Bulletpoint

What will happen to licensing when you shut down?

Fwiw you are pushing propaganda as the absolute truth. Even Jewish acquainces who fought with the Haganah (and weren't welcome in Britain until very recently for that reason), which I have spoken to in person, don't support your version of the facts. 
Ciao 

I know about the history, imo it isn't 'strange' they refused the specific offers thar were made at the times they were made.

I posted a video a while back of some OSINT guy who pixel counts the open storage fields for tanks. 
According to his rough estimate, and dismissing large numbers of vehicles that were in too poor shape, russia has about 1.5-2 years of tanks left to continue this burn just on its own, not counting production numbers that are in the 3 digits
As for mobilisation, true greedy volunteers and convicts have been supplementing the graveyards but mobilisation is still active, just not in a big wave but trickling, which causes far less political instability (and 0 protests) than a million russians getting a letter at once.

Personally I'm not a big fan of the extreme 'woke bandwagon', although neither of the other extreme side (although woke literally means 'alert to prejudice and discrimination', which is a good thing imo).

That being said, history is quite clear and we (the West) weren't always the bright beacon of civilization as we'd like(d) to see it. 
AFAIK he asked whether racism played a role in how some people seem to not care about the bloody death toll the Israeli regime is (and has been) causing in Gaza at the moment. I think it does.
Also imho it is stupid to 'support' only one side. Because supporting one side exclusively defacto means denying the other side, both have millions of people, (of a normal) life. Does supporting one side mean you don't care whether the people of the other side get slaughtered in the many thousands? That is not a humane perspective imho and goes well beyond any woke bandwagon; that's just supporting mass killings of civilians.
Don't know about you, but that's not my cuppa.

This just shows how it could be being tackled...
It really shows the war in Gaza for what it is an excuse to remove the people from the area and give more land to be settled.
As noted time and time again these actions will not make Israel safer and will not bring security to the region.
If folk want safety for Israel this is absolutely the wrong approach.
Russia has the excuse that their targeting systems are crap, the IDF are hitting exactly what they want and when they want to.
This makes imo the IDF worse than the Russians yet they are not being held to account.
Send them more ammo to murder more innocents to make Israel (and the world) less secure...
Dohhh...

It is pretty frustrating. Looking back at the 2023 plan and seeing how little of new things were actually introduced, with no real updates in the interim. I’m crying out for the Engine 5 update as I can’t really play CMCW at the moment. 
Also the promised patches didn’t fix some big issues with the games (my particular bugbear is the TOW Stryker). Underpromise and overdeliver would be preferred. But also more regular updates.  

Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.
This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.
Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.
But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.
Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?
If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.
I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 
What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 
Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.
Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.
In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.
There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.
The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.
Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 
They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.

Out of curiosity, when was the last time any there was any meaningful change/update to the game rules or fundamental features?
Not a battle pack or a module with some new units, but the kind of changes people have now been requesting for 37 pages in this thread. Which is far from the first feature request thread.
The last time I can remember new features were added were in CMFB (2016), when flamethrowers and mortar halftracks were added.
Both awkwardly and buggily implemented, but at least they were new capabilities.
There was also a patch around the same time that added some new features to the editor, such as a retreat mechanic and an area fire order for the AI. But that was still eight years ago.

Yes. Same thing with any faction. Russia, Israel, Hamas etc... They all think they fight the good fight.

Generally, the same tactic works for all CM2 games.  Recon and lead with inf.  Locate the enemy's primary threats, ATGM's or ATG's (more WW2).  Kill them with arty.  Then the AFV's can blast away at buildings and troops.  In CM2 the tanks seem rather delicate.  While we read about geat tank assaults, leading with AFV's etgc. designers usually make that a suicidal tactic since the designers create defenses specifically to make that tactic suicidal. 
It seems common that one spends perhaps 75%+ of the game prepping the battlefield and the last 10%-20% actually rolling out the assault.  So, patience is critical. - much more so than in CM1 games.

Yes. Same thing with any faction. Russia, Israel, Hamas etc... They all think they fight the good fight.

The sad truth is that Russian troops are not all evil people bent on murder. Some, yes. But far from all. Many are just deluded.

Yes.
Yes. In war, there will be casualties, even with the best planning.
No.
But I understand it can be really frustrating. In the beginning, I also reloaded every time something bad happened, like an unexpected barrage, or friendly fire. But then I realised that it's much more enjoyable to take these things in my stride and try my best to continue with what I have left, trying not to lose my cool.
So I began only reloading when something bad happened that wasn't due to my own decisions. For example, a tank refusing to go straight from A to B through good terrain but making some long weird detour for no reason and getting destroyed. Or troops refusing to enter a house through the back door, instead running all the way through streets and getting cut down.
I also found this way of playing made me better at the game. Which is an advantage against a human player where you can't just reload. I played several PBEM games where my opponent started out very sensible, but then there would be some mass casualty event on his side, and all of a sudden, it was clear that he got frustrated and started giving all kinds of risky orders that just made things worse. It's easy to fall into the trap of "oh man, I just lost a half platoon to that barrage, so the game is over.. I better gamble now".
But what he doesn't know is that I also took lots of losses. So we're actually still equally matched, but it's his rash decisions that end up costing him the game.

I don't think civilians should ever be targeted.
But even if we accept the argument that Russians need to be attacked and made afraid in order to make them oppose the war, you should not bomb some tiny border town where people have no say in anything.
The only thing their deaths will accomplish is to provide perfect fuel for the Russian propaganda machine.
You should attack Moscow, and especially the areas where the Russian elite lives.
 

Out of curiosity, when was the last time any there was any meaningful change/update to the game rules or fundamental features?
Not a battle pack or a module with some new units, but the kind of changes people have now been requesting for 37 pages in this thread. Which is far from the first feature request thread.
The last time I can remember new features were added were in CMFB (2016), when flamethrowers and mortar halftracks were added.
Both awkwardly and buggily implemented, but at least they were new capabilities.
There was also a patch around the same time that added some new features to the editor, such as a retreat mechanic and an area fire order for the AI. But that was still eight years ago.

No. They are growing stronger by the day, despite the losses. The idea of Russian collapse is pie in the sky.
No. But they are going to be fed into the grinder as usual.
No. The average politician in the West is a weatherwane that is very sensitive to the sentiments of the voter base. And the voter base changed opinion about this war when the 2023 Ukraine offensive failed.
I doubt it. But I think both sides are feverishly trying to solve the drone problem, while also pumping out as many drones as possible. We might see more anti drone countermeasures, but then also anti-anti countermeasures. I think drones are here to stay.
No. In the West, we are horrified when we see the casualties the Russians are taking. But it would take millions of dead Russians before Putin's authority starts to get challenged.
No, but it is waning. Western political will depends a lot on where the front line goes. Currently, Western leaders (and the public) are not too unhappy about where it runs.
We do care somewhat about the fate of Ukraine as a whole, but we care much less about Crimea and the extreme eastern Ukraine than the Ukrainians do.
 

What are your predictions for the war in Ukraine in 2024?
Here are mine:
Increasing Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian towns and cities.
Russia will take Avdiivka before spring, and also close the Robotyne pocket. Then the frontlines will not move much more before summer.
Ukraine will attempt a new offensive in early summer, and it will be in the north, east of Kharkiv, where Russian defensive lines seem less strong. The aim will not be to liberate key territory but to cause maximum losses and for the political objective to show Western sponsors that the war can still be won.
The drone war will enter a new stage where the off-the-shelves commercial drones are replaced with mass produced purpose built drones, and the numbers of drone attacks will increase massively. Instead of single drone attacks, we might see several working in cooperation. Increased use of drone-dropped tear gas.

I predict the F-16's will turn out to helpful for Ukraine's defense this year, but not as much as some may have hoped.

It is the best example because it is not an example of indiscriminate bombing, I think. Precision strikes on infrastructure allow people to make the rational decision to stop or pay the costs.
By contrast, having their livelihood destroyed and their loved ones killed rarely makes people weigh costs against gains. They just want revenge.

Out of curiosity, when was the last time any there was any meaningful change/update to the game rules or fundamental features?
Not a battle pack or a module with some new units, but the kind of changes people have now been requesting for 37 pages in this thread. Which is far from the first feature request thread.
The last time I can remember new features were added were in CMFB (2016), when flamethrowers and mortar halftracks were added.
Both awkwardly and buggily implemented, but at least they were new capabilities.
There was also a patch around the same time that added some new features to the editor, such as a retreat mechanic and an area fire order for the AI. But that was still eight years ago.

Out of curiosity, when was the last time any there was any meaningful change/update to the game rules or fundamental features?
Not a battle pack or a module with some new units, but the kind of changes people have now been requesting for 37 pages in this thread. Which is far from the first feature request thread.
The last time I can remember new features were added were in CMFB (2016), when flamethrowers and mortar halftracks were added.
Both awkwardly and buggily implemented, but at least they were new capabilities.
There was also a patch around the same time that added some new features to the editor, such as a retreat mechanic and an area fire order for the AI. But that was still eight years ago.

Given that Israel is equally embroiled in a genocidal story, the same technique could be used.

Re ATGs: spiking the gun, abandoning, comparisons to AFVs, etc. is a bit of a silly argument. At the end of the day, fact is that ATGs were routinely "abandoned" by their crews with the intent of recrewing them later on, much more regularly than AFV crews would dismount to recon on foot. And the "spiked gun" argument hardly holds water since the TacAI abandons the ATG out of panic: it stands to reason that few crew would relish the thought of staying around to smash optics, remove the breechblock, etc.
 
 
100%. Unless the heavy weapon itself has been spotted, or the crew has been spotted and the firing of their heavy weapon has been heard and fairly well narrowed down, the weapon itself shouldn't be spotted (same goes for HQ units, unless radios, epaulets, caps, etc. have been spotted). It's a bit weak playing on Iron difficulty and magically knowing that (though usually I don't spot heavy weapons until they've fired on me).

And last.
Please improve the FOW by remove the detected enemy units' UI panel.
 
right now with as soon as you detect a riflemen, you will know if the contact is a HQ, a part of HMG team , an AT Gun position or a Javelin ATGM team. That is so unrealistic.  I miss the way how CMx1 handle the unidentified infantry contacts
 
Or, I also miss the CMx1's tank misidentification . 
 
Sound contact is also far better in CMx1.  In CM2 a sound contact gives you a precious position.