Duckman

I agree that Kursk is underrated for variety. The bulge was almost 200 kms across and had everything from the pancake steppe above to rolling hills and a mini Stalingrad at Ponyri. 
Personally I prefer smaller scenarios but those can be set anywhere. Not every action at Kursk was a battalion sized fight of course.

It's Kursk.

It's Kursk.

Whose grass mod is that?

Interesting discussion. The armies of 1914 have gotten too much stick, for reasons that have been mentioned in the thread. Pre-WWI armies did understand firepower and had by and large drawn the correct lessons from previous wars, most of all the Russo-Japanese War which was the real dress rehearsal for WWI (including the naval part).
There were some hard to solve problems though:
- Artillery firepower was well understood but supporting the advance was not. There was too much reliance on the infantry doing it alone.
- The armies of 1914 dwarfed all previous ones and were largely composed of reservists. Tactics suffered and prewar obeservers commented on clumsy tactics during maneuvers. This was probably the source of a lot of the mindless rushes.
One major problem was that the lessons of recent wars were mixed. In Manchuria the Japanese attacks had succeeded in the end despite horrific losses, which led to the not unreasonable conclusion that offensive tactics won battles and wars if you simply had the guts. However unlike may other theorists who were proven wrong (remember the many deaths of the tank?) the assumptions of the pre-WWI generals were put to the most brutal test of all.
 

Yes. I remember that the tank became obsolete in 1918, because the conditions that made it useful in WW1 were unique and would never be repeated. And then in 1945 the tank was obsolete because infantry carried HEAT weapons meant that any old infantryman could defend themselves against a tank. And then in 1973 the tank was obsolete (for realsies this time) because Isreali losses against Egyptian AT-3 Saggars proved that tanks could not survive on a battlefield dominated by ATGMs (which side won that war again?). And then in 2022 the tank was obsolete because...the Russians lost a lot of tanks (has there ever been a war involving tanks in which a lot of tanks weren't lost?).

Interesting discussion. The armies of 1914 have gotten too much stick, for reasons that have been mentioned in the thread. Pre-WWI armies did understand firepower and had by and large drawn the correct lessons from previous wars, most of all the Russo-Japanese War which was the real dress rehearsal for WWI (including the naval part).
There were some hard to solve problems though:
- Artillery firepower was well understood but supporting the advance was not. There was too much reliance on the infantry doing it alone.
- The armies of 1914 dwarfed all previous ones and were largely composed of reservists. Tactics suffered and prewar obeservers commented on clumsy tactics during maneuvers. This was probably the source of a lot of the mindless rushes.
One major problem was that the lessons of recent wars were mixed. In Manchuria the Japanese attacks had succeeded in the end despite horrific losses, which led to the not unreasonable conclusion that offensive tactics won battles and wars if you simply had the guts. However unlike may other theorists who were proven wrong (remember the many deaths of the tank?) the assumptions of the pre-WWI generals were put to the most brutal test of all.
 

Interesting discussion. The armies of 1914 have gotten too much stick, for reasons that have been mentioned in the thread. Pre-WWI armies did understand firepower and had by and large drawn the correct lessons from previous wars, most of all the Russo-Japanese War which was the real dress rehearsal for WWI (including the naval part).
There were some hard to solve problems though:
- Artillery firepower was well understood but supporting the advance was not. There was too much reliance on the infantry doing it alone.
- The armies of 1914 dwarfed all previous ones and were largely composed of reservists. Tactics suffered and prewar obeservers commented on clumsy tactics during maneuvers. This was probably the source of a lot of the mindless rushes.
One major problem was that the lessons of recent wars were mixed. In Manchuria the Japanese attacks had succeeded in the end despite horrific losses, which led to the not unreasonable conclusion that offensive tactics won battles and wars if you simply had the guts. However unlike may other theorists who were proven wrong (remember the many deaths of the tank?) the assumptions of the pre-WWI generals were put to the most brutal test of all.
 

I'm toying around with the Chieftain in the WoT armor inspector, and I'm considering revising my opinion of it. My initial assessment was that, despite its heavier armor, it would not prove any more survivable than the M60 on the late 70s battlefield, since late Cold War HEAT and APFSDS ammunition was so deadly. But although nothing the Soviets have should have too much difficulty penetrating it in this time period, it may nonetheless manage to bounce an appreciably higher proportion of the shots that hit it. So it may have noticeably better survivability after all.
Granting I'm not working with a particularly detailed data set. The only source I know of that has a listing of ammunition performance that is as comprehensive as I need is the Steel Beasts Wiki. But I went ahead and grabbed the following, on the assumption that this was all ammunition that the Chieftain might face from 1976-1982:
100mm BM-8 HVAPDS-T (1968) - 300mm
100mm BM-20 APFSDS-T (1976) - 390mm
100mm BM-25 APFSDS-T (1978) - 430mm
100mm BK-5M HEAT-FS-T (1955) - 380mm
115mm BM-21 APFSDS-T (1975) - 430mm
115mm BM-28 APFSDS-T (1978) - 460mm
115mm BK-4M HEAT-FS-T (1969) - 440mm
125mm BM-15 APFSDS-T (1972) - 350mm
125mm BM-22 APFSDS-T (1976) - 440mm
125mm BK-12M HEAT-FS-T (1969) - 440mm
125mm BK-14M HEAT-FS-T (1970s) - 500mm
I then clicked on the WoT armor inspector model a bunch of times from the frontal aspect, trying to be as random as possible in where each "shot" landed, and I recorded the los thickness that shot would have faced. I got the following:
1: 430mm
2: 343mm
3: 429mm
4: 551mm
5: 140mm (joint between the upper and lower front plates)
6: 554mm
7: 384mm
8: 141mm 
9: 407mm
10: 658mm (ended up getting a particularly steep angle on the hull armor on this one)
Ignoring range, forgiving the small sample size, and taking both the WoT armor inspector and Steel Beasts ammunition data at face value we get the following performance for the Soviet tank ammunition.
100mm BM-8 HVAPDS-T (1968) - 20% of shots penetrated
100mm BM-20 APFSDS-T (1976) - 40% of shots penetrated
100mm BM-25 APFSDS-T (1978) -  60% or 70% of shots penetrated (one shot is right at the cutoff, perhaps it would have only gotten a partial pen or spalling)
100mm BK-5M HEAT-FS-T (1955) -  30% of shots penetrated
115mm BM-21 APFSDS-T (1975) -  60% or 70% of shots penetrated
115mm BM-28 APFSDS-T (1978) - 70% of shots penetrated
115mm BK-4M HEAT-FS-T (1969) - 70% of shots penetrated
125mm BM-15 APFSDS-T (1972) -  30% of shots penetrated
125mm BM-22 APFSDS-T (1976) - 70% of shots penetrated
125mm BK-12M HEAT-FS-T (1969) - 70% of shots penetrated
125mm BK-14M HEAT-FS-T (1970s) - 70% of shots penetrated
So it would seem that every Soviet ammunition type is still capable of taking out the Chieftain from the front, but it isn't as certain as it was with the M60. Considering that it feels like more than 90% of shots that hit the M60 manage to penetrate, that might translate into noticeably improved survivability. But we'll only know when we actually get to see it in action.

Yesssss! My dream was confronting the Red Horde with a troop of Chieftains, partly because they're cool but also because they fit my lethargic playing style. And now it's coming true! 
The Canadians are a nice bonus. I assume they're bringing their Centurions and their own accent(s) for the speech pack.

I was wondering about that one, it looked like a Warrior but too early of course. What's the BV?
Those are really cool. As for burning wrecks, recon assets tend to do poorly in games but their tiny size should help them. I think they show up as fake Soviets here (along with more moustaches):
The tone is a bit darker, with one squad tragically lost as their APC gets stuck on a fallen tree.

Chieftains, moustaches, squaddies with SLRs… it’s all there: 
 
 

I was wondering about that one, it looked like a Warrior but too early of course. What's the BV?
Those are really cool. As for burning wrecks, recon assets tend to do poorly in games but their tiny size should help them. I think they show up as fake Soviets here (along with more moustaches):
The tone is a bit darker, with one squad tragically lost as their APC gets stuck on a fallen tree.

The one bit of kit that would have given us a chance to beat the Soviets - tea anyone ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel

I was wondering about that one, it looked like a Warrior but too early of course. What's the BV?
Those are really cool. As for burning wrecks, recon assets tend to do poorly in games but their tiny size should help them. I think they show up as fake Soviets here (along with more moustaches):
The tone is a bit darker, with one squad tragically lost as their APC gets stuck on a fallen tree.

Chieftains, moustaches, squaddies with SLRs… it’s all there: 
 
 

Yesssss! My dream was confronting the Red Horde with a troop of Chieftains, partly because they're cool but also because they fit my lethargic playing style. And now it's coming true! 
The Canadians are a nice bonus. I assume they're bringing their Centurions and their own accent(s) for the speech pack.

Chieftains, moustaches, squaddies with SLRs… it’s all there: 
 
 

I guess people don't like taking losses they can't prevent. 
After my previous post some more m60s came to the ridge but they took atgm to the face. However enemy choppers took down 2 t62, gun runned my Shilka damaging it and incapacitating a crew member. And a rocket attack immobilized a BTR. Couldn't do much about it but that's life / (simulated) war I guess. 
I probably should have just rushed things forward into the town so more difficult for the enemy choppers.
So far I'm enjoying the battle.

One of the cool things about CMCW is that we'll be able to compare NATO doctrine.

The British, the West Germans and the US were all trying to solve the same problem, but did so in very different ways. Where the US were attempting to create depth through elastic defence, up-front, then rotating back, the British were more about static defence in depth and counter-attack. Where the TOW is really the centrepiece of US defence, for the British it's Chieftain, and anything armed with Swingfire is in a more supporting role. They also tend to embed recce assets down to the company level, so perhaps a pair of Scimitars in front of a mechanised company team.

My own feeling is that the low point for the US as far as balance of conventional forces with the Soviet Union was in the mid to late 50s. That's when you have the Pentatomic Army doctrine. Conventional ground forces were viewed as having little importance, so US ground forces were neglected. The Pentatomic doctrine left US forces too dispersed to either attack or defend effectively, at a time when the US Army was not yet mechanized enough to concentrate quickly (I've heard it described as an overreliance on assets which did not yet exist). The lack of German forces in the early 50s to add to NATO's strength also probably hurt the overall NATO vs WP balance. As far as equipment is concerned the M14 probably does not stack up as well against the AK-47 as the M16 stacks up against the AK-74, and my guess is that the M47 and M48(A3 or earlier (the ones with the old 90mm gun)) Pattons probably don't stack up as well against the T-55 as the M60 stacks up against the T-62 (although I would love to test this, so an early 60s expansion to CMCW would be welcome). Mid 60s to mid 70s are also a contender since the Soviets have the T-64 at a time when the Americans don't even have significant upgrades to the M60 to help close the gap. I definitely think that by the mid 60s some sanity had returned to US Army doctrine and there was a realization that conventional ground forces would still be important even in the nuclear age. But obviously it took some time to catch up.

Cold Warriors.
  Well it looks like Steve has already dropped the mic over on the annual update thread, so let myself, Bil H and Cpt Miller (along with a small team of unwashed heathens - two of whom are actually from the UK), be the second to announce the first CMCW Module - CMCW - British Army On the Rhine (BAOR).

We are still in development so I will only outline the broad strokes of what we are working on, and insert the caveat that we reserve the right to add/subtract - 
 - Time frame of the game is going deeper backwards into the Cold War.  We are setting the clock back to 1976, so CMCW will now encompass 1976-1982 (including some minor tweaks to the existing US orbats).  As has been noted we are less interested in the later Cold War years largely because they really do start to resemble the later CM titles and we are shooting to keep CMCW distinct in its own right.
- UK BOAR - right now we have a pretty comprehensive build planned for the UK units as they transitioned from their 1974 structures - to where they landed in 1980.  As per the picture above players should be able to become deeply engaged within the historical BAOR sector of the ETO.
- And because I just have to represent the home team, we are also doing the Canadians.  That little black box is the planned 4 CMBG AO - you will note this was right at the tail end when the brigade was still part of the BAOR, although for those that really want to play First Clash and park them down in Lahr you are fee to do so because the basic unit structures remained the same.
- We do have plans for the Soviet side, but are going to hold off on details until we zero them fully in...more to follow. 
- I will let you all speculate and discuss what new vehicles and weapon systems we are talking about but there is a not insignificant list of new ones we are planning - more as we start to get some cool screen shots.  
As noted by Steve, we are well on our way and are planning for a release this year - content and full scope remains TBA.
Thank you all very much for your support, the response to CMCW has been well beyond what we were expecting and that is entirely thanks to you guys.

I think this is where you use all the community volunteers who can't program, paint, or do anything else useful but who have some skillz in the useless facts area. I count myself among those. 🙂

I think this is where you use all the community volunteers who can't program, paint, or do anything else useful but who have some skillz in the useless facts area. I count myself among those. 🙂