AlexUK

Soviets are tricky and it also depends on a lot of factors (year and weather conditions, time of day etc).  So with the Soviets you have to remember that optics and spotting are not their strong suit (and I know some people will argue the opposite but on the whole it is true).  This makes sense as Soviet doctrine was never to elegantly out maneuver an opponent; their aim was to overwhelm through speed and mass.  Basically the choice for the Soviets is "die all at once and maybe win" or "die slowly and definitely lose"
"Uh that is nice Capt but what does it mean on the board?"
Well here are few rules of thumb that you can play with:
- Take your time picking the line.  Soviets were all about speed and violence but they were not stupid.  Look at the ground and pick a line of assault carefully and then once you have decided...commit hard.
- Make a Hole: strip off the US AT assets early and do so through attrition.  So here you actually try push in and engage US tanks and AT first, probably why Soviet doctrine has tanks leading.  BRDM AT systems are brutal little bastards here if you can get them.  In this gun battle you do not need to win the firefight, you just need to strip the US down until holes start to appear in their line.  Here trading 1 for 1, or even 2-3 for 1 is acceptable.  And concentrate, concentrate and concentrate along your line of assault, do not try and take them all on.
- Get in close and start chewing.  The Soviets are brutal in closer terrain and here the BMPs really can make the difference in close up fights.  Trick is that you need to get there.
- Arty is not a paintbrush...it is a bucket.  Drop it early and hard.  Soviets are hard to delicately time rolling drops so just wait long enough to get a sense of where your opponent may be and then drop the sky (lots of "Maximum").  Smoke works very well against ATGMs.
- Weather plays a very important role.  Soviets are in real trouble at night and in fog; however, they actually do much better in damp or wet conditions.  The reason is that guns do not kick up as much dust so their optics work better. 
- Speed, never enough.  There is a fine line between suicidal and effective momentum, judging that takes time and experience.
Finally, if you are of legal age in your country/state, try vodka, it helps. [note: BFC official policy is to always remember to drink responsibly while wargaming but clothing is always optional.]

 

I proofed a bit. 
I wasn't keen on the tone either. 

Ok, well lets unpack this.  I, for one, do not think you are a troll (perhaps trying hard to impersonate one but...), you are a paying customer who appears uninformed and we aim to both educate and entertain.
So looking at the the ol' scenario list AND not counting the extra versions based on dates (more on this later) AND the US Campaign (1982) ones we are at 23 standalone scenarios.  Now one could say that the Soviet Training Scenarios do not count, which based on the number of YouTube videos is pretty unfair, but let's be brutal on ourselves (sorry Justin).  This would bring our paltry total down to 19 standalones.  Now BFC policy for a base game release is 15-20 with emphasis on the 20, if we can get to it.  So here we fell one scenario short of the upper end of content range.  Now in our defence CMCW requires large maps in order to really show things off, much larger than other titles, so that played a factor.  
Now as to the "why the multiple years?" question.  Well we did that because CMCW covers off a 4 year period in which available equipment varies significantly year to year.  These differences create pretty interesting and noticeable variations in gameplay.  For example in 1979 you could see M48s vs T55s and in 1982 we have M1s vs T80Bs, the balances is very different between these dates.  So we thought, "hey there is a lot of kit here and maybe players don't really know the ins and outs of all of it.  We should create different time versions so they can easily see and learn how different equipment stacks up."  
Now as to "rushing".  I am not sure what your scenario design and building experience is, or is not; however, it is no small task to create multiple versions of the same thing.   For example, the work that went into the 1982 vs 1979 US Campaigns was such that it probably would have been easier to simply do two completely separate campaigns.  The testing and play balancing is a long process, as is the deploying of units and AI.
Finally, as to the the "cheating" US Campaigns ported over as standalones, there are 10 in total.  Well the thinking here was that these should really be bonus content.  First, not everyone is going to finish the US Campaign, or play all its battles, so this gives the player a chance to play and try any of them up front.  Second, it allowed us to offer them for H2H play, which should be very interesting for some.  Again, as to "rushing", porting the campaign scenarios over into standalones actually took more time as Red side briefings and Human vs Human considerations had to be made.  The US Campaign alone has over 190 square kms of map work btw, again very big maps required all tied to the actual ground in the region (seriously, check it out on Google maps). 
To this we add one NTC campaign, and two versions of both the Soviet and US campaigns, I would sincerely hope that the average player can squeeze out at least of 60+ hours of quality play time, before hitting the QBs or Scenario editor.  
So there you have it.  As per content guidelines, based on past titles, we are safely in the upper end of content requirements by about any metric.  I will leave the qualitative judgement to all you fine grognards.

I proofed a bit. 
I wasn't keen on the tone either. 

The typos you find in the briefings are all historically accurate. 
 
This kinda makes me want more scenarios that give you as little information as this. Reminds me of a book I was reading by a Russian platoon leader on the WW2 eastern front. Often the only orders he would get were just "Go take that town over there." His company commander also liked to go missing for long periods at a time, leaving the platoon leaders to do everything themselves. Vague orders might come down straight from battalion, skipping the company commander entirely.
The war was bizarre and confusing, filled with things like units going in circles or wandering aimlessly for miles in the wrong direction, zero coordination between different companies/battalions/tanks/infantry/whatever, or even friendlies launching entire assaults on their own positions by accident. To me, it would be interesting to see more CM scenarios that deliberately try to put the player in a very confusing situation that they have to think their way out of.

I still wish we had a specific throw grenades command. It is so frustrating to watch hardly any grenades get chucked while the smg blasts off his magazine, then has near empty mag for the attack. From films, admittedly, but it seems very common practice for grenades to get thrown en masse before a prepared close assault. 
 
My idea would be equivalent to throw smoke command for infantry.

I still wish we had a specific throw grenades command. It is so frustrating to watch hardly any grenades get chucked while the smg blasts off his magazine, then has near empty mag for the attack. From films, admittedly, but it seems very common practice for grenades to get thrown en masse before a prepared close assault. 
 
My idea would be equivalent to throw smoke command for infantry.

Something for the first module, perhaps. Can you find a scenario set around Wank that really demands being made?

I was hoping for this one myself ...

Some might say it is appropriately metaphorical for this thread ... 😉

I proofed a bit. 
I wasn't keen on the tone either. 

This thread should be renamed to "Grammar nazis: A Case Study"

Spending money doesn't excuse you from being nasty. Be constructive, not destructive with your feedback. Instead of implying the target of your criticism is a child, perhaps act like an adult and mind your manners. 

So, because this was becoming a rather vocal issue, and I began to doubt us for a second, I exported 19 of the standalone scenario briefings (both Blue and Red) out of the commercial scenarios and cut and pasted them into Word.  That came to 20727 words in total.  Scrubbing through them all and using the Word spelling checker, we come to a grand total of 15 real spelling mistakes (not military slang or funny abbreviations) out of the sample.  This yields an error rate of about .07%, which in just about any industry standard is well below the accepted manufacturing rate errors (outside of the nuclear and space industry).  It is even lower than accepted experimental error in engineering. (https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/virtual_lab/LabZero/Experimental_Error.shtml#:~:text=Engineers also need to be,analysis techniques to get any). 
The worst offending scenario had 5 spelling errors and the writer is not a native English speaker, but we can make sure we get help with that.  So now I am going to do a grammar and punctuation check but from that I can see so far (again thank you MS Word) we are doing better than a lot of adult students I know. 
Now we will continue to try and get better in all things in order to continue a solid wargame to you all...thank you for your patience. [Note, I am sorry but I cannot share the Word Doc here as it is company IP etc.]  Oh and as an aside, I hold a Master's degree and still managed to spell "Frankfurt" wrong in Valley of Ashes, so human error happens.

And a quick follow up.  So looking at grammar and punctuation (here again MS Word has a very handy "double blue line system) we are looking at 86 errors in total so an error rate of about 0.4% of the briefings sampled.  These were mostly Word disagreeing with coma placement but there were missing periods, missing hyphens and the dreaded double colon.  Plus a few spacing issues and the odd dropped 's' which makes for some weird noun-verb alignments.  So based on this, our spelling is not that bad but we could use some work on punctuation...and flossing, always getting in trouble for the lack of flossing. 

You know what, you're right. I come off as an dick because I always see these things as simple. But I come from years of wargaming, so I know what works and what doesn't work. I was really bothered that day and I really shouldn't have said or posted anything. I don't know what's wrong with me

Regardless of whether or not you're right or wrong, your method of communication really needs some serious recalibration.

Okay, you're right and I'm wrong. I duplicated your test and was getting catastrophic APDS kills from 2800m. I'll report this to the higher-ups.

it might be worth noting that we got CMCW not by just asking over and over for it but because a couple people actually put in the sweat to do the project.  They had a lot of work even convincing BF that they could manage it.  If you really want it you may have to do a bit more than just keep asking.

You’re wrong. And being antagonistic does not help anyone or anything, especially yourself. 
 
The LOD issues are being addressed in the first patch. In fact, I believe as of right now most of them are fixed. 
 
The reason the game shipped with them is because, for techno wizardry reasons I will never understand, when the final release candidate was built, something caused some LODs to get a little wonky. We figured that it was not worth delaying the release of a game for a minor graphical issue that has no effect on gameplay, and only occurs on certain models and in lower graphics settings. 
 
I think we made the right call. The response to Cold War has been overwhelmingly positive. And I think BFC hitting a release target has been very positive as well. Further, most feedback on bugs has been very polite and professional, and I think we have done a good job of responding and addressing these issues. A patch is being worked on as we speak that will fix these issues, and some other issues that were the result of very constructive feedback. 

Ummm there is a CMCW area available however it doesn't display until mods are submitted to me and no one has mailed me any yet.
Sorry if the service I provide you for free on my own hosting isnt up to your standard... I mean if you are interested in funding/building this yourself going forward I will happily send you all the mods - deactivate my sites and let you crack on.
Have a nice day.

Soviet doctrine was to fight buttoned. "Why" isn't entirely clear to me, but I imagine it's a number of factors - NBC, vulnerability to small arms since you're planning to close aggressively, the general low height of the Soviet armour, etc. It's probably a combination of factors.

The unbuttoned position for Soviet TCs isn't really conducive to it either - they're pretty exposed.

In practical terms, it shouldn't really matter. If you're following Soviet doctrine, you're massing armour in line, and so making up for poor spotting with multiple rolls of the dice - ten tanks with poor spotting will have the edge over one with better optics, at least until you start hitting Abrams and the technological edge takes over.

"Wow, these NTC maps are a barren wasteland"
"Well, I was *supposed* to have a Combined arms company"

Really suffering from this too. Maps seem great, but I mainly see featureless low detail. 
 
Fact I got slaughtered in first NTC mission probably didn't help.... 

Really suffering from this too. Maps seem great, but I mainly see featureless low detail. 
 
Fact I got slaughtered in first NTC mission probably didn't help....