Bud Backer

He was, and will remain, an icon for all things early CM.
He set a great example. 

He was a good guy.  

He was a good example to all of us that make things for these kinds of games/simulations- he kept it interesting and fun. A person that understood how to create a like-minded community of tinkerers.
I was lucky enough to correspond with him, like others here- ages ago by now. But I recalled him when working on things, even just last week. His help has grown into many like-minded makers of things. That's a gift.
Thanks again, WBW. With gratitude, "Recon" (he assigned nicknames, that was mine- I think I was researching something!).

Infantry squads have more sets of eyes than an FO team, or a tank crew.

The mechanics of spotting are obfuscated, but they're clearly decided per-soldier, and there is a random element. All things being equal, a squad is making more dice rolls, and therefore has more chance of seeing something.

In addition, all things are not equal. US rifle squads that pick one up will carry the Javelin CLU, which has tremendously powerful spotting abilities - to the extent that they remain useful even if they have no missiles. They are some of the best optics available in the game. You'll likely see similar or better results with other purpose-built spotting kit, for example the M1151 Reconnaissance Humvee with the LRAS3 system in CMBS.

Now, should your SOP be to lead with an infantry squad? Not necessarily. Spotting passively requires time and location, and a smaller FO team will be harder to spot, and will not reduce your available combat force by devoting a squad (and perhaps a Javelin) purely to spotting duty - sitting quietly in a location with good visibility is pretty much what you want to be doing with an FO, whereas a squad is a manoeuvre element.

Further, the FO isn't a scout. Their job is to control fire missions, and therefore they need information relayed to them through the C2 network. They don't need to be spotting the enemy, as long as they can call down fire onto areas where fires are needed.

Heh. So, step aside from the world of Javelins and Abrams tanks for a second, and look down a couple of rungs. Ukraine vs Russia or Syria vs Syria, perhaps.

At that level, access to ERA can become a serious benefit, and APS is a "magic shield", as per reports in Ukraine. ERA is no good against tandem warheads, and APS in CMBS has no protection against the top-attack Javelin, but if you don't have access to that (or, more importantly, if defences exist to defeat these), then suddenly this isn't true anymore. There is no plausible defence against the main round from an MBT of any reasonable size, and that doesn't look like something which is likely to change any time soon.

In “Lessons Learned” from the Russo-Ukrainian War by Phillip Klaber, he lists four tactical lessons, applicable (and predictable!) from CMBS:

- Ubiquitous Presence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
- Increased Lethality of Indirect Fires
- ATGMs and Armor’s Counter-revolution
- Declining Survivability of Light Infantry Vehicles

That is to say:

- UAVs are used en masse, especially to plan and direct artillery. Not necessarily for Precision attacks, as in the US, but for sighting massed bombardments.
- Indirect fires are called faster, and with increased numbers. Since these are co-ordinated over UAV, indirect fire is more important than ever.
- The above mentioned technological advancements - first ERA, then APS, have fought back against the supremacy of ATGMs predicted since 1973 or so.
- Conversely, IFVs are more suspect than in previous conflicts - there's a push towards developing heavier APCs/IFVs, since light armour is so vulnerable. Infantry are fighting dismounted, without direct support from their vehicles. As you can see from CMBS or CMSF, fighting without a BMP strips the squad of much of it's needed firepower.

So... no. ATGMs do not make tanks obsolete, any more than they did in the Sinai. The game has certainly changed, but it's not as simple as "you can do without armour", in a purely tactical, wargaming sense. Now, what the role of the British army should be, and what's motivated this announcement are very different questions.

Can you get away without them? Sure, if you can guarantee that you stay at least one generation ahead of the armour/anti-armour race at all times, and that this is even possible conceptually. The minute that isn't possible, you run into major problems.

Just a further clarification on this: without an AI plan, you can’t use the map against an AI opponent as the AI units will not Advance, and be an effective enemy. They just sit in their starting positions.
But against a human opponent no AI plans are needed in a QB map. I’ve made many such maps and they all worked fine in QB against a human opponent. 

If you haven’t played any Combat Mission games then it may help to know that there are four types of battles you can have:
 
1. Premade battles (“scenarios”) that allow you to pick one or any side and have forces pre-selected. You read the conditions, forces available and objectives and attempt to fulfill the latter to win. They can range in size from a few squads to a regiment. 

2. Campaigns - these are an interconnected series of what is mentioned above in 1 with outcomes of each battle determining various things for the upcoming battle.
3. Battles you create using the scenario editor - these are like 1 above, but you are making it. 
 
4. Quick Battles - these are battles where you can choose the purchase points for each side and then either specifically set all the conditions or let them be random, including map choice. Here you can still set battle size (or let it be random) so once more you can have battles involving a platoon and a few tanks, to something much much bigger, wIth two battalions or more per side. There are a fair number of customization options so that you can decide the experience, morale, equipment supply for each side, etc. This is my favourite mode, I rarely play anything else. Thousands of hours of fun and still haven’t exhausted all the possibilities. 

If you haven’t played any Combat Mission games then it may help to know that there are four types of battles you can have:
 
1. Premade battles (“scenarios”) that allow you to pick one or any side and have forces pre-selected. You read the conditions, forces available and objectives and attempt to fulfill the latter to win. They can range in size from a few squads to a regiment. 

2. Campaigns - these are an interconnected series of what is mentioned above in 1 with outcomes of each battle determining various things for the upcoming battle.
3. Battles you create using the scenario editor - these are like 1 above, but you are making it. 
 
4. Quick Battles - these are battles where you can choose the purchase points for each side and then either specifically set all the conditions or let them be random, including map choice. Here you can still set battle size (or let it be random) so once more you can have battles involving a platoon and a few tanks, to something much much bigger, wIth two battalions or more per side. There are a fair number of customization options so that you can decide the experience, morale, equipment supply for each side, etc. This is my favourite mode, I rarely play anything else. Thousands of hours of fun and still haven’t exhausted all the possibilities. 

Finally found it.
 
 

Dang. Sometimes things are surprisingly easy to find or recall, and other times... 
If you stumble across is please post here. It helps. 🙂

That alone makes the move worthwhile 😁

Up front is a great game. Nicely made and presented cards, rules that are sophisticated enough to make it quite serious, and a small unit feel as it’s really squad - sized, with supporting elements. 

QA report filed for this. 

Yep, little anecdote: my father was a line infantry officer in the 60s and 70s in the Canadian Armed Forces. Officers were officially supposed to go into battle with an SMG. He would always turn that down for any exercise or deployment. He preferred to carry and assault rifle just like everyone else. His reason was to stand out less.
 
This. I don't like it when that happens either. It sucks. To assert that this is somehow lopsided against the human player needs some serious backing up with lots of evidence. To assert that leaders and gunner are dying at a higher rate overall that they should be also would require a lot of evidence.
And I don't mean my self or anyone else cannot be convinced I mean we have people come to these forums and cry that they lost this asset or that asset and its not fair. Hell I do that - but I don't blame a game bug it just feels better to tell other of your troubles 🙂. There just is no point in investigating each cry that the game is broken just becasue some one pops in here and says so. For a claim like this, I would not lift a finger until there is thousands and thousands of verifiable data to back it up. Which consisted of not just who died and which side they were on but what they were doing when that happened.
The game is designed so that once the battle playback starts all soldiers are controlled by the AI. There is no difference between troops controlled by humans vs the computer because none of them are controlled by humans. They are all controlled by the computer. Bugs are possible, of course, but if someone is going to try to convince the testers or the programmers that the AI has some kind of advantage in who becomes a casualty vs who does not - well that's a huge lift. Huge. The game is literally designed to not do that.
Combine that with all of our built in observation bias and the chances that this are a real thing are vanishingly small.

Rifle target range distances and actual combat distances have nothing to do with one another. Using the former can lead to some very tenuous conclusions.
A more useful thing to look at would be data collected by different militaries on what they determined to be actual combat ranges for a given period, as well as their doctrine and training requirements.

Omg, that’s a blast from the past. I lost touch with J.D. Webster but years ago when there was a paper version of this I used to do research on aircraft and submit game stats for him. He had a newsletter for the game and it would include additional aircraft and aircraft variants. 
 
The computer version solved the issue of having to get together with an opponent. The AI was a respectable foe. 

Rifle target range distances and actual combat distances have nothing to do with one another. Using the former can lead to some very tenuous conclusions.
A more useful thing to look at would be data collected by different militaries on what they determined to be actual combat ranges for a given period, as well as their doctrine and training requirements.

One of the things I hate most about urban battles is exactly what you described going on at Berliner Weisse. I stubbornly hope for a tipping point to be reached. Probably what everyone is doing here! 
 
Nice AAR. 

WIP
 

 

They will also go straight in to the top of tank from a raised urban position.

This is excellent stuff, I remember being very excited when I first saw ARMOR magazine touting SF1 and a few individual Canadian army units using it ad-hoc to help visualize otherwise bland wargaming; it never moved on to anything beyond such individual initiatives (which you've explained earlier). This is a massive step-up to see ready made versions for use with armed forces. Congratulations guys.

I get your point . It may well be that the AI algorithms are not complex, but they are certainly clever.
Here is a very typical result from a game I'm playing against the AI now:

My scouts easily saw the tank just behind the crossroads (now a burning wreck) - to which there were two good avenues of approach. Expecting a trap, I threw everything at it and took both. I don't know if I've seen everything yet, because the game is still in progress, but each group of tanks had to come over a slight rise, leaving them vulnerable to temporary numerical disadvantage and visibility disadvantage.
The ambush was cleverly done. I expected it, threw everything at it, and still lost two tanks and an immobilisation just to kill one tank and take out a lightweight AA gun (so far).
I know that none of this was engineered by the designer, because I was the map designer and I gave no thought at all to any of this when I created the map or selected the slice, and the AI plan was one of the very simple ones I mentioned above. This very enjoyable and quite difficult game is all the result of the AI. This kind of clever set-up is the norm. In the maps I've been doing myself I never see a random defence that is easily overcome.*
Now it's possible that the AI just has a very simple set of rules for placing units. I don't believe that - my guess (and it is just a guess) is that it's quite sophisticated. Either way, the end result is very good. And my original point was that the AI wouldn't need major changes to be made more responsive. If it simply used the calculations it's already doing, but directed them actively at general areas of enemy concentrations, I think it would most formidable.
(*Having said that, whatever the algorithm is doing, it seems to work best with multiple AI groups, even very simple ones.)
 

The wagon (squadrol) Chiraq, 15th District (Hill Street). 

Now you can shoot the messenger and eat him or her! 

Good thing about these is they can get wet and still work, and they never suffer from bad batteries. 

What you get when you set your equipment quality to Poor.    (Because this is the internet -> That was a joke).