BletchleyGeek

It is indeed minor thing within the context of CMx2. There's some stuff coming up soon or soonish that will go a long way to give us satisfaction when it comes to bonding emotionally with pixel truppen. I wish it would be possible for the few surviving tactical war game developers to establish partnerships, so we can get compelling gameplay at several levels. In any case, looking closer at the true face of battle will be certainly refreshing. But it will be hard to gloss over sketchiness when it comes to the "fire and movement" side of the business.

Unfortunately, dear Oliver, it's not always that you can choose to turn down such offers The backstory to this old tune is quite interesting, one of his authors was none too happy about its success...

Thanks mate, I thought that since this is an AAR, there will be space for reflection. I am happy to get parts of this AAR "syndicated" in your blog. Let's have first a test run over here.

Anybody interested in taking up this as a QB? I would gladly play either side, in either modality. Are you going to post further directions @Ithikial_AU? Like what are the force restrictions etc.?

Another terribly busy week... just barely managed to watch @General Jack Ripper excellent video. It's a shame we can't work out the name of single privates. When I saw him being mowed down I remember jumping on my chair. Thanks for that @Bil Hardenberger! Tthat's perhaps the highest praise I could expect. All those battle drills that you painstakingly curated in your Battle Drill blog are being put into (good) use Over the weekend I will come along and post some pictures and video capsules to illustrate the overall (both at the macro and micro level) attack plan. Which was inspired by the following passages of a famous book: The advice one finds on books (or booklets, or other doctrinal pamphlets) rarely can be applied verbatim. Rather than a method to do something, like drills are, they actually are heuristics. That is advice compiled by trial and error by those who came before, which is expected to facilitate the work of others. They're the basic ingredients to guide the formulation of a plan, but not a template (necessarily). Figuring out when they are applicable, and how to get a handle on how their advice can be used with the resources at hand and negotiating the constraints the environment imposes is a hard problem. That is, you will rarely solve it entirely to your satisfaction, and very often, things will go very wrong because you drew the wrong conclusions, formulated the wrong plan and implemented it wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. I have almost always learnt something from the games I have played... and this one was no difference. If I manage to get 50% not wrong, I consider myself a happy man

From my favourite book on software development, and the only I think anybody needs to buy. I don't think everything below applies, but I will leave it here to invite some reflection. https://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy Software Entropy While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard. Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of “disorder” in a system. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that the entropy in the universe tends toward a maximum. When disorder increases in software, programmers call it “software rot.” There are many factors that can contribute to software rot. The most important one seems to be the psychology, or culture, at work on a project. Even if you are a team of one, your project’s psychology can be a very delicate thing. Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature’s tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict . A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality. The “Broken Window Theory” has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level. Don’t leave “broken windows” (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired. Fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it properly, then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or display a “Not Implemented” message, or substitute dummy data instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you’re on top of the situation. We’ve seen clean, functional systems deteriorate pretty quickly once windows start breaking. There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we’ll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor. You may be thinking that no one has the time to go around cleaning up all the broken glass of a project. If you continue to think like that, then you’d better plan on getting a dumpster, or moving to another neighborhood. Don’t let entropy win. Putting Out Fires By contrast, there’s the story of an obscenely rich acquaintance of Andy’s. His house was immaculate, beautiful, loaded with priceless antiques, objets d’art, and so on. One day, a tapestry that was hanging a little too close to his living room fireplace caught on fire. The fire department rushed in to save the day—and his house. But before they dragged their big, dirty hoses into the house, they stopped—with the fire raging—to roll out a mat between the front door and the source of the fire. They didn’t want to mess up the carpet. A pretty extreme case, to be sure, but that’s the way it must be with software. One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of “All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.” It doesn’t matter if the project has been fine up to this point. In the original experiment leading to the “Broken Window Theory,” an abandoned car sat for a week untouched. But once a single window was broken, the car was stripped and turned upside down within hours. By the same token, if you find yourself on a team and a project where the code is pristinely beautiful—cleanly written, well designed, and elegant—you will likely take extra special care not to mess it up, just like the firefighters. Even if there’s a fire raging (deadline, release date, trade show demo, etc.), you don’t want to be the first one to make a mess. Challenges Help strengthen your team by surveying your computing “neighborhood.” Choose two or three “broken windows” and discuss with your colleagues what the problems are and what could be done to fix them. Can you tell when a window first gets broken? What is your reaction? If it was the result of someone else’s decision, or a management edict, what can you do about it?

Time for an update. It's been a hard, very busy week, and finally I found a little moment to add some comments about the force I brought to this game, and my initial plans. Force The force I brought to this battle was a full 1943 CDN Infantry Bn, with its full complement of support weapons. I bolstered the "Carrier Section" (a bit of a misnomer really) with a few Bren MG Sections and added another section of engineers to the Pioneer Section. Bringing along the AT guns was sloppy QB purchasing on my behalf: I just forgot about them. On this weather and visibility conditions they could only be marginally useful as I would need to carry them pretty much to the thick of it, Napoleonic style. The Canadian guns come with a few HE rounds allotment so I wasn't going to be pulling my hair just yet. At least they could shoot at stuff. Commonwealth Infantry Battalions are interesting for various reasons. First, they are made up of 4 rifle companies. Other than the pre-1944 Red Army, which eventually dropped this off and rarely kept their establishments up to their "paper" strengths, I am not sure any other combatants with 4 coys in their infantry battalions at all throughout the war. I find the 4-coy structure to be significantly more flexible tactically than their 3 coy counterparts. Not that this matters much in CM other than for the purposes of sharing intelligence more effectivel. If you wanted to deploy 4 coys, say, with the German army, you'd have involved 2 different battalions requiring certain arrangements to make sure those two command structures share spotting information etc. Second, they have a pretty comprehensive support company tossed in there, with AT, Mortars, Machine Guns, Engineers and Scouts. It is a very convenient arrangement. In terms of equipment, this is 1943. So my guys are bringing to the battlefield the Enfield, the Bren MG, those iconic watercooled HMGs, their 3in mortars and hand grenades. And optical binoculars. That I think imposes very specific constraints on how to conduct reconaissance or do battle, which are very different from other titles by Battlefront. Initial Plan As is the usual case with QBs you start with pretty much 0 information about the enemy dispositions. This requires to conduct battlefield reconaissance to "feel" the enemy positions. In the real world, a couple platoons would have engaged in some aggressive patrolling in the hours before the main gig started. Chris setup the game in a fashion that such a thing could be played out. So the first part of my plan was to learn where Chris forces were. For that I detached 1 platoon from each of A and C Coys, which would sweep forward through the avenues of approach that Chris identified in his opening video. On the map below, you can see my initial moves: The scouts of the "Carrier Section" + Bren specialists would be screening the left flank. I had no real intention to be very aggressive on the extreme left, as I had instinctively prioritised the other four targets. 1 platoon of A Coy would advance towards Casa d'Antonio 1 platoon of C Coy would advance towards the general direction of Casa Fanella and stop at the ditch On the map I indicate where I suspected Chris to have deployed forces. The map is cut in half along the West - East direction by a ditch, which I expected to be Chris' first line of defence. I wasn't sure whether he would try to setup some LPs/OP's on the orchards on my left, it felt to me like an ideal position to stall any advance and threaten the flank of any advance on the targets on the rightmost half of the map. Coys D and B, and the guns, would be kept in reserve. I split the HMG platoon into two groupings, augmenting the firepower of coys C and A, which I had earmarked to be the tip of the spear. And that was all the planning I did initially. I was pretty much convinced I would have to change it quite soon.

I will try @General Jack Ripper, my usual evening quality time in the man cave is been squeezed out of existence by work

Thanks for that @Rinaldi, I am still more bemused than anything else. I will try to post a couple posts describing my force in detail and the initial plan. That changed a bit as things didn't happen. I know the General is a very busy man, and I am also too very busy. Thanks too @sid_burn for the comments. Rest assured that I don't suffer fools gladly, but I think giving the benefit of the doubt to people is for the better.

Care to ellaborate why is this video relevant to the discussion? Thanks.

In this particular example I think the result of this engagement could have been quite different if you had got a contact marker first. Given the superior quality of your guys, I think you could have gotten away with setting a short pause, showering the marker with your SMGs and then bug out with a fast command. Note as well that I was moving in columns to avoid getting pinned down on a fight not of my choosing. As you could see it would have taken me easily 2 to 3 minutes to reinforce that section. Fighting guerrilla is risky, as indeed you can have your forces picked up in detail if they get pinned down. It is hard to get timing right, but when you pull it through you really get that Hannibal Smith moment.

In this other short video it can be seen what was the formation I was using (about 80 meters deep and 30 meters wide) for each platoon. The meeting engagement with that scout team made obvious to me that the spacing between the echelons of the formation needed to be closer. Also, the command and the mortar element should have been moved a bit forward to be able to support the overwatch squad properly. Another change I made to my platoon formations was to make them wider - as you can see I didn't have anybody going through that little forest on the right. I wasn't expected him to be there just yet, but certainly that meeting engagement was a reminder that nobody needed to have flanks exposed like that. As @General Jack Ripper notes, spotting cycles are between 7 to 9 seconds and you really want to maximise the number of spotting checks. As I am on the attack and moving in force, my plan to increase awareness was to advance at "normal" speed with the Move command. In CMx2 I have found it is the best trade off between awareness and speed, at least for my style of armchair command. I also think it is better to work with "tangible" timers like that of another element of the same unit getting into position rather than going purely by the numbers.

Here's the video for the very few seconds before the end of the turn... the obvious command for that section was to set it to fire on that contact marker

Nice video as always, @General Jack Ripper I hadn't looked through your files yet, so the video was also quite enlightening to me. I was actually expecting you to have deployed significant forces fighting in "guerrilla" well ahead of your force. So I was moving always in column of platoons, and Sections moving forward leapfrogging, with 1 Section always on overwatch while another advanced forward, on a strict 30-40 meters frontage. Hence it took me a while to reach your HKL, when you move in formation like that, you're trading off security for speed. My calculation was that you could easily have at least 1 platoon or platoon equivalent using specialist teams, waiting for me. That's what I would have done in these circumstances. The result of that engagement was that I adjusted my formations, so that the mortar and the command team were always part of the overwatch component. I was a bit miffed to see that at 10 meters range a whole Section wasn't able to brush off your guys without losses, as I had got a sound contact on your scout team the previous minute. In my next post I will go over the OOB of my force, but for now it will suffice I bought from the QB the "default" package. So you were facing the Canadian army as modelled by Battlefront It did too reinforce my assessment that a cautious approach was for the best, and strengthened my resolve to micromanage my pixeltruppen all the way until I made contact.

No worries, I follow your lead here. Screenshots I had in mind to illustrate the plans, and how those evolved, as I thought that bit cannot be captured so well with videos I need to remember to drop by your discord server!

Great to see this starting @General Jack Ripper In this particular instance, the randomness of the QB created a quite interesting tactical situation for me to deal with. The QB generator assigned me to the 1st Canadian Division, which sort of explains why were attacking with an unsupported Infantry Battalion against a well entrenched German position in rather awful weather. Defended by a Battalion of light infantry, no less. Many letters would have to be written to Canada. From Chris' commentary I see we both read the map similarly and pretty much we both identified which were the two sensible avenues of approach. Yet I had something going for me, and it was quite big: visibility was down to about 150 meters (until the firing starts). My experience of night battles with CMx2 is that when the balloon goes up and every body starts firing, you really want to have fire superiority on the point of contact. Being the Canadian a Commonwealth army, this posed a number of very specific challenges. The CW sections are really anaemic when it comes to direct firepower, for which they make up with their little mortars and judicious use of their HMG platoons to bolster sections firepower. Pretty much any attack plan revolves around those guys being brought forward to take potshots at the enemy positions in a timely fashion, not too early and not too late, so follow up riflemen can dash into the breach. As Chris says, this wasn't going to be a fast moving battle. The weather conditions are bad and the terrain is bad, with lots of linear obstacles orthogonal to my approach. Having precisely 0 knowledge of Chris' positions required caution and also a plan that allowed for maximum flexibility. I didn't really want to be hauling ass laterally, with flanks up in the air, in the snow and in the dark, creating an opportunity for an enterprising German to infiltrate and ambush my platoons with those LMGs. I leave it there - if I have time I will be posting the odd screenshot from my POV to contrast with Chris' video exposition.

I would rather have a battery of 81mm ready at hand

The whole thing must have been like assaulting a castle with concentric walls. That approach you chose is indeed best, you don’t want to walk down a slope like that in the view of the enemy.

That sounded a bit gloomy, mate. Think of your Bachelor's as an enabler, rather than the thing you'll be doing for the next 50 years of your life. One thing is the specific knowledge you get on a particular field, and another thing are the skills you get to develop creative, analytic thinking, how to perform a formal inquiry into a particular topic, and so on. If you get the latter, you shouldn't have any trouble crossing over to other fields with more appeal to the labour market.

Colour me surprised ☺ Looking forward to it!

No worries @Lethaface that comment wasn't directed at you. The push onto Moscow was motivated by one big assumption: that the grip Stalin and his clique had on the Soviet Union would loosen up and disorganise the war effort. That wasn't a far fetched idea entirely. In Glantz's Stumbling Colossus it is discussed to great extent that the NKVD had about 1 million personnel deployed throughout the Soviet Union, in a variety of tasks, from beating the bush for conscripts (draft evasion was pretty massive in some areas of the Soviet Union) to policing "wreckers" (anybody showing some sort of discontent). Those security troops stayed in place throughout the worst of 1941... so one can tell that Stalin was worried about something untoward happening. But he was paranoid and maybe just imagining an opposition which I think it would have been hard to exist after 5 or 6 years of purges. On the other hand, would it have been possible for the Germans to get over the Red Army and on to Moscow with two or three weeks more available? Maybe, but AGC was weakened and needed rest and refit anyways. Would have that toppled the Soviet Union? Probably not, but it may have weakened it enough so as to create the conditions for an armistice. The "diversion" to the Ukraine was borne out of necessity. The Red Army had managed to bog down the push of AGC, and it was necessary to reorganise, replenish and consolidate the lines of communication. The pigheaded resistance of the Southwestern Front along the Dnepr created the conditions to dislocate the two main groupings of the Red Army (around Vyazma and Kiev), and eliminate the southern one. Distracting the freshest formations of AGC to strike, and help the AGS - which was suffering also a bit trying to get a bridgehead over the Dnepr - was less of a gamble than to press on. David Stahel's first book on this matter was very illuminating. Afterwards I think he got a bit too distracted by the anecdote of the experience of the German soldiers and lost sight of the scope. But that's personal assessment.

I think that @Ivanov has been carrying here on this thread the flag of Reason. I salute you friend! I hope you're taking good care of the fort at the homeland for me. Given the recent flare up of militancy against content posted on these boards that may be intellectually or factually unsound I'd advise some of the posters here to reflect on the saying about people in glass houses etc. Some observations about some of the statements on this thread: The Soviet Union did manage to evacuate a great deal of machine tools and heavy equipment beyond the reach of the Axis armies, not the factories themselves. That is historical fact. Nevertheless, there is a difference between being able to evacuate, and being able to resume production instantly. Another historical fact is that it did really take a long time sometimes to set up production thousands of miles from the original site. You can check the bibliography on Gary Grigsby's War In The East manual for more details, and also the section of the manual on the industry relocation rules will prove a good read, as it tries to account for the process. The Germans were also quite good at doing "impossible" stuff and rebuild their nation (or use the rubble to setup hills in parks, even). Not to mention the Japanese herculean efforts. Lend Lease was very important for the Soviet Union, way more than the Soviet propaganda wanted to admit from 1943 onwards. Stalin and Molotov "game plan" was to play the victim at the negotiation table in Tehran and Yalta. Richard Atkinson "Army at Dawn" and "Guns at Last Light", goes to the nitty gritty details of both conferences. For a treatment from the Soviet point of view, Ewan Madsley "Thunder in the East" is very good at reconstructing the beliefs and intentions of the Soviet leadership. The consensus amongst historians regarding "when Germany lost the war" as in unable to win is to put it at some point during September and October 1941, when it became apparent that the Soviet Union would not collapse like France a year and a half before, even in the face of crushing defeats in the Ukraine and right in front of Moscow. That's an assessment with the benefit of hindsight, the combatants certainly didn't feel like that at the time. More interesting is, in my opinion, the question of "was the utter destruction of Germany an unavoidable outcome?". On that, the jury is still out. My personal opinion is that there were a number of checkpoints throughout the war where they could have settled for a status quo, and possibly prepare for the next round, like Napoleonic France did 140 years before. The die was cast probably when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, or even, when GROFAZ decided to jump on the Japanese bandwagon and declare war on the US. The stupidity of the latter, and utter lack of basic understanding of the United States, will confound many generations to come.

From probably the most boring book ever on WW2, and via my collection of bookmarks on WW2 "numbers" (many links broken, though :-( ) World War II: A Statistical Survey: The Essential Facts and Figures for All the Combatants by John Ellis https://books.google.com/books/about/World_War_II.html?id=T72aQgAACAAJ Figures given in 1,000s of tons, so 888 = 888,000 tons of oil. For an indirect confirmation of the above there's this short article from a journal published by the University of Kentucky http://www.caer.uky.edu/energeia/PDF/vol12_5.pdf that cites a total synthetic fuel production of 18,000,000 tons for the period of 1939 to 1945. There used to a huge site devoted to document German synthetic oil production, but it seems to be down these days. So the above may be a bit off, but it is in the same order of magnitude. You can see that total net production of fuel - both from inside the Reich own oil wells and its synthetic fuel plants. You can see a very clear dip between 1943 and 1944 due to the Romanian fields being goners as Romania switched sides, and the contraband of Venezuelan oil through Spain stopping due to the liberation of France. The Reich production declined due to the very active aerial campaign against the fields and the synthetic fuel plants. No data I can found on 1945, but my guess is that the collapse of German railroads as the Allied air force focused on the German bridges and rolling stock during 1945 pretty much rendered irrelevant any production by the Spring. We can see that oil production at the peak of the Axis war fortunes was significantly smaller than during 1943, the actual turning point of the fortunes of the Axis. It's still a tiny volume compared with the production of the US or the Soviet Union even, but certainly it was sufficient to clobber into submission Western Europe, and almost cripple the Soviet Union.

A Canadian Bn assaulting a German fortified position, in the night, in the middle of a blizzard kind of fits the bill, doesn't it? That was the QB I played with @SLIM recently... He set the conditions of the match, we thought it would be fun. And IT WAS a fun game, even with those Brens that were as functional as blunderbusses It wasn't a match as realistic as it could have been, though.

BTW, @Japanzer homepage seems to be down atm.