to play it right makes it feel like a sergeant's level game, in which I am primarily focused on the tasking and decisions within one squad at a time.  With a platoon a comfortable total force and a single company leaning toward giant feeling.  The realistic fire is dangerous enough, moreover, that large portions of the fight "go static" pretty quickly, since staying in good cover and firing is often the right thing for most units to do, at that point.
By comparison, CMBB feels like a company commander's game.  It moves along quickly, the decision each game turn are managable but interesting, etc.
 
I freely acknowledge that people with other play priorities, or just a lot better at CMRT, may find it more enjoyable.  I just don't.  I'd love to have CMBB gameplay with updated graphics - wouldn't even need single man depiction.  But that's just not where we are.  In the meantime, I still consider CMBB the best tactical computer wargame ever made.
 
One man's opinion...

There can only be one response to Reiter's posts -
 

Macisle, re battalion scale engagements being overwhelming in CMBB but readily playable in CMRT, because you can split down to 2-3 man units - um, sure. We believe you. We really do. Sliced bread and everything. We are also really, really stupid.

I've played 4 scenarios of CMBB so far this weekend.  I last played CMRT last November.  The OP has a point. 
It isn't actually the QBs and time frame that make the difference for me, it is the game play and scale.
I freely admit that CMRT is more realistic and that it is visually much more immersive.
 
But the level of micromanagement needed to play it right makes it feel like a sergeant's level game, in which I am primarily focused on the tasking and decisions within one squad at a time.  With a platoon a comfortable total force and a single company leaning toward giant feeling.  The realistic fire is dangerous enough, moreover, that large portions of the fight "go static" pretty quickly, since staying in good cover and firing is often the right thing for most units to do, at that point.
By comparison, CMBB feels like a company commander's game.  It moves along quickly, the decision each game turn are managable but interesting, etc.
 
I freely acknowledge that people with other play priorities, or just a lot better at CMRT, may find it more enjoyable.  I just don't.  I'd love to have CMBB gameplay with updated graphics - wouldn't even need single man depiction.  But that's just not where we are.  In the meantime, I still consider CMBB the best tactical computer wargame ever made.
 
One man's opinion...

I've played 4 scenarios of CMBB so far this weekend.  I last played CMRT last November.  The OP has a point. 
It isn't actually the QBs and time frame that make the difference for me, it is the game play and scale.
I freely admit that CMRT is more realistic and that it is visually much more immersive.
 
But the level of micromanagement needed to play it right makes it feel like a sergeant's level game, in which I am primarily focused on the tasking and decisions within one squad at a time.  With a platoon a comfortable total force and a single company leaning toward giant feeling.  The realistic fire is dangerous enough, moreover, that large portions of the fight "go static" pretty quickly, since staying in good cover and firing is often the right thing for most units to do, at that point.
By comparison, CMBB feels like a company commander's game.  It moves along quickly, the decision each game turn are managable but interesting, etc.
 
I freely acknowledge that people with other play priorities, or just a lot better at CMRT, may find it more enjoyable.  I just don't.  I'd love to have CMBB gameplay with updated graphics - wouldn't even need single man depiction.  But that's just not where we are.  In the meantime, I still consider CMBB the best tactical computer wargame ever made.
 
One man's opinion...

Macisle, re battalion scale engagements being overwhelming in CMBB but readily playable in CMRT, because you can split down to 2-3 man units - um, sure. We believe you. We really do. Sliced bread and everything. We are also really, really stupid.