marais

The last information to go away, as the game strips out detail, is the color of the ground. I've appreciated maps where the designer used ground color not just to represent terrain naturalistically, but as a signal to the player. I'll tend to line edges of wooded areas with light or heavy forest; to mark breaks in fences and walls with gravel or red earth; to use brown grass on high elevations and green grass on low.

I wrote a little python script to set the elevation in the editor according to a digital elevation model. Those come in various resolutions, for instance, in Germany data for the whole of Northrhine Westfalia is available for free with a 1mx1m granularity. I then use PyAutoGui in order to automate setting the correcting height and clicking/scrolling in the editor. The script currently sets the height information for every square in the editor, not just contours.
An example height map:

The resulting terrain in the editor (3328mx1920m):

Vista somewhere in there.

The script is not terribly fast, making this map took about 7h, but it beats doing all the clicking yourself. The limitation, btw., is the editor, the script could go faster. The advantage is that you can do much better micro-terrain, I think, the disadvantage is that you can't just use an old topographical map and draw the contour lines. It would be possible to do contour lines but you'd need to have those in a machine readable format.
Anyway, if people here are interested, I could polish the code a bit and make it available to everyone, e.g. via github. If there is additional interest, I could imagine doing other stuff that way, like, for instance, drawing roads from Open Street Map.

The book's full of little gems:
Storr suggests that, because of range safety rules at BATUS that made it awkward to push past notional enemy units, British small unit leaders acquired the habit of attacking hostile positions rather than bypassing. A chapter about armor compares major MBTs by diagraming their protection, firepower, and mobility in a triangle. The Panther tank is represented as an equilateral triangle, as a baseline, and it appears on every tank's diagram as a reference. The Chieftain's heavy weight toward firepower is clear in an instant; the T-34's mobility but limited protection and firepower is equally stark. Storr examines readiness and deployment times in considerable detail, tallying up the number of formations that would have been available to mount an attack or to resist a Warsaw Pact advance. (Maybe Brigade! might have been a more appropriate title?)  

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:
It's well written, approachable but serious. There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition. The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations. That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper. I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army.  For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise. Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago. There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents. Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources. The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail. Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII. Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this. That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

Thanks for this extended writeup, I appreciate it and you've sold me on picking up a copy (or procuring one by other means). Seems like something worth reading, though to be honest not everything inspires me with confidence. Thanks for taking the time out. 
@holoweenI would certainly agree with you there, though interestingly I myself have found some evidence to suggest that the Bundeswehr adopted American training practices such as MILES/Simulated fire systems, certain Israeli inspired gunnery courses, and the NTC concept which was applied to revamp Graffenwoehr and camps. I would suspect that the Germans were trying to 'buy' ala carte many of the ideas that the US Army was trying to implement, some of which were ironically inspired by ideas that the Army had already bought from German history. There is an interesting dynamic there. 

This is something I am a bit interested in for the later Cold War era, the relationship between German Generals, Nazis, and the US Army has always been....... weird. After all we forced many of them to write us histories while they were in prison camps, histories which were pretty influential in how the civilian community has gone on to remember WWII and especially the Eastern Front. From what I've read of both documents and of writing on the subject, the US Army was pretty uncritical when it came to the Nazis. There is even an infamous Military Review article which is very flattering to Joachim Piper and has, as I recall, one line in it about all the bad stuff he did. The interviews with Hermann Balck I linked in that other thread are also interesting, I've always gotten the vibe from reading the interview transcripts that what theyre really saying is that the Russians are incapable of being good soldiers, Germans are inherently good soldiers, etc. Balck also definitely takes the line in his memoir that Berlin and the rear area troops were responsible for the brutality not the troops on the line. Thats not really true (see the work of Omar Bartov who takes down that specific myth). Yet the US Army took those lessons seemingly uncritical and really adopted the German lessons from fighting the Soviets without any comment on all the nasty parts of WWII on the Eastern front. Also no comment on the fact that the Germans lost(!!!) and why that may have been the case. Its interesting stuff.
Back on schedule @marais the Amazon page suggests he has some SHOCKING revelation about the Bundeswehr. Is that just selling fluff or does he seem to have something to say there? Is it just 'the Germans were really good?' Also for those who have read it, where do you think this falls on the memoir to scholarship spectrum? Sometimes you get these guys who do this annoying thing where they want to contribute to bigger questions about a subject, but are too lazy to do more research so they just take their own direct experience and apply it writ large to the whole Army or the whole system. Or just ignore everything they didn't directly engage with. It makes me wary of these kinds of books sometimes. Do you think he does a good job of striking a balance? 
If his big revelation re: the Germans is that 'they had learned lessons from WWII and that made their doctrine good' I hate to break it too him, but the US also did that, both AD & AirLand Battle were directly based off WWII experiences generally, German experiences specifically, and were written in combination with German doctrine. The 1980s HDV 100/100 and FM 100-5 were very similar, and DePuy was PROUD that he had gotten the Germans to rewrite the 1970s version of HDV 100/100 to make it like Active Defense. I wonder how much of 'German doctrine is good!' stems from biases developed during WWII and the 1950s, applied to the 1970s & 80s. My own work looks to conclusively show that German and American doctrine werent all that different in theory, and were written jointly together at multiple levels. So why would someone like Storr rate the US and Germany differently, as often happens? (I dont want this to sound rotely nationalistic, but rather why the Germans get elevated so highly) Is it that their WWII experiences look good and carried their reputation through the Cold War? Or that they were still doing something nobody else was? If there were I havn't figured it out. 

The book's full of little gems:
Storr suggests that, because of range safety rules at BATUS that made it awkward to push past notional enemy units, British small unit leaders acquired the habit of attacking hostile positions rather than bypassing. A chapter about armor compares major MBTs by diagraming their protection, firepower, and mobility in a triangle. The Panther tank is represented as an equilateral triangle, as a baseline, and it appears on every tank's diagram as a reference. The Chieftain's heavy weight toward firepower is clear in an instant; the T-34's mobility but limited protection and firepower is equally stark. Storr examines readiness and deployment times in considerable detail, tallying up the number of formations that would have been available to mount an attack or to resist a Warsaw Pact advance. (Maybe Brigade! might have been a more appropriate title?)  

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:
It's well written, approachable but serious. There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition. The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations. That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper. I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army.  For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise. Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago. There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents. Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources. The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail. Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII. Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this. That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:
It's well written, approachable but serious. There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition. The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations. That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper. I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army.  For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise. Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago. There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents. Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources. The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail. Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII. Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this. That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

Agreed—also found the book interesting and a quick, enjoyable read. It's given me perspective or confirmed ideas that I only had before from random websites.
I think I figured out how I'd sum the book up: good at thinking about battalion- and company-level organizational, training, and equipment issues that affect operations at the scale of divisions and corps. Talking about battalions and below, though, the book becomes more normative rather than descriptive.

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:
It's well written, approachable but serious. There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition. The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations. That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper. I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army.  For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise. Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago. There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents. Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources. The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail. Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII. Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this. That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

Glad I'm not the only one who thought the wargaming examples were weird. I admit that I skimmed the chapter explaining the wargaming because it felt so bizarre to include in the book. Combat Mission has a number of people involved in researching armor values etc and no one is citing it as gospel. This is just too guys and some dice.
Another issue I had was how he utilizes citations. I think they should be used to support specific details/numbers (armor values, troop numbers) but Storr would state a generic maxim like "British infantry were just better" and a citation at the end. I am not going to read an entirely different book to confirm vague generalization.
I wish he focused on a few subjects and went into further detail. I was really interested in his discussion of mechanized infantry and how each nation preferred fighting dismounted compared to mounted but he only spends a few pages on it before moving on to another topic.
I'm being pretty harsh but I found the book interesting and finished it pretty quickly. For a casual like me, it's a wide but shallow introduction to operations in Europe.

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:
It's well written, approachable but serious. There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition. The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations. That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper. I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army.  For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise. Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago. There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents. Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources. The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail. Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII. Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this. That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

The East German Border. If you have not seen this movie you should.
 

Wow, looks like I lost the internal betting pool.  We are 13 days released and first time someone asks this question.
Answer.  We spent days of work on this one, round and round.  So basically US mech infantry platoon still brigaded the M60s and (technically) the Dragons at the PL HQ level where they would be dolled out as the situation dictated.  This is impossible with CM so we created variation to reflect that decision and give the player flexibility in their use. 
So: 
Heavy = a bulked up squad, obviously expecting trouble.  2xM60s and the Dragon
Medium = originally we were going to only have the medium version but it was too restrictive. 
Light = 1 xM60 and no Dragon.  There were enough Dragons in the platoons and coys for one per squad but they could taken away and sent out to tank hunting teams and some squads might wind up light.  Light also does not get the extra M60.
In any standard mech infantry platoon the mix would normally be:
2 x Heavy and 1 x Med squads.  But now scenario designers can have flex in different scenarios. 

As a Fire Direction Officer, our battery once spent 14 hours straight in MOPP4. The only good thing about it was that it was FREEZING cold out and it made us warmer. But calculating artillery firing data and transmitting it to the guns and talking to the FOs on the radio was challenging to say the least. Hard to see, hard to talk and be understood. 
We ended up using a runner to the guns with slips of paper with the firing data (two actually - one for each 3 guns), because it was too easy for the gun crews to not be able to understand us on the field telephone speaking through the mask. Deflection error wasn't so bad, but an error in elevation could kill our own troops too easily. Made completing fire missions much longer - probably twice the time.
Dave

I also thought it was a fair question, and a good answer.

As the old joke goes.  I wanted to join the RMP, but they wouldn't let me when they found out my parents were married.

Two features come to mind, one about C&C, one about graphics but really interface.
First, a change to C&C of split squads. An oddity of the command and control system is that, if you split a squad, the resulting fireteams both report directly to the platoon leader. This is reasonable for small squads, especially ones with lots of radios. It falls apart in close terrain and with limited lines of sight. It's a particular challenge for the USMC, where squads split into three fireteams, only one with a radio. This results in odd situations where, say, a fireteam is out of sight of the platoon leader and thus out of command, even though it's sitting right next to the fireteam with the squad leader. Better for the B and C fireteams to report to the 1st, which contains the squad leader, and then to the platoon HQ. I can imagine the data structure complexity here, and why this might be necessary, but one can dream.
Second, hillshading. I wonder if graphics cards are now up to the task of having terrain cast shadows? This isn't just eye candy—it would greatly improve the player's understanding of terrain, and in a more intuitive way than the contour line mods.
One quick example:
I could imagine this as a controllable feature, even, with exaggerated hillshading available for low-contrast and nighttime conditions. The interface isn't just a scene from a war movie, it's a tool that gives players information.
I'll probably say more about hillshading later. I'm a cartographer, and I tend to understand CM maps as, well, maps or visualizations.

The 2001 series Red Cap follows RMP investigators stationed in Germany. The setting is right for CMCW, even if the time period is closer to CMSF. (There's also a 1960s series of the same name, starring John Thaw, well before his days as Morse, but I've never been able to find episodes.)
Edited to add: I think the series is terrible, but even terrible television has its place.
 

@marais I recall hanging around at Forward Mounting Centre at South Cerney many years ago and read something about the Red Cap team doing filming/research there for the series.  The comment was that Tamzin Outhwaite could never play an RMP character convincingly because "she was attractive, intelligent and welcome in the unit."

Another great video of 1980s Cold War porn to put you guys in the mood. 😃
 

Of course, you could write the "history" of what happens in the BNCW world to be anything you want, within reason. The very general mission was drop in, seize a key airfield/airport somewhere in the world, and hang on until there were enough armor/mech units airlifted in to maintain. Was that realistic? Dunno. Probably depends a lot on where in the world that airfield was. We sure practiced it a lot.
We also trained for the AAAD (Airborne Anti Armor Defense). Which was a fancy way to say - come up with a plausible defense and enough light portable AT weapons to greatly attrit an attacking armored unit. Could be a place in the NATO line, could be a forward deployment to stop a reinforcing unit, while NATO forces counterattack to link up. Now that last one has possibilities for CW. Rush to the aid of the beleaguered paratroopers.  
"We're paratrooper son. We're supposed to be surrounded"
Dave

Oversights
- Battle for Normandy Canadian Infantry Battalions are short on Sten guns. A Canadian Army report from July 1945 states that as of May 1944 Canadian infantry battalions in NW Europe had an additional pool of at least 12 Sten guns to be parceled out to the rifle platoons at the commander's discretion. There would be myriad ways to represent this in game, as while spread out evenly it would yield just a single extra Sten per platoon, the intent was far more likely to be be to allow concentration of the weapons. The first option is to give Canadian infantry squads a chance to have a second Sten per section, though I'm generally not a fan of representing pooled weapons in that way as it leaves interesting orgs up to nothing but dice rolls. Influencing that dice roll, or better obviating at least some of them entirely by tying it to the equipment quality options in force selection is a better option, with higher equipment levels bringing in more Stens at the Section level to represent allocated weapons from the pool, to a maximum of an additional per section at Excellent. A third option is instituting an Assault Company formation option that can be chosen for an infantry battalion in force selection in the same way you select whether you want a Wasp Carrier platoon or the like, which represents the concentration of that additional Sten pool into a single one of the battalion's four companies, with an extra Sten per section (probably in the AT team) and for the platoon commander. The final option that comes to mind is bringing the choice right down to the platoon level,, in the same way you choose if you want a PIAT for the platoon, you can select 0-3 Assault Sections instead of the regular ones, which come at a slightly higher point/rarity cost, but get 1-2 extra Sten guns. Unfortunately, I have yet to find any documentation to confirm or refute this practice extending outside of the 1st Canadian Army, but given that 1 Cdn Army did have Polish troops under it, as well as the British I Corps, I do not think it would be unreasonable to also expand whatever implementation is decided on to British infantry battalions, albeit at either the next step higher equipment standard or a marginal points bump to represent the reasonable potential that this was implemented more widely than exclusively Canadian formations. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20030302010024/http://www.dnd.ca/dhh/downloads/cmhq/cmhq141.pdf

Bit the bullet on making a forum account to bring this up, because it's something I've been running up against more and more as I play more and start to poke around at making and modifying scenarios. Basically I've been finding some bugs, oversights and oddities in TO&Es and thought a place to collate and discuss them would be valuable, as I doubt I'm the only one who has found some, and documenting them all in one place might help players and scenario makers work around what is and isn't there, help the devs identify and rectify technical issues or consider alterations to certain formations/vehicles/teams and also just let some of us politely vent a little bit of frustration. Many of these issues are likely to be extremely simple, a matter of changing a number value in a unit's cargo load or adding something to a force selection list, but given the breadth and depth of content in CM, it's still worth reporting them because otherwise it is very likely that they'll continue to slip through the cracks, as indeed they have done until now. Of course, in an ideal world we could crowdsource solutions from the community rather than just feedback but sadly I don't think TO&E editing is going to be on the cards anytime soon.  
I'll try to break down what I've found so far into Bugs, Oversights and Quibbles: Bugs are things that don't work, formations that should be present in a given period not appearing for selection in Quick Battles and the like, where I anticipate something is supposed to be functioning a certain way but just isn't, Oversights are things that aren't there or haven't been appropriately modified for task or errors in correctly portrayig a unit's historical organisation, ala vehicles not being accessible in the single vehicles tab or having inappropriate cargo/ammunition loads, or the wrong vehicle being the command vehicle of a mixed platform platoon, etc. These are issues that likely were simply missed in the larger scale work of getting the game developed, and Quibbles are things that I just don't like, be it for reasons of history, gameplay/balance or a combination thereof, like the points costing or composition of certain units/vehicles, they will be a lot more long-winded as they require justification. The reason I'm putting these three, potentially very divergent categories all in the same thread is that I don't know BF's intent on each instance and thus can't say with absolute confidence what was a conscious choice that I just happen to disagree with and what was missed or didn't function as intended, so I'd rather none of them be wholly discounted as 'irrelevant to the topic' because their exact origin was not correctly divined, and I also particularly think there is still merit to debate on whether certain TO&E choices are the 'correct' ones (especially in relation to specialist teams, where things are considerably less cut and dry than the documentation backed and relatively rigid organisation of a formation). I'd encourage others who want to add to the list to use the same terminology as consistency will make the information easier to parse, and help avoid muddying the water. 
So, all that waffling out of the way, I'll get to the meat of things, though note that as I've spent most of my time with FI, and mostly the Commonwealth forces therein that's where the majority of things I've turned up are, but I'd like for this thread to eventually be title agnostic. 
--
Bugs
- Fortress Italy German Army Gebirgsjager Battalion is not able to be selected in Quick Battles even when it should be present, though it is available in the scenario editor.
- Fortress Italy and Battle for Normandy British Reconnaissance Regiments are only available in the Infantry tab and thus cannot be taken with their vehicle component in QBs, only scenarios, and vice versa, with a dismounted Recce Regt (a not uncommon occurence especially in Italy) unavailable in the Scenario Editor.
- Fortress Italy Brazilian and Indian forces cannot take any vehicles in QBs due to only having Infantry tabs.
- Battle for Normandy Commonwealth Armoured formations have a Recce Platoon option menu that has only a single entry, 'Stuart Tank', presumably this was intended to work similarly to the one in Fortress Italy British Armoured units where you can select between gun tanks or Stuart Recces with a dismount element, but I'm not sure if its current state is truly a bug or simply a vestigial feature that was cut due to the Stuart Recce being a vehicle pack entry for BfN.
 
Oversights
- Fortress Italy Canadians have no anti-tank gun Specialist Teams.
- Fortress Italy New Zealanders and Indians have no 6-pounder anti-tank gun Specialist Teams (they do however, have 17 pounder ones, unlike the Canadians).
- Fortress Italy British Airborne vehicles (jeeps and the Airborne Infantry tab Supply Platoon) have not had their ammunition loads changed to reflect the paras' use of 9mm at all, let alone their higher concentration of SMGs in general, with twice as much .45 as 9mm despite the only Thompsons in the airborne orgs being in the hands of mortar gunners.
- Fortress Italy and Battle for Normandy British Medium Mortar and 6-pounder ATG Specialist Teams do not come with ammo bearers, while their US and German counterparts do, and when taken in formations British Mortars and ATGs have ammo bearers (This one might be a conscious choice I suppose but that seems like a cruel one if so given the British reliance on supporting fires).
- The Bedford QLT TT truck is not available in the Single Vehicles tab for any Fortress Italy Commonwealth force, and as such can only be brought in lorried infantry battalions. It is available in the Single Vehicles tab in Battle for Normandy.
- The Lloyd mortar carrier is not available in the Single Vehicles tab for FI and BfN Commonwealth forces (Honestly the vehicle itself might be an oversight, as it's only present in anti-tank gun platoons/troops [2x Lloyds + 2x 'mortar' Lloyds per section], and contains ammo for 2 inch mortars, which the anti-tank gun platoons do not have and as far as I know the only use of the Lloyd in a mortar related role was as a transport for the 4.2" Heavy Mortar).
- Battle for Normandy British Armoured Car Squadron Car Troops have one of the scout cars designated as the troop HQ vehicle, which is contrary to the Nov 1943 War Establishments and what accounts I've seen of British AC units in action where the subaltern generally commanded from one of the two Daimler armoured cars.
- Fortress Italy Stuart Recces and BfN Stuart Kangaroos carry no additional ammunition for infantry arms. Particularly rough on the former on account of their organic scout teams.
- Fortress Italy New Zealanders have two different Morris CS8 trucks available in the Single Vehicles tab, one of which has 2" mortar ammo and one of which does not. The former is the only Morris CS8 available to any Commonwealth force in FI that has 2" ammo. 
- Fortress Italy and BfN dismounted carrier formations (Infantry Only Recce Regts and Inf Bat Carrier Platoons) lose access to their section PIAT and 2" airborne mortar entirely as they are stored in their vehicles and the game does not take into account those vehicles not being there in the way it does if one were to select the 'dismounted' option available for many mechanised/motorised platoons. It would be nice if these formations could retain those weapons when dismounted, and/or for the sections to be amalgamated into 9 man sections with a 3x3 structure, as dismounted they must act more conventionally as infantry.
 
Quibbles 
- 2 inch mortar ammo is bizarrely rare in both FI and BfN, despite the 2" being one of the integral platoon weapons of British infantry. The only places it can be found are Lloyd mortar carriers, Bedford QLD GSs (in very small quantities), QLD TTs, the aforementioned Kiwi CS8, and one universal carrier in each carrier section from a carrier platoon (though this ammunition is intended for the section's own airborne 2" rather than the resupply of platoon weapons). Not a single round for can be found in a supply platoon's trucks. This seems very odd to me especially when the 2" already comes with such a small complement of initial ammunition, often only enough for a single engagement. Admittedly, making the QLD TT available as a Single Vehicle in FI will mostly address this one.
- A specific quibble as an example for a greater, broader quibble. Daimler Dingo crews should have a rifle and a Bren gun instead of just revolvers, as the given stowage for the vehicle included a rifle, and the sum total procedure for dismounting the Bren gun on a Dingo was to lift it up out of the slot in the front plate. I often wish to use the Dingo crew to conduct stealthier, foot recce once they've reached the limits of where they can safely take their light vehicle, or used its mobility to get to an advantageous vantage point, but with only a pair of revolvers if they run into literally anything they can't generate enough fire to win or to disengage. This kind of dismounted work is both interesting from a gameplay perspective and historical, so giving the crew the necessary tools to look after themselves is I think fine. The broader quibble is that all recce/armoured recce vehicle crews from all nations should receive their proper allotment of stowed weapons for dismounted work, the Daimler Dingo's just a good example as if required I can post the stowage sketches and a historical example of crews dismounting to infiltrate and then hold a position.
- British Scout and Breach teams just kind of suck, and that's a shame because Specialist teams should be a way to flavour units and represent task organisations. Scout teams for everyone else are a combination of foot recce and assault team that can bolster the point squad in an attack with extra close range firepower. A German Scout team is three men, with three SMGs and a pair of binoculars for 28 pts (assuming Reg/Normal/+0, baseline ratings). A US Scout team costs 35 pts, but gets not just binos and a pair of SMGs, but a pair of demo charges, making it a more assault friendly Breach team, albeit with half as many charges. The British team costs 26 pts, gets one SMG, with a 20% chance of a second one and no binoculars. You might as well just grab a scout or assault team from a rifle section for recon or assault, it doesn't offer a tangential utility like the US team does, and at just 2pts cheaper than the vastly more effective German team it's not even good value in a QB setting. My proposition for improving it is simple: Scout teams represent a task organised or attached down three man foot reconnaissance element for an infantry formation. The British already have just such a unit that the Scout team could be modeled off: The carrier section dismount team, exactly the unit a battalion commander might assign to help scout for a probing platoon or to bolster their automatic firepower in an assault. Pump the points up (given an extra 2 SMGs and a pair of binos apparently clock in at 2pts and the cost of Bren detachment is 26pts, I can't imagine more than 30pts being necessary), give them an SMG, a Bren and a rifle with a 1 in 3 chance of getting a pair of binoculars (representing getting the section leader's team). 

For the Breach team, with no SMG they cannot be relied upon for one of their primary tasks, breaching into structures because they'll often bust in and promptly lose the firefight with people in the room or the next one down where your covering troops who can't follow them in for another turn cannot assist. Also, they get binoculars for some reason, unlike the Scout team. Now, I get why they have no SMG, the British were relatively light on automatic weapons for the most part and it's important not to overcorrect that in the name of gameplay and risk damaging the historical representation of these forces, but, I'm fairly certain there were instances where CW units' SMGs were task organised into concentrations in the frontline units, particularly for urban fighting, and I think a Breach team is a good opportunity to represent that. I don't want to make a concrete statement that it was done because I can't remember what sources I heard it from and in which battles (I want to say Ortona but I just cannot remember) but giving them a weapon distribution the same as the current Scout team (1 SMG with 1 in 5 chance of a second) or just a pair of SMGs would go a long way to making them a bit more fun to use.
- FI and BfN British Motor Platoons should probably have a chance at a second SMG in their first section and the platoon commander should have a higher chance of a rifle or SMG than a revolver. Motor platoons had 7 SMGs in their war establishment per platoon and 20 rifles. 15 Rifles in the sections, another 3 for the mortarmen and HQ, that leaves two 'spare' for 2 of the drivers, and similarly, 5 SMGs are drawn by the HQ, Mortar team and similarly, 2 are left for the drivers, nominally. However, given the job of a driver, I've some pretty hefty doubts that the Platoon commander was happy to leave a functional rifle or SMG in the trunk to saunter about with his revolver, but this is conjectural because I've yet to find much of anything detailed written about the motor battalions.
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Well, if you made it through that godawful meandering novella of a post, thank you, feel free to chime in with your own TO&E discrepancies if you've run into any, gripes if you've got them, or just to tell me I'm wrong, again my hope here is that this can be a bit of a ongoing thread for CM TO&E discussion and analysis.