Drusus

I am wondering what strategy the Syrian forces would use against an opponent like USA. Would it be something like only defend the cities and some key locations, let the enemy take control of the open areas? Or would it be defending the whole country with some sort of WWII style of defence. Immediately go to guerilla warfare? If the army was loyal, this could be a devastating strategy. Other half begins to fight guerilla style, the other half defends the big cities. To me it seems the Syrians would not have an option to defend against the UN led forces out in the desert anyway, so it could be better not to fight until they have really the better ground. Defend some big city with 100000 men and the UN side has a real problem on their hands: Attacking the city will lead to high casualties, both civil and UN. Not attacking the city, just making sure nothing enters or leaves it will result in lots of civilian casualties and take a lot of time. I am ofcourse assuming that the Syrian forces would be fighting to the last man. Think about Grozny, only with the defender having lots of ATGMs... What is the map of Syria like in strategical sense? Is there some key areas where the war would be win or lost? I can dig up maps of Syria with google, but I really can't say from a map where the key locations are. Is there some areas the UN troops would try to avoid, because they would be too easy to defend (mountaneous areas come in to mind)? That is, where are the big fights of the CM:SF campaing likely to be fought?

There is a lot of discussion going on about the performance of Syrian troops. Now, what comes to the scenarios, it seems to me that there will be a lot of battles where the balancing is done through victory conditions. Now, this might be quite realistic. But I like playing quick battles. In quick battles you can have balanced forces. You don't have to think if this kind of battle would happen or not. Basically, every single unit in the game is supposed to be balanced through some sort of point system. Now, if M1 turns out to be nearly impossible to kill, it will cost you a lot. Think about King Tiger and Sherman. The armor most used in CMAK seems to be Priest. It is not because it is just so powerfull and impossible to kill, but because of its price. Now, in CMSF we will have really great quick battles. I will really look forward to commanding a lot of T-72s against a few M1s. If you want something _really_ balanced, just play Blue vs Blue. And defending with two platoons of US infantry against a company of T-72s will be fun. What is going to be best of all is playing with the forces added in the modules against each other. Think about Germans vs French

What makes Syrians dangerous? In an urban setting, you are ordered to attack a fortified company of Syrian regular troops with your Stryker company. Have fun. Not challenging enough? Make the defenders special forces. As I have said before, the reason US troops are performing so well is that they have the chance to avoid fair fights. I am not saying that they wouldn't win most of them. But when you are playing CMSF I am sure that you will have to fight a lot of fair fights. Be the fairness of the fight because of the victory conditions or just having balanced forces.

In the Small Unit Tactics AAR thread there is mentioned that molotov coktails are in use: Molotov cocktails - one part liquid laundry detergent, two parts gasoline - Used when contact is made in a house and the enemy must be burned out

Will you have IEDs or something like this? http://www.mil.fi/maavoimat/kalustoesittely/index.dsp?level=70&equipment=128 This thing is just like the more advanced IEDs used in Iraq. It "fires" a cone of steel capable of penetrating 150mm of steel from 15m. Now what I mean by will you have IEDs is that this thing is _not_ an Improvised Explosive Device, but a sort of mine excellent for ambushes.

Well, if the battles (or to be more precise, the victory conditions) are well balanced, it will mean that you will have an interesting time. Also, most of the battles in Iraq would be boring. Why is that? Well, it is because the US forces have almoust always the possibility to wait for support and fight only when winning is guaranteed. Now, in CMx2 I think we will see battles in the campaing where you are fighting against an opponent who has a real change of winning even with CMx1's victory conditions. We will see completely different types of battles where your goal is not "hold the flags, cause more casualties than inflicted on you". The goal might be to clear some houses with minimal casualties. Now, the interesting part about this battle is _not_ if you will be able to clear the houses, but can you do it with, say, less than 10 casualties of the original 200men you had. I don't think we will see battles where hundreds of 14 year old boys are attacking M1A2s over open field. Also, if you are bored figthing against the syrians, why don't you just fight against the US. The balancing of QBs is done through the point system, so there will be interesting battles for sure. What I really like to see happen in the added modules: If it will be possible to fight US against the forces added. I mean US against Rapid Deployment Forces or something. Should be well balanced, and us Europeans can show that the M1 isn't invulnerable Sherman vs JagdPanther. How different is that from M1 vs T-72 or T-80? Don't like having the better one, but still want to play the US? Have T-72 vs Stryker. You will not win this one without proper tactics. To make one point clear: The US forces are so well performing because they can usually pick their fights. Yes, they have better equipmet, they have better communications, they have better training and so on. But it is very possible to make balanced fights with Syrian forces on the other side and US on the other side. If you put a Stryker company to attack against T-72 Company, it will be an interesting fight. Now, interesting fights is something the US forces try to avoid. And they can do this usually because of better Intelligence, Air superiority, better communications... But in CMSF you will propably be fighting these interesting scenarios a lot more than the US Forces in reality are forced to. Ok, I hope Stryker vs T-72 is an interesting fight, I don't know if it in reality would be...

Ok, a bit more information about AMOS: It can fire 14(!) shells so that they explode simultaneously. It takes less than 30 s to get it ready to fire, and less than 10 s to get moving again. It can fire direct fire. Maximum range is over 10km. It can fire up to 26 rounds in a minute. The strike of one AMOS unit rougly equals one strike of an artillery battery. Talk about überfinnish technology Sources: http://www.patriahagglunds.fi/amostech.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mortar_System And a nice video, especially the part they are firing this thing from the boat: http://www.suomensotilas.fi/nettisotilas/Lehti/Kuvat/amos.mpg Now, I hope the US forces would be using this system in 2007...

Does anybody know the max range of the 81mm mortar? At least the finnish model we were using had a range of about 6km with the new grenade, but only a range of about 3km with the old one. Also, the new grenade was said to be almoust as effective as the old 120mm grenade. Anybody have any information about AMOS? I think it was at least cosidered to be bought by the US. The system is twin tubed 120mm mortar mounted on a vehicle. It should be possible to fire at least 6 grenades to the target so that they will all land at the same time. Also, it should be possible to fire accurately while moving (max speed of 10km/h, but still..)

One year in Finnish Defence Forces. I was in a mortar platoon. First there was snow, then there was a lot of insects all around. And then there was snow again. My record was only 5 mosquitoes with one hit. It was real fun to try to be silently doing guarding in the forest. Ofcourse we told to the new comers not to use any deterrants (is that the correct word for the stuff you use to get the insects go away) when guarding because the enemies could smell your positions.

When attacking it would be much more important to know where the foxholes, trenches and things like that are. If you only know where some of the enemy units are, it will be too easy to do a gamey exploit of this. It is just enough to start so that your troops are not where you are going to be defending and turn 1 you move your troops to the planned positions. Ofcourse this can also be considered a good real life tactic. It could also be interesting if the defender in some scenarios would gain control of the units only when enemy troops are first seen. This would simulate a suprise attack. Campaings where you would first try to recon enemy positions. A good idea. Make it like this: The defender only has a mission to control the flags. He doesn't know if the enemy mission is recon or attack. The attacker has only a small amount of units when doing recon. The defender can't move his units between battles. How would this play out? Battle 1 could be a platoon reconing enemy positions of a company sized force. Now, the attacker must be able to go through enemy screening forces with these units. If the defender doesn't have any units in front of his main line, the attacker will get to know the enemy main lines position. Now, why wouldn't the defender just attack the "attacker"? Remeber that the defender doesn't know the enemy has only a platoon in his use. The first battle could also be a attack by a batallion sized force. Or the real attack could be the third one. The second could be moving your units into attack positions. Interesting? I think so. Out of scope of CMx2? Im afraid the answer is yes to this too. Yes, I know the force sizes are a bit too big for what CMx2 is planned to handle. Not the point of the post.

I learned during my service the way a normal attack goes is supposed to go like this: I don't know if this is how attacking was done in WWII. But: CMx2 will not be all WWII and at least the Finnish artillery system _was_ somewhat similar to what I will describe. 1. You do recon / somebody else did that recon for you. You have information where the enemy is supposed to be. Ofcourse the enemy tries to make obtaining this information as hard as possible for you. This information is very important for the success of the attack. 2. You plan how the attack is supposed to go. 2a: Make your attack plan, that is what route the squads are supposed to attack, who will lay covering fire, who will do the actual assault to the enemy positions and so on. 2b: Make a fire plan. The fire plan is a series of barrages by different pieces of artillery. First you fire the big stuff, say -5 (mins) from the start of the actual attack, this could go on for 2 minutes. Then from -4 to -2 you fire the smaller stuff, 120mm mortars for example. Last goes light mortars from -2 to zero. It is well possible that the bigger stuff will fire to a supporting enemy location from -1 to +x, also the smaller stuff could do this after they have fired to the position being attacked. Now, all the times are to the second and when the shells will land on target . For example the first rounds from light mortars will explode exactly at -2 and the last ones exactly at zero. Once the plan gets going, you don't do adjustments to the plan. Making the plan doesn't take that long, this is, this sort of attack can be deployed as a counter attack. 3. When you are attacking, you can get to 300m from the target when the big stuff is firing, to 200m when the 120mm mortars are firing, and to 100m when the light mortars are firing (ranges are made up, but you get the point...) The one coordinating movement of the attacking force is the FO, he shows when to advance and what is the closest safe distance to go to. When the light mortars stop firing, the assault gets going. This means that the _exact_ second when the last rounds are on the target the attacking force will start the assault. It was considered a _very_ bad mistake when we fired so that the last shells were 3 seconds late! In CMx1 (at least CMAK, don't know about CMBB): You start with no information about the location of the defensive forces. Ofcourse you can quess where they are. But the pricing of the artillery (at least in CMAK, I don't have CMBB) is made so that it is not wise to fire prep fire to quessed enemy locations. There is no way to make a fire plan to the second. There is no way to coordinate your attack to the second (you can use the pause command, but it isn't the same thing). Well, what is my point? It is that the procedure given by LongLeftFlank is what you will be doing in CMx1, but it is _not_ what you are supposed to do when attacking. The attacking FO's role _is_ to suppress the enemy positions, but it might well be that he has given all the commands before the start of the actual battle. During the fire plans execution the only thing the FO is going to command to the guns is stop firing. After the plan is over he becomes regular CM FO again. Ofcourse there might be even more guns that could fire opportunity fire even during the plan. What I would like to see in CMx2: You could buy pre-planned fire missions or FOs. The preplanned missions would be a bit cheaper than the real FOs. When deploying, you could give commands like Fire from turn 8 to turn 10 at that target. Then if you would also have some better way of coordinating unit movement than the pause command, you would have a system which allows for very well planned attacks. The reason I would like to see preplanned barrages and regular FOs bought differently is because the regular FOs fire will be more effective. When they are firing, it will almoust always be fire to 100% known enemy positions and also to a good target. Ofcourse it would be nice to have a possibility to give an order to a regular FO to fire from turn 15 to turn 17 on that hill. Now, there is only one problem left. You don't have the information needed to do the attack. At least when you are playing assault battles it is highly unrealistic that the only information you have about the enemy is that he is likely to have at least a portion of his troops from the middle of the map to the flags. I don't really know how to overcome this. In scenarios it would be easy to give information to the attacking player about where the enemy is (or give wrong information, to spice things up). But doing this in QBs is propably hard. The information should be something like "a suspected enemy platoon on top of Hill 365". Ofcourse one way is that the player will do the recon. But this would mean that first you will do some careful recon but also try to make enemy screening forces to withdraw to find out where the real enemy positions are. Next, you would do the planning, give orders etc. And then you would have the actual attack carried out. Now, the problem with this approach is that there would be really many turns during which time nothing would happen. This could make the game boring. Or maybe this would make the game much more interesting, but it would just take a much longer time to play one battle.

It could be a good idea to: 1) Have a firing delay for area fire. This way it would simulate the thing that somebody else is requesting the fire, and it will take some time to get that information to the gun. 2) Make area fire really what the name says. You give your unit a area where to fire. Make this area big enough, and the area fire wouldn't be so much a gamey way to use your god information, but a way to lay supressive fire to enemy position. Ofcourse, what I have described is how indirect fire works in CM. But isn't this the way it is supposed to be? Either the gun sees a target and fires at it, or it is being told by somebody else that there is enemy platoon in that patch of wood, fire there. Ofcourse I might be wrong, unfortunately I have god vision in CM only...

As I understand there is no difference to the damage the shell does if the shell is fired with target unit or if it is fired with area fire. However I think that firing area fire will give you a pattern of 15m circle, while targeting directly will target a smaller area, maybe even the exact point where the squad is. Also, I think there should _not_ be any decrease in the effect of the shell exploding if it is fired blind. It just doesn't make any sense. The shell explodes exactly the same way if it is fired blindly or if it is fired to the targed. This area fire isn't really a problem except when you have big guns to play with. With 150mm shells it doesn't really matter if you hit the point of the target or if you hit 15m away from it. There are some more points to consider with this. First: If you play CM, it doesn't make any sense to conserve ammo with guns. I mean you want to use _all_ of your ammo during the 30-60 mins of the game. Now this means that even if area fire isn't as effective as firing directly to the unit, it is still better to fire all your shells away than to conserve them for the next battle. Ofcourse, CM is a game, so there really isn't much to do about this. Ofcourse it would be interesting if you had your score calculated so that it gives points to the enemy from your lost combat effectivenes. That is losses would be a major part of the score, but so would be remaining ammo, the morale of your remaining units and so on. Ok, Im not sure, maybe these are already taken into the score? Second point is that as I understand the squads in CMx2 will be occupying a much larger area. If I understand the system correctly, they are point sized in CMx1, but they will be represented to the man in CMx2. Now this means that area fire as it is will be even better against these targets.

Area fire will be a problem with CMx2 if implemented like it is now. This is because even if your gun crew doesn't know anything about the enemy you can give area fire order to the location the unit is in. With guns this means almost as good performance as with targeting the unit directly. So I hope there will be a change how area fire is implemented. Maybe some command delays for area firing? Larger pattern for the area fire command? Now it is possible to rout my defending units even if the gun has never seen the unit and has no LOS to the unit. Just place the area fire order close enough to the unit. If you play attack/defend multiplayer quick battles you know what I am talking about...

Finnish infantry doesn't need javelins for AT combat. We have toothpicks for that. We do use javelins though they are reserved for AA purposes only.

I would like to see a command where armor only stops to fight when they see something that is a threat to them. Be it bazooka, ATG or enemy vehicle.

Few things: 1. I think that when people are saying that FPS games need to do the checks realtime I think they miss one important point: If CM does the checks in realtime it means that the computing of the turn will take 1 minute. Are you sure that average customer is ready to wait 1 minute? Ofcourse there are a lot of other stuff that fps games do in realtime but also, there are a lot more units to check in CM. Also, there is this thing that if ram is the limiting factor, then adding more time doesn't help. This is because when you go to swap, everything becomes _really_ slow. I was teached that if you look something up from the processor cache, it is like getting something from fridge. If you use ram, it is like going to shop. If you use swap, it is like going to moon. Now, there are 60 units maximum in FPS games. Lets assume that every unit takes 4 units of ram for the LOS checking. Now, the used ram is 60x4= 240 = maximum acceptable ram usage. Now, assume that in CM it takes 1 unit of ram for every unit. Now the amount is 200x1=200 -> OK! But if every check takes 4 units of ram you will use 800 units. This is WAY over the limit. Now you will be badly swapped, and this means unnacceptable performance. I assumed that the amount of checks is doubled if the amount of units is doubled. It is very well possible that this is wrong. But if it is wrong, the amount of checks in CM will be higher, not lower. 2. I don't know much about coding, but there is one point Id like to ask. Smoke cuts LOS in CM. How is this done? Is the LOS map recalculated every time when smoke goes "on" and "off"?

Actually, Im sure anybody even without any military training ever can do this kind of FO. You just have to point the mortar team to fire somewhere in the direction of the target and use a wild guess of the range. If (when) you didn't hit you can just say: It got about 200 meters short and 100 meters to the right of the target. And the mortar teams leader should have everything he needs to fire another round which should land at least a bit closer. Repeat. Ok, this might not be fast and it might take many rounds to hit the target, but it is really that simple. Ofcourse this is not the way this kind of firing is done properly. But who cares if you don't have any better way of doing it.

How to represent accurately the situation where a battery gets overrun? If they are offmap, it can't happen. If they are onmap, they can't fire indirect fire. This is a real situation, and Im sure there are numerous historical examples of this happening. Also, a mortar platoon needs only minutes to set up, given that there is some precise map location near their position. This is something we were learning a lot while in army. The marching order of finnish company on foot is usually: 1st platoon, Mortar Platoon, 2nd platoon and 3rd platoon. When 1st platoon has contact to the enemy, mortar platoon deploys to fire with "lyhytkanta menetelmä", which can be represented in CM using platoon leader as FO. The mortar platoon immediately begins to prepare for "koordinaatti menetelmä", which is the normal indirect way. So, how much it takes to deploy in this way? It depends only about the distance to the nearest precise map location from where to take coordinates from. Ofcourse you need another map location to close the calculation (ie. to verify there was no error when calculating your position). There are other things to do, but they don't take much time. If there is direct sight to precise map location it takes just minutes to deploy to "koordinaatti menetelmä" This is very much something that can be done within the scale of CM. Even in the normal situation where you have to do some more running to get the coordinates it doesn't usually take that much time. Doing this kind of deployment is something which can not be done in CM as is. If you don't have the mortars on map, there is no way that the enemy can overrun the 1st platoon and then the mortar platoon. There is no way to use "lyhytkanta menetelmä". There is no way the enemy can ambush the mortar platoon. You'll just have the FO. If the mortars are onmap they can't do proper indirect fire. Another thing is if these situations were common enough (Im quite sure they were) and if coding somthing like this into the game is worth the effort (propably not worth it).

I was a mortar platoon leader in finnish army. 25 seconds to get a shot off is something we could never do with 81mm mortars, because calculating your current position is usually slow. Ofcourse if you happen to be in a accurate map point (crossroads or something which you can take accurate coordinates) then I think it would be possible, but not safe to do. Mostly because the aiming of the mortars would have to be error prone. Ofcourse our team members had just 6 months of training, and 4 of that with mortars. So we could not do it given perfect condition... I also was in 120mm company some time (just weeks, but still). As I understand the firepattern of a single platoon is something the platoon leader is responsible for, but if you want the correct pattern from the company, the FO needs to do some tricks (yrjö lauri anybody? ). One thing which I think isn't quite right in CM. It is accuracy of direct fire with mortars from the run (also, how come it takes +30 seconds to set up for DIRECT fire, there is nothing to do). Seeing the distance without any equipment is DAMN hard. It was not uncommon when we were practising to have the distance off by 50%. Ofcourse then you can easily adjust the fire, and when you hit the target, you can hit it _every_ shot. Actually, what comes to setting up mortar for direct fire, we could do it in a show in less than 10 seconds. The funny thing is that the group had never used mortar before, and they had 2 days of training. Setting a mortar up in 10 seconds is easy. Getting to know your coordinates and adjusting all the mortars in the exact same direction is slow. Then again after this is done firing is fast, and correcting your fire is seconds. Oh, one thing still about direct fire. It is common practice, atleast in finnish army, to have your mortar behind cover, but still adjust the fire to hit exactly the target, using only the mortar team. How do you do it? Well, the mortars leader has plenty of time to get into a position where he can see the target when the round is up in the air... Hint how to correct your fire: One finger is 30/6000 circle