BletchleyGeek

You can picture the scene where several T-90s are racing up the M20 from Dover to London, when an unexpected knocking noise causes them to halt. At which point two dozen Somalis from the Jungle jump out of the ammo bins and disappear into the undergrowth 
p

Sounds like Borderland. Germans attack from west (left map edge)

P

The best strategy for fighting in woods is to avoid them. 
However, if you must move through them you need to send scouts through the woods ahead of your main body with plenty of listening halts, try to always have about half your force stopped and listening for enemy contacts... hunt only through woods unless you know for certain where they are located.  The scouts should not engage (if possible) but should halt as soon as they get any contact whether it is firm or a sound contact... always know what you are going up against before you concentrate your main body against it.  I used this technique in my CMRT BETA AAR if you would like to see it in action (follow the link to the exact post where I discuss this).  Another reference is a very short AAR I did with C3K with Germans versus Russian SMG troops in the woods.
If possible, skirt the edge of the woodline and avoid the center of the woods, which is where you will probably find most of the defenders.  I used this technique in my CMRT BETA AAR as well.
If you have armor then a tank or two behind your scouts to send random shots as far as they can see will usually spook and make enemy defenders move around, which makes them easier to locate.
Good luck.

I think it would be best if we could keep this forum confined to CM and WW2 history in general. But, when certain Arrogant (sic) people start spouting about "refugees" then their rants cannot be left unopposed. 
My granddad was an "economic migrant" or refugee as modern parlance would have it. He saw his mates being killed in 1940 on the road back to Dunkirk, then went through the Western Desert, and Normandy, and on to Hamburg. I won't use the words of Roy Keane on a forum that might attract younger readers, but I suggest that "Arrogant" (sic) follows his advice. 

About Germany, isn't the whole point that it was to be neutered after the war, so that it wouldn't become a danger to Europe once more? And as a result of that neutering the German people today are culturally not very militaristic. 
So, in a democracy, if the people are not militaristic, why would they vote for politicians who would take their tax money and spend it on the army?
There's lots of other things you can do with taxes, that are better for the average person. Or at least are felt more directly than paying for having loads of tanks rumbling around on exercises in some distant field.

No the next Combat Mission is a simulation about a customer base waiting with great  anticipation for a new product.The new game is  tentativley being called CMBP , Combat Mission Beyond Patience.

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.

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.

Oh don't worry, I wasn't trying to sound gloomy, I was just trying to be realistic about how my degree is directly useful. I'm well aware of the general utility of a university degree. Even if it were useless, I'd still have no regrets, as I've had a great time studying for it.

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.

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.

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.

@Bozowans Hitler wasn't preoccupied with the oil because the war with USSR was supposed to be over by the end of 1941. The only mention of oil during the planning of Barbarossa, was curiously enough in the context of Crimea, which was supposed to be captured in order to prevent Soviets from bombing of the Romanian oilfields. I'm not saying that oil was unimportant. I'm just opposed to a simplification, that it was the main reason why Germany lost the war. And yes, I've watched the whole video and I think the author contradicts himself. The source he quotes most often is: "The First War for Oil: The Caucasus, German Strategy, and the Turning Point of the War on the Eastern Front, 1942", which I think is an article. To me it seems like a "one source syndrome": an enthusiastic amateur gets excited over one, maybe a little revisionist source and starts constructing his own narration. 
Back to Hitler - Kershaw or Snyder write at length about his aims for the upcoming war. It was an autarkic, agrarian empire in the east, that would allow Germany to be immune to the British or US naval blockades. He was too chaotic to be seriously preoccupied by some practical considerations, like getting enough of oil for his armed forces. Again, in the long run lack of oil was one of the biggest issues, that were affecting war waging capacity of the Third Reich. But there were few other, at least equally important issues. They assured German defeat, long before the oil shortages became critical. For example at least equally serious was the small pool of trained reserves, caused by the fact that until 1935 ( only 4 years before the outbreak of a major, world war against major powers ), there was no conscription in Germany. This lack of trained reserves ( especially in comparison to the Soviet Union ) was at least equally crippling as the lack of oil. Hell, I think I should grab now my camera now and make a video, claiming that Hitler lost the war because of insufficient reserves of trained manpower: "TIK destroyed - the shocking, real reason why Germany lost revealed" 

Try fighting german squads with mg42s firing bursts with your good old british sections with single shot bren guns, i'd say that's pretty game breaking in certain scenarios... after 14 months and no patch people will complain, like it or not, and they do not care how marginal you think the issues are. 14 months are a long time.

Sigh.

My contention is this:

We throw a wild party for Battlefront, and all of us are in attendance.  We all get positively rip-roaring drunk, do stupid things.  At the height of the party I'm demonstrating armor maneuver by going full sprint through the office swinging my arm wildly to indicate turret direction while screaming "Death before dismount." I certainly 100% do damage.

However it's hard to separate the next morning what specifically was damaged by my "Thunder Run" vs what other parties did too.  Sure there's my tanker boot treads all over the shattered remains of someone's desk...but I "ran" it over after someone else already kicked it down screaming "THIS IS SPACE LOBSTER COUNTRY!" I contributed my share to the massive pile of bottles yes....but I wasn't even the one who drank the most.

Within the context of both fights, US artillery and aviation certainly did destroy things.  This is a known variable.  However pointing to the rubble of Mosul and chittering how it was all those damned Americans and their bombs, or Raqqah and placing all the blame on 18 heavily abused 155 MM howitzers is a bit disingenuous.  

ISIS vigorously practices scorched earth type tactics.  Our "Friendly" and friendly forces all practice firepower warfare vs manuever (or they're going to shoot the objective with every weapon they have for an hour, THEN move to a closer firing position to repeat the same tactic, and then maybe five hours later, short on ammo move onto the objective).

Both of those cities felt the full weight of a 3rd World conventional military attack, a suicidal bomb happy defender, and then some Western precision fires.  Between those three, those fires certainly did their part in damaging those cities.  But again the contention that basically, without those fires the attacks would have left either of those cities pretty much intact is very much a falsehood.  Aleppo for instance serves as a really good example of what happens without the US precision fires, and with the opposition not being generally ISIS tier individuals.

So.  Again not denying there's collateral damage, but it's just idiotic to lay the preponderance of the damage at the feet of 18 howitzers while ignoring the effects of thousands of ground combatants, tanks, conventional artillery from both parties, IEDs in all guises all duking it out in close quarters.

The US has a distinct advantage in fires integration, targeting and precision.  

The greater question for artillery in the next few years is being able to achieve effects in the face of frankly terrifying counter-battery capabilities.  The idea a M777 battery is going to be able to fire off more than 1-2 rounds before having to displace or face total destruction is certainly sinking in.  The traditional massed and persistent Russian fires are basically inviting ruin on the firing batteries.  

From that fires and effects are going to have to be able to answer the question of how to achieve the same effects, with less time/rounds to do so.  Precision will certainly play a role  although the current laser/GPS guidance trend will be challenged by EW (while the laser itself is not subject to jamming, the spotting element's communications, let alone if it's a drone are), as will advances in non-kinetic ADA (or whatever we care to call lasers or similar hard kill non-bullet options) observation. 

One thing that will be interesting is the historic fires integration piece taken to a more refined output, in that it may be still possible to put dozens of rounds on a target while still only doing so from a small number of guns by coordinating and allocating fires across a wider collection of units, or as far as several batteries firing very small missions, but sequenced and coordinating digitally (Battery A shoots 1 round per gun, displaces while Battery B fires 1 salvo then displaces, then BN mortars drop 3 rounds before displacing then Battery A opens up again).  

Or to visualize, artillery will spend more time in motion than firing, and each firing opportunity will need to mean more, and each target will need to be more relevant (or the historical US/and to an even larger degree RU ability to simply dump fires on anything that's being troublesome will be deeply challenged).

Basically it's going to matter a lot less about the gun, or how the gun is loaded, and more about how the round gets where it needs to go, and how we accomplish effects while someone tries to kill the gun.  The Russians especially historically have counted on massed non-precision fires, which may be lethal but again it won't take too many "missed" displacements to start to reach parity in numbers and greater effects disparity in terms of fires.

As far as "Alas Babylon"

It would be a mistake to attribute too much of the damage to US fires, or to at the least, indicate somehow they were responsible for causing more damage that would have occurred anyway.  Both Mosul and Raqqa were subject to lots of dumb artillery and direct fire weapons from the non-US elements rolling in (some of whom conduct "recon by fire" and little else), and ISIS rather relies on booby traps or other scorched earth type techniques.  

Basically several bulls went through the China shop.  The US precision (either in guided or digitally aided) fires certainly did some damage, but it's a bit obtuse to pretend they made it especially bad after looking at the other actors and factors at play.  

Well, a long discussion about those problems in engine 4.0 started in April: (10 months ago!). And a lot of people were agreeing there was an important problem.
And Battlefront acknowledged the problem, after a lot of requests from his customers, at least in August (6 months ago):
In my opinion a patch to fix the main problem with engine 4.0 should have been already released. I can not understand the policy that Battlefront is following with engine 4.0. It was released 14 months ago and at least 10 months ago a long discussion was started pointing out an important problem with that engine and stock campaigns. But that is only my opinion, of course.
Txema

Taking what bait? This is not about you. Why should it be about you? And why is 'seeing' you of any importance? Unlike Steve and you are the same person.  You are just picturing yourself as the voice of reason. Which you are not. People are asking justified questions and in return calling them sad or pathetic IS arrogant. If screenshots are announced and promised, but nothing happens for more than a month, than there is something wrong with communicating from the side of BF.  Time and  time again reading the same old 'information' is getting on people's nerves. That's quite normal.
And another thing. This forum needs a Young Guard, since the Old Guard is pretty decimated. So let's welcome their comments and questions and make them feel at home, so they will stay with us.
 
 
 

The whole communiction from the side of BF is a joke. People can defend it as much as they like, but their PR is not only very bad, it is almost non-existent. I don't buy nonsense like 'they must concentrate on their work', 'new information will only bring discussion and questions' and 'you can tell them how to do things once you have your own company'.
Reading this forum IS like being stuck in a time-loop and the lack of information IS causing speculation.
 
 
Utter arrogance. Technically not allowed to say that....

What's the latest on the forthcoming patch? It seems a bit strange that we are halfway through the fourteenth month since 4.0 was released and we have still had absolutely nothing....