Sarjen

If the Russian narrative can be believed it seems the mines and arty were enough to stall the breach before ATGMS started to hit the UKA armour. As @The_Capt previously stated it does not seem that everybody piled on from the RUS side at that time however, and so the UKA forces were able to withdraw, even if on foot, rather than be destroyed. 

Not sure either side will be really pleased with the outcome, as I suspect both will think they could have dealt with the situation better
P

lol c'mon guys, start a new thread on what rounds size is best and stopping power.  The UA isn't using those.

or just rank stupidity. I'm kind of past the point of wondering about Russian motivations.  They have done so many things beyond the pale of what is considered decent human behavior that I just don't think I can attribute what I'd consider rational behavior to their thought process.

Exactly. Would have been a strange coincidence if it collapsed "naturally". 
 
 

One of my ongoing side projects (aimed, mostly, at the new influx of Steam Players) is to host an 'All in One' for every CM game here.
CMSF2 has been a bit of a mess on that front with separate modpacks for Syria, Afghanistan as well as old dropboxes of content from SF1 scattered around the place.
This has now all been brought together under one package... a proper 'All in One'.
Arguably this 'All in Ones' primary feature is a vast mass of content (361 scenarios* & 31 campaigns) which has been organized into four different categories...
 
Syria
The default modpack should be fairly familiar to many consisting of (tweaked) versions of @Kieme(ITA)'s outstanding terrain & buildings mods (I also added a few of @Zveroboy1's Allepo buildings), @MikeyD's horizons, @Pete Wenman's flavour objects, a tweaked version of @Sir Lancelot's realistic Syrians, @Jock Tamson's unconventional & (tweaked) British mods, tweaked versions of @AtlasActual's Canadians & a few bits & pieces from @mjkerner's USMC mods. There are also some .mds fixes by @Kevin2k & @Jace11. Many of the old SF1 vehicle mods by the likes of @Ryujin, @M1A1TC, @Kieme(ITA) & @Marco Bergman will also be quite familiar. @Mord's Marine vehicles have been given [brown] tags & so don't conflict with the US Army vehicles.
UI mods are provided by @xacto, @SteppenWolf, @Vinnart, @Mord & @MikeyD. Whilst music is a mix from @Blimey & (I believe) @Augusto. The ME effects compliation & ME soundscape (with its expanded dynamic range) & voices by waclaw, @George MC &  @Mord complete the package.
What might not be familiar is that I have added "rudimentary weathering" to (I believe) every vehicle in the game & used @JMDECC's .psd layers to add dust to every uniform.
207 user made scenarios & 23 user made campaigns are set in Syria.



There are three zip files inside the Syrian mod folder labelled Afghanistan, MENA & OPFOR. Unzip ONE of these files to activate that particular regions mods...
 
Afghanistan
Users of the (now discontinued) SF2-Afghanistan 'All in one' will be familiar with this mod option. It is in essence a fusion of @Zveroboy1's excellent Afghanistan, Taliban & ANA mods alongside a port of Combat Mission: Afghanistan's terrain & @Bil Hardenberger's Afghanistan trees as well as various doodads from @SeinfeldRules & @Kieme(ITA). The modpack has been tweaked & simplified somewhat from the 2021 version but little has really changed.
There is now a folder for appropriate text changes (renaming "Syria" into "Afghanistan" for example) however this will only work for the current game version (2.06). This folder will have to be deleted for all other game versions prior or to come.
2 user made campaigns & 44 scenarios have been given an "AFG" prefix to highlight that they are set in Afghanistan.



 
"Middle East & North Africa" aka "MENA"
Whilst planning the 'All in One' I was considering updating the old "Road to Bahgdad" mod by @Blimey using primarily the cool DCU uniform mods by @beeron & @Damian45.
However as I sorted through all the user made scenarios, I came to realize that there were many other Middle Eastern scenarios set in places like Libya, various fictional Middle Eastern kingdoms, various training camps & even a blue on blue battle set in an Egyptian shopping mall.  As such the MENA modpack was born... the best way of describing it is "The Middle East but NOT Syria".
Terrain & doodads are a port of the old SF1 terrain & (I think) is quite pleasing to the eye (it also looks much sandier than I remembered). @SteppenWolf's UI & music take centre stage here & more of @Zveroboy1's buildings enter the mix. There's a few different vehicles by @M1A1TC, some more voices by @Mord (as well as a different mix of portraits). @JMDECC's .psd's have been used to create alternative red uniforms alongside his Iranian vehicles (although these have also been rudimentarily weathered &, inspired by @IICptMillerII's sandy vehicles, recoloured somewhat).
There is also a folder for appropriate text changes however this will only work for the current game version (2.06). This folder will have to be deleted for all other game versions prior or to come.
2 user made campiagns & 60 scenarios have been given a "MENA" prefix to highlight that they are not set in Syria.



 
"Generic OPFOR"
The old SF1 content creators (and some of the newer SF2 ones) were an adventurous & experimental bunch and, with only one CM game to work with for many years, unsurprisingly made a considerable amount of content set in alternative theatres. There are scenarios set in Europe, in Chechnya, on Artic Islands, nuclear wastelands, Africa, South America, New Zealand, New England, various fictional countries... I think there's a Chinese invasion of the United States & a zombie attack or two.
To mod all of these places would be impractical to say the least, so I came up with the "Generic OPFOR"... they are everyone & nobody, everywhere & nowhere.
Terrain is a mix of the old Euroscape & Syrope mods by @dpabrams & @birdstrike respectively as well as their US vehicle mods. @Kevin2k provides the Syrian & British vehicle mods whilst @JMDECC provides the various woodland uniforms. I also added some @Oleksandr uniforms to the mix.
Yet more of @Zveroboy1's buildings are added to the mix alongside the modern UI mod by @Kinophile. I have no idea where the music tracks are from.
There is also a folder for appropriate text changes however this will only work for the current game version (2.06). This folder will have to be deleted for all other game versions prior or to come.
4 user made campaigns & 50 scenarios have been given the "OPFOR" prefix to highlight that they are not set in the Middle East.



 
There's also another two additional folders...
Extras & Options
Here you will find various extras which can be activated when needed or desired for example there's a modern version of @RockinHarry's re-animate mods (I used a lot of SF1 animations for the modded stances) designed to keep the pixeltruppens heads down & (possibly) increase their survivability.
There's the old SF1 marsh & mud to water mods which can be used whilst playing SF1 campaigns which are meant to have water on them (the old content creators did not have access to water so often made do with marsh).
There's an untagged night effects pack designed for dawn/dusk scenarios (this will also have the added benefit of removing all those sunglasses... your troops will no longer wear shades at sunset) as well as @Kieme(ITA)'s optional HD highway pack (these look good but don't work with every maps highway set-up).
Modtags
There's not many but here you will find @Zveroboy1's ANP pick-up, a weathered & desert version of @Chelentano's T-34, the old "Road to Bahgdad" cemetary mod & @Pete Wenman's squalor mod. They're activated automatically.
 
DOWNLOAD LINKS & INSTALLATION
 
https://www.mediafire.com/file/hk8tt6jfxv2ro8l/CMSF2_%27All_in_One%27.7z/file
https://app.mediafire.com/izmk6muctniv5
Unzip the file & add the "Z for Syria" folder to your games data folder (the folder with the .brz files in it)... that's it.
For the content, add the campaign .cam files to your games campaign folder & the scenario .btt files to your games scenarios folder... I suggest adding the content to folders which only contain base game scenarios & campaigns.
 
*I have updated a lot of the old SF1 maps which featured marsh being used as pseudo-water with proper SF2 water however there's nothing much I could do about the campaigns (other than provide the old "marsh to water" mods as an optional extra).

Let's calm down a little, shall we?
This unpleasant "discussion" made me dig out a test I did some time ago. I've been doing data analysis for basically all my professional life, so I always suffer a bit when reading these threads. So, as we've been discussing on page one or so, anecdotal evidence ("here look at this battle, spotting is broken!!!!") is meaningless. But also doing "experiments" is only as good as the experiment itself plus the evaluation afterwards. First of all, if you do experiments, control the variables! Eliminate everything you are not directly interested in. If you want to look at spotting, do it on a flat surface and make both opponents hold fire. Because, as I often see, if you measure time until first shot, or kill, you are skewing the spotting process. Next, don't look at averages or medians alone. Look at distributions. And don't eliminate outliers. My text book about statistical data analysis said that, eliminating outliers, although done often, should really only be done if you know what you are doing, e.g. when you know that your outlier is actually some measurement error and not some rare event.
So, here's what I did:
I put an M60 TTS and a bog standard T72 (the exact models aren't relevant for the method) on a flat map with paved ground, roughly 2 km apart. I set both vehicles to hold fire. I then measured the time it took for each tank to first get a partial contact and then a full contact.
Here is the raw data:
t72 = [84, 17, 78, 4, 174, 65, 77, 321, 289, 444, 31, 3, 290, 2, 40, 120, 40, 159, 57, 69, 15, 54, 80, 95, 19, 58,
       23, 672, 154, 154, 17, 14, 342, 12, 386, 43, 84, 12, 378, 123, 30, 44, 240, 311, 110, 2, 68, 181, 137]
t72_id = [7, 21, 7,28, 7, 35, 14, 0, 56, 0, 35, 0, 7, 70, 42, 7, 35, 35, 0, 49, 0, 7, 0, 0, 0, 63, 28, 7, 14, 0,
          7, 7, 7, 49, 7, 21, 14, 21, 14, 0, 7, 14, 28, 0, 14, 7, 28, 56, 77]
m60 = [89, 68, 41, 38, 71, 10, 73, 0, 20, 9, 4, 55, 91, 34, 31, 8, 14, 116, 64, 4, 18, 63, 116, 38, 3, 18, 71, 132,
       39, 73, 43, 73, 116, 210, 207, 36, 180, 27, 88, 48, 102, 3, 52, 77, 176, 22, 18, 80, 24]
m60_id = [7, 7, 7, 0, 14, 14, 0, 14, 14, 7, 14, 0, 7, 14, 35, 14, 7, 0, 7, 14, 7, 0, 14, 7, 7, 7, 14, 35, 7, 0, 7, 0,
          0, 7, 0, 7, 14, 14, 7, 7, 7, 0, 7, 0, 0, 7, 21, 7, 7]
Times are in seconds, the entry t72 is time until partial contact for the T72 trying to spot the M60, the one with  "_id" is the difference between partial and full contact. The same for m60. And in order to get the distributions I made histograms with 30s bins for plots 1 and 3 and 7s for plot 2.



So, what do we see here? Well, first of all, I should have taken at least ten times the data or make make larger bins. I didn't have the patience for the former and doing the latter would mean that we don't see much of a distribution. 😉 Anyway, from the raw data we see: time until partial contact can be any number, time to ID (which is what I call time to go from partial to full contact) is always a multiple of 7.
The histograms tell us the following: Although it is not possible to get the exact distribution, this is definitely not something symmetrical where average or media are easy to interpret. If you look at the bins with the highest counts, those are at low times. That means, players will usually see that their T72 or M60 are often quick to spot their target. Nothing to complain about or make a forum "rant". But for both (!) tanks it is quite possible that it takes several minutes - more likely for the T72 but also the M60 TTS had an event with over 3.5 minutes. The time until partial contact is consistent (no more, no less) with an exponential decay which you would expect when counting the number of dice rolls necessary to roll a specific number - only that the M60 TTS rolls with a D6, while the T72 rolls a D20, so to speak.
Now, is spotting "broken" or not? For me, this is really not a meaningful thing to say. Because by "broken" people usually mean "takes too long" without saying what "too long" is and why. With the above distributions, it is possible to never spot the target. Right? Wrong? Broken? This is a game/simulation and as any such thing, at least if you want it to run in reasonable time on a consumer machine, it is simpler than real life and abstracted. A meaningful discussion would be "Is this spotting model adequate? Could CM do better by applying model XYZ, instead?". I'm not sure if the long tails (what some call "outliers") are working as intended (although I find @The_Capt analogy with the barrel quite convincing) or if it is a model that is just designed to get the "center", the common situations, right, accepting that every now and then it produces something odd. But getting the tails of an exponentially decaying distribution right is brutally difficult - in fact, come to think of it, my whole PhD thesis was about modelling the tails of a similar distribution correctly.
 

If you're playing the Sov and you put your tanks in a situation where they are getting into 1:1 duels with the Americans you're doing something wrong. 
Bring a platoon or a company of tanks along instead. Or, even better, infiltrate infantry ATGM teams forward and kill them the way. The Sov has very competent infantry luggable ATGMs that will absolutely wreck pre-M1 armor. 
H

Just some info regarding the IR capabilities of the T-80s: the early T-80s uses the TPN-3 which is equipped with a much more sensitive infrared image converter assembly than its predecessor. The passive range of the early versions is between 500 and 800m. With the support of the modernized infrared headlight L4A, which had received a more luminous lamp, the visibility in active operation increased to about 1200 m. Still worse than the western technology but still more than 20m as in my video example. 

I do share this frustation in many battles when i play the soviets. Just now i experienced a harrowing view. My T80B1 is driving into the enemy. Many of its company are already dead from invisble enemies. C2 didn't help. Infantry spotted and relayed the contacts to the HQ, but the info didn't trickle down to the tanks. So i just drove my tanks to near (20m) range of the enemy, still seeing nothing. I have recorded this from both views. Playing the soviets is no fun at all.
 
View from the T80B1:
and the view from the US side:
 

Just some info regarding the IR capabilities of the T-80s: the early T-80s uses the TPN-3 which is equipped with a much more sensitive infrared image converter assembly than its predecessor. The passive range of the early versions is between 500 and 800m. With the support of the modernized infrared headlight L4A, which had received a more luminous lamp, the visibility in active operation increased to about 1200 m. Still worse than the western technology but still more than 20m as in my video example. 

I do share this frustation in many battles when i play the soviets. Just now i experienced a harrowing view. My T80B1 is driving into the enemy. Many of its company are already dead from invisble enemies. C2 didn't help. Infantry spotted and relayed the contacts to the HQ, but the info didn't trickle down to the tanks. So i just drove my tanks to near (20m) range of the enemy, still seeing nothing. I have recorded this from both views. Playing the soviets is no fun at all.
 
View from the T80B1:
and the view from the US side:
 

I have this morning uploaded the 'final' versions of my creations including:
(1) Normandy and Netherlands Master Maps (7 maps)
(2) ASL/SL to CMBN conversions. (11 Scenarios)
(3) Kandu's Original Scenarios (6 Scenarios)
(4) 82nd Airborne in Normandy standalone scenarios (29 Scenarios)
(5) Mission Boston - Objective La Fiere; a short, five mission, linear, 82nd Airborne in Normandy campaign. A longer version is still in development.
 

This was forwarded to me I and decided to post it here for wider distribution:
https://secure.braintumor.org/site/TR?fr_id=3783&pg=team&syclid=cheq0auf216rlb1pbau0&team_id=91439&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_148425113754&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email

Just some info regarding the IR capabilities of the T-80s: the early T-80s uses the TPN-3 which is equipped with a much more sensitive infrared image converter assembly than its predecessor. The passive range of the early versions is between 500 and 800m. With the support of the modernized infrared headlight L4A, which had received a more luminous lamp, the visibility in active operation increased to about 1200 m. Still worse than the western technology but still more than 20m as in my video example. 

Exactly this. Thanks domfluff for getting the point through.

The TPN-3 is not a thermal optic. It does have passive night vision out to a decent range, which a lot of the earlier models lacked, but it's not comparable to a thermal optic.

Direct comparisons of those are always a bit deceptive - in the below case, this is looking at something a tiny number of metres away, which isn't really indicative of any kind of real situation, but it gives you an idea of how much of an advantage a modern optic gives you:
https://packaged-media.redd.it/lqjq2oe3zzu81/pb/m2-res_720p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1683761911&s=fce3986b5d013acede59eb3727f2b360cced2c80#t=0

(Ukranian T-64 with thermal sight, compared to the regular one).
The thermals in CMCW aren't going to be of the same resolution to pick out details, but they'll certainly be similar in terms of contrast, and finding hot tanks against a cold background.
 
Of course, none of this minutia is actually the point of this post. The Soviet tanks do indeed have worst situational awareness than the US ones in CMCW. They also have significantly better fire control systems, a much scarier armament, and superior protection. They are in most respects superior to the US tanks, until the generational change that happens with Abrams and Bradley (and to a lesser extent, the M60A3 TTS). This naturally leaps ahead of the Soviet designs, and this was late enough such that it wasn't something the Soviet Union ever really caught up with.

I've mentioned before that I think the best way to approach CMCW is about 1980 or so, and with Strict rarity, if you're playing a QB. The more thermals you add, the more the game looks like Shock Force.

Totally agree. M60 A1's/M-150's/M-1113's vs T-62's/BMP1's/BTR-60's is one of the most even match ups in the series while playing radically differently.

Against high-end US vehicles the Soviets suffer from a noticeable quality gap, but the earlier American stuff is another story. I certainly didn’t feel like I had any kind of technological disadvantages as the Soviets playing Mittelaschenbach for example, rather the opposite actually.

Yes, tanks have very narrow fields of vision, which means that the closer they are to something the less likely they are to see it. Remember, you're essentially looking at things through letterbox-sized periscopes or viewports, and in the case of the gunner through a straw.
To overcome this, they should be used en-masse where possible.
Western doctrine is to fight with the commander at least partially turned-out. Soviet doctrine was to fight turned-in and en-masse.

there is smoke around area , night time +smoke + nou thermals 

It's also night-time isn't it? Bradleys have thermal optics, while the T-80s don't, they have IR lamps which only provide visibility out to something like 100m. And I'm not even sure if they're used.
Edit: yeah it's 4.30AM, so visibility would be very low for non-thermal optics.

I was expecting German forces, as the war is mainly fought in German lands and I think they are a must have, but I have to admit, I also want to see the Brits in the game, and getting the Canadians as well is a great bonus. Looking forward to it, many were requesting it.

This was my first dive back into the world of reshade. Some are better than others (at least to my eye) as I was figuring out how reshade works again and trying out different settings. Not sure why I decided to go with CMFI to test this out, something about this game always seems to pull be back from time to time. It's got a certain character to it. There are a handful of mods alongside the reshade in these pictures. 















 

This former Bradley crewman loves it!

It looks like M2 in Ukrainian service will be called „Kitty Cat” (I do not dare to suggest another name, commonly used for both cats and ladyparts). UA are really good with social media and I love witty videos they usually post - but this one is just too much 🤣😂