ratdeath

the FSB got their hands on plans that the AU used to crush the Russian army, they are actively looking for their author....
I have an idea but I won't say anything !!!😉
You will excuse a little humor in this thread,
It's just to say thank you to the speakers, I think that in a few years this could be used for a historical study to analyze how the new media have modified the perception of a war

finally a use for me in testing!

I love you too Warren.

IMO the below house rules (hard cat rules) developed by Bil & IanL are very useful.  This is what I use.  I sometimes add my own modifications to the rules when I want to test a new idea.   Hard Cat Rules v2 is a good place to start.  
 
 
I also made a CMRT scenario (mini-campaign) Alarmeinheiten that features runners assigned to each infantry platoon to facilitate C2 when using Hard Cat Rules v2.
https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-red-thunder/cm-red-thunder-campaigns/cmrt-mini-campaign-alarmeinheiten/ 

I'm ok. I just too tired about all these news monitoring, so I havn't enough energy to write here. Today I tried to depart my wife from the city to her parents in more calm Cherkasy oblast, but we can't reach to railway station. Municipal transport stopped on the left bank of Kyiv, though on the right it works like and subway. 
All day from my balcony, wich exits to Obolon' and Vyshhorod periodically heard a sounds of shellings. Now I heard outcoming shots of our 2S7 Pion guns, located in 5 km from my house close to city limit. They fire somewhere to the west, where Russian troops concentrates to attack on the city. All day there were periodycal clashes on the line Irpin'-Bucha-Vorzel-Hostomel. There was attempt of Russian tank attack from Chernobyl zone through Ivankiv on Kyiv, but because of we had a time to demolish the bridges through the Teterev river, they halted. 

Not going to weigh in here on @Free Whisky's tactics I will leave that to the rest of the group.  I so want to highlight somethings that jumped out at me though as I watched this excellent AAR.
First, CM is really unique, or at least one of very few, in that it is a game about 'managing chaos' or in this case "surviving chaos".  Free Whiskey had a plan going in, it met an opposing plan and not a small amount of just random acts of tactical turbulence in that collision.  
Second, clicks per minute are not going to save you.  In CM, it more likely that "re-thinking per minute" or re-strategizing (e.g. 4 Plans) faster and better than an opponent is going to carry the day.
Points 1 and 2  are in constant dynamic competitive motion, forcing players to constantly make decisions.  These are what makes CM realistic, in many ways beyond its contemporaries; not the vehicles and weapon systems, they are the means to the end.  I play other wargames (I can hear the gasps) and in a lot of RTSs it is about clicks and strategy is very attritional (i.e. how fast can I throw more stuff in that direction).  This is not to say they are not without merit, and they can get the blood pumping but one does not get the same "combat chess on a ship deck, in a storm" feel.
So when I look at what Free Whiskey did right, I see a lot of adaptation of "the plan" and improvisation with limited resources in the face of an opponent under the same conditions.  His ability to re-think and adapt with what he had (e.g. Toothless) is the real stuff and frankly what led him to a solid draw.  "But how could he have won there Capt?".  No idea, in fact in this QB, on that map, maybe there was no way to win.  But I do see those skill sets that need to be nurtured and enhanced that will lead to more wins than losses.  
I also see bottle madness as the red god laughs his ass off, and that is simply outstanding.   

Hi all, I uploaded a video AAR of Combat Mission Cold War to Youtube. I thought I'd post it here so you can all tell me what it was you believe led to my demise 😉
 
https://youtu.be/qxLCkSFYq2c

Personally I'm not very interested in this module. Will buy it of course, but not really interested. Same as the announced Normandy battlepack. Hope it sells well though. Good to see many other people do like it. They both will totally be worth the money, of that I'm sure.
I am looking forward to the RT battlepack and the NATO module for CW. Don't want to hear any release dates, prefer to be surprised one morning. 🙂

I am with Aragorn.  Just drop the bomb on us some dull, dreary weekday.  The day CW was announced still stands as one of the happiest workdays of my life
I am looking forward to the Normandy module, I can't get enough of that stuff.  Which reminds me, as soon as I finish my current CW campaign, I gotta get back to Normandy. 

I think pretty much the only manual targeting orders I ever give are "Target briefly" when I am trying to suppress a known or suspected position in coordination with my troop movements, otherwise I just let my pixeltruppen figure out who to shoot at.  They are pretty good at figuring it all out.

I personally stopped complaining about marksmanship after digging for information about hit probabilities on Napoleonic battlefields, and found figures suggesting that it was common for it to take somewhere between 200 and 500 rounds to inflict 1 casualty. I know it's the wrong time period, but the chances of a round finding it's mark would have actually been significantly higher on a Napoleonic battlefield than on a modern one. The enemy on a Napoleonic battlefield can be clearly seen, and is standing in a dense formation. The enemy on a modern battlefield is in extended formations, and each soldier is taking cover and concealment on their own initiative. Cover was used on Napoleonic battlefields, contrary to popular imagination. But not on the initiative of the individual soldiers. Rather, a battalion commander would have to find a suitable linear terrain feature that could provide decent protection for their whole battalion (a ditch, tree line, wall, etc...), which is a much harder task than an individual finding a terrain feature that could protect just themselves.
The fact that they had muskets and not modern rifles does not account for the low hit probability. Muskets, while inaccurate compared to modern rifles, are far more accurate than people imagine. About 30 arcminutes (+/- 6 arcminutes), or about half a degree is the accuracy of a typical musket, which is abysmal by modern standards. But it is just accurate enough that a perfect marksmen should be guaranteed hit someone in a close order formation at 200 yards with every round. Clearly it was the humans that were inaccurate. Specifically, the humans under battlefield conditions, since they achieved much higher accuracy when shooting at targets on a range. Considering how much more elusive modern targets are, I now find estimates that it takes 2000+ rounds to inflict 1 casualty on a modern battlefield (which I used to find absolutely absurd) to be completely plausible.
I came away from this with two conclusions:
1. The marksmanship in Combat Mission is perfectly fine.
2. Imperial Stormtroopers are actually excellent marksmen and the "stormtroopers can't aim" memes need to die.

Why is CM great?  Good question to be honest.  But maybe the question should be "why is CM great, for me?"  Clearly there is a gaming population out there that love the franchise or it would have gone out of business years ago.
CM has its quirks and every game is an abstraction so I guess it all comes down to what gaming experience the player is looking for, and enjoys.  Lotta wargames out there that span the old school hex based, turn based "chess with guns", to the RTS click-heavy affairs.  CM, and a few other titles, kind fall right in the middle of the spectrum [aside: been seeing comments on micro-management in CM, yeesh try playing Steel Divisions 2].  It has a mid-level pace (WEGO slowest, RT quickest), low-tactical level scale (Bn and below for the most part). 
The issues that get raised in CM, spotting and unit behaviour tend to get the most ink, when these come up the first question we ask ourselves in the back "is this a feature or a bug".   First off, players need to re-visit "what they think should happen".  Pre-conceived notions drive a lot of the negative feedback which is to be expected and frankly if a player really does not like enough of them then one has to ask if "CM is for you?"  That said, we have a lot of veterans in the back room -the last 20 years has provided plenty of them- so when we analyze combat behaviour we do have people who can carry it over to RL.  So when a player asks:
I get the question but I can also tell that this person has never actually had effective fire pointed at them.  Green inexperienced troops may believe this and they do not live long enough to become "battle hardened".   An MG in a turret is an exposed position and once you start taking fire from multiple directions and incoming is bouncing off around you, battle hardened troops duck...fast.  Why?  Because at this point someone else's fire is all that will save you; veterans are veterans because they know when they are suppressed and know what to do.  There are times when you get off the X and shoot your way out and then there are times to get your head down and call for support, try very hard to avoid situations that lead to that first one.
CM has a lot of what I call "chaos features", at a micro level individual behaviour follows a set of standard rules but embedded in that is a level of chaos.  Units will cower at odd times, miss something right in front of them (trust me this happens in RL all the time) run away or not run away.  This chaos is the essence of tactical warfare. Atypical behaviour is the norm as combat is an atypical environment.  People crack, shock and fear have really strange effects.  It is that chaos that makes the game realistic.  I often say that many players do not want full "realism" because if they find the game frustrating at times now...
Why is CM great for me?  Well, I do enjoy the realistic tactical level but what always hooks me are the micro-dramas that pull one in.  That last Dragon missile, holding off that last T64, a crew, down to pistols, that hold out for just one more minute and that stupid APC that zigged when I told it to zag.  But every devotee to the brand probably has their own reason and hopefully the OP can find his/her own, if not, well then keep wargaming at least and thanks for trying.   

I couldn't agree more.

Just found this topic, I know its been out for awhile, but this is a perfect way to play.

This is a 2-hour conversation between @Hapless, his opponent @Rice, and @domfluff, who is the admin of the unofficial (but extremely active) Combat Mission discord server.
They go into detail about their thought processes going into the game, how they responded to what happened during the match, and how Soviet doctrine can be used successfully in CMCW.
Figured it's worthy of its own thread because of how fascinating it is, and I hope we see more like this in the future.
This is a link to the unofficial discord server if you want to interact with more people in the community: https://discord.gg/SXkQ6rUuJN

Is given the bad record of BF with regard to release dates and other predictions a surprise release like Cold War not preferable? 

Soviet tanks are not blind! They spotted and killed two of my M48A5 (unbuttoned) before they could finish to say "enemy ta....." a few moments later all three soviet tanks died from the combined fire power of six dragon teams.

Playing Grieshof Meet and Greet PBEM. 
Has anyone else noticed or is starting to get the feeling that Cold War is even more lethal than Black Sea in its own way?  It seems that playing doctrinal with so many mechanized forces that death comes very swiftly to so many more than in BS.  Just my thoughts...
Anyway, this BEAST of a T-64 shrugged off 18 hits, yes 18!!, from an M-60 and at least one TOW missile at about 1500m.  The 5 or 6th shot actually hit the track and immobilized it.  I had the crew bail out and they ran into the building it's sitting next to and watched a few more rounds bounce off.  Feeling brave they re-crewed the tank only to take a couple more hits and bail again.  Finally, the 18th round went in and killed an empty tank.
T-64s are the real deal.

 

Looks like 2022 can be a very good year, Thanks for the bones Steve
I saw nothing about the upcoming Cold War module but maybe that CM family have a new tradition, it will be announced at the same time it's ready for preorders!
Free Engine 5 upgrade is a nice surprise as well.

Using Steam is optional, you can continue using the battlefront installation

Using Steam is optional, you can continue using the battlefront installation

Using Steam is optional, you can continue using the battlefront installation

You guys have created something that is singularly unique and you should be very proud.