Roter Stern

Here are a couple of other threads on the topic:
Some messed up images in the above post but the thumbnails show the full images OK.
 
and
 

Well, there's a pretty exhaustive discussion on this very topic happening here - have a read:
 

I have to say, I do like me a "story driven" scenario - certainly makes me care about my pixeltroopen a lot more! 👍
Are these positions supposed to be prepared tank firing positions?

Not going to lie, they don't work all that well, and I think there is a better way to make what you must've been trying to accomplish:



Here's how it looks like in the editor:

Hold CTRL when you do a direct elevation set to create those "blue" markers - those produce a "Ditch Lock", a much steeper elevation change.
Normally you'd want a 2-meter high berm for a good hull-down tank trench, but since these are on a significant elevation to the expected enemy, a gentle down-slope away from the berm will allow the tanks to inch front and back to find the perfect hull-down position.

You’re wrong. And being antagonistic does not help anyone or anything, especially yourself. 
 
The LOD issues are being addressed in the first patch. In fact, I believe as of right now most of them are fixed. 
 
The reason the game shipped with them is because, for techno wizardry reasons I will never understand, when the final release candidate was built, something caused some LODs to get a little wonky. We figured that it was not worth delaying the release of a game for a minor graphical issue that has no effect on gameplay, and only occurs on certain models and in lower graphics settings. 
 
I think we made the right call. The response to Cold War has been overwhelmingly positive. And I think BFC hitting a release target has been very positive as well. Further, most feedback on bugs has been very polite and professional, and I think we have done a good job of responding and addressing these issues. A patch is being worked on as we speak that will fix these issues, and some other issues that were the result of very constructive feedback. 

I mean, I'm not going to be that jerk to throw a "RTFM" at anyone ... but that has been a feature for some time (since Engine 2 or 3?) - see CM Engine Manual v4.00 (page 91) or A Scen Design AAR PDF Book (page 32). 😁
The manuals are really worth the read for anyone making scenarios - some kind soul put a good effort into those works. 👍
Here's what a "Ditch locked" tank position looks like on flat ground:

An easy solution to that, which also looks good visually, is to paint that berm with terrain impassible to vehicles (heavy rocks, heavy forest, deep marsh*)
*well, i guess a deep marsh berm doesn't actually look good 😁

I mean, I'm not going to be that jerk to throw a "RTFM" at anyone ... but that has been a feature for some time (since Engine 2 or 3?) - see CM Engine Manual v4.00 (page 91) or A Scen Design AAR PDF Book (page 32). 😁
The manuals are really worth the read for anyone making scenarios - some kind soul put a good effort into those works. 👍
Here's what a "Ditch locked" tank position looks like on flat ground:

https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-cold-war/cm-cold-war-scenarios/cmcw-team-yankees-first-battle/
This is a recreation of the opening battle in the novel "Team Yankee". There aren't many options for the Soviets and Team Yankee has all the advantages...this time.

I don't see what you're trying to prove here. You're also making a rather huge assumption that calculations pause when the RT is paused. There's plenty of reasons why that would not be the case.
Point is, the more units are on the field, the slower RT runs - where as turn based is hardly effected.

Sure, let's try that.
Load up the scenario in question (The Citadel) and try running it in real-time. On my side it runs at sub-single FPS.
Now load up the same scenario in turn-based. For me each turn takes about 3 min to calculate, but once that's done I'm getting a decent 30~40 FPS.
Seems pretty clear cut to me.

And then you get these Chads:

Considering they only get 40 rounds for that SVD, that's quite the kill count.

Not sure how much of an interest there will be, but I decided to share some faction mods I have made over the last month or so in case anyone wanted to use them. Not everything is completed in full, but are near a state of completion that I am happy with. I may make some tweaks/adjustments as time goes on, or if any major issues pop up. 
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hnuj6bmyst5n6kg/AABYp29_jC7l2uOSzuwRUuSea?dl=0
The above drop box link contains individual downloads for the following:
Britain
-British Woodland DPM Uniforms
-British Mixed Uniforms (Several variants of mixed S95 Woodland/Desert DPM Uniforms) 
Canada
-Canadian Woodland CADPAT TW Uniforms
-Canadian Mixed Uniforms (Several variants of mixed CADPAT TW/AR Uniforms)
Netherlands
-Dutch Woodland DPM Uniforms 
Germany
-German Woodland Flecktarn Uniforms
Russia
-Russian Faction ca. 2008 (or as close as I could get it) modeled after the war in Georgia. Conscript units wear mixed VSR/Flora uniforms, whereas regulars are primarily in Flora. Weapons have been visually changed in some instances, ex: AKM swapped for AK-74 model. Helmets are updated to the SSh-68.
Iran
-Iranian Faction modeled after resource pictures I could find online. Units are wearing Iranian DPM. Load Bearing equipment is featured in a US DCU pattern that I frequently saw Iranian troops wearing online. AK family has been replaced with G3 rifles. PKM has been (mostly) replaced by the MG3. All vehicles have been painted a uniform sand/desert tan color. I was going to try and replicate some vehicle patterns I found online but I was never really satisfied with how they came out. After thinking about it, I may leave them untouched, as it paints them in a more generic light and doesn't force them to specifically be Iranian; they could be any kind of make-believe faction you can think of. 
Notes:
-Regarding the Brits, Canadians, Dutch and Germans there are two sets for each camo type (woodland/mixed): one set that is clean and one set that is dirty. That way you can pick and choose which you would prefer. 
-In relation to the above, you only need to choose one of the options (Clean OR Dirty, not both) for each faction and drop that folder into your 'Z' folder to use. 
-Regarding the Russians, US Army & USMC, I did not alter the vehicle colors. There are a few mods (Euroscape) that come to mind that will give the vehicles more of a European paintjob. I would download those currently to complete the overall look.
-Most folders in each download will have a section titled "PSD". These are the photoshop file types that I used while editing. If you have photoshop or a program that can accept .PSD files you can open them up and make any changes you'd like. 
Known Issues: 
-Russian Faction currently does not exhibit any changes to the SF units. I have a few ideas here for what I want to do in the future but this will require some more experimentation. 
-Iranian MG3's that are setup via tripod are currently sunken into the ground. Have not been able to figure this one out yet.
-Iranian G3 rifles that replace the grenadier rifles do not have an underslung grenade launcher. Pretend they're just shooting rifle grenades!
-Any instance where a weapon swap has been performed (AKM to G3 for instance) is purely cosmetic. The G3 will still use the same ammo type from whatever rifle it is replacing; equally so, the magazine sizes will also stay the same. There is nothing that can be done about this on my end. 
-The Editor Logo for the Iranian Faction correctly displays the Iranian Flag button, but the text still reads "Syrian Army".
-The Editor Logo for the Russian Faction displays both the Syrian Flag and the text reads "Syrian Army".
-Some of the weapon icons in the squad overview have black backgrounds, I forgot to alpha channel these out and only just noticed today. Not game breaking by any means but I will see about fixing it up later on if/when I make further adjustments. 
-The Russian faction is still currently using Arabic voices. 
Pictures:

 British Troops in Mixed DPM 
 

German Troops in Flecktarn
 

Canadian Troops in CADPAT TW
 

Russian Conscripts in VSR/Flora
 

Russian Regulars in Flora
 

Iranian Conscripts
 

Iranian Regulars
 

More Iranian Regulars w/BMP-1
 
Huge thank you to mjkerner who, about this time last year, walked me through how to begin changing/editing the base game files. Modding has brought me just as much enjoyment as playing the game and I would not have been able to do it without him. 
 
Again, hopefully these will be useful to someone and help mix things up a bit. That's all I have for now!

We need a topic on this, apart from tiny engagements I can't see how you can manage medium to huge scenario in RTS. 

My opinion is that comparing those two and expecting correlated results is a mistake. The scenario in question has something to the tune of 1200+ soldiers and 320+ vehicles - is that something you'd ever see in ARMA? I might be wrong, but I'd wager that's an order of magnitude more than the largest ARMA scenario.
Point is - this is not a graphics issue - 3D rendering is not the issue, I'd expect your GPU to be below 20% utilization running CM. The issue is the sheer volume of CPU-heavy calculations each and every soldier and vehicle has to execute - each pair of eyes looking around, each gun sight taking aim, each bullet being fried - every single frame.
I do have some good news for you, though - there is a fix! 😁
I'm going to wager a guess and say you're attempting to run that scenario in Real-Time.... don't. Huge scenarios like that are not really meant to be run in RT - try turn-based.
You will notice that each 60-second "turn" takes about 5+min to calculate - that should tell you something. Once the turn is calculated, your FPS should be back up to your "normal" level, given the size of the map and number of units.

I have created a spreadsheet to show how much points IFVs and MBTs cost and how rare they are / rarity point cost.
There are three tabs for loose/standard/strict rarity levels.
You can access it here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GGWyVuMdVJEuxZzBaMaqOnye-aBdKrc7G_aX6Y_1zDk/edit?usp=sharing
It looks like this:

Did a bit of repetition - recorded the outcome of 550+ Dragon hits on various Soviet tanks at various aspects.
I'll keep it to the point:
If a Dragon manages to score a penetration, it is a guaranteed K/O - 292 penetrating hits recorded, all of which resulted in a (often catastrophic) K/O. The real weakness of the Dragon is reliability. I didn't keep track of how many nosedived and hit the dirt short of target, but it was a lot; and that's considering the Dragon teams were not being fired upon. T-55s and T-62s have no protection against the Dragon - first hit to connect is a guaranteed penetration at all aspects and hit locations. I stopped recording 55s/62s results after the first 48 frontal hits resulted in 100% K/O rate. All other Soviet MBTs seem almost impervious to the Dragon in the upper frontal arc (front turret, weapon mount, upper front hull). Of 280 hits that landed in upper front, only 2 managed to penetrate (0.07% rate).  At the same time, all other arcs offer no protection - of the 290 hits recorded to sides (even at rather shallow 30* angles and including turret sides) and most importantly lower front hull - all scored a penetrating hit, a 100% K/O rate. So a true case of YMMV:
On one hand, a T-64/72/80 in a perfect hull-down position might appear "invincible". During one contrivance, I had to stop after 30 (thirty) consecutive hits failed to K/O a single T-72; however, make no mistake, there was not a single relevant subsystem left functional on that tank. Where as on the other hand, something as simple as a 30-degree traversal of the turret relative to the ATGM team pretty well guarantees a K/O on the first shot to reach the target. I think no matter which side of the Dragon ATGM you find yourself in, such dramatically polarized results can most certainly lead to frustration.
p.s. In case anyone is curious what my last two hours looked like, here's a 12 min segment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2midc46M9CA
(You can also get a sense of how many missiles fail to reach target ... or even clear the launcher, as a few unlucky teams caught their own shrapnel)
 

This is something I threw together in my own time. Please remember that this is from a beta build of the game and is subject to change. 

Did a bit of repetition - recorded the outcome of 550+ Dragon hits on various Soviet tanks at various aspects.
I'll keep it to the point:
If a Dragon manages to score a penetration, it is a guaranteed K/O - 292 penetrating hits recorded, all of which resulted in a (often catastrophic) K/O. The real weakness of the Dragon is reliability. I didn't keep track of how many nosedived and hit the dirt short of target, but it was a lot; and that's considering the Dragon teams were not being fired upon. T-55s and T-62s have no protection against the Dragon - first hit to connect is a guaranteed penetration at all aspects and hit locations. I stopped recording 55s/62s results after the first 48 frontal hits resulted in 100% K/O rate. All other Soviet MBTs seem almost impervious to the Dragon in the upper frontal arc (front turret, weapon mount, upper front hull). Of 280 hits that landed in upper front, only 2 managed to penetrate (0.07% rate).  At the same time, all other arcs offer no protection - of the 290 hits recorded to sides (even at rather shallow 30* angles and including turret sides) and most importantly lower front hull - all scored a penetrating hit, a 100% K/O rate. So a true case of YMMV:
On one hand, a T-64/72/80 in a perfect hull-down position might appear "invincible". During one contrivance, I had to stop after 30 (thirty) consecutive hits failed to K/O a single T-72; however, make no mistake, there was not a single relevant subsystem left functional on that tank. Where as on the other hand, something as simple as a 30-degree traversal of the turret relative to the ATGM team pretty well guarantees a K/O on the first shot to reach the target. I think no matter which side of the Dragon ATGM you find yourself in, such dramatically polarized results can most certainly lead to frustration.
p.s. In case anyone is curious what my last two hours looked like, here's a 12 min segment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2midc46M9CA
(You can also get a sense of how many missiles fail to reach target ... or even clear the launcher, as a few unlucky teams caught their own shrapnel)
 

The deaths following penetrations are not surprising - there's not a ton of room in a Soviet tank, and almost everything you're going to hit is going to be ammunition in the autoloader, which isn't going to end well.

The main issues the Dragons have in practice (aside from failure rate, correctly reflecting the difficulty in firing the thing) is that it has a 1km range.

As with any ATGM, there's a huge launch signature. That means you're exposing your position and having to keep exposed for several seconds, whilst being firmly in a range where the opposing MBT can easily destroy you. If you miss, you die. If you fail to kill the target, you die. Further, the MBT can lethally engage you at ranges well beyond those which you can engage them - 2km is nothing special here.

The advantages are ubiquity - the US platoons have three Dragons and five MGs per platoon, so there's one per squad in practice. That's a really nice capability, but it's not the primary capability of the US (the Dragon is not a Javelin). Ranged firepower should be based around a combination of TOW and MBT. Active Defence doctrine had the unit decamping when the enemy was in range of the medium antitank weapons (i.e., Dragon). That means that Dragons were not supposed to be the primary tank killers, but instead a volley of Dragons might be the signal to get a move on and get back into the transport.

In general, M47 Dragon is "fine". It's a valuable capability to have, but it's not something you can rely on, and it doesn't need to be.

Perhaps another data point some might find interesting is frontal arc survival chances for the T-64/72/80s. Those three models and their variants were converging on the same numbers, so I'm calling them equal for simplicity.
This is of course not in hull-down and is not a reflection of Dragon's lethality - but rather the odds of hitting the lower front hull sweet spot at 980 meters.
This is also only counting hits which connected with the target, not shots fired - so does not account for Dragon's (lack of) reliability.

TL;DR - about a 50% chance that a single Dragon hitting a T-64 or better from the front will knock it out. It compounds from there with multiple hits - >90% of K/O if four hits are allowed to connect.
Seems the lesson for anyone playing OPFOR is to keep your T-64/72/80s hull down or roll the dice with shoot-and-scoot. With Dragon teams being plentiful and carrying 3 ATGMs each, the odds are still very much against any Soviet MBTs caught in the open.
Oh yeah, and send the T-55/62s to the scrapyard. 😁

Did a bit of repetition - recorded the outcome of 550+ Dragon hits on various Soviet tanks at various aspects.
I'll keep it to the point:
If a Dragon manages to score a penetration, it is a guaranteed K/O - 292 penetrating hits recorded, all of which resulted in a (often catastrophic) K/O. The real weakness of the Dragon is reliability. I didn't keep track of how many nosedived and hit the dirt short of target, but it was a lot; and that's considering the Dragon teams were not being fired upon. T-55s and T-62s have no protection against the Dragon - first hit to connect is a guaranteed penetration at all aspects and hit locations. I stopped recording 55s/62s results after the first 48 frontal hits resulted in 100% K/O rate. All other Soviet MBTs seem almost impervious to the Dragon in the upper frontal arc (front turret, weapon mount, upper front hull). Of 280 hits that landed in upper front, only 2 managed to penetrate (0.07% rate).  At the same time, all other arcs offer no protection - of the 290 hits recorded to sides (even at rather shallow 30* angles and including turret sides) and most importantly lower front hull - all scored a penetrating hit, a 100% K/O rate. So a true case of YMMV:
On one hand, a T-64/72/80 in a perfect hull-down position might appear "invincible". During one contrivance, I had to stop after 30 (thirty) consecutive hits failed to K/O a single T-72; however, make no mistake, there was not a single relevant subsystem left functional on that tank. Where as on the other hand, something as simple as a 30-degree traversal of the turret relative to the ATGM team pretty well guarantees a K/O on the first shot to reach the target. I think no matter which side of the Dragon ATGM you find yourself in, such dramatically polarized results can most certainly lead to frustration.
p.s. In case anyone is curious what my last two hours looked like, here's a 12 min segment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2midc46M9CA
(You can also get a sense of how many missiles fail to reach target ... or even clear the launcher, as a few unlucky teams caught their own shrapnel)
 

Did a bit of repetition - recorded the outcome of 550+ Dragon hits on various Soviet tanks at various aspects.
I'll keep it to the point:
If a Dragon manages to score a penetration, it is a guaranteed K/O - 292 penetrating hits recorded, all of which resulted in a (often catastrophic) K/O. The real weakness of the Dragon is reliability. I didn't keep track of how many nosedived and hit the dirt short of target, but it was a lot; and that's considering the Dragon teams were not being fired upon. T-55s and T-62s have no protection against the Dragon - first hit to connect is a guaranteed penetration at all aspects and hit locations. I stopped recording 55s/62s results after the first 48 frontal hits resulted in 100% K/O rate. All other Soviet MBTs seem almost impervious to the Dragon in the upper frontal arc (front turret, weapon mount, upper front hull). Of 280 hits that landed in upper front, only 2 managed to penetrate (0.07% rate).  At the same time, all other arcs offer no protection - of the 290 hits recorded to sides (even at rather shallow 30* angles and including turret sides) and most importantly lower front hull - all scored a penetrating hit, a 100% K/O rate. So a true case of YMMV:
On one hand, a T-64/72/80 in a perfect hull-down position might appear "invincible". During one contrivance, I had to stop after 30 (thirty) consecutive hits failed to K/O a single T-72; however, make no mistake, there was not a single relevant subsystem left functional on that tank. Where as on the other hand, something as simple as a 30-degree traversal of the turret relative to the ATGM team pretty well guarantees a K/O on the first shot to reach the target. I think no matter which side of the Dragon ATGM you find yourself in, such dramatically polarized results can most certainly lead to frustration.
p.s. In case anyone is curious what my last two hours looked like, here's a 12 min segment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2midc46M9CA
(You can also get a sense of how many missiles fail to reach target ... or even clear the launcher, as a few unlucky teams caught their own shrapnel)
 

BMP1s and 2s are still way better than BMP3s. Those things are VBIEDs that happen to contain dismounts. One thing I learned very early was to get the dismounts a good way away from BMP3s so they don't get wiped out by the secondary explosion. 
 
H

Did a bit of repetition - recorded the outcome of 550+ Dragon hits on various Soviet tanks at various aspects.
I'll keep it to the point:
If a Dragon manages to score a penetration, it is a guaranteed K/O - 292 penetrating hits recorded, all of which resulted in a (often catastrophic) K/O. The real weakness of the Dragon is reliability. I didn't keep track of how many nosedived and hit the dirt short of target, but it was a lot; and that's considering the Dragon teams were not being fired upon. T-55s and T-62s have no protection against the Dragon - first hit to connect is a guaranteed penetration at all aspects and hit locations. I stopped recording 55s/62s results after the first 48 frontal hits resulted in 100% K/O rate. All other Soviet MBTs seem almost impervious to the Dragon in the upper frontal arc (front turret, weapon mount, upper front hull). Of 280 hits that landed in upper front, only 2 managed to penetrate (0.07% rate).  At the same time, all other arcs offer no protection - of the 290 hits recorded to sides (even at rather shallow 30* angles and including turret sides) and most importantly lower front hull - all scored a penetrating hit, a 100% K/O rate. So a true case of YMMV:
On one hand, a T-64/72/80 in a perfect hull-down position might appear "invincible". During one contrivance, I had to stop after 30 (thirty) consecutive hits failed to K/O a single T-72; however, make no mistake, there was not a single relevant subsystem left functional on that tank. Where as on the other hand, something as simple as a 30-degree traversal of the turret relative to the ATGM team pretty well guarantees a K/O on the first shot to reach the target. I think no matter which side of the Dragon ATGM you find yourself in, such dramatically polarized results can most certainly lead to frustration.
p.s. In case anyone is curious what my last two hours looked like, here's a 12 min segment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2midc46M9CA
(You can also get a sense of how many missiles fail to reach target ... or even clear the launcher, as a few unlucky teams caught their own shrapnel)
 

Did a bit of repetition - recorded the outcome of 550+ Dragon hits on various Soviet tanks at various aspects.
I'll keep it to the point:
If a Dragon manages to score a penetration, it is a guaranteed K/O - 292 penetrating hits recorded, all of which resulted in a (often catastrophic) K/O. The real weakness of the Dragon is reliability. I didn't keep track of how many nosedived and hit the dirt short of target, but it was a lot; and that's considering the Dragon teams were not being fired upon. T-55s and T-62s have no protection against the Dragon - first hit to connect is a guaranteed penetration at all aspects and hit locations. I stopped recording 55s/62s results after the first 48 frontal hits resulted in 100% K/O rate. All other Soviet MBTs seem almost impervious to the Dragon in the upper frontal arc (front turret, weapon mount, upper front hull). Of 280 hits that landed in upper front, only 2 managed to penetrate (0.07% rate).  At the same time, all other arcs offer no protection - of the 290 hits recorded to sides (even at rather shallow 30* angles and including turret sides) and most importantly lower front hull - all scored a penetrating hit, a 100% K/O rate. So a true case of YMMV:
On one hand, a T-64/72/80 in a perfect hull-down position might appear "invincible". During one contrivance, I had to stop after 30 (thirty) consecutive hits failed to K/O a single T-72; however, make no mistake, there was not a single relevant subsystem left functional on that tank. Where as on the other hand, something as simple as a 30-degree traversal of the turret relative to the ATGM team pretty well guarantees a K/O on the first shot to reach the target. I think no matter which side of the Dragon ATGM you find yourself in, such dramatically polarized results can most certainly lead to frustration.
p.s. In case anyone is curious what my last two hours looked like, here's a 12 min segment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2midc46M9CA
(You can also get a sense of how many missiles fail to reach target ... or even clear the launcher, as a few unlucky teams caught their own shrapnel)