LuckyDog

Contains some profanity, but absolutely hilarious.
 

First answer to “Did NATO forces plan etc?”  Absolutely, yes.  The 11 ACR (V Corp) owned this ground: had war gamed it, exercised over it and planned for a Soviet attack in this area for decades.  They had PTPTs (peace time prepared targets) already sketched in, in some places only needed to add mines or explosives to obstacles pre-sighted.  In game I was probably too forgiving for levels of US/NATO prep but there was a strategic surprise element built into the backstory.
Soviet doctrine actually had a fair amount manoeuvre built into it, however, it was normally only ever exercised at operational levels.  An MRR or TR was really considered a tactical munition - point at enemy and pull trigger.  One had to go up to divisional level before anything resembling manoeuvre warfare kicked in.  The Soviets were hampered by centralized control however, so we really do not know how things would have really panned out.
Mission 3 is extremely realistic from a Bn or Regt COs point of view.  This is day 3 or 4 of the war so recon would have largely been stripped away in the forward Recon Battles.  So formations and units would be relying on their own recon/FSE’s.  An MRB CO would have been pointed and ordered at a primary objective with limited recon against an opponent how really knew and owned the ground.  A collision of this sort (I.e. rolling straight into a KZ situation) is very realistic for the forces and time of the battle.  Removing the Soviet players ability to shape or pre-position was by-design to reflect this situation.  You are an MRB CO smashing forward.  If you die, there are entire echelons behind you that may bypass but you are stuck with this situation.  We really were aiming to put the player in realistic Soviet shoes, not simply allow them to fight as westerners in Soviet kit.
Is it unfair?  Most definitely.  Is it realistic.  Absolutely.

We won’t really know until final TO&Es are put in but we had planned pretty much the full gambit of UK units - if it was in the BAOR or had a chance to get pulled in, we put it in for submission to the game.  For the Canadians, I basically recreated 4 CMBG from the old ‘76 redesign - beefed it up some and tried to get some cool stuff put in.
Not sure I can post much more than this - BFC has a pretty uptight policy until we get the thing entirely baselined.

I wouldn't call it a sham election either...because I wouldn't call it an election. It was a propaganda exercise. As to fair, well...

As a wise man has already mentioned we (all of us outside of the Kremlin) have no idea what the real turn out was...
But we can clearly see that it wasn't an election. It was a PR exercise...
 
 

Solving the manpower crisis
 

"Lyberty for Russia Legion" and "Syberian battalion" claim they control Kozinka village
 

As someone who has done game design then you know that your own experience is not necessarily reflective of everyones experience.  Take a look at the Cold War forum.  A few people before you have come out not liking the Soviet campaign, or even Scenario 3 but it is not overwhelming by any stretch.  In fact most of the feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive from the community we built the game for.  And we do have some new folks getting into a whole new era of warfare they did not know about before.
As to skill, well I beat Scenario 3 (after more than one try) and felt like I had to use skill.  I even learned something about how the Soviet system could work in this situation.  There is a counter-point, and based on feedback I know I am not the only one.
So I read your points and do not even entirely disagree but as far as CMCW is concerned, but the core community has already spoken.  We must be doing something right.  Handholding is a plague on modern gaming.  So much so the retro Rogue-like movement is very alive and well.  For this community, spoon feeding post-game solutions or explanations kinda takes away from the community as a whole in trying to figure a game out.  Go online and see how many videos have been made of folks playing CMCW.
So I am not claiming CMCW or the Soviet campaign are perfect.  But they are squarely in the red rings as far as the primary audience is concerned.  Not going to mess around with that solution to much - if it ain’t broke don’t fix it…kinda thinking.  As to market growth.  Look, first rule of game design as far as I am concerned is the same as warfare - know what game you are in.  CM is a niche within a niche.  It will never, and has never gone mainstream.  This is a point of pride for all these weirdos, some who have been with this whole thing for over 20 years.  We welcome new gamers with open arms.  This has to be one of the last non-toxic gaming communities left.  But we aim to target the fan base.  If we can do that and pull in some new interest, great.  In many ways CMCW pushed the envelop of what CM can do.  We used huge maps and large forces…that was a turn off for some.  But we adhered to realism and authenticity.  We made a game designed for the community, by members of that community.  The only reason I got engaged in this discussion was that you seemed to infer that we did not do QA/QC and that is why you had a bad experience.  Not how it went down.  Deliberate design decisions.
So when we get BAOR done, it will have an easier, middle and hard campaigns. Some scenarios bordering on unfair but a lot of real war scenarios are unfair.  We won’t be dropping hints or suggestions…let the grogs grumble.  But the right people will love it to death, and maybe some new ones too.  
 

I don't have a Telegraph sub so I can't read the article but while Macron's shift is surprising...LePen's is far more surprising still. If I were a betting man, I would throw some kopecks on the square that says that the French government came into possession of some information regarding Moscow's efforts to undermine the government that shocked and that information exposed the LePen and her cohorts in such a way that they had to make a swift and decisive choice. 
Watch this space. 
 

Operation in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts still under a fog of war. 
Today we had only free-Russian fighters "presentation" of 25 captured enemies, among them was platoon commander of 45th engineer-sapper brigade of Western military district, which unit set minefield, was attacked and destroyed. 
Free-Russia fighters wrote, Russian aviation is dropping many KABs/FABs on own villages and settlements, and its number is more that was in Bakhmut.  
Russian milbliggers became more pessimistic (therea are no more reports about completely repelled attack) - they report  about fierce clashes, especially in Kozinka and Spodariushyno. Graivoron is under artillery shelling. Belgorod is under periodical MLRS strikes and... under fallings of Pantsyr S1 launch stages. For today more than a dozen buildings got damages, were destroyed and damaged more than two dozens of cars
  

870 km from closest point on the border. 
Both these refineries maintained about 10 % of Russian oil products output. Reportedly, one of this refineries lost 70 % of output, so total loss Russia oil production capabilities already declined on about 15 % or even 20 %

I have a serious problem with this narrative that somehow Russia “did Adiivka” and has now fully recovered.  This entire position is based on some pretty sketchy vehicle production stats, most of the info coming out of Russia itself.  As far as we can tell the RA wrecked an entire MRD at Adiivka.  This is on top of loses elsewhere.  The idea that Russia simply stamped out an entire shiny new MRD to replace it is disinformation as far as I am concerned.  Russian force quality has been on a one way trajectory from the start of this war, except for a few notable areas: UAS and ISR - and we still are not sure if these are anomalies or trends.  In other capability areas it is exactly as you describe, more older equipment. (equipment less suitable for this environment) This is due to RA losses exceeding Russian industrial capacity to generate modern equipment.  It has been noted by more than one expert that Russia is draining its Soviet legacy force pool of equipment and ammunition.
So the idea that Russia is simply shrugging off all these losses - losses that Ukraine is barely able to sustain, while quaking under the giant footsteps of an unstoppable Russia, all the while the weak and puny west sits back and watches…well this borders on propaganda not worthy of this forum.  These sorts of gross oversimplifications without any real evidence, or skewing evidence need to stop as they play directly in Russian information operations.
I suspect the Ukrainian posters who have pitched these angles are a combination of war weary and/or are thinking that by continuing to promote a desperate Ukrainian situation that we will somehow become politically motivated.  However, they are missing the very real risk that some who read this forum may take this entire narrative as a sign that Ukraine is a lost cause, and we are all out of patience with lost causes.  By continually shouting “Ukraine is dooooomed” they might just convince enough people that they are right.  The answer won’t be to “double down and support Ukraine” it may wind up being “cut out losses and move on”.   That is what makes this angle such a powerful pro-Russian tool.  Russia must make this war appear “too hard, too complicated” because we in The West hate those situations.  Any and all skewed or heavily biased assessments like these simply play into Russian hands.

Not really but maybe half way there….?  My point was that a societies military is a lot more than a lone political ideological data point.  If we somehow built a perfect Afghan military that aligned with their society and culture the outcome would have likely been the same.  This is because the issues with Afghanistan were deeper than defence and security.  The ANA was very often a domestic army of strangers because the locals were voting with IEDs. No equipment or training was going to solve that. Maybe a couple hundred years of social evolution but it really wouldn’t matter how we built a central military in that nation because it did not want to be the nation we wanted it to be.  Hell the Taliban do not have full internal security control and they are far better aligned to Afghan reality.  The failure to “graft” an Afghan security force was a symptom of a larger disease, not the disease in itself.
My larger point is that there is a link between a society and its military (obviously) but we should avoid oversimplifying that relationship or ignore a lot of other factors as we apply a nice neat template to the war in Ukraine.  When one is doing Military Assistance, you definitely have to take into account “how they fight” but one cannot bet on that single pony and expect success.  “How they live”, “Where they live”, “How they pay for it”, “Who they fight and fight for” and “Why they fight” are much larger than whatever political ideology is in play.
In reality this entire discussion is not about building militaries around the world, it is about intervention as a broader strategy.  Based on the last 30 years it has been the major strategy of the Western world, we are doing a version of it in Ukraine right now.  However, our successes in employing this strategy are spotty at best, with many high profile failures.  How much longer we are going to keep trying it?  Well that is a very good question.
 

Link for 'All in one' mod pack is in this post.

I'm unsure if we will have a chance to get to war. In retrospect, if Russia were to invade Ukraine again, it would probably start with hundreds of thousands of drone strikes to cripple infrastructure, command and control. Take out government offices, cell towers, TV masts, power stations, command HQs, water utilities, fire stations, docks, oil/gas storage, and cause major traffic accidents on the arterial roads the army will use to deploy. Never mind the military targets.  What kind of response could be coordinated and executed if they did that? 
If this is a realistic possibility, how can any country guard against it? Sanctions have reduced border traffic, but there are too many avaricious useful idiots that will enable this to happen (again, in any country). Have we arrived at mutually assured destruction version 2?
[Edit - after thought] And that is why we can't stop helping Ukraine now. It will be worse next time.

I'm unsure if we will have a chance to get to war. In retrospect, if Russia were to invade Ukraine again, it would probably start with hundreds of thousands of drone strikes to cripple infrastructure, command and control. Take out government offices, cell towers, TV masts, power stations, command HQs, water utilities, fire stations, docks, oil/gas storage, and cause major traffic accidents on the arterial roads the army will use to deploy. Never mind the military targets.  What kind of response could be coordinated and executed if they did that? 
If this is a realistic possibility, how can any country guard against it? Sanctions have reduced border traffic, but there are too many avaricious useful idiots that will enable this to happen (again, in any country). Have we arrived at mutually assured destruction version 2?
[Edit - after thought] And that is why we can't stop helping Ukraine now. It will be worse next time.

For those interested in listening in on two world leaders talk about Ukraine before the war. More to follow....
 
 

This article may explain an increase in Russian ISR:
Russian Shahed-136 With Camera, Cellular Modem Could Be A Big Problem For Ukraine (twz.com)
Co-pilot summary
 

Thanks, Bill. I appreciate the resources you provided, and the context for the discharge petition. Took a moment to track down my rep (who hasn't signed) and rattled the windows a bit.

Lies, damn lies, statistics, and economic statistics. Reminds me of the old joke!
Two economists are walking in the park. As they're walking, they come across a pile of dog ****.
One economist says to the other, "If you eat that dog ****, I'll give you $50". The second economist thinks for a minute, then reaches down, picks up the ****, and eats it. The first economist gives him a $50 bill and they keep going on their walk.
A few minutes later, they come across another pile of dog ****. This time, the second economist says to the first, "Hey, if you eat that, I'll give you $50." So, of course, the first economist picks up the ****, eats it, and gets $50.  
Walking a little while farther, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $50 to eat dog ****, then you gave me back the same $50 to eat dog ****. I can't help but feel like we both just ate dog **** for nothing."
"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $100

Yes, after reading the article @billbindc posted I came to the conclusion that there are an awful lot of moving parts to this, probably too many. Too many other distractions/issues/platforms. This backs this up. Sadly, democracy is a messy business.
Thanks for taking the time to explain.

The discharge petition for Representative Fitzpatrick's Bipartisan House Bill to strengthen borders and provide aid for Ukraine - among other things - is now listed by the House Clerk and gathering signatures:

https://clerk.house.gov/DischargePetition/2024031210?CongressNum=118

If you're not already aware of him, this guy (assuming) does really good threads on various Soviet weaponry and vehicles. Time to share. 
 

Kerch Bridge delenda est. 

Some good vision here of Challenger 2 on the training range.  Includes an example of one of the things that the reporter says is an issue fielding this vehicle in Ukraine when it gets bogged in a ditch.  He comments at the end re mobility and maintenance being the main problems they've been facing.