BletchleyGeek

To a great extent yes. Kursk was bad business as it both blunted the edge of the German Army and put most of its strength in an awkward place to respond to incoming Soviet offensives. The real grind came along the long road to the Third Winter. German losses at Kursk were not catastrophic but serious. Especially in comparison with had been achieved in 1941 and 1942 with similar concentrations of force.

Warren needs a new set of dice and a fresh bunny leg Bil is definitely still in the game, yet I 100% subscribe Warren's assessment of Bil's current plan of maneuver. Bil's flanking maneuver is too short.

Cheers @Pete Wenman From Bil's last post it sounds he's getting second thoughts about his maneuver.

Thanks for that John. Great to know that you guys have approved to progress from Beta to RC... Here's hoping the verification phase for the release F&R is one of the short ones.

That's indeed the most distant kill I have heard of in this game. Correct me if I am wrong, but Bill is coming down a forward slope with his armour right? That's a precarious battle position. But Warren seems also to be happy just with detaching a platoon off his main effort to deal with Bill's attack, rather than seeking numeric advantage. Still eating popcorn, and not updating my probability of success estimates

He didn't seem to care much, as soon as he considered the T64 threat was done, he launched his counterstrike. I would say that those scouts Bil has forward are pretty much seeing everything Warren is doing. Perhaps he has more artillery, and the M60s are just the goats.

It has adopted it basically because the partnership with Slitherine allows to manage easily the admin burdens that you very clearly identify in your first post. The user experience is great, tbh. For the small business side... well, it's not like Steam will send to Steve's address (figuratively speaking) truckloads of unsold copies as it used to be the case. Welcome to the forums! I hope we will all be able to enjoy our favourite Eastern Front vignettes (within the 1944-1945 timeline) this weekend if that "mop up" that John mentioned doesn't turn out into a "snafu".

To me at least, the question isn't about what are typical ranges, that is well settled. Rather, I just have a valid curiosity about whether the games underlying simulation is as robust as it is on "average" engagement ranges. A wise thing is to test the extremes, as well as the "typical" baseline. This matters gameplay-wise because specific tactics are enabled and weapons platforms become useful at very long ranges. I am not personally expecting to be able obliterate tank and mech battalions from 2,000 metres+ with superior tech. What I am expecting is that engaging the enemy just outside their optimal fire envelope will allow to disrupt their maneuver with little losses. Nothing like the lead tank of a column blowing up all of a sudden to stall a move, delaying them long enough to call in murderous artillery on them. FWIW maps like the one for the scenario Bridgehead at Khalaryk (sp) in CMBS allow pretty much to fight it out from 2000 meters plus (with state of the art M1s). That, and the scenario by George MC where you run Tigers versus JS-2, can't remember the name right now, are my only in game experiences with engagements happening at extreme ranges. Bigger maps than the average 1000x1000 usually do not have the kind of elevation differences that enable such long range LOS. For instance, CMBN CW maps like Colossal Crack are very large, but buildings, walled orchards and subtle elevation changes preclude that. There is a majority of scenarios that cater for knife fights, but there is a substantial number of large scale maps that allow to explore the limits of the sim in interesting ways.

Lucky you - every time I tried, I have got an obscure error message before the games boot about lack of OpenGL support. The same machine runs DX11 games, very slowly, but not OpenGL ones. I guess the website disclaimer is for me.

I am surprised you managed to boot the game on an Intel card. Maybe the smeared text has to do with having a post processing anti aliasing filter on? If you got to get the game up and running, you msy want to invest some time researching with Reshade to see if it is possible to rectify the issues you found. Will not increase FPS but having CM while on the move sounds like a good outcome.

So rely on it at your peril?

Thanks for the picture @sawomi, if not catering for "ideal" tank duels, those line of sights are pretty good for artillery spotting.

Thanks for that @DMS - always insightful to hear the point of view from the other side of the Iron Curtain FWIW, I don't think either that a Red Storm Rising scenario of a desperate Communist Party leadership staging a "short victorious war", where in order to conquest the Persian Gulf one had to defeat NATO, ever made much sense. Power politics in the Central Committee were never an straightforward affair after Stalin, so it is not clear how a lunatic plan like that would have gone smoothly through the Soviet Union government decision making processes. An accident or mistake, like shooting down civilian airliners (quite a few in the 1980s btw), or a missile test being confused as the real deal, both constitute more compelling scenarios. I want to think that the lesson that there isn't such a thing as a "short victorious war" was learnt after two pretty cataclysmic conflagrations.

Good luck @The_Capt thanks for sharing your thoughts. From our vantage point and the topo maps there is a lot of tactical detail that escapes us. What does this "slot of covered ground" look like? From the pictures and the topo maps the "central approach" looks to me more like a gentle ravine which is somewhat restricting your maneuver options in the center to moving in column formation. That kind of channeling looks dangerous - but from what you say the terrain is more complex than my perception.

It is a very stark asymmetry that I wasn't really expecting. We're also watching an AAR of the beta version.

It was interesting to see that the T 64B is rather blind, and also that it took a bit of work for those M60s to get full kills. Kind of reminds me of the duel between King Tigers and ISU-122 in the Red Thunder "Gog and Magog" scenario. Yet, I am not sure the Capt is toast, nothing has yet taken a decent shot at the M60s. Therefore I revise my previoud estimate of Bil's success probability from 0.3 to 0.5, in true Bayesian fashion

Cheers for the update! Great to see the last piece of the puzzle that estab making is fall into place.

Your post made me think of what would Combat Mission titles sound like if these had to describe the main mechanics of the games... "Firing & Moving 2: Fire & Rubble"? "Shooting & Scooting 2: Fire & Rubble"? "Briefly Targeting 2: Fire & Rubble"?

Hear, Hear @BFCElvis release the damn thing already!

wargamer.com has become just another of the 5 or 6 N network outlets for search engine optimisation (or "creating online communities" if you want). Generic articles are written on anything vaguely resembling a wargame, which look and read like product placement. Computer wargame reviews are dead but for Tim Stone's Tally-ho Corner, and a few blogs (Max Chee, chelco, etc.).

Cheers for the overview picture, I was confused by the nap of the earth shots. I can see you are going to play the man, not the ball. Let's see if that man is too fast to let himself be injured.

You're forgetting about CMFI, which came in between CMBN and CMRT...

Yep, first of the WW2 titles in the Steam pipeline is CMBN, probably some time this summer. I wouldn't expect CMRT on Steam until 2022 (but there may well be surprises...).