A Canadian Cat

100% or the endless bitch session that would result here if the decision was made to delay and issue a new date was made. 
There are really only three choices with regard to this: 
Pick a date and ship whatever you've got - obvious downside is bugs and issues with content Pick a date and delay to a new date if things are not as you want them - obvious downside here is complaints and erosion of "trust" Don't pick a date (or I should say don't say one publicly because all projects have dates) and just repeat the mantra "it will be done when it is ready" - is there a downside here - I don't know one. Marketing people will say they cannot build the sales collateral - BS just have it ready and book the interviews and reviews in the final weeks or after release but what do I know? I only have 30 years of software development experience and no marketing experience - other than watching them do it and not make sweet **** all of a difference if the campaign starts before release or after. Customers say they cannot plan or rely on you - BS: buy the products that are available that fits your needs. If non are available you have to wait. Wouldn't you rather have a working product in some future time than crap now? If you say you want working product now that's just stupid because that doesn't exist does it? Hence this question. You can end up in a combo of 1 and 2 that either turns into a death spiral: the product is not ready so we will delay it but that means you need to add feature X because the competition has changed which leads to more delays and feature Y needs to be added etc.; or you delay one or two times but piss off everyone and eventually you are forced to end up releasing early even though you tired to do the right thing and fix your problems.
I have worked in through all of these scenarios. The choices that BFC make are absolutely the best framework for managing projects I have lived with. I have worked for other places that get it right too BFC are not unique but doing this right is not the norm - sadly.

Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.

What?!?? We would never, ever stoop to that level. What a gross mischaracterization!
 

Ok, let’s think about this for a minute.  Anyone who has played CM knows that a tank needs to do three things to be effective - move, target and shoot.  These giant sheds basically erode all three of those.  They can still move but I am pretty sure with some serious impacts as drivers situational awareness is worse and the fact they have a giant metal box on their tank is going to impact mobility.  Targeting must be a joke.  They cannot swing the gun sights and can only see a narrow window out the front. Situation awareness in that garden shed must be the worst. They are likely blasting nearly blind.  And finally shooting.  What sort of gunnery are they accomplishing with a giant box over top them?  They cannot move the turret more than a few degrees to the front, so they have basically become a mobile field gun….in a big metal box.
What these sorts of developments tell us is that the RA is more afraid of drones than they are of anything else, to the point that they are willing to drastically reduce the effectiveness of armor.  The fact they have to put garden sheds on their tanks is already a tactical victory.  It demonstrates just how far things have gone. They do not “work” beyond keeping whatever these vehicles have become alive for a few more minutes and raising the number of FPVs it takes to kill them. 

So this post and the one above it are what we like to call “losing the bubble”.  You have let your passion for Ukraine cloud objective strategic thinking to the point that you are proposing a denial of reality to insert one of your own that matches that passion.  In blunt terms, if you were on my staff I would be thinking you need a vacation and maybe a posting away for awhile.
1.  We cannot simply discount/avoid/wave away the risks of a full on Russian political and social collapse.  First off it is not “impossible” or even improbable given we have a rigid autocratic political mechanism that has been under significant strain for some time now.  Russia has collapsed in the past (twice in the past century and a bit) and can do so again.  
2.  The consequences of a Russian collapse cannot simply be waived away either.  At best we get a stable regime quickly grabbing power so that the centralized control apparatus stays in place.  That regime will need to 1) have clean enough hands to do an honest deal with, and 2) be supportive in stopping this war.  That is a tall order. Follow on scenarios of a Russian collapse and its impacts get worse from there and we have gone into them many times.  You are essentially so gripped with the Ukrainian cause that you have simply stated “ignore them” with neither proof or logic on why to do so beyond “well it hasn’t happened yet, so it will never happen”.
3.  By your metrics Ukrainian security is not guaranteed outside of a full Russian collapse and regime change.  Nothing would stop Russia from lobbing missiles even if it was forced back to 2014 lines.  So we are back to “we need a full Russian collapse to ‘win’ but ignore the consequences of that collapse because = ‘love Ukraine’.” That makes no sense nor does it address the scenarios where a collapsed Russia poses as greater risk to Ukraine than what they are dealing with now. 
4.  There are plenty examples of frozen conflict where an enduring peace and security were guaranteed: Korea, Cyprus and Former Yugoslavia, to name a few.  Like Israel right now, there is always risk of reemergence of warfare but we can manage that.  So immediately writing off any and all other peace scenarios is not only extremist narrative, it is dangerously reductive thinking.  This is not how high levels of diplomacy, defence and security or economics think about the world, it is how college students on a campus do.
5.  Your position and thesis essentially start with a conclusion and then build a logic model theory of success that only supports that conclusion.  Ukraine must have total victory, all other outcomes are defeats.  Further the West must support Ukraine in this venture to the point that it will risk the total political and social collapse of a nuclear power.  We are to sidestep all that risk for Ukraine.  What happens if we get to 2014 lines and Russia does not quit?  Do we need to go into Russia proper?  This nearly happened in Korea/China in 1950, this was how MacArther talked himself into nuclear weapons and a massive Chinese reaction.
6. We all support Ukraine and want a victory here.  But..and you really need to sit down and think about this…Ukraine is damned important, but it is not that important.  We are not going to start WW3 over Ukraine - even as we skirt around it.  We would be talking hundreds of millions of deaths, even if the thing stayed conventional.  We have 8 billion people on this planet and keeping them all alive takes a lot of energy and resources.  We built a highly complex and integrated system to keep the whole dance going.  One war breaks out between Ukraine and Russia and we already have people starving to death in Africa. Imagine a full on conflagration that drags in NATO. Iran and possibly China.  I am sorry but we could easily go with plan A, which was likely the plan on 24 Feb 22: continue to support Ukrainian resistance, fall back to NATO lines, drop a new Iron Curtain, and fund the hell out of NATO - in fact there are likely big winners in this scenario who know it.  We won the First Cold War, we can take our chances on a Second.
So, no, total 2014 lines are not the only victory in this war by a long shot.  In fact those territorial lines might not even mean victory if they were attainable.  We are very likely looking at a stop line, like in 2014, somewhere in the middle.  Then we will get some sort of shaky ceasefire that we will need to exploit, quickly.  We need to set the conditions to strategically deny Ukraine from Russia.  We know Russia can be deterred, this is why we do not have deep strikes into Poland happening.  We will need to move that deterrence line.  We will likely have to pound Russia until it drops its ridiculous negotiating position and we can land on something more reasonable.  Whether that will take a full on collapse is unknown, we can only hope if it does that we are looking at a soft collapse of political position and not social controls within Russia.
Finally, framing the war the way you have supports Russia.  You are making this war nearly unwinnable via these maximalist rhetoric.  As such, a reader of this thread could easily walk away agreeing with you but arriving at a very different conclusion - unwinnable war = GTFO, because we have already seen this movie twice in the last 20 years.  Which is exactly what Russia wants.
You have narrowed down the acceptable narrative only to those ardent extremist viewpoints that agree with you.  By leaving no middle ground you violate a core component of war: negotiation.  There is no negotiation in your position and that immediately sets off warning bells.  We hear this everyday now coming from all sorts of corners over so many issues.  I vehemently disagree with your analysis, narrative and conclusions based on this fact alone.

I have no earthy idea what that was supposed to show.  I saw 5-6 gun trucks (at least one tank) make a gangsta style gun run into a town, entirely unsupported mind you.  And 2 came out, likely damaged.  They look like they ran around and shot things up at a vehicle loss of 3-4 and then drove back out.  Not sure what the point of that entire rodeo was but if it was to prove that the garden sheds that the Russian's are bolting on armor are working...well, not sold.

Probably because the targets have dried up too.

Well, scientific proof that BFCs potty mouth filters are no match for English football songs.

The Russians already knew that ATACMS could attack the bridge and since the bridge is officially still on Ukraine's territory they didn't need a green light from anyone. Ukraine could always attack its own territory with western weapons.
So explicitly stating the fact only does, as the_capt would say, enlarge the uncertainty space for Russia.
Btw, are those arches only decorative or are they a structural necessity for the bridge? I would imagine they are easier to hit than a pillar and easier to damage. Even something like napalm may weaken the strength of the steel enough.

Someone text the grandkids and have them take the keyboard away....

I use the slow movement command for vehicles if I want to try and force my way through something and I am not sure I can do it.  Plus placing waypoints as described on either sides of the feature.  That way, if the tank crew decides that it is better to travel 1 km out in the open to get to the other side of the hedge, by using slow command, it has hopefully not yet moved out into a dangerous position, and I can cancel the order and try something else.

I'm not quite convinced that working for free constitutes a viable business model.

There is no auto surrender in multiplayer. This only happens against the AI in single player.

My understanding is that the low and high bocage blocks movement in CMBN. CMRT and CMFB both have low bocage (but not high) except it does not block armour. Having said that if you want your armour to cross it you need to place a order way point just on one side and the next one just on the other. Otherwise the pathing system might decide to go around or through a gap some distance away. 
When i am trying to get vehicles to cross any obstacle I always place a way point around 5m away from the obstacle and another way point 5m or so on the other side. That tells the TacAI "I want you to drive through / over this". I do this for streams, hedges, walls, bocage etc. So, also for jeeps, trucks etc. not just tanks.

I assume we are talking about this:

Gotta be honest, I see a lot of potential dangerous salients forming up, which was how the Germans made life miserable for the Soviets.  The RA lacks the logistics to really support a major drive unless conditions have changed there.  I get the concerns but until the RA can take a major operational objective - which based on this map looks like Povrovsk - we have death by a thousand nibbles.
However, I do share the concern that the UA is fully capable of collapse as well.  If that happens things could shift quickly, albeit likely slower than in Fall ‘22 re: Russian logistics.  We need a Deep Battle here to get corrosive warfare happening again.  My sense is that this war has recently shifted to front edge attrition which is not what we want.  This plays to Russian strengths.  The key Russian weakness is systems-fragility and for that we need deep deliberate corrosive warfare approaches.

I was speaking more of demonstrating the high cost of this war.  As to this, well first the situation is not clear but a 10-15 km advance is going to sting but it very much matters which 10-15 kms.  A lot of these Russian advances have had very little operational significance. They have not fundamentally provided Russia positional advantages that can be translated into operational success.  Imagine for a moment if the roles were reversed: the UA was making incremental advances at great costs…oh wait, we already did that last summer.  The hue and cry of “lost summer offensive” was echoing across the infosphere last summer while the UA was basically doing the same thing the RA is doing now.  But with the RA it is “Ukraine cannot stabilize the front!”
From a military viewpoint, objectively, both sides have been conducting small tactical actions and taking bites of what is essentially wasteland.  Neither side has been able to create the conditions for operational breakthroughs or collapse since Fall of ‘22.  From an operational and strategic point of view this conflict has been pretty static.  With this surge of new support we might see Ukraine re-take a few kms etc but unless these turn into something more it won’t mean anymore than costly Russian gains this winter.
 

Meh, the 2% thing is a weak metric and everyone knows it.  I mean it is better than nothing but it is not a measure of effectiveness nor contribution.  Greece is spending nearly 4% GDP - which is essentially an extension of workfare.  When was the last time Greece led a multinational brigade in Latvia or took an entire operational province on in Afghanistan?  Cynically 2% GDP is designed to drive NATO members to buy into American defence industry either directly or indirectly as opposed to really measure effectiveness.  
The reality does not often match the theatre.  But we will bow and scrap. Roll in Coast Guard and VA funding and other creative accounting until the heat gets turned off.  The US on the other hand cannot walk away from its position as a leader of the free world and expect everyone to forget it.

Agreed Canada and most other NATO members could and should do more. But these guys below should show that Canada indeed was and is part of NATO.
 
Fallen Canadian Armed Forces Members - Canada in Afghanistan - Canadian Armed Forces - History - Remembrance - Veterans Affairs Canada

I think Ukraine has already done this.  There is an army's worth of scrap metal all over south-eastern Ukraine right now and at least 50k dead (likely more) and times 3-4 wounded.
You know what would demonstrate the futility of the Russian cause even better...another RA operational collapse.

Just wanted to say that BFC are not Matrix/Slitherine and vice versa.  From memory BFC decided not to release the Black Sea module in the current circumstances, and publisher Matrix/Slitherine agreed with them.  If Matrix/Slitherine proceed with other 'similar' titles, that's nothing to do with BFC.

Ah, the Commonwealth.  Ian will appreciate that I'm sure 😉.

In the Commonwealth of Nostalgia Magna we forge our own history.

🙂

From the cheap (and safe) seats, I would go for it.  But, and it is a big “But”, they would need to create and sustain operational pre-conditions first.  The problem with defence only, except for largely symbolic high profile strategic strikes, is that Russia gets to say when it is time to “stop”.  There is analysis out there (and posted here) that points to 2026 as Russia’s out-of-gas moment.  But that is a long way out and conditions could change a lot. So pinning the war on attritional hopes is a strategy but it definitely comes with risks.  The same goes for internal dissent eventually toppling the Russian political power structure.  It can happen but hard to build a plan off of, and we have gone on at length on the risks of another Russian Revolution.
Offensive operations make headlines, signal resolve and play into “we love a winner” in the West.  If the UA sit back and dig in there will be huge and cry on “well we sent them all that stuff and they are doing nothing!”  The real trick is to find where the risk-v-gamble line is.  We do not want a final gamble but a forward leaning risk.  But how to do it?  This remains the outstanding question.  How to do it with what they have and can support?  My money is on light, fast and distributed.  Infiltration, isolation and exploitation.  But the UA will have to do this in multiple areas to increase RA lateral friction.  All the while hitting the backfield.
Tricky, tough and absolutely no guarantees.  Of course we can’t see the hi res picture.  If we had that maybe the choice is far more obvious.

I would very much like for the Ukrainian strategic strike campaigns to stop being “symbolic” and start shaping the battle space for re-engaging in offensive operations.  Symbolism is great but destroying Russian abilities to effectively defend an 800km frontage with a highly degraded military are much better.  Further, “symbolism” is not going to keep western support coming…operational gains that push the Russians back will.  The thumbnail sketch plan:
- Re-establish denial of air and ground. 

- Hit the RUAF hard and keep them well back.
- Hit The RA where it hurts…logistics, enablers and C2.  Prioritize artillery and EW.
- Hit the SLOCs.  Hard military targets that move all that hardware and people to the front and then up and down it.
- Solve for offence.  Stop using FPVs defensively now that artillery is showing up and use them offensively en masse.  Saturate bridgeheads and try bounce crossings at scale.
- Re-establish forward momentum and get the RA reacting to them, not the other way around.
- Bite, grab and hold….repeat.  Eventually, if we are lucky, corrosive warfare will work again and the RA will have to re-set like it did in Fall 22.
That is one helluva bill to pay but it is the one in front of the UA and the West to support.
Do not waste limited military high end hardware on “symbols”…use it to kill the Russian war machine.