domfluff

Yes, it's usually a good idea to dot along contour lines, rather than tracing them out in full. You still want to dot every 3-4 action spots or so sometimes, at least for the more complex height changes.. It can look better if you actually dot two spaces at a time (i.e., Direct-ly assign two adjacent action spots, then another pair four squares away, or something like that).

Yeah, sort of. One of the things that CM:A does very well is to show how inappropriate the Soviet system was for the fighting in Afghanistan. The fight really was a light infantry war, and they didn't have the flexibility or low-level independence needed to cope with it. They can bring massive, unstoppable amounts of firepower to bear, but that's no good if the enemy isn't there anymore. This did develop over the war, and by the end they were leaning heavily on air assault and vertical envelopment to quickly react, isolate and neutralise hideouts and positions, but all of the changes were expediencies, and the core issues remained.

I really like the mortar team

Their ability to fire directly, either over massive ranges or at targets just out of line of sight from anywhere on the map, can be extremely powerful - those are good reasons to have them both mobile and armoured. That they can also be used to call in fires from an FO is a bonus really - the only advantage they really offer in that mode are the radios in the vehicles, so if that was their only intended use then you may as well not bother and have conventional mortar teams.

I've not had that problem, indeed I've used them to do both recently. That might mean that if there's a problem, it's a problem with a specific model or scenario. Do you have a save file, or any more details?

I have a vague memory of seeing this issue occur in CMBS, but it happens a lot in CMCW. It's typically when the Bradley engages a hard target with the TOW off-axis, and then the turret returns to the centre, but the TOW launcher does not.

A couple of points on this. A representative line from the Gefechtsausbildung der Panzergrenadiere (Helmut von Wehren, 1944), translates as: "The squad fights mounted from the vehicle, as long as enemy fire, terrain and mission permits." There has been a very common trend, both on this forum and elsewhere, of focusing more on the first part of that sentence than the last. Indeed, that same manual has a lot of examples of squad attack, and the majority of them are dismounting for combat, with the SPW in support. I'd suggest that the circumstances where "dropping grenades from the halftrack" are reasonable are going to be those similar to the use-case of the Flamm SPW 251/16 - e.g., used as a reactive force against a counter attack (as per that Panzergrenadier training film, which itself is rather optimistic), and employed against the enemy occupied trenches after the firefight has been won. You can see this kind of situation rather more clearly in Combat Mission that something with the granularity of the WRG rules - since spotting can be on an individual soldier basis, it's not impossible that you can "clear" a trench position, but actually miss an enthusiastic individual with an ATR, who could recover and shoot you in the rear. A burst of flame or two against an "empty" trench is a quick way of ensuring that there's no surprises waiting for you. This is going to be of chief importance when under significant time restraints, as with the counter-attack example. In that kind of use-case you're trying to seal up the breach in your lines very quickly, before the follow-on forces can exploit it. The expectation, though, is that the fight has been won, so any enemy extant are having some kind of emotional event, and you can reasonably expect to roll up to within grenade range of these trenches without return fire. Further, the above manual was produced in 1944, but would have been derived from earlier in the war. Earlier in the war, infantry-held AT options were limited, and that's inevitably going to be the chief concern with this. The second is the essay that John Curry wrote in the back of his publication of the Contact! rules, about the way the BAOR intended to fight. I've asked him for sourcing, since it's the best description I've read for the BAOR doctrine from the strategic to the combat team level. He mentioned that "This should be considered first hand testimony. I was there as an officer. I worked with a number of units and I was briefed on lots of things including the BAOR operational plan." In that, he discussed the relative paucity of offensive doctrine in the BAOR. Specifically in terms of dismounting FV-432s, and how close this should be to the objective. In that essay, he makes the claim that opinions on this varied, and there wasn't a definitive answer in the British doctrine. For what it's worth, my opinion on this is that whilst dismounting inside grenade range gets you across the last 300 yards, it represents a tremendous risk. You can't ever know for certain that 100% of their AT assets are supressed or out of action, especially from the back of a vehicle, so leaving the vehicle blind and potentially under fire seems like a huge roll of the dice to me. It's also worth considering tactical problems such as these: http://armchairgeneral.com/tactic-101-103-bradley-platoon-attack.htm Where the (modern) Bradley platoon is dismounted a full 2km away from the objective, to make the most use of the Bradley's weapon systems, with the mounted element advancing once the dig-in BMP has been removed. Clearly this increases the time of this platoon attack significantly - pushing it up to 90 minutes, but I suspect it's a good indication of what this kind of thing should look like. Incidentally, there were two things which I really hoped Battlegroup would do, and was disappointed to see that it didn't really do either. The first was a comparative study on the various NATO concepts of the battlegroup, for instance how British, US and German doctrine differed on the subject, especially at the Combat Team and Battlegroup level. My sources on the Bundeswehr are distressingly limited, and the aforementioned John Curry, uncited essay is the best I've seen on the BAOR. I'm desperate for more on this subject. The second is a lot more rigor around outlining your methodology. I'm very much a proponent of the power of wargaming as a instructive or investigative tool, but it's extremely hard to understand your conclusions in this case. There's a lot of telling, but not much showing. To use the IFV assault example, I'd have hoped to have see some diagrams and discussion illustrating your attempts to make IFVs work under the WRG rules, and where and when those failed, even if the examples were only representative. Without that grounding, it's very hard to engage with the argument, because an argument isn't really being made - there's no listed assumptions or method to base things on, so the only element the reader has is the claimed result.

TTS and Vassal are functionally doing the same thing - a simulation of a boardgame on the table in front of you. TTS is in a 3D engine, which helps with a number of things, and is much easier to amend and prototype stuff with - it's trivial to import/create new objects. I significantly prefer TTS for live play. Vassal is the stronger option for PBEM.

Still not exactly what you want, but an interesting article discussing the logic and organisation of various modern IFV and APC solutions with their dismounts, as well as where those came from. http://www.regimentalrogue.com/blog/caj_vol13.3_06_e.pdf

Oh quite - hitting the thing at all at that distance was lucky, setting the ammo off was also somewhat lucky (but then hitting a BMP in the side/rear means you're quite lucky to be hitting *something* meaningful, and they are crammed with ammo and fuel - they're really only designed to take hits from the front, if at all)

Yes, hard to come up with specifics. In the broadest terms though, you'll certainly want to focus on a single portion of the front. Since that looks like there's a solid line of enemy armour across the entire width of the map, it doesn't look as though that's possible to do with manoeuvre. That's... well, aside from that not being terribly interesting, that means that the only tool you have to work with will be artillery. You'll need a fire plan to shape the battlefield for you, to create a local advantage, which your armour can than exploit. That will likely be a combination of HE and smoke rounds, depending on what assets are actually available. In terms of planning the actual attack, your forces are likely to be better at closer ranges against the Panzers. Without knowing all of the specifics, this is the kind of thing I'd start looking at: The forward element (yellow) appears to be out of position and isolated, so you can deal with that en masse with little difficulty, since you'll be attacking with 6:1 odds or so. If you head to the right, the green element looks as though that would be unable to engage due to the terrain. If so, you're passively eliminating a bunch of the opposition. The orange area is then the focus of the fire mission, giving you some cover through smoke and suppression, and allowing you to focus your mass against the platoon to the right rear, another 6:1 attack or close to it. When that's dealt with, the focus is on pushing through, and bypassing the position, if at all possible. There's presumably no need to turn back and re-engage the Panzer line, depending on the precise mission parameters.

1) One trend in the "lessons learned" from Ukraine has been a push towards heavier vehicles in general, and heavier carriers in specifics. That may well just be a tactical concern though, since a war in the Donbas doesn't require vast operational movement. The BMP by this point (especially the BMP-1 and BMP-2) are very old vehicles, and were not designed for anything like this generation of weapons. The BMP of any model is a glass cannon - extremely high amounts of firepower, with limited protection (although there's been some change on that). 2) In CMCW (or the Cold War), this sentence is pretty much backwards. To take a CM-specific example, an adjusted 155mm DPICM cluster mission can be on target in as little as two minutes. Dismounting is slow, and slow is the one thing the Soviets can never afford to be - for a number of reasons they are forced into the proactive role in a tactical sense. Doctrinally, the BMPs were supposed to fight mounted wherever possible. When not possible (which means sufficient unsuppressed AT assets or complex terrain, although what "sufficient" means is an interesting question here), the intention would be to dismount as close as possible to the target - typically within 300m. If you're facing heavy enough AT assets, then dismount range would be at 1000m, but that's going to make the attack very unlikely to succeed. Aside from terrain and AT, the main other reasons to dismount are situational awareness and the extra firepower. It's a good mental exercise to try to plan your offensive assuming that you're never going to dismount, and work out what you'd have to do to ensure that this is successful. Then you have the option of dismounting if that makes something easier. 3) All BMPs have most of their armour to their heavily sloped front. They're designed to be pointing at the enemy. The BMP-3M in particular has quite significant frontal armour, which makes it hard for a Bradley to penetrate it with the 25mm autocannon. There's been a move towards larger calibres across NATO for this reason, and more vehicles are getting 40mm cannon because of it. Clearly the TOW will still wreck them. In CMBS, the BMP-3M (ERA) can resist 25mm fire at a reasonable range pretty well. It's not great, but there's a good chance of surviving and sending a lethal attack in return. Clearly the Javelin is an overmatch to most things on CM battlefields, and the BMP won't change that, but that would be true in "Blue v Blue" scenario as well, so I don't really think the ability of a US rifle squad to deal with BMPs is indicative of the BMP's design necessarily.

The 40mm 203 has a HEAT round, which is more than capable of taking out a BMP. It's not terribly reliable, especially from the front, but it can certainly do it.

I'm not sure that first point is clear at all - indeed, there have been several books written about it, and ultimately their failings. My general understanding was that Soviet Advisors were rarely of the military sort. It does seem to be that for the run up to the 1973, the Soviet Union was more closely involved with Syrian policy than it was before or afterwards, but I don't know how much that carried across into operational and tactical planning. You may well be correct, but I don't think it's clear. As to the utility of the BMP in general, I'm going to put this in terms of experience with CMCW here, since that's at least grounded in something testable, even if his does not necessarily align exactly with reality. The 73mm HEAT round can frontally penetrate any and all NATO armour of the period - Leopard 1, M60 and even Chieftain. The ATGM clearly can do even better at range. AT-3s have all of the obvious problems of that manual system, but the later AT-5s do not, and represent a very scary proposition. Fighting from within the vehicle is often stated as being an NBC concern, and I imagine that's true, but CMCW shows that there is utility to remaining mounted far beyond that. In the context of CMCW, the US artillery call-in times are incredibly fast, and dismounting takes precious time. The Soviets on a tactical level have to keep moving, and and dismounting for combat is going to result in being hit with artillery within 2-5 minutes. This doesn't mean that firing ports are a good idea, but it does mean you should probably be dismounting later with your BMP infantry, if you dismount them at all. Never dismounting is a viable and defensible option with them. The problems? The BMP is blind and cramped, it only has a one man turret, the 73mm is a good AT option, but it's rate of fire is too low to suppress infantry effectively (the 73mm gun was originally supposed to be an AGL, but they needed an AT option to cover the AT-3's minimum range). It's a troop carrier, so it's inherently vulnerable and it's expected to fight, so it's going to be exposed. Some of those are issues with every IFV (and indeed the entire IFV concept), and some of those are unique to the BMP-1. The end result though is that you have a vehicle which packs a tremendous amount of firepower in a small space, and is a threat to everything on the CMCW battlefield. As a design it's a compromise, as all IFVs are, but I definitely do not think that in the context of CMCW that it can be dismissed.

I think "the BMP was a failure" is a tricky sentence to claim, since it's never been used in the context for which it was intended (i.e., rolling into West Germany with the Soviet Army). Iraqi BMPs were hugely outclassed by Desert Storm, certainly, and they were (among many other things) the wrong tool and doctrine to fight in Afghanistan with. 1973 I'm less clear on, but clearly is not the Soviet army, and by most accounts none of the operators were employing it as per Soviet doctrine, which makes it a hard thing to judge. In a CM context, the BMP-1 and BMP-2 are pretty laughable in CMSF. The BMP-3 is scary in CMBS, but outclassed by the Bradley. In Cold War, however, the BMP-1 and BMP-1P are terrifying vehicles, which make an awful lot more sense. That would be even more true the further back you go, especially since it was introduced in the sixties.

In terms of specifically Panzergrenadiers (which will be a small part of, but quite distinct from, the original question), there are some good videos that Military History Visualised has put out. Two I've found useful for use with CM:

Yeah, this is something I'd really like to dig into myself. There have been some rather controversial takes recently in print, and I'd certainly like a clearer understanding of everything involved. Broadly, I think the outline is pretty clear - you have some early examples in WW1, and some more focused experiences with Universal carriers, SPWs, tank riders and experiments with Kangaroos in WW2. Then the Soviets began mechanising everything with the early BTRs, and then changed the game significantly with the BMP - causing everyone else to catch up (with a possible exception made there for the Shutzenpanzer Lang HS.30). More recently, there's been a couple of trends - APC-like vehicles seem to have been gaining heavily firepower (blurring the line between them and IFVs), APCs have sometimes been getting heavier in general, and there's been a move to wheeled vehicles for increased operational mobility and flexibility (Stryker, Boxer, etc.). Doctrinally through, there seems to have been significant debate on correct usage of infantry transport over the years, and that doesn't look like it's being resolved any time soon. How much you fight whilst mounted, when you dismount, and what the fundamental purpose of the vehicle is has been debated up and down the spectrum. For instance: My understanding of current Bradley practice is that the default would be that the infantry dismount at a significant distance from the target, and assault on foot as light infantry would (perhaps on a long move under cover, attacking the target from a flank). The Bradleys then provide organic long-range fire support, presumably in co-ordination with the formation mortars. This is distinct from BMP practice, which is to keep the squad and BMP together as a single unit - and perhaps not to dismount at all, if they can help it. This clearly preserves tempo, but does increase the possibility of losing a transport with all hands. German practice, as I understand it, was to use the Marder as a light tank in support of the armour - roaming *ahead* of the infantry, and using the infantry position as a line to fall back behind. (First time I read this was in "When the Squad Dismounts", a period article from Infantry magazine). I do have a copy of that floating around on the discord, but I don't have one to hand right now. Should be able to post it later though. All three of those approaches seem like they can offer major advantages, so none of them seem stupid. They're all pretty distinct though. Certainly the field manuals tend to talk about various options - dismounting before the objective, on the objective or past the objective - in the latter case, the attacking force would attack on and through, and then isolate and screen the objective, allowing the infantry to clear up. Some of the techniques discussed, especially the US Cold War stuff around the M113 formations seem... ambitious, looking at them with a CM lens.

Quite right, that was the "first clue". Tests since then have been carried out with the TC vs individual soldier, and have shown the same weird jump in accuracy.

Yes, the lack of detail in that article is frustrating, especially as it gets posted every single time this comes up. I actually tried to recreate it as best I could from the description (50x US 155mm shells versus a mix of M113, M577 and M48), and the end result in CMCW was actually significantly more devastating than the vague description in the article - 60% of armour was immobilised, and 100% of the light vehicles were destroyed. That's a lot better than the "50 percent suffered damage that would have prevented them from moving or firing" quoted in the article. I'm still more than willing to believe that artillery damage against subsystems is too low, but I've yet to see any hard data that actually shows this. Instead, the same article gets posted over and over, which doesn't include any rigorous data.

Again, both circumstances are the same weapon, firing directly at the soldier - so both are the AI aiming and firing at a man-sized target. The end result is that the shots that are targeting the tank commander/gunner are significantly more accurate that those on a target on foot.

So, my (limited) understanding: 1) A TRP is a pre-measured range, and some trigonometry. I imagine that it doesn't really matter how you measure that range, but the easiest and most accurate way would be to fire the thing pre-battle. 2) GPS does allow for pre-measured ranges, but with greater inaccuracy. You can target based on a grid reference and a computer, but they still teach the spotting cycle that CM demonstrates, even if it's not the first choice. 3) Pre-measuring the range allows you to (for example) get your sights aligned correctly. By default your sights might be set to 300m, so if you've premeasured the distance to a nearby ridgeline as 200m, and you're tasked with defending from that direction, then you can set your sights to 200m. That way, hitting is mostly lining the sights over the target. Now, in CM there's some abstraction - CM can't know what you're intending to do with a given rifle platoon, so it has to give a bonus to everything that's firing in that area.

Hah, wow. Well, that's new to me.

You're not doing anything wrong. Pre-battle intel is something that's designed in to the scenarios. The campaign missions are scenarios that have been packed together (and carry over losses, etc. with a script), so you can't view them individually, without a third party tool to unpack them. When the scenario does and does not give you pre-battle intel, and how much it gives you, will depend on the scenario in question. Typically it represents prior reconnaissance, which would only make sense against a mostly static position, and not if the situation was more fluid. The actual system is set as a percentage, and will give you a number of random spotting contacts at the start. That might be extremely helpful, or it might be useless - that will mostly come down to luck.

They are trying to target the individual soldier in both cases (and granted they're not exactly the same, but they're as close as you can get), but that the dispersion from the first is significantly more. This is clearer with automatic fire, since that will inevitably spread more for all of the obvious reasons. This really looks like a bug in the underlying calculation, rather than something intentional or working as designed. Where that bug actually is obviously not known (it'd require a look at the algorithm, for a start), I wouldn't take my suggestion of the cause as anything other than baseless speculation, but it's where I'd start looking personally.

AT Guns and their employment. As with many things in CM, there's more to a weapon that just their basic stats or points value. The enemy gets a vote, and this should be taken into account. An AT position which is set up to directly engage armour head-on is going to die pretty quickly. You might get the jump on them and kill the first tank to cross into your sights, but then you've given away your position, and the immediate response will be incoming HE from tank rounds or mortar fire. You are slow, static, and don't have any good defence against this - even digging in to protect against mortars doesn't really help you continue the fight, since if you're suppressed then the enemy has already won the engagement. The important point, then is to combine a couple of principles, illustrated here in FM7-35 (ANTITANK COMPANY, INFANTRY REGIMENT, 1944). In the above: 1 is a covered position, safe from observation and fires. Your transport will stay here. 2 is the primary position for the 57mm weapon. 3 is an alternate position, still capable of performing the same function, but sufficiently far away from the primary position to avoid fires 6 is the observer (The missing numbers are for a secondary mission, which isn't relevant here). You'll note a couple of things - the guns are behind a ridgeline, giving them protection from the terrain. Ideally they would also be dug in. There's an emphasis on spotting and relaying information, as well as shifting into another pre-planned position if needed. Most importantly, the engagement is at an oblique angle. At no point are the guns pointed directly down a long road, outside of their effective range - instead the point where the road clears the treeline is the point where the guns can engage. By engaging obliquely like this, the guns will immediately minimise both opportunities to observe their position, as well as a position to assemble a base of fire. Clearly an oblique engagement will also improve the chances of flanking shots, but that's not necessarily the main reason to do it. I *don't* think it's sufficient to think about AT guns in the context of "well, at least I killed more points of the enemy than I lost". That isn't an entirely useless measure, but it's pretty far down the list of importance. The role of the AT here is to give the enemy a dilemma, and to force a response.