dan/california

Its the Marine AAV with with the AGL that really cool, its the same grenade launcher but it has like 4+ times the ammo. Just hose down EVERYTHING.

Its never sooner....

The trolls go weird when underfed, fresh meat is not being shoveled fast enough.

Smoke, suppression, and paying the butchers bill. There is a reason the Pentagon is devoting so much effort to robotics. But for ground warfare the tech isn't there yet. You just don't get clean victories against a reasonably competent opponent. Its an excellent reason not to have the war. The solution for small drones getting swatted like flies is to launch enough of them at once that some of them live long enough to be useful. The TO&E has not yet adjusted to this reality, however.

In terms of game mechanics, the limits of real sniper operations, and the effort of doing a completely new model I have a proposal that is at least simple. Give any true sniper a large concealment bonus, subject to thermals and such, if they stay in the spot they started the scenario in. This represents the extremely painstaking process of setting up a proper concealed shooting position. We just assume they started the night before. As soon as they move, everything reverts to current normal. The ghillie suit is just eye candy, in game terms its the modifier that matters. Scenario designers would of course have to provide rational set up zones where appropriate. I don't think we are even likely to get that, but it is probably the BEST that can reasonably be hoped for in a game with this much armor focus.

Can we get a current blood board? I have lost track of all of the destruction. Hang in there and make him pay, it will be good for him, if not his pixeltruppen.

How good are the lines of sight from the heights you are about to control? Can you see all the way into town? And last but not least what are your plans for your fire support assets? Not that it looks like you need them.

So between the Ukrainians getting minced, and now your running the Russians through a meat grinder we are at what, 25 or thirty burning tracks in 16 minutes of play? The vanguards of the new Czar didn't expect to atone for their sins quite this quickly.

Just for reference approach march loads routinely exceed 35 kilos, and 40 plus is not uncommon. You just have to have a reasonable expectation of what a person can do while carrying it. Unless it a special forces qualification course, then the expectations are intentionally UNREASONABLE. There is whole genre of inside jokes on this forum related to the exceptional performance of the Finns against the Soviets in that viscous little warm up for WW2 they had. You need to read at least the Wikipedia synopsis for them to make any sense at all.

Its been heavily discussed in another thread.

The hide command means they aren't trying to anything else. Get all the way down in the lowest spot you can find and hug dirt. Maybe have one guy peek, Barely, a little bit, maybe. This reduces spotting, a LOT. It also more or less amounts to hold fire command outside of some specific circumstaces.

Lets not forget the Javelins almost certain to be over-watching from the central hill soon. He is in a bit of a fix, too put it mildly.

When your done slathering armor on the poor beast it still has to be able to move, or its tactical utility is poor. You can't max out all around and meet that criteria, its been a problem since the beast in question was a real horse.

I have been been misled/misunderstood the briefing any number of times, and gotten hammered for it too. I shudder to think what its like in real life, and it surely does happen.

I wonder if they could make it dismountable with a very short set up as a compromise?

I would actually argue that Bradleys are significantly compromised in the sort of full up fight taking place in the AAR, or would be if Panzrlder didn't have almost complete fire superiority. Hideous as the logistics are you need Abrams level protection to really call it an IFV. There are just a lot of ways to die out there.

Are Strykers even sort of survivable in this threat environment? I have doubts......

I did mention a while back that a lot of scenarios are going to end early, with at least one side reduced to smoking wreckage.

You could argue that the Americans should be very short of forces in the next AAR scenario, due to what was committed here. Just don't win that argument and then get handed command of the Americans.

Grozny wasn't pleasant, but no one had to be concerned with the Chechen air-force. You would be far less aggressive with against ground targets when there was much risk at all of Apaches raining missiles on your force.

You did get the other half of that die roll with your Tugunskas at least once.

It is also possible that a far more conservative approach by the Russian player would have altered things considerably. He blitzed the Ukrainians on the ridge right out of existence, but it cost him a fair bit,and they were almost irrelevant in terms of combat power anyway it appears.

The jamming, EW, and stealth systems that would massively influence who got to a specific battlefield with what are almost entirely beyond the scope of this game. They give a couple of very small nods but the mechanisms are entirely opaque. The "all out air war for the control of Ukraine's airspace" as Pnzrldr memorably put it would be a whole different game. Furthermore the information to base such a game on is almost entirely classified. You would have to make a lot of it up from educated guesses at best. Indeed the interaction of large scale cyber, electronic, air space missiles and stealth is HIGHLY unpredictable. It is quite likely that there are significant threats of various types on both sides whose existence, much less details are classified. You can argue for almost any result with some basis in fact. The result that is the best for this game though is to assume that all those forces and systems are more or less canceling each other out. Maybe at this point in time SAMs and anti-missles just have the upper hand across the board. Because if one side gets anything like air superiority the other side is toast. Fuel trucks are easy targets, and the first ones. I actually feel that fixed wing support should be almost non existent because if the other side is still in the war those planes would have higher priority missions or be afraid to cross the front lines. I will point out that the Russians showed up unmolested and in good order as well. The scenario was laid out in mid beta, and has come out a little unbalanced. The ones that ship with the game will be better, and the ones written six months from now will be better still.

Pnzrlder your attention to detail and willingness to share is amazing. Thanks for the effort, and write that book if you ever have time on your hands.

They might as well play out the fireworks for a few turns and the start something else if so motivated then .