dan/california

No final candidate announcement implies we are a week out at best. This is on the hopeful assumption that they don't hit a bug in the installer and so on.

One of the things this game has taught me is how small the zone of control of a military unit is. If you assume that the minimum size for a patrol or outpost is a squad, the amount of ground even very large forces can control gets very small relative to even a medium sized district. It decreases even more if the ROE even pretend to care about civilian casualties. This is relevant for both the Caucasus and any Ukrainian territory the might Russians take.

If you want to write a campaign where the Russians have massive air support, then write one. The tools are there. The possible/fictional air war between Russia and NATO is a completely different game. It would be an interesting one, but its not the one BFC is working on.

They don't want to write whole novel, and they don't want to preclude user generated scenarios and campaigns with a very tight frame work. Think of the game a a vehicle to tell the story you have in mind. Then get in Google Earth and star making maps. The units and TO&E are in there. The framework of the game just imposes some slight discipline on your story telling. Since other people will play it a see for themselves what happens when Force X and Force Y decide to get serious. If you think all of the Ukrainian's Forces should be rated as green troops with bad commanders you have that option. It even relatively easy for someone else to change nothing but the soft factors and see what that does to the result. Its by no means perfect, but if it was your computer couldn't run it anyway.

I assume BFC will tell us when they go to final candidate testing. I believe they have previously stated they expect final candidate testing to take at least a week, I would then hazard a guess we are at least a week out.

It just cries out for a little remote controlled widget you could plant in front of your position. Heck just lay the beam across the avenue of approach with no remote at all. Its non lethal and will only work until the battery runs down Just turn it on and bug out when they are a few kilcks out. Preregister the mortar battery and FFE the second you see the smoke. It surely wouldn't improve their day.

In addition to the almost entirely classified specifics of a vast array of radars, jammers, and miscellaneous electronic warfare platforms, there is the even bigger question of which side has been hacked worse. There are entirely plausible scenarios foe either or both sides to have been badly compromised Russia was not exactly a tight ship for a good ten or fifteen years, and the U.S, defense industries background checks and cybersecurity are not exactly perfect. It is entirely possible that BOTH sides have been hacked rather severely. This can be speculated on endlessly, but for CMBS purposes just assume whatever makes your scenario/campaign work. And be happy its not your job to re-QA a few million lines of code in very great hurry.

And you have to hide every fuel truck if you plan on keeping your guys in the fight for more than a day. Those trucks have much harder time working into deep woods to hide, probably have to cover a lot more miles, and go boom from a single 30mm HEI.

Auto canon rounds are occasionally nettlesome in this regard as well.

Thank you!

Well, if you wanted to start modeling irregulars for the module I have some uniform suggestions.

Also can I start on this in Red Thunder and import it? Someone said its exactly the same trees and so on.

With my possibly demonic children now asleep I am going to try this again, but coherently This is Terny Terny is a lovely little crossroads town with the potential to become important for all the wrong reasons in our hopefully imaginary little war. It is a very obvious place to try to flank a defensive position on the E101, or as a second line of attack in its own right. The red line across the top of the photo is 4k, just to help with scale. I have two immediate questions before I really invest some time in this. Is it already in the game? It really is a pretty obvious location and I don't want to duplicate a lot of effort. Does anybody know a way to determine the conditions of that river bank?

I so hoped that bmp bugged out. I think that Abrams will be back soon. Its a bummer to go negative on the blood board...

How do we post pictures from google earth?

This Terny Terny is a pleasant little crossroads town south of the E101. It is exactly the kind of place that could be temporarily for all of the wrong reasons. None of these terrain features are un-flankable, but they would certainly impose a delay relative actually owning the road junction. The red line is 4 kilometers, for scale. There are a lot of possibilities for one large or several small scenarios.

Its winter, in Russia, we won't know anything one way or another till spring.

They said somewhere they didn't want too get too specific, they want to encourage maximum community creativity. If the level of interest being shown holds up it appears there are going to be multiple story lines backing up a lot of campaigns and scenarios.

So what isn't finished?

It sounds like something you can only really depend on if you unpack it from a sealed crate the night before the big offensive. Though anything regarding the exterior of a military vehicle that requires it to be clean in combat seems problematic.

The ammo goes uhm where? exactly?

BFC has never had a release on the bright side. Edited for typo

PFFT.., Our AAR won't give people cause to fall out of their chairs laughing if we both play all three campaigns first.

I was perhaps overly forward in how I phrased my disagreements with Ikalugun's post. All we can to about the politics is agree to disagree and pray the war remains hypothetical. As a basis for discussion of tactical and operational possibilities at the level of the game H1nd's layout is superlative. I have already looked at the map of Terny and there are features that you could base hasty defense on. We just need to keep asking ourselves what makes a reasonable scenario and ignore the politics. I have stated previously that the best assumption for the interesting game is that air-forces/air-defenses more or less neutralize each other. I have no clue what would actually happen, but that is what makes the best CMBS scenarios.

Among other things, to reach Kiev in a week or less would require pre stacking an enormous logistical tail up the M3 and the relatively small number of side roads capable of heavy truck traffic. Their would be no possibility of surprise. The vulnerability of a target like that to air or missile strikes is staggering. The Ukrainians have already proved they can get a missile on target in the right circumstances. Even if you assume they won't strike Russian territory it would take time to suppress and otherwise preclude the risk to the kind of logistical tail it takes for that kind of corps sized armored force.