landser

War in the East is an epic grand strategy game. I've done quite a few of the grand campaigns, for both sides and different point targets.
Perhaps grand operational game is more accurate.
It's a great what-if generator, allowing the player to pursue alternate-history paths. I only wish the player could opt to set the starting state instead of being limited to the historical start. I'd love to see what I could do if I were to mass AGC south of the marshes for example.
It impresses me with how complex it is while at the same  time hiding this complexity beneath the surface. Every shot fired in a battle phase is calculated.  Yet it does this under-the-hood stuff nearly instantly. Yeah, it's old and we should expect it to run well on modern hardware, but it's still tight design that distills massively complex calculations down to such minimal presentation.
The logistics and supply model is probably my favorite in any game of the sort. It's rather brilliant in my view. How it drives home the shoestring Barbarossa actually was, how essential railheads are to an army, how important headquarters units and their proximity are and, the effects of raputista, blizzards, partisans on supplying your front line units. You are even required to manage the rail conversion, hex by hex using far too few resources. Now, decide on which rail lines get the attention, and hope you didn't choose wrong! In one of my runs, the whole of Army Group South, and later Army Groups A and B, were dependent on a single rail line for supply. If partisans cut this at any spot along it's hundreds of miles the front line stops dead in its tracks.
Do not even think about this game unless you embrace the micro. In the grand campaign, every turn you are considering hundreds of counters. I remember the reorganization I undertook when Army Group South splits upon reaching Rostov. One of the game's mechanics is command overload, where HQ units suffer penalties if they have too many subordinate units. When this split occurred I saw an opportunity to reorganize and hopefully fix this command deficiency since we gained a new Army Group. Here's what I wrote in my AAR about this process, which some will never even have the chance to do. But it highlights the micro demands the game places on a thorough player
War in the East also shines in the operational sense, the massive encirclements you can pull off from concept to execution. Tying the noose around several enemy armies at once is heady stuff indeed.
On the other hand, it's not without its weaknesses as I see it. And top among these for me is the fact that the German side is strictly tethered to history. Only units present in the war are available, and departures and arrivals occur on a strict timeline to reflect actual history. But the Russian player has no such constraints, he can build new units, armies, air fleets and, well, everything. The German player can build nothing, not even a lousy HQ and this disparity in the rules is the biggest drawback in this game for me. Both sides should play by the same rules, even if the underlying resources and potential varies.
That's a long post but just skims the surface of what is one of the grandest war games of all. Every semi-serious wargamer should play it, but steer clear if you don't embrace micromanagement on a colossal scale.
The AAR can be seen here
https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4454240/1

War in the East is an epic grand strategy game. I've done quite a few of the grand campaigns, for both sides and different point targets.
Perhaps grand operational game is more accurate.
It's a great what-if generator, allowing the player to pursue alternate-history paths. I only wish the player could opt to set the starting state instead of being limited to the historical start. I'd love to see what I could do if I were to mass AGC south of the marshes for example.
It impresses me with how complex it is while at the same  time hiding this complexity beneath the surface. Every shot fired in a battle phase is calculated.  Yet it does this under-the-hood stuff nearly instantly. Yeah, it's old and we should expect it to run well on modern hardware, but it's still tight design that distills massively complex calculations down to such minimal presentation.
The logistics and supply model is probably my favorite in any game of the sort. It's rather brilliant in my view. How it drives home the shoestring Barbarossa actually was, how essential railheads are to an army, how important headquarters units and their proximity are and, the effects of raputista, blizzards, partisans on supplying your front line units. You are even required to manage the rail conversion, hex by hex using far too few resources. Now, decide on which rail lines get the attention, and hope you didn't choose wrong! In one of my runs, the whole of Army Group South, and later Army Groups A and B, were dependent on a single rail line for supply. If partisans cut this at any spot along it's hundreds of miles the front line stops dead in its tracks.
Do not even think about this game unless you embrace the micro. In the grand campaign, every turn you are considering hundreds of counters. I remember the reorganization I undertook when Army Group South splits upon reaching Rostov. One of the game's mechanics is command overload, where HQ units suffer penalties if they have too many subordinate units. When this split occurred I saw an opportunity to reorganize and hopefully fix this command deficiency since we gained a new Army Group. Here's what I wrote in my AAR about this process, which some will never even have the chance to do. But it highlights the micro demands the game places on a thorough player
War in the East also shines in the operational sense, the massive encirclements you can pull off from concept to execution. Tying the noose around several enemy armies at once is heady stuff indeed.
On the other hand, it's not without its weaknesses as I see it. And top among these for me is the fact that the German side is strictly tethered to history. Only units present in the war are available, and departures and arrivals occur on a strict timeline to reflect actual history. But the Russian player has no such constraints, he can build new units, armies, air fleets and, well, everything. The German player can build nothing, not even a lousy HQ and this disparity in the rules is the biggest drawback in this game for me. Both sides should play by the same rules, even if the underlying resources and potential varies.
That's a long post but just skims the surface of what is one of the grandest war games of all. Every semi-serious wargamer should play it, but steer clear if you don't embrace micromanagement on a colossal scale.
The AAR can be seen here
https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4454240/1

I understand your point about how this improves your experience. In a different but related way this is why I think WW2 titles would be better with early war (1939-1942). I think that lower lethality results in more tactical game play and it's why I think Combat Mission would be well-served by starting to focus on this part of the war.
It's a similar result as your thread illustrates, but because the weapons are less lethal, not the soldiers manning them. A less lethal battlefield would be great in this series to put a premium on tactics, even more so than it already does, and it does a good job as it is. More suppression, more damaged but not destroyed vehicles. More failed penetrations, more casualties to administer to. Shorter ranges, more freedom to maneuver without being killed from afar.
So yeah, we need early war. I know this isn't the point of this thread, but I do think it hints at why this time period would suit this game so well.
Either way, your thread makes perfect sense and shifts the dynamic a little to change the gameplay patterns, expectations and results. And well, it's more tactical, isn't it?

For me the ideal showcase for suppression in the series is the first mission in Road to Montebourg for CMBN. When I first opened the scenario I thought no way. No way am I getting across this open ground with nothing but infantry and a bad attitude. But of course suppression is a thing in Combat Mission, and I was able to finish the mission with surprisingly light casualties.
This is the map. Wide open, and enemy dug-in on the far side, hemmed in by mines, and supported by pillboxes and artillery. It's a killing zone of the first order. You have no heavy weapons, vehicles or armor.
 

 
For me, crew-served machine guns are rather ineffective in this game for whatever reason. They rarely contribute the sort of kill numbers I'd expect. So instead of using them as a means to destroy the enemy, I see these weapons as suppression tools. Find the enemy and fix him with machine gun area fire. Just keep pouring bursts in to the position. You're not going to kill anything, usually, with an occasional exception. But you can keep their faces in the dirt.
For the mission above, it was a combination of this area fire from my machine guns, combined with liberal use of smoke and artillery. It takes a long time to move the troops across this much open ground, and so the suppression effort has to be kept up throughout so that you can maneuver the troops forward and avoid having them in turn become pinned down. It's a matter of fire superiority I reckon, and the AI doesn't use area fire much if at all, so the player has this advantage as long as the ammo stocks can support sustained suppression.
My example may not help the OP much, but I'd recommend this scenario for anyone who wants to see a perfect example of how suppression can work in Combat Mission, and how to accomplish it in a scenario which is designed to make it essential to success.

Nice AAR, well-written and illustrated.

Keep moving to contact.

A better term would be an attack order. Imagine a hunt order but the unit:
Spots the target Engages Loses the spot Continues moving toward the location you set Repeat steps 1-4 until the unit is either pinned or reaches the end of the attack order

I hope this succeeds, as Combat Mission's in a rut, and competition drives innovation. The 'heroic, yet doomed' vibe is strong here, even though Combat Mission is also programmed by one man. Charles may be exceptional, but also an example of why small dev teams aren't automatically doomed to fail (see Seven Years War and Grand Tactician). There's not much game there yet, but in what little we are shown I reckon this new game already has better graphics and camera controls than Combat Mission, addressing two of the most glaring weaknesses in the series. That's not going to dethrone the aging Combat Mission from the top of the sparsely populated tactical wargame genre on it's own, but it's a fair start, isn't it?
Oftentimes in this forum I see comments along the lines of 'we don't want to forfeit gameplay in the name of graphics' as if the two things cannot exist together. It's a slippery position to take, and I reckon done so in defense of Combat Mission, which looks old. I think you can have both. And while I also am one that prefers gameplay over graphics -- I play Combat Mission as proof -- there's no escaping the fact that CM looks twenty years old.
But even if we ignore graphics, Combat Mission has changed little in all that time. The AI isn't really AI, the editor is curmudgeonly, the camera and controls are clunky, the campaign system is too basic, the update and transaction processes are archaic and the way content is generated too trying. I don't want Combat Mission surpassed necessarily, after all I've been playing since the CMBO demo, I want it to kick in to gear, address the weakness, innovate and modernize.
A successful competitor is not automatically going to affect the course of Combat Mission. Steve and Charles have their vision, which they've done well with. They may want to stay the course. CM is a great game. I'm a fan. An increasingly disillusioned fan, but one nonetheless. There are things CM handles better than other games (spotting, ballistics, command and control). What I hope is that those core strengths can be married to modern conventions and conveniences and if an upstart competitor is the catalyst for this change that's a win for all of us.

Everything about Combat Mission feels like it's 2002 because BFC are banking on a big retro gaming revival.
UI, transaction and update processes, graphics, editor and well, just about everything, appear to be from the turn of the century.
Maybe we'll get another module?
 
Wake me up when we catch up to five years ago.
I'm a fan, in it since the start, but no longer pay attention since everything is just so far in the past. 

Boom. Conscripts clear church room by room. No more killing everyone from 300m away.
 

I hope this succeeds, as Combat Mission's in a rut, and competition drives innovation. The 'heroic, yet doomed' vibe is strong here, even though Combat Mission is also programmed by one man. Charles may be exceptional, but also an example of why small dev teams aren't automatically doomed to fail (see Seven Years War and Grand Tactician). There's not much game there yet, but in what little we are shown I reckon this new game already has better graphics and camera controls than Combat Mission, addressing two of the most glaring weaknesses in the series. That's not going to dethrone the aging Combat Mission from the top of the sparsely populated tactical wargame genre on it's own, but it's a fair start, isn't it?
Oftentimes in this forum I see comments along the lines of 'we don't want to forfeit gameplay in the name of graphics' as if the two things cannot exist together. It's a slippery position to take, and I reckon done so in defense of Combat Mission, which looks old. I think you can have both. And while I also am one that prefers gameplay over graphics -- I play Combat Mission as proof -- there's no escaping the fact that CM looks twenty years old.
But even if we ignore graphics, Combat Mission has changed little in all that time. The AI isn't really AI, the editor is curmudgeonly, the camera and controls are clunky, the campaign system is too basic, the update and transaction processes are archaic and the way content is generated too trying. I don't want Combat Mission surpassed necessarily, after all I've been playing since the CMBO demo, I want it to kick in to gear, address the weakness, innovate and modernize.
A successful competitor is not automatically going to affect the course of Combat Mission. Steve and Charles have their vision, which they've done well with. They may want to stay the course. CM is a great game. I'm a fan. An increasingly disillusioned fan, but one nonetheless. There are things CM handles better than other games (spotting, ballistics, command and control). What I hope is that those core strengths can be married to modern conventions and conveniences and if an upstart competitor is the catalyst for this change that's a win for all of us.

I hope this succeeds, as Combat Mission's in a rut, and competition drives innovation. The 'heroic, yet doomed' vibe is strong here, even though Combat Mission is also programmed by one man. Charles may be exceptional, but also an example of why small dev teams aren't automatically doomed to fail (see Seven Years War and Grand Tactician). There's not much game there yet, but in what little we are shown I reckon this new game already has better graphics and camera controls than Combat Mission, addressing two of the most glaring weaknesses in the series. That's not going to dethrone the aging Combat Mission from the top of the sparsely populated tactical wargame genre on it's own, but it's a fair start, isn't it?
Oftentimes in this forum I see comments along the lines of 'we don't want to forfeit gameplay in the name of graphics' as if the two things cannot exist together. It's a slippery position to take, and I reckon done so in defense of Combat Mission, which looks old. I think you can have both. And while I also am one that prefers gameplay over graphics -- I play Combat Mission as proof -- there's no escaping the fact that CM looks twenty years old.
But even if we ignore graphics, Combat Mission has changed little in all that time. The AI isn't really AI, the editor is curmudgeonly, the camera and controls are clunky, the campaign system is too basic, the update and transaction processes are archaic and the way content is generated too trying. I don't want Combat Mission surpassed necessarily, after all I've been playing since the CMBO demo, I want it to kick in to gear, address the weakness, innovate and modernize.
A successful competitor is not automatically going to affect the course of Combat Mission. Steve and Charles have their vision, which they've done well with. They may want to stay the course. CM is a great game. I'm a fan. An increasingly disillusioned fan, but one nonetheless. There are things CM handles better than other games (spotting, ballistics, command and control). What I hope is that those core strengths can be married to modern conventions and conveniences and if an upstart competitor is the catalyst for this change that's a win for all of us.

Everything about Combat Mission feels like it's 2002 because BFC are banking on a big retro gaming revival.
UI, transaction and update processes, graphics, editor and well, just about everything, appear to be from the turn of the century.
Maybe we'll get another module?
 
Wake me up when we catch up to five years ago.
I'm a fan, in it since the start, but no longer pay attention since everything is just so far in the past. 

Top shout mate. I could get behind that.
When it became known that whatever had been the original name for the module was infringing, and Battlefront needed to find another, I put forward several candidates. All were rejected in favor of the glory that is Fire and Rubble. I don't trust me either, so that logic follows and no hard feelings haha.
These were my punts
Across the Oder
Final Assault
Red Vengeance (maybe too much in that?)
Reckoning
Red Thunder: Reckoning though, does it for me. It's alliterative, and there's value in that. And indeed the time period covered by the module was a reckoning for what had come before. But there was also fire. And rubble. I saw some pictures.

Own both, play both, prefer World War 2 gameplay in Combat Mission.
I feel like the lower the lethality of the weapons system featured, the more tactical the gameplay is. It's why I want early-war Combat Mission. Until then, it'll do.

Own both, play both, prefer World War 2 gameplay in Combat Mission.
I feel like the lower the lethality of the weapons system featured, the more tactical the gameplay is. It's why I want early-war Combat Mission. Until then, it'll do.

Personally I think Normandy is the top WW2 title. And objectively I think my opinion comes down to two things...content and subject matter.
But I have Red Thunder too and it's great, although I skipped Rubble's on Fire. It it had been called anything else I might have bought it. Like Red Thunder: Reckoning. Then yeah, of course
But seriously, I think which one you see as 'best' is simply a matter of preference.
Red Thunder could hold this spot for me, but there are too many holes in its game, namely, too narrow in timeline, not enough campaigns and a module focused on the least interesting part of the war in the east. I know folks like big urban battles, but I think Combat Mission is ill-suited in some ways to this type of warfare and anyway I just don't find it fun.

Top shout mate. I could get behind that.
When it became known that whatever had been the original name for the module was infringing, and Battlefront needed to find another, I put forward several candidates. All were rejected in favor of the glory that is Fire and Rubble. I don't trust me either, so that logic follows and no hard feelings haha.
These were my punts
Across the Oder
Final Assault
Red Vengeance (maybe too much in that?)
Reckoning
Red Thunder: Reckoning though, does it for me. It's alliterative, and there's value in that. And indeed the time period covered by the module was a reckoning for what had come before. But there was also fire. And rubble. I saw some pictures.

I think "Rubble's on Fire" would have been better than "Fire and Rubble" as a title. But you can never top "The Balalaika Boys take Berlin" in my humble opinion.
As for finding a game fun, that is the most important thing. And we all have our favourites in that respect. I don't like fighting up mountains, so I don't like Fortress Italy, other players love it.
OK back to the wintery wastes for me. My Stugs need to start nailing some T-34s pretty damn sharpish.

I didn't expect that, fair one kohlenklau. If I do buy it, I'll send you a PM.
I want lots of flames silhouetting retreating landsers

you bet! 

Dude! If you buy it, I can make you a new splash background that says exactly that.

Blunting the Spear does have very big battles too. Not a beginner's campaign I don't think, but in my view one of the best WW2 campaigns in Combat Mission.
Great map(s). Written that way because each battle takes place on a section of a single master map, right?
The action this campaign portrays is not very well-known, but this was the largest armor clash that occurred in Poland. In July of '44 the Russians were closing the Vistula and the eastern approaches to Warsaw. Operationally, it was XXXIX Panzer Corps defending against Rokossovsky's 1st Belorussian Front, and in this region 2nd Tank Army, of which the campaign's enemy, the 3rd Tank Corps, was part. Model ordered a counterattack with four Panzer Divisions. The Hermann Goring and 19th Panzer Divisions attacked first and managed to cut off 3rd Tank Corps from 2nd Tank Army. 5th SS and 4th Panzer then arrived and the pocketed 3rd Tank Corps was destroyed. In the campaign we command elements of 4th Panzer, and the player is attacking/pursuing 3rd Tank Corps as they fall back in to the pocket to ultimately deliver the crushing blow.

Historically, this action was a sharp success for the German. For the moment anyway, the Vistula crossings were safe, and the direct threat to Warsaw removed. It was a good example of how vulnerable armored spearheads can become after a long advance, and here, at the end of Bagration, 2nd Tank army was exploitable, Model recognized this and struck when the time was right. This action is also interesting for the role it played in the Warsaw Uprising which sparked as these forces approached the river. The Soviet defeat left Warsaw on it's own as they needed to cross the river elsewhere. Of course it's questionable whether Stalin wanted to enter Warsaw in the first place, as one might reason capturing Warsaw with no home army intact was preferable from a political point of view.
In the game, this campaign is strong, but larger than what I usually play, battalion sized, with large maps 3km x 3km? As I said earlier, I really like the 'balance' here, between long-range gunnery duels, and close-in fighting. For me, balance is often a mis-guided aim in wargaming, not desirable in of itself, except for multiplayer fairness. But here I mean the way the nature of the combat is balanced between distant engagement and close assault in a way that appeals to me. I was getting kills at over 1800 meters, and these sorts of duels are always fun in Combat Mission.
Despite how I tend to shy away from large-unit campaigns, I really took to Blunting the Spear. One of the biggest challenges for me when playing it was movement. The maps are so large that simply walking my infantry across from the jump-off positions was not practical. Not only does it take too long, the infantry then arrives out of shape, out of breath and nearly out of time. So I felt compelled to organize and execute motorized movement. This imparted a distinctly operational feel to the tactical framing.
The campaign is split narratively between two 'flank forces' one with Panthers and the other with Mark IVs. One flank force has trucks and one has half-tracks. Both are vulnerable, but the trucks especially so. I found it a compelling challenge to bring the weight of my infantry to bear where and when I needed them, to safely get them in to position and in condition to fight. This compelled me to establish things like embarkation points, columns, disembarkation points and covered assembly locations where the troops could form up to reach their jump-off. More than once, infantry formations mounted up, moved forward, jumped off, took a position, remounted and moved forward to the next position and did it again.
The very first battle was like this, where I used the troops to clear the terrain on the near side of the river, before loading everyone up to make the river crossing. To do this it requires planning ahead, good timing, overwatch, escort, suppression, smoke, co-ordination and luck.
This is the opening map in Blunting the Spear

 
In this battle the Germans must cross the river you can barely see running through the center, take the VLs on the other side while attempting to deny the exit of Red armor. You can see the smoke I am laying as a screen against any forces in the village on the right edge of the shot. As it turned out that village was unoccupied, but you can't know that (and AI plans means next time it might be garrisoned and defended) and I did a full assault on that dead space, with smoke, arty and recon by fire. Once the near side was clear (watch out for surprises!) then all the infantry was mounted up on the tracks under concealment, and then all made the move simultaneously to cross the river.
This is a big undertaking, massive co-ordination of assets, but I loved it. It felt like an operational challenge in the tactical Combat Mission.

Yes indeed. I like it for a number of reasons
-- Fearsome German armor.  Your force is limited, but what you do get is top shelf
-- Core force.  I prefer this for a number of reasons, not least of which is that each loss is keenly felt. I lost my Pak40 with twenty rings painted on the barrel, and you know how hard it is to keep an AT gun alive long enough to get twenty kills. Ouch, but in a good way. Core force also makes me learn the names of my commanders and officers, imparting a sense of attachment I don't get in campaigns with a different approach, such as Montebourg (except Lt Turnbull!).
-- Ammo and repair state carry over. One of the later missions is to force the river Dives, which comes on the heels of the Hunters in the Mist mission. There is a single, heavily-defended bridge to get across. And the player must do so with battered tanks and nearly-empty racks. A tough nut, and forces you to find a different approach, since you cannot rely on overwhelming firepower applied at range.
When I played I focused on keeping my armor alive, and was very successful at this, but by the end it was in tatters. Damaged tracks and barrels, shot-out optics, broken radios. Campaigns are best when decisions and outcomes have cascading effects on what comes next. One Panther was little more than a barely-mobile pill box at the end.
-- Mission innovation. Some of the missions in this campaign are clever and innovative, such as Tiger Poaching, where you must recover an abandoned King Tiger behind the enemy's forward outposts. Or Hunter's in the Mist where you must capture a couple hamlets, while one enemy force meets you head on, and you also encounter a Canadian armored force moving across the map from side to side. As the name implies, the limited visibility negates the range advantage afforded by German optics, and you must work out how to capture your objectives while simultaneously denying the Canadian's exit. This is the mission I lost that Pak, grrr....
This is the opening map for this campaign. Love this sort, with lots of open ground and broken sight lines that make it such an interesting tactical puzzle. I sent recon elements to OPs 2 and 3, another element to fix the troops at the road block, while my main effort went up the right side.
 
 

 
On the other side of the ledger I felt the exit mechanic was used too much (not a fan) and one or two missions I didn't care for, such as Guardian Angels which is a fairly tedious battle/exit mission. It may be more due to Combat Mission's limitations than anything. If we could easily give formation orders it wouldn't be bad. There is another mission, I can't recall the name, where you must traverse the map at night and exit your entire force. I perfectly chose my path and rather breezed through it. In the debrief I was shocked to see how strong the enemy had been, and it was only by good fortune that I weaved my way through it all. If I had chosen a different path it would have been very difficult and not a fun mission I don't think. I'm no fan of exit missions, night fighting or urban combat in Combat Mission.
But in all it's one of the best Combat Mission campaigns I've played and well worth your time if you like German heavy hitters and don't mind having the odds distinctly against you (hard campaign). It is the Falaise pocket after all, and it takes all of your skill to get through to the end. Speaking of which... I got there through a combination of luck and skill, and was promptly handed my ass in the final battle, called Deliverance.

Kampfgruppe Engel is really exciting !  Nice and innovative scenarios, and nice  stuff... miaow...