Lethaface

Back when I was doing this for beta testing I would not submit a result to BFC with less than n=300, but I don't have the patience for it anymore. There is a guy who wrote a program in Python to automate it and would do n=1000 but that's not a skill set I possess.
Exactly right. I also make sure all spotters are looking at the same thing, i.e. rather than timing the test groups spotting each other I time them spotting an identical third group (I use T-72As as my "target" group in all tests). I also eliminate C2 information sharing by making every unit of the test group in a different battalion and spacing them by more than 32 meters from each other.
I've never noticed that before, but it would make sense given CM spotting cycles are in 7 second intervals, most of the time.
BFC has never commented on the long right tails, but they are a consistent feature of the CM spotting model across titles. I mentioned earlier that I have seen results longer than 10 minutes at ranges up to 1000m in CMBN but they are very rare.
Thanks for running the tests! I would not have been surprised by an even larger M60 advantage given the thermal imager. I picked the RISE+ in my test as I felt that was more apples to apples vis-a-vis the T-72A.

Let's calm down a little, shall we?
This unpleasant "discussion" made me dig out a test I did some time ago. I've been doing data analysis for basically all my professional life, so I always suffer a bit when reading these threads. So, as we've been discussing on page one or so, anecdotal evidence ("here look at this battle, spotting is broken!!!!") is meaningless. But also doing "experiments" is only as good as the experiment itself plus the evaluation afterwards. First of all, if you do experiments, control the variables! Eliminate everything you are not directly interested in. If you want to look at spotting, do it on a flat surface and make both opponents hold fire. Because, as I often see, if you measure time until first shot, or kill, you are skewing the spotting process. Next, don't look at averages or medians alone. Look at distributions. And don't eliminate outliers. My text book about statistical data analysis said that, eliminating outliers, although done often, should really only be done if you know what you are doing, e.g. when you know that your outlier is actually some measurement error and not some rare event.
So, here's what I did:
I put an M60 TTS and a bog standard T72 (the exact models aren't relevant for the method) on a flat map with paved ground, roughly 2 km apart. I set both vehicles to hold fire. I then measured the time it took for each tank to first get a partial contact and then a full contact.
Here is the raw data:
t72 = [84, 17, 78, 4, 174, 65, 77, 321, 289, 444, 31, 3, 290, 2, 40, 120, 40, 159, 57, 69, 15, 54, 80, 95, 19, 58,
       23, 672, 154, 154, 17, 14, 342, 12, 386, 43, 84, 12, 378, 123, 30, 44, 240, 311, 110, 2, 68, 181, 137]
t72_id = [7, 21, 7,28, 7, 35, 14, 0, 56, 0, 35, 0, 7, 70, 42, 7, 35, 35, 0, 49, 0, 7, 0, 0, 0, 63, 28, 7, 14, 0,
          7, 7, 7, 49, 7, 21, 14, 21, 14, 0, 7, 14, 28, 0, 14, 7, 28, 56, 77]
m60 = [89, 68, 41, 38, 71, 10, 73, 0, 20, 9, 4, 55, 91, 34, 31, 8, 14, 116, 64, 4, 18, 63, 116, 38, 3, 18, 71, 132,
       39, 73, 43, 73, 116, 210, 207, 36, 180, 27, 88, 48, 102, 3, 52, 77, 176, 22, 18, 80, 24]
m60_id = [7, 7, 7, 0, 14, 14, 0, 14, 14, 7, 14, 0, 7, 14, 35, 14, 7, 0, 7, 14, 7, 0, 14, 7, 7, 7, 14, 35, 7, 0, 7, 0,
          0, 7, 0, 7, 14, 14, 7, 7, 7, 0, 7, 0, 0, 7, 21, 7, 7]
Times are in seconds, the entry t72 is time until partial contact for the T72 trying to spot the M60, the one with  "_id" is the difference between partial and full contact. The same for m60. And in order to get the distributions I made histograms with 30s bins for plots 1 and 3 and 7s for plot 2.



So, what do we see here? Well, first of all, I should have taken at least ten times the data or make make larger bins. I didn't have the patience for the former and doing the latter would mean that we don't see much of a distribution. 😉 Anyway, from the raw data we see: time until partial contact can be any number, time to ID (which is what I call time to go from partial to full contact) is always a multiple of 7.
The histograms tell us the following: Although it is not possible to get the exact distribution, this is definitely not something symmetrical where average or media are easy to interpret. If you look at the bins with the highest counts, those are at low times. That means, players will usually see that their T72 or M60 are often quick to spot their target. Nothing to complain about or make a forum "rant". But for both (!) tanks it is quite possible that it takes several minutes - more likely for the T72 but also the M60 TTS had an event with over 3.5 minutes. The time until partial contact is consistent (no more, no less) with an exponential decay which you would expect when counting the number of dice rolls necessary to roll a specific number - only that the M60 TTS rolls with a D6, while the T72 rolls a D20, so to speak.
Now, is spotting "broken" or not? For me, this is really not a meaningful thing to say. Because by "broken" people usually mean "takes too long" without saying what "too long" is and why. With the above distributions, it is possible to never spot the target. Right? Wrong? Broken? This is a game/simulation and as any such thing, at least if you want it to run in reasonable time on a consumer machine, it is simpler than real life and abstracted. A meaningful discussion would be "Is this spotting model adequate? Could CM do better by applying model XYZ, instead?". I'm not sure if the long tails (what some call "outliers") are working as intended (although I find @The_Capt analogy with the barrel quite convincing) or if it is a model that is just designed to get the "center", the common situations, right, accepting that every now and then it produces something odd. But getting the tails of an exponentially decaying distribution right is brutally difficult - in fact, come to think of it, my whole PhD thesis was about modelling the tails of a similar distribution correctly.
 

No dude don't do that. We already have Wargame Red dragon. Don't need another one. RNG spotting is what makes CM different. Even though it does frustrate players at times.

I have explained why that is a contrived number. I'm done talking about it.
Sturm-S vs M60 RISE+ @800 meters. Outliers not excluded.
Median M60: 29 seconds Sturm: 17.5 seconds Average M60: 29.8 seconds Sturm: 25.5 seconds Since you attach so much meaning to the single largest time, for the Sturm it was 88 seconds.
That's a 49.4% advantage in median spot time for the Sturm-S. WTF @The_Capt, how do you sleep at night? 😡😡  😡

The other area of improvement is the effect of artillery on armoured vehicles.  The current CM engine is not reflecting realities we are seeing in the war in Ukraine, I do believe a revisit is in order on just how vulnerable tanks are to heavy indirect fires.  This will have a big impact on CW as the Soviets were an artillery heavy force.

ATGM team is not necessarily. Only BTR formation have them. It means you have to give up BMP formation. It's more than it's worth. BMP is better suited to running an attack. BTR is just car. My view is that instead of putting effort into sending ATGM teams to destroy American tanks, more effort should be put into reconnaissance and planning. Choose a manoeuvre route that will expose as few of your troops as possible. Approach US forces quickly. Get within 1,000 metres before the Americans launch enough ATGMs and rounds. This is more valuable than ATGM.

Ah well then clearly this is nothing more than a bitter-drive by.  You are not really here to help, just resurrect old gripes. 
As to "old tanker" if you could point that one out?  As you can see, I was heavily involved in both of those posts - dbsapps (may he rest in piece) pretty much tried a lot of weird stuff to try and prove "CM spotting is broken!" and really did not get anywhere with it.  A lot of us ran extensive tests (again) and found the spotting was pretty much in line with reasonable expectation for the equipment and era - not perfect but there you go.
The major difference between you and me is that I am one of three game leads for this title and actually has a chance to get things changed, if it is merited. And I am totally open to this, we have a list of fixes and outstanding tweaks.  However, it has to based on solid data, not anecdotal drive bys.  Why?  Well because the fastest way to get caught in a CM-Karen loop is to correct one way and then be yelled at by the next person that we are doing it wrong and to go the other way.  That is a fools errand and incredible waste of time. 
I personally think that if BFC scrubbed the outliers from the game they would pull the life right out of the simulation.  War is outliers, a lot of weird stuff that everyone remembers.  They not only enhance the experience, they add to combat friction - war is chaos and a lot of the fun in playing is embracing that.
Back on topic.  VAB results are a solid representation of what we should be seeing.  A T72 did not have the same spotting abilities as an M60 - technical, ergonomic or even training and doctrine.  Given even ground an M60 should see a T72 first, they were designed to do this because the Soviets had a lot more T72s.

So I believe the term you are looking for is superfluous: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superfluous
Not “redundant”; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(linguistics)
You are also pivoting on your premise to simply be argumentative, or at least that is how it appears.  I thought I was “redundant” because you were all discussing spotting between different vehicles.  Now it is buttoned/unbuttoned.  This is an old-school Internet forum ploy of niggling as opposed to actually presenting any facts to support your position - attack everyone else’s without any real logical framework.
So the OP, sounding like a new guy, came on the forum and declared “CM spotting is broken!”  We have seen this post perhaps a thousand times in 20+ years.  The post is an emotional one and that is fair.  Invariably some old timers jump in and try to help out.  VAB just did and posted some controlled test results that show what we have also known for years - CM spotting has pretty reasonable means but wide outliers.  The outliers represent the effects of warfare on human cognition and perception.  I have done dozens of these tests myself, as have many others.
And then we get old timers who just want to grind some old axes and be rude.  They are not here to solve anything, nor do they put in the actual work to demonstrate their position, because if they did they would get the same results as VAB.  They invariably play Reddit games etc until things peter out.
But you are correct, we were talking about unbuttoned…even worse for spotting in some circumstances.  You see here in the back room of CM we have more than few combat veterans that know exactly what it is like to have someone try and kill them on a daily basis.  If one is unbuttoned, unlike the Sunday driver, you are exposed to the environment and specifically to having severe trauma projected onto your head and upper body.  The human reflex to this is to look around quickly…furtively and anxiously.  This means that one’s concentration is not great and depending on the situation a spotting outlier is likely going to happen.  Ivan missed the big tank in the field because he was too busy looking for the sniper in the trees.
So here is what you can do to be helpful beyond simply being rude and attacking everyone in some weird strategy to make your point.  Go run a series of controlled tests - different vehicles, buttoned/unbuttoned etc and them come back and we can look at them.  I would suggest you start with trying to replicate the conditions the OP posted at the start and see where they take you.  
Less noise, more work (I should put that on coffee mugs).  

Well, there is no reason to assume a T-62 has any better spotting than a T-72.
If you don't like my data, get your own. Otherwise, good luck with your rant.

I did share an opinion. You just didn't like it. Too bad.
Personal experience? Well, I have actually done some testing in the past. Nothing extensive, but enough to suggest that the differences in spotting between M60 and T-62 are in the 10-20% range, at least under the testing conditions...
... which would be reasonable given the real-world differences I have documented (albeit for T-72):
 
Thank you. I agree 😆

I understand OP, as I used to have this problem too. But since I gave up micromanagement I've solved that problem. Also I found the charisma of Soviet. In my personal experience, Soviet tanks were perfectly fine, if not overwhelmingly superior, in tank battles within 800 metres. NATO spotting magic only beats the Soviet at a distance. Once the Soviet tanks got close(within 1000 metres), the m60's pathetic gun and armour could not save them. 
Focusing on whether a particular tank can see enemy tanks is a form of micromanagement. For the Soviet player, micromanagement means nothing. You just need to get enough tanks moving in the general direction of the enemy position. Mass will solve the problem of blindness for you. 
And don't forget artillery bombard. Soviet can't live without battery.

T34/76 had a more reliable method. Open the breach look down the barrel and fire at an enemy tank you see through the barrel. You can't use this commonsense method with an autoloader. It makes perfect sense. 😉🤞

Sure, we are spending our free time on a game and so it should be fun, nothing wrong with that. But the definition of fun is very subjective. For me, the fun in playing this game is to explore what difficulties a commander would have faced in such a conflict (and try to overcome them), not necessarily just winning. So, if you are after a more balanced game, where you can just as easily win with both side, maybe games like WARNO are more your thing? (And that wasn't meant in any negative way, I do enjoy WARNO and games like these, too, they just scratch a different itch.)

One episode of war...
Today my husband has conducted own 300th combat flight. This is biggest personal number among all Air Forces pilots. This is more, than conducted most famous pilot of WWII Ivan Kozhedub. But every time he emphasizes this it's not something he wants to be proud of.
 

Interesting information about current situation with APFSDS in UKR and RU armies from the tanker of 3rd assault brigade (on the photo 3BM44 Mango APFSDS projectile with BM42 rod):
- What a fu...g meeting! Very rare guest in our corner of the world!
- Mango? It should be main AP-ammo of orcs
- Who said that? They have mainly, like and we are BM22 (Zakolka) and BM26 (Nadezhda)
- I've read before a war they sold by Indian contract some Mango-M. Patriots then cried "Where our Svinets?"
- All what is issued for public and that, what in real are different things. Yes, no doubt, recently thet had more BM42 (Mango) then we had in percentage, but now they mostly use BM15 and BM22. 
 
So, Russian stocks of relatively modern APFSDS also degraded. We can't see mass usage of newest Svinets ammo, though we got as trophies several 3BM60 Svinets-2 with tungsten rod (3BM59 with DU rod wasn't spotted in Ukraine). According to Defense Express information, destiny of Svinets is unclear, because in 2020 MoD ordered 2000 3BM44M "Lekalo" (or other name "Mango-M"). So in current stage of war (likely from the end of summer 2022)  Russian tankers use old BM12/22/26 as main APFSDS

Interesting video. I'd seen some of it but now it was combined with drone footage. And happy to see those YPRs doing more work.

The offensive of the Third Assault Brigade or how the 72nd Brigade of the Russian Federation "fled" from Bakhmut TEASER
 


looks to be a darn goldmine of footage to come

Another 3rd Assault Brigade clip:
 

Just another sign in a very long list - troop quality, “no ammo for Prig”/noted drops in RA indirect fire, falling ATGM stocks, and now faltering AD.  I am sure it will be blindingly obvious in hindsight - the RA is eroded and prime for operational collapse.  I suspect the UA has been slowly waging corrosive warfare all winter while everyone was watching Bakhmut.  Little bites and nibbles add up especially for stuff Russia cannot built back.
Given some of the force numbers being tossed around I am beginning to think we might actually see an offensive we recognize in the next while - which will no doubt make the tank nuts happy; however, just remember that it took months of precision deep strike shaping to allow for it.
I avoid predictions but I am confident we will at least have a decent chance of understanding what we are looking at when it happens.

Sure. That could work.
So, do the Russians have 5-8 officers in each of their platoons, filling the roles that in other armies would be filled by the (commissioned) platoon commander and the (non-commissioned) platoon 2-ic, section/squad leaders, and their assistants?

Oh, tanks as SPA is definitely a thing. But generally you'd only do it from a position of strength - ie, your tanks don't have anything better they could be doing. Like, tanking.
Its generally a waste of resources (vehicles, crew, ammunition) in the short term, and bad for the tanks in the medium term - those cannons really aren't designed to be used at high rates of fire for long periods. The barrels wear out, and the trunions get knackered. But if all the enemy tanks are dead, and you need to add a bit of weight in order to break though somewhere ... eh, why not?
That, of course, is not the position the Russians find themselves in.

True, but ... the tide does seem to have changed all of a sudden. Instead of only defending against almost constant dry humping and slowly conceding ground, UKR seems to be now constantly heading east.

Could be lack of guns, or lack of ammo, but either way this is bad for Russia. The lack of training these guys are getting pretty much excludes the possibility that they'll be able to sustain the "SP" part of "SPA", leaving them with a bunch of fragile metal pill boxes firing indirectly. Given the various capabilities that UKR has on hand, dealing with these "batterys" shouldn't present too many tactical challenges ... assuming they aren't just abandoned by their crews first.
Also, even in their nominal role of pseudo artillery, and assuming no UKR interference, they're going to be a bit pants - the crew is too small and the compartment too cramped to achieve much in the way of sustained and flexible fire support.
Long may this development continue.

Situation inside Bakhmut
UKR troops has retaken Industrial college. Heavy clashes for sсhool and kindergarden on Korsunskoho street. 
UKR troops pushed off Russians from part of Ivanivskyi forest SW Ivanivske village (southern part of forest was under Russian control). Wagners threw there own "core" units to stabilze situation
Also in Bakhmut area was destroyed Pantsyr-S1. First strike missed, but probably slightly damaged it, secons was successful
 

Read back over the many many posts here. They quote Russian politicians, Western politicians, Ukrainian politicians, Belarussian politicians, the New York Times, the Guardian, Russian TV, Pentagon officials, Kremlin officials, think tank papers, generals in the field on both sides, foot soldiers in the field on both sides, manufacturers, activists, historians, economists, satellite imagery and close combat footage, history books involving similar conflicts, they cover the granular detail of individual combat as well as geopolitical fallout. If this is viewing the war 'through a keyhole' its a mighty mighty big keyhole. Basically the only source not cited here is... uh... Brietbart, (if Brietbart still exists).