Roter Stern

I'm not sure audience you're targeting with this review. You start as if you're addressing those already invested into the Combat Mission franchise and familiar with Battlefront's past publication practices: But then you carry on to explain Combat Mission as if to someone completely new to the series, while making a reference to something fairly obscure ... which "War on Terror" are we talking about here - the 15 year old PC game, the 14 year old board game, Labyrinth another 10 year old board game? I do agree with this wholeheartedly: Without a doubt the biggest reason to own the game on Steam. Every time I come back to Combat Mission after a year or two break, it seems my PCs hardware has changed enough to invalidate all of my activations. Can't find serial keys, login to web account, can't remember password, reset password, go to activate, out of activations, submit a ticket for a reset. Granted, CM series is not for those lacking patience, but hardly something the mass market will accept when it takes a day or two to get a game running.

To continue that thought. The highest award of the British Commonwealth - the Victoria Cross - was introduced to honor valour during the Crimean War. The metal used to create the original Victoria Cross medals was from Russian cannons captured at the Siege of Sevastopol. There has been some dispute about the metal origin, especially with later-era VC's, but nonetheless. I personally know of another example where Russian trophy cannons from the Crimean War show up - a monument to Sir John MacDonald in Kingston, Canada features a pair of cannons on pedestals with the Russian Imperial double-headed eagles cast into the cannons. Tells you something about the significance of that war.

...must've been those unarmed B-52 lumbering around in ones and twos that saved the day

What's involved in the "officer courses"? Is that a military university degree or something else entirely? Have you played CMBS and if so, what are your thoughts? Speaking about the simulation, not the conflict of course.

A T-90 and a BMP-3 kept hitting this immobilized Abrams for about 3 minutes at a range of 600m - the T-90 ran out of APFSDS ammo and the BMP ran out of ATGM rounds. The crew eventually bailed out. Notice the penetration hits inside the commanders cupola and all over the RWS.

Here's my favorite from that sidebar - https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-54354876

Ha! Yeah, not quite that bad ... then again I am swapping the control board on the old HDD and then hooking it up using a SATA adapter card - so my desk does look a little bit like I have an IED here

I'm actually about to (attempt to) recover an old HDD (it's an IDE even), which should have my original CMSF1 install on it. I ended up losing a number of scenarios and maps I made back in the day, and perhaps this scenario would be among those as well.

Yeah, absolutely - it's enough to look at the state of their heavy and personal equipment during the 2008 conflict in Georgia. It was not much better than what they had back in the 90s - they won despite the equipment, not because of it. Even CMBS is being very generous with equipment in some cases - T-90AM, which is featured so prominently in that version of 2017, has just started trickling in to the top tier units earlier this year. I would, however, argue that fancy-schmancy-equipmenttm is not the predominant reason for adding a combatant to a CM title. After all, Italians do exits in both CMx1 and CMx2 Hesco barriers - sure, but that's just a fancy sandbag that a backhoe can fill. However, I'm not sure adding Russians to CMSF inherently requires occupation duty units or equipment; not any more so than a late-WW2 title requires "occupied population logistics", shall we call it. I imagine the initial thrust would focus on taking over airfields and ports - not civilian centers were NATO is conducting 'occupation duty'. My feeling exactly - hearing that they're working on USMC for CMBS makes me cringe, if I'm honest. I realize this is going to be a segue from the topic at hand, but as much as I like how the new CMx2 modules add depth, I equally dislike how the multiple titles shatter the breadth. CMx1 worked out pretty well, once all of the titles were out - CMBO was the first one you'd only play if you really wanted the Tiger-II; CMBB was the East Front; and CMAK was 95% of WW2 west of Warsaw start-to-finish. Where as in CMx2 I struggle to understand why CMFB is a title and not a module for CMBN - the two share about 80~90% of TO&E and are separated by less than 200km of land and two months of time. I suppose in the same vein I struggle to find a reason for CMBS to exist - especially if they already knew CMSF2 was going to be developed. I understand that it is not feasible for CMSF to span a decade and two continents worth of combatants; but considering the conflict is hypothetical, perhaps I just wish CMSF was a bit more of a sandbox (not a desert pun, I promise).

That's exactly my issue with CMBS - all probable additions to the Black Sea theatre have already been done in CMSF; and those not already in CMSF are even less plausible in CMBS. Sure I get that, I enjoy CMBS a great deal as well - a well equipped OPFOR is a fun challenge; but that's exactly my point. The way I see it, we can either have CMBS play catch-up to the tune of 3-4 modules ... or get a single new ("well equipped") OPFOR combatant for CMSF and make a solid title even better. Russia is where my vote is, but Iran would indeed make a solid addition as well. Additionally, playing an interesting BLUFOR, like the Dutch or the Canadians, against a Russianesque and UNCON combatant seems a lot more interesting than commanding Yet Another Stryker Battalion(tm), even if it's against a "real" Russian force. To be completely honest, I feel the issue of "geographic setting" to be of little consequence. At least to my mind, it is purely an aesthetic issue, one which can be easily solved with a texture pack. To illustrate that point - I have more play-time in CMSF(1) re-textured to look like CMBS, than I do in actual CMBS. Perhaps that's just me, but I'd rather see a single modern title with a half-dozen modules, than a half-dozen titles with a single module each.

Not going to lie, a Russian module for CMSF2 would be a tremendous addition - especially now that the title is released on Steam. Sure we have CMBS, which can pretty well portray most hypothetical modern day US-v-Russia conflicts, but I think it's save to say that CMBS is now a shelved dead-end product. We are approaching six years since release without as much as even a hit at a single module. CMBS saltiness aside, I do find CMSF to be more compelling - in both the setting and the variety of OPFOR available. Personally, I'd rather see a 4th module for CMSF than a 1st module for CMBS. As far as the argument that the Russian appearance in CMSF would "conflict with the lore" - well, that's the beauty of an alternate-history setting - you get the write any narrative to fit your end-goal. Seems like a fairly reasonable scenario for the Russo-Georgian war to escalate into a Russo-NATO conflict about a year after the events in CMSF. In turn that could bring Russia to Syria in an attempt to re-instate the original Syrian regime, in order to solidify their allies in the Eastern Mediterranean region. No re-write of the existing CMSF lore, simply a continuation of the original time line past the initial NATO invasion and into NATO occupation. NATO would be portrayed mostly on the defensive and counter-attack; where as Russian forces would be portrayed as a force-multiplier of whatever is left of Syrian military. Perhaps not so much "Syrian military" as much as bands of UNCONS, but that's besides the point. I would also like to echo some of the things OP is saying (about CMSF:Russia, not so much the extensive apologism of real-life Russian involvement in Syria ):

I see ... thank you! They should've made that button even smaller and have it blend in to the background even more. Should also have the help desk article updated to read "submit a ticket" instead of a broken link.

Right... right - the first page has a link to this very forum and to the help desk. The help desk page has an article about resetting activations which, and I refer you to my post above, says: But that link seems to be dead - comes up as "Page not found" for me. I see we're back where we started.

How do we request an activation reset? The help center article (https://battlefront.mojohelpdesk.com/help/article/127981) says: But that link seems to be dead - comes up as "Page not found" for me.

I wonder if the 2017-time frame of CMBS is responsible for the apparent increase in capability compared to our 2014/2015 perspective? Consider that only the 82A is capable of airbusts in the game, while the 80A is not - even though both of have the same 2A72 gun. Perhaps that's how BFC foresees the 82A getting upgraded over the next 2 years - while at the same time treating the 80A as a legacy platform being phased out.

As will the AI, make no mistake about it - the briefing does give a few solid tips from what I recall. You really need to pour hot molten shrapnel from the skies onto the shoreline and get smoke on the water going.

Not to discourage you, but like I was saying earlier, Trophy is for all intensive purposes 100% effective against ATGMs - both aircraft and tube launched. I've seen Ka-52s overwhelm the APS with their Vikhr missles, just with sheer volume, but that still takes the better part of a dozen missiles. So you might as well start figuring out way to take out the Abrams.

Unfortunately the APS on the Abrams does seem to be brutally effective at defeating the Kh-25, or any other ATGM for that matter, making bombs the munition of choice. Or rather would have, if not for the Frogfoot's is brutal inaccuracy at delivering its unguided munition - can't seem to hit the broad side of an apartment complex. The other two air frames - the Su-24 and -34 - certainly do a fantastic job of dropping two bombs into the same crater, even annoyingly so, but their cost is hard to justify esp for a battle of this size. Presuming those Abrams even have APS, one can hope your Sukhois will go pick on easier targets first, before wasting the precious missiles

A very solid start DMS, rootin' for ya! Love the videos as well! What type of air support did you get - ground attack or anti-tank? While it'd be fun to see an Abrams catch a Kh-25 missile up its exhaust, I'm hoping to see some areal bombs drop

The scout HQ team can call in precision arty rounds using their detonator. Honestly not sure what good they are for the squads.

Would it be possible to perhaps host the file as a torrent?

04071776 1817 I deserve it MORE than the bloke who posted just ahead of me because Steve once said:

What makes you think that a mortar strike guided solely by a set of map coordinates "SHOULD always be on target"? There are lots of other factors affecting the delivery of rounds other than the spotter's ability to correct fire.

BF is already well aware that TCP/IP WeGo is a much-requested feature. The issue is not that they don't want or don't know to put this feature into the game, but rather that they're currently not able to due to other priorities.

It looks like they only included the art and model assets for the few bridges which appear in the demo battles and stripped off the ones that don't. Same goes for the buildings as well - try placing a whole bunch of different buildings all over the map and you'll notice in 3D preview that some of them have missing roofs or some of the textures are greyed-out.