Pelican Pal

Same here, I came here for war discussion, pretty sure will end up playing the game

no reason to be concerned whatever that means.  Again, there is another thread with updates from Elvis.

Please take this to a different thread to discuss, it is just disruptive here and there is a discussion with more info elsewhere.  Just a week ago Elvis posted an update.
 

For over two decades, Steve has found time to mix it up with us grognards. Far from taking away from development, I think it only improves the end product.
Who do you want to make your wargames for you: someone that watches CNN and thinks himself up to date, or someone voraciously doomscrolling and discussing events here?

Interesting approach to trolling the thread. Demanding work on the game like a spoilt brat…

RE: Ukrainians being pocketed South of of Izium.

The Russians haven't shown the capability to fight their way out of a paper bag excepting the first 2-3 days near Kherson. While the Ukrainians have shown good capability to fight defensively and at the same time I've not seen any evidence that the Ukrainians are capable/wanting to launch counter-offensives that have to wrest ground from the Russians.

Keeping troops in the area seems to make good sense. It plays the UA strengths and RUAF weaknesses. I'd also just question the capability for the Russians to seal the pocket and liquidate it? How many men would you need to seal the pocket, then to defend against UA attacks from the outside of the pocket, and also liquidate it?
Troop comfort seems tied pretty tightly to economic power so I'm not entirely sure how important it is on its own. During WW2 the USN had entire ships dedicated to ice cream production. Did the U.S. win the war in the Pacific because it cared more about its troops or because it had so much excess economic power that it could just dedicated an entire ship/crew to ice cream production?
 

RE: Troop Comfort

I don't disagree that troop comfort can be beneficial to combat.  But my point is more that if you find yourself in a military where comfort is considered you are likely in one that is relatively well funded and relatively professional.  So the troop comfort is a low level representation of the quality of the force. If you have a water heater in your tank your officers are probably competent and you probably have other good equipment.

If you gave the Russians troops outside Kyiv heaters in their tanks they wouldn't have done any better because the Russian army is not professional and not well supplied.

----

Troop comfort is a symptom of professionalism and economic input and both of those are beneficial to military success.

RE: Troop Comfort

I don't disagree that troop comfort can be beneficial to combat.  But my point is more that if you find yourself in a military where comfort is considered you are likely in one that is relatively well funded and relatively professional.  So the troop comfort is a low level representation of the quality of the force. If you have a water heater in your tank your officers are probably competent and you probably have other good equipment.

If you gave the Russians troops outside Kyiv heaters in their tanks they wouldn't have done any better because the Russian army is not professional and not well supplied.

----

Troop comfort is a symptom of professionalism and economic input and both of those are beneficial to military success.

RE: Ukrainians being pocketed South of of Izium.

The Russians haven't shown the capability to fight their way out of a paper bag excepting the first 2-3 days near Kherson. While the Ukrainians have shown good capability to fight defensively and at the same time I've not seen any evidence that the Ukrainians are capable/wanting to launch counter-offensives that have to wrest ground from the Russians.

Keeping troops in the area seems to make good sense. It plays the UA strengths and RUAF weaknesses. I'd also just question the capability for the Russians to seal the pocket and liquidate it? How many men would you need to seal the pocket, then to defend against UA attacks from the outside of the pocket, and also liquidate it?
Troop comfort seems tied pretty tightly to economic power so I'm not entirely sure how important it is on its own. During WW2 the USN had entire ships dedicated to ice cream production. Did the U.S. win the war in the Pacific because it cared more about its troops or because it had so much excess economic power that it could just dedicated an entire ship/crew to ice cream production?
 

RE: Ukrainians being pocketed South of of Izium.

The Russians haven't shown the capability to fight their way out of a paper bag excepting the first 2-3 days near Kherson. While the Ukrainians have shown good capability to fight defensively and at the same time I've not seen any evidence that the Ukrainians are capable/wanting to launch counter-offensives that have to wrest ground from the Russians.

Keeping troops in the area seems to make good sense. It plays the UA strengths and RUAF weaknesses. I'd also just question the capability for the Russians to seal the pocket and liquidate it? How many men would you need to seal the pocket, then to defend against UA attacks from the outside of the pocket, and also liquidate it?
Troop comfort seems tied pretty tightly to economic power so I'm not entirely sure how important it is on its own. During WW2 the USN had entire ships dedicated to ice cream production. Did the U.S. win the war in the Pacific because it cared more about its troops or because it had so much excess economic power that it could just dedicated an entire ship/crew to ice cream production?
 

And there's a strong suspicion that the defenses of Kherson were compromised by treachery, so even that example of apparent competence may flatter.

My thoughts on this:

UA has a firm network of defences on this front, manned by very good units and have fixed the RA units facing them in place. Withdrawing therefore might just be conceding the best defensive positional set up the UA have got? If so, I'd suggest that's a big call to make! 

Some commentators on the conflict don't put too much credit in UA military strategic leadership, if military planning is as sclerotic as the Russians, it might also explain why a reassessment of the situation isn't punctual.     

It's strange. Some people in this thread have decried press taking a picture of a cat as representative of vacuous MSM manipulation. But they don't seem to mind being manipulated by a picture of the press taking a picture of a cat. That picture was a snapshot, a moment in time. I highly doubt that people who have risked their lives to actually be there would spend their whole time photographing just a cat. How do you rabidly photograph anyway?
But war is conducted by humans and it is human to be drawn to life and comforted by it among such tragic destruction. Maybe it even helps with morale.
Here is another thread about a cat. By an adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. I suppose he should be doing more important things too than being compassionate to an innocent creature.
 

I think we can quit with the biggest fascist awards.  Anybody even competing is on the other side.  Doesn't matter if they are the worst or runner up worst.

Tl;dr: Artillery shells hitting ERA blocks don't count as hitting the tank so you can have direct hits not causing direct hit type damage.

So there are two bugs that create most of the armor - artillery problems that people bring up.

1. Artillery will not cause damage without a direct hit1
2. Artillery hitting ERA does not count as a direct hit in the game's logic2

Artillery doesn't always kill armor with direct hits but a direct hit will at minimum cause some pretty nasty systems damage, and as you've stated can kill tanks. Two direct hits (if I am reading his comment correctly) should pretty reliably mess up a tank. Either killing it outright or causing some pretty significant systems damage depending on the caliber of the shells being fired. However, if one or both of those shells hit the ERA block the tank would be far less damaged than it realistically should be besides driving slower.

The prevalence of ERA on certain vehicles in Black Sea likely explains why you occasionally here of weird results where a Bradley or some tank takes multiple direct hits and is still fighting capable. The ERA downgrade a direct hit to a near miss and near misses don't do damage to certain vehicle types. There is some cut off in the games logic where near misses can cause kills but I've not narrowed down where that is at.

1 Nearby hits will only cause damage to the tracks so you can get an immobilization with enough fire or large enough shell but you will never degrade/destroy any other system regardless of the number of near misses that occur. Outright kills by blast can happen to IFVs but I've not seen it occur to a tank. Tanks seem to require direct hits for a outright kill to occur.

2 If an artillery shell directly hits an ERA block the game treats it as if its a near miss strike and not a direct hit. So you could have a direct hit literally next to the gun and the only system that would be damaged would be tracks.

 

It's natural for most people to comprehend someone's behavior from their own mental/cultural position.
And anything that is outside of the norm of the civilized person seems like a funny quirk - hence the genuine fascination of the western folk with russian/soviet "culture", not realizing those aren't funny quirks. Not funny at all.
Hence why it's so hard to explain to any person whose neighbors are either getting high in Amsterdam or chill in cafeterias near the Eiffel Tower - how anyone can be so genuinely evil and barbaric - it seems truly unbelievable and exaggerated.
And then you get Bucha and Mariupol.

Tiresome and boring! Stop trolling!

Let's stay on topic guys. If you want to discuss racism do it with personal messages not forum posts please. 

Could we maybe knock off these racist accusations? Russian is not a race. Ukranian is not a race. It's the same as saying American or British or French is a race. That's just nonsense and all it's doing is inflaming passions.
Plus it's tiresome to wade through while trying to catch up.
Dave

The responses here have been really helpful.
From watching some more videos, the father away modern warfare is from my in-built belief of how infantry combat should work - mainly due to the fact that infantry, or at least infantry using rifles, are not the key players in many attacks as a rule.
It is fairly rare, from what I can see, that you are going to be able to perform an 'Assault at Brecourt Manor' type infantry assault. There is simply no need when you are trying to minimise casualties, and have access to stand off weapons. I have to try to plan along the lines of minimising exposure on the modern battlefield, picking my matchups where I can mass overwhelming or unmatched fire power, and blow everything which might even smell like an enemy soldier, to kingdom come before I get there.

I ran a multiplayer game via stream a few months ago. I acted as umpire and would drop players into/out of my stream based on who was currently "seeing" the action. After everyone ran through their personal turns I dropped everyone who had C2 into a channel together for ~30s. It worked fairly well except that it took quite a lot of time to get through each turn since 4 players (coy commander, 3x platoon commanders) had to each play a turn. I think you could complete a company scale fight in 3-4 hours.

What was most interesting was seeing players react to far more limited info than what CM usually offers. An enemy attack cut off a platoon from the C2 network and all that the other 3 players could see was black smoke from burning wrecks and explosions covering the area. The assumption was that the platoon had been wiped out and the other players reacted by pulling back and setting up a secondary defensive line. However in actuality the platoon had beaten off the initial attack and needed support. And in normal single-player they would have gotten that support ASAP but in this umpired game it took maybe ~5 minutes for the other players to work out what was happening.

 

Put an AFV on hunt with or without a tentative contact and the difference becomes obvious. Red Dawn in Fire and Rubble just to make sure the regimental HQ gets the Intel required. During a turn on Iron select the Regimental HQ and see how much info he has. He barely knows where his own units are. Play the game as realistically as possible and the rewards are great. Playing Soviet in WW 2 is a challenge with the C2. 

deleted

Hey all, I might get in trouble for this but I'm gonna do it anyway.
While we are all very concerned about the deaths in UKR it's also important to remember the other slaughter that's been going on for two years.  Another covid wave, very contagious, is on the way.  I know this crowd skews a bit older so lots of folks here are more at risk.
If you aint vaxxed, get vaxxed.  If you aint boosted, get boosted.  Only 50% of americans are boosted, though 75% are vaxxed.  Immune system resistance wanes over time, particularly w Pfizer (moderna better in this respect).  At Omicron peak we were losing ~2500 americans a day (~4000 per day at the pre-vaccine covid peak last year).  That nearly all those omicron deaths were PREVENTABLE is a tragedy.  And that tragedy is driven by propaganda, much of it spawned from Russia and percolated thru facebook.  So if you want to give a big FU to Putin, get your shots! 
I don't want to lose any of you excellent Combat Mission aficionados.
Hong Kong has a huge percentage of old people who refuse to get vaxxed, it's gonna be a bloodbath.
Thanks, I will take my vacation now.

Thanks Ian, the Black Sea manual says precious little about APS so i've been running tests to figure out exactly how they operated.


So far I've identified that:

Trophy
- Maximum 4 intercepts (360 degrees)
- Intercepts Javelin
- Intercepts TOW-2

Zaslon
- Maximum 4 intercepts (270 degrees from front)
- Maximum 2 intercepts(90 degrees from rear)
- Intercepts Javelin
- Intercepts TOW-2

Zaslon's intercept is unique in that it does have segments


Arena
- Maximum 4 intercepts (360 degree)
- Will not intercept Javelins
- Also seems poor at engaging TOW-2



I doubt we're going to see any patches for Black Sea again, but if we do, it would be nice to increase the Arena cartridge count from 4 to at least 6. Since that would better represent its strengths (more intercepts) compared to Zaslon/Trophy while still maintaining its weakness to Javelins. As an aside I suspect Zaslon/Trophy should not be intercepting Javelins as readily as they do but there isn't a ton of info on it.

 
So the vehicle will correctly intercept projectiles in a 360 degree circle. It just operates closer to Zaslon/Trophy than Arena. Actually its fairly close to the new Arena-M which has 8 charges (4 per side) rather than the old Arena.