domfluff

Ha, I did mock up a quick version of this following the analysis video. Glad to see you picked this one up and ran with it.

Since Javelins can be used against helicopters and also individuals, I suspect it'd do fine against a landing craft.

Agreed, but I don't think that's remotely surprising. Hmmm. I'd give that one about twelve months to bed in. Clearly something has gone wrong here, but precisely why, and to what extent isn't yet clear. It's certainly possible to speculate on possible reasons, but only some of those reasons might be relevant or systemic. The Ukranian army of 2022 is not the same army as the one of 2014. I do think there's a good argument that CMBS may have over-represented that army. CMBS is set in 2017, but certainly not the same 2017 as in reality, and a lot was learnt very quickly.

Yeah, I get why terrain triggers aren't a thing. It's frustrating, but I understand why. Thinking about it, I suppose the reason why order triggers don't work are that we can't know what groups are actually going to be used - it's no good waiting for an order from AI Group 4 when the AI has assigned things to 1, 2 and 7.

Great video, thank you man. I'm really curious why you stopped the advance on the right. Allowing your force to grind to a halt is what cost you here I think - the hills look like the M60 could engage you 2-3 tanks at a time, and that's always a fight they're going to win. Halting then meant the artillery could catch up to you, to seal the deal. Your comments as to recon - the correct use of recon assets in the Soviet sense is to send a formation (typically a platoon, sometimes a platoon with an attached tank or even two) to roam ahead of the main force. They're not trying to spot the enemy, strictly - instead they're progressing along the line of advance - the exact same line of advance that the main body is going to follow - with the idea of finding and impacting the line of resistance. They're not trying to get themselves killed - the encounter with the M150 is a good example of the right kind of thing - but the M60 that halted you should have been engaged with a single recon platoon, rather than the main line of your armour. That would have allowed you to work out where that position was, and to pop over the crest with all of your tanks, looking in the right direction. I did like the "feint" to the left, but flank security is a thing, and having a platoon dedicated to that as well is important. It's hard to see your fireplan explicitly, but it didn't look daft. I do wonder if you could have pre-emptively cut the possible reinforcement lines with some of that though.

I've been doing some thinking about this. I agree that with a game like Combat Mission, having a scenario that each player has a 50% chance of winning ("balanced") is both not really plausible, and worse, doesn't really play to the strengths of the game. I think the better option for balance is a scenario which gives each player an equally interesting problem to solve. Those scenarios that can do that, or something close to it, are the ones which should be suitable for H2H play. If they can't offer that, then perhaps they're better off being AI-only.

Yeah, the workaround was to do the facing order with a second, dummy order - having a facing order on setup doesn't seem to do much. I get why the terrain triggers disappear (they disappear, and don't convert), but Order triggers also seem to not work, which seems odd to me.

1. Is there any reason why, or way to stop everything in a QB facing the same direction at deployment? I was recently working on something where N and S were set as the friendly edges for both sides, and every unit set up facing East. The workaround for any static elements was a dummy order following setup which consisted of a facing command, but I wonder if there's something I'm missing. 2. Am I correct that no triggers work in Quick Battles? Terrain triggers disappear, which doesn't surprise me. Order triggers don't seem to function (but I could be wrong) - so you have to do everything with time-only?

Nope. Sort-of. No. CMBS is set in 2017, and there's more to be gained from respecting that setting than speculating on a near-future one - there's more information available, for a start. Whether there will be changes in the 2014 TO&E to reflect the reality of 2017 Russia is a different story - that happened with CMSF 2, certainly.

So from the same calculator, I make that 0.18 degrees, not twice as much. It could probably go a bit lower and flatter than that (this was only a quick guess), and at that inclination doesn't reach as high as 5m. Trajectory at 0.18:

Obviously that 4cm "miss" doesn't take into account the 7.5cm shell, or that the tank is a 3D object, but again, this kind of tool is useful to get some understanding of the physics involved, but one that needs to be applied carefully to real-world results. Spherical elephants in a vacuum, etc.

So I make that an angle of about 0.18 degrees, which means at 600m, the shell is at +50cm. The height of a Panzer IV is 2.68m, with the turret taking about a third (judging by eye) of that, or 0.89m. Centre of the turret then has 0.46m either side of it. That means the top of the tank is 4cm lower than the "point blank" (which I agree, pedantically, is not the correct term - "point blank" would mean "can hit without using the sights" in this sense), or rather the pre-zeroed position. CM is also explicitly not a firing range - it's a design principle that there is an assumption that you're involved in full-on combat - so there will be deviation from that point. That'll take the form of a vertical ellipse from this central point, and the size of that ellipse will depend on too many factors to guess at (but you can iterate solutions to get a reasonable idea).

Its worth pointing out that the battlesight is zeroed to a figure, which we believe to be 800m (since this was increased for cold war). That means that although I do think ballistic calculation isn't entirely the wrong tool to use here, the angle certainly will *not* start at zero degrees - best way to model that is for the shell to lose zero height at 800m (so the trajectory will go up, then down), for the given velocity. Then it's worth considering both error bars, and the height of the exposed portion of the tank. This is a good tool to help understand ballistics, but it does need to be used carefully

I'm not sure how this could possibly be relevant to CM Cold War

Yup. My understanding was that it's not likely that the Russian army would use MT-12s in a direct fire role in a scenario like CMBS presents. They'll still exist, sure, but then lots of things still exist that I imagine they wouldn't deploy to the front if they could help it.

The manual has them only for Ukranian forces (as per reality, for the most part), which presumably means that the Russian formation for them shouldn't exist.

Indeed. TRPs are the way to "pre-plan" stuff that isn't plannable inside 15 minutes, and should be leaned on for precisely that reason. I don't think this is a desperately important point - the tools that currently exist will do a decent job of it - but it would be nice to have some more control.

Yeah, there's a number of things like that - whilst it's certainly going to be difficult to pre-planned effectively deep into a scenario, there doesn't seem to be a reason why this can't be set to 5/10/15 - why not 20, or why not 7 for that matter? Similar to quick battle points - it's useful to also have some guidelines, but the lack of a "custom" points value seems odd. It's probably one of those holdovers from cmsf1 and the assumptions made at that point.

MT-12 is in-game, yes. It's only in service in the direct fire AT role for the Ukranians though. There are actually two variants - the MT-12 and the MT-12K, the latter of which can fire ATGMS.

I have previously watched it, and it's a pretty good overview. "Winning" with Active Defence was never really an option, and ultimately winning tactically or operationally can never be, because there's no proactivity to it. The aim then was to slow, delay, and make room for a strategic or especially political victory - something which wargaming, and especially wargaming of that period, tends to model very badly. Whether "winning" on that level is plausible is more guesswork. CM:CW sits right at that switch-over, and I think does a good job of showing why that would be the case at the tactical level - the disparity in numbers and raw strength means that you're forced into a defence in depth (so, similar to the Syrians in CMSF), and your mobility and coordination allows you to perform an elastic defence effectively (unlike the Syrians in CMSF). Whilst Active Defence might well have had no chance of winning (and as ever with Cold War it's *really* important to specify timeframe here, but let's say the seventies), I'm not sure there were too many other options on the table, given the equipment and the state of the US army post-Vietnam. The more Bradleys, Abrams and M60A3 TTS you start throwing in, the more the US play like the US in CMSF. The enemy is still better equipped than the Syrian army there, so it's not a complete stomp, but it's a lot more of a stomp than the rest of the game. What I do think is interesting is that all of the NATO powers were pursuing some kind of "defence in depth" strategy, but the manner they went about it was quite different. (Some of this is from some inadequate sourcing, especially for the Bundeswehr, so take it for what it's worth) The US was pursing "virtual" depth through an elastic defence (so "sideways", if you like), because their key weapon was TOW. The aim was to maximise the number of 2km+ engagements and keep the enemy more than 1km away at all times. The British emphasised actual depth ("backwards") and counter-attack, with the structure being built around Chieftain, especially it's heavy armour and 120mm cannon. The Germans instead emphasised creating depth forward - dropping off infantry defensively and them roaming ahead with Leopard and Marder independently, creating depth in what would otherwise be the enemy position. The key weapon then is Leopard 1, and the mobility that would offer, as well as using Marder more like a light tank.

So, a point on that - quite aside from the main doctrinal answer above: CMCW is specifically about the Soviet army attacking into Germany, a highly mechanised force rolling over tank country. That's not true for all potential theatres - if Cold War becomes the most popular CM title and ends up with modules for everything possible, then fighting in Scandinavia, especially Norway, would be likely to be a lot more infantry-centric, dictated by the complexity of the terrain. The same formations would be expected to fight there, but there would be a lot more emphasis on lighter vehicles and the GPMG.

Whilst I think history seems to have shown that smaller, decentralised control is the better solution to modern warfare - suggested by how both the Russian and Ukrainian armies have pushed things further and further down their organisational structure, especially artillery, although this has happened in different ways - I do think there are still potential advantages to a centralised system, especially on the offensive. To take the extremes in the abstract: a battalion which operates as a single unit requires minimal orders to get going. Everyone knows their place, and where everyone else is, so the command structure can be made pretty simple. In the other extreme, where every platoon commander can run off on his own initiative, I suspect the end result could look a lot like herding cats. Sure, that can be overcome with proper drill and training, etc., but that's not as necessary for the centralised approach, which can also be an advantage. Clearly the main loss is flexibility - "battalions as ammunition" is correct, I think, in the sense that it's a resource to expend in order to accomplish a task, much like an artillery battery, but that implies you're committing it and hoping that it works. If something unexpected happens, you're probably relying on the regiment committing a second battalion to do something about it.

Yup yup. The distinction is that the Soviet offensive doctrine appears to have been rather more developed and sophisticated, whilst NATO's offensive doctrine was rather more vague. The opposite is mostly true defensively, of course.

Attacker Force Ratios Meeting Engagement: 1 : 1 Probe: 1.5 : 1 Attack: 1.65 : 1 Assault: 1.8 : 1 Worth mentioning that 3:1 force ratios are an ideal, not a reality. Engagements don't happen in a vacuum. "What am I to do?" - you need to use the terrain and shape the situation to produce local superiority. To use Hapless' Death Ride series as an example - if he'd followed the course I suggested in the aftermath, dividing the battlefield with his artillery, and sending everything on a push to the left, he'd have had an entire tank battalion of 31 T-62s and supporting BMPs coming up against an isolated platoon of 5 M60s and a single M901, who wouldn't have lasted long. That's a ratio of at least 6:1.

That formation (and the similar one for the BTR formations, that has MG teams and AT-7/SPG-9 assets) were intended to form a hasty defence after the objective was taken - it was a way to have something carried with you that could resist an immediate counter-attack, before you had a chance to be reinforced, resupplied and/or recovered. So the intention is for them to be used defensively, generally split down and supporting individual platoon/squad positions. Since that's the intent, the best way to use them would be to form the basis of your defence in defensive scenarios, supplementing the AT assets (which in BMP formations are the BMPs themselves), with perhaps some infantry set aside for that task, and the main effort being the counter-attacking element you've held back. Outside of that context, they're more or less along for the ride. You can certainly use them as infantry or as your recon platoon or whatever, but that's not really what they're for.