Rokko

Reporting from Ukraine covered this fight around a coal mine in a recent video
 

That one I just downloaded and it worked for me. But maybe my local dev version contains some fixes I forgot about, I guess I should release a new version soonish.

That one I just downloaded and it worked for me. But maybe my local dev version contains some fixes I forgot about, I guess I should release a new version soonish.

This looks like the 16-byte campaign file header. Basically, every CM .cam campaign file begins with the same 16-byte sequence identifiying it. It looks like the files you are trying start with a different pattern. Are you 100% certain they are actually .cam files and not some kind of compressed archive? I mean it's unlikely, since these files come with their respective base games, so there is no reason for them to be archived, but it's a guess. Otherwise, you could send me DL link for these (private & temporary Dropbox or Google Drive should work) and I'll take a look if they unpack alright if the campaign header check is simply relaxed.

That's 10 out of, what? 50 delivered Bradleys? So 20% of all Bradleys Ukraine has to drive over a minefield in the first defensive line and give a few Ka-52s some target practice...

That's 10 out of, what? 50 delivered Bradleys? So 20% of all Bradleys Ukraine has to drive over a minefield in the first defensive line and give a few Ka-52s some target practice...

That's 10 out of, what? 50 delivered Bradleys? So 20% of all Bradleys Ukraine has to drive over a minefield in the first defensive line and give a few Ka-52s some target practice...

That's 10 out of, what? 50 delivered Bradleys? So 20% of all Bradleys Ukraine has to drive over a minefield in the first defensive line and give a few Ka-52s some target practice...

From the RUSI publication "Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine":
 
Personally I do wonder that longer range (and larger) missiles like ATACMS would be the silver bullet many make it out to be, given that it would probably also be easier to shoot down, although I do suspect they might force the Russians to re-calibrate their AD network and spread their assets thinner/further out, likely at the cost of effectiveness against shorter range threats.

From the RUSI publication "Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine":
 
Personally I do wonder that longer range (and larger) missiles like ATACMS would be the silver bullet many make it out to be, given that it would probably also be easier to shoot down, although I do suspect they might force the Russians to re-calibrate their AD network and spread their assets thinner/further out, likely at the cost of effectiveness against shorter range threats.

From the RUSI publication "Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine":
 
Personally I do wonder that longer range (and larger) missiles like ATACMS would be the silver bullet many make it out to be, given that it would probably also be easier to shoot down, although I do suspect they might force the Russians to re-calibrate their AD network and spread their assets thinner/further out, likely at the cost of effectiveness against shorter range threats.

The rationale for holding on to Bakhmut continues to elude me. The only thing I might understand is to force the Russians to stay on the offensive, i.e. they can't give up the assault for political reasons and staying on the offensive forces them to continue wasting resources that won't be available for countering any UKR offensives. Had they taken Bakhmut a few months ago I would have suspected the Russians to happily start their next death grind towards Kramatorsk, but now they are probably "on edge" enough to stay on the defensive after Bakhmut falls.
On another note, I've been under the impression that Ukrainian CB has been rather weak around Bakhmut basically for the entire duration of the battle, unlike in other areas like Vuhledar, Avdiivka, etc. With RU artillery being apparently particularly concentrated around Bakhmut, I would have thought this area would be a rather obvious candidate for attriting RU artillery capabilities, or am I missing something/under some wrong impression?

The rationale for holding on to Bakhmut continues to elude me. The only thing I might understand is to force the Russians to stay on the offensive, i.e. they can't give up the assault for political reasons and staying on the offensive forces them to continue wasting resources that won't be available for countering any UKR offensives. Had they taken Bakhmut a few months ago I would have suspected the Russians to happily start their next death grind towards Kramatorsk, but now they are probably "on edge" enough to stay on the defensive after Bakhmut falls.
On another note, I've been under the impression that Ukrainian CB has been rather weak around Bakhmut basically for the entire duration of the battle, unlike in other areas like Vuhledar, Avdiivka, etc. With RU artillery being apparently particularly concentrated around Bakhmut, I would have thought this area would be a rather obvious candidate for attriting RU artillery capabilities, or am I missing something/under some wrong impression?

Hello,
I haven't touched CM in ages, having mostly lost interest in it, but today I had an itch and looked at the code I had written for the uncam tool and somehow ended up rewriting the entire thing in one setting. I fixed some issues and it should be possible to unpack CMCW campaigns as well as potentially campaigns of yet unreleased games, as long as BF does not muck with the file format. Anyways, I don't have CMCW so I can't test and there are no campaign files in the scenario depot. If it doesn't work, send me the campaign file (or a download link) and I can take a look at it. I don't even have a Windows PC anymore, so I couldn't test the Windows version either, so please report any issues.
Best regards
PS: If anyone wants the source code, feel free to ask but I didn't include it this time in the archive.
uncam-0.10.zip

I like that explanation even better. So they are not only there to make the brigade look like a competent and capable military force but also to protect their colonel from said disheveled mobiks fragging him at the earliest opportunity.

I like that explanation even better. So they are not only there to make the brigade look like a competent and capable military force but also to protect their colonel from said disheveled mobiks fragging him at the earliest opportunity.

This is "puzzle solving" on a grand strategic, war covering, level, though. I am more wondering about what happens during the course of one, potentially very large attritional defensive battle over terrain that has no inherent strategic value spanning multiple months. To give an example, what happened between 1 July 1916, when the British Army suffered more casualties than on any other day in its history, and November 1916, when after the dust had settled, there was a roughly 1.4:1 casualty ratio (using Wikipedia numbers)?
Perhaps the puzzle analogy is useful on that layer as well, but the solving involves finding ways to move casualty ratios more in favor of the attacker until the defender is exhausted. There were some minor tactical innovations during the Somme, as well, such as placing troops well outside of their usual trenches and inside deep shell holes out in the open, which took the British some time to figure out (=solve this part of the defensive puzzle). But overall I would assume it always comes down to some combination of the factors I had outlined earlier and potentially others as well, i.e., destruction of fortifications, risky counter-attacks, growing attacker terrain and tactical familiarity/experience, etc.
This seems a bit vague, but probably points in the right direction. Although we may understand different things under non-linear, adaptive and dynamic. I would take it to e.g. include abandoning positions or parts of your defensive network once it can no longer be expected to allow you to inflict casualties to your enemy at a favorable ratio and instead move backwards into fresh fortifications and therefore "fresh puzzle territory" for the attacker, where he has to learn all the painful lessons again.
This being Russia, I assume the "calming" involved the use of strong sedatives?

Now this I found *very* interesting:
If true (that this is really their assessment) it would explain why the Ukrainians keep holding on to Bakhmut despite the enormous costs and risks. I think anyone would deem a 7-1 casualty ratio favourable under such circumstances. Whether this is actually accurate remains to be seen of course.
I have noted several times, though, that the Ukrainians often seem to release drone footage of flights which seem to have served no other purpose than to count mountains of dead Russians. Perhaps their baseline estimates are more accurate than we would think...

Now this I found *very* interesting:
If true (that this is really their assessment) it would explain why the Ukrainians keep holding on to Bakhmut despite the enormous costs and risks. I think anyone would deem a 7-1 casualty ratio favourable under such circumstances. Whether this is actually accurate remains to be seen of course.
I have noted several times, though, that the Ukrainians often seem to release drone footage of flights which seem to have served no other purpose than to count mountains of dead Russians. Perhaps their baseline estimates are more accurate than we would think...

Now this I found *very* interesting:
If true (that this is really their assessment) it would explain why the Ukrainians keep holding on to Bakhmut despite the enormous costs and risks. I think anyone would deem a 7-1 casualty ratio favourable under such circumstances. Whether this is actually accurate remains to be seen of course.
I have noted several times, though, that the Ukrainians often seem to release drone footage of flights which seem to have served no other purpose than to count mountains of dead Russians. Perhaps their baseline estimates are more accurate than we would think...

Now this I found *very* interesting:
If true (that this is really their assessment) it would explain why the Ukrainians keep holding on to Bakhmut despite the enormous costs and risks. I think anyone would deem a 7-1 casualty ratio favourable under such circumstances. Whether this is actually accurate remains to be seen of course.
I have noted several times, though, that the Ukrainians often seem to release drone footage of flights which seem to have served no other purpose than to count mountains of dead Russians. Perhaps their baseline estimates are more accurate than we would think...

Wow, stop making me blush! Your campaigns are works of art, by the way
Can you retry with the most recent version? I just checked with a file I found on this forum by googling and it got unpacked with no issue.
Or alternatively, send me the file causing issues, it may be a different version of the campaign than the one I found.

There seems to be not much that can be realistically done to counter this, no? From here on out, preventing the enemy from having small observation drones in the air is going to be impossible. So any assault is going to be spotted beforehand, more often than not. Suppressing enemy mortar positions seems more plausible, but for that you need your own observation drones and precision artillery (so at least impossible for RU in this war, for now). That may not help against this relatively new form of ultra-mobile long range artillery, though. But the mortars seem the greatest danger, simply due to their much greater availability and local response times.
It looks like Russians actually did find a counter: Keep sending more waves until the enemy is through their mortar ammo. Although this clearly does not scale/is not sustainable.
BTW, I don't really get why UKR keeps asking for fighter jets, it seems several trainloads of mortars plus ammo would benefit them much more and would be infinitely easier to achieve.

Wow, stop making me blush! Your campaigns are works of art, by the way
Can you retry with the most recent version? I just checked with a file I found on this forum by googling and it got unpacked with no issue.
Or alternatively, send me the file causing issues, it may be a different version of the campaign than the one I found.

It may be worse than what can be reasonably considered as acceptable for a defensive battle like this, though.
The way it seems to me, defensive battles become riskier and lead to increasing numbers of casualties for the defender over time, basically as prepared defenses, fortifications, etc. degrade and get progressively more shot up and therefore less effective.
Also, with deteriorating overall situation, individual positions probably get overrun more often (leading to high casualties), necessitating local counter-attacks, which is also riskier. In addition, the attacker has superiority in indirect fires (pretty much an established fact for Bakhmut), making *any* kind of movement riskier, i.e., especially these localized withdrawals and counterattacks.
The following are pretty much my own amateur conclusions and may well be off, but to me it seems the biggest mistake, so to speak, a defender can make is to stick in the fight for too long, fighting for too long to cling to or even recapture shot up positions, ruining the "exchange ratio" over time and messing up the attrition calculus, likely due to sunk-cost-fallacy. There are some harrowing descriptions in Storms of Steel from the Battle of the Somme that particularly stuck with me, of command sending company upon company into some totally untenable and destroyed position just to be smashed, either en route or on top of the previous occupants. Any resemblance of an effective defense from that point had long become impossible, as trenches had been smashed up, fields of fire altered by artillery terraforming, etc.
And this does not even include any form of operational collapse of defensive, as the enemy begins to bypass remaining strong points, as we may start to see in the near future or are already starting to see around Bakhmut.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, casualty ratio for the entire Battle of the Somme was about 1.4:1, which seems pretty bad for a defensive battle and I'd wager that ratio much more favorable when the battle began in July and got progressively worse, as reserves were fed into counter-attacks and shot up positions