domfluff

Controlled Pairs mostly does CQB-related stuff, as his name implies, but he's definitely got a good mentality for CM. His CM videos have been doing pretty well for him, so that's encouraging.

Yeah, that’s the one I linked above- it’s one of the more useful for Cold War in general (as company level manuals tend to be)

Slow is the best command to crest hills, certainly, and for a number of reasons - not least is that it exposes the minimum amount of you before you get into a firing position.

You're not wrong, but the issue is mostly when you're scaling up to do longer road moves with complex movements, especially with battalion sized forces, on multi-kilometre maps. It's still more than possible to do that manually, but the interface firmly does not scale to that kind of thing, so you're left with an awful lot of clicks to work through.

Yes. The convoy command clearly isn't the end-all of features, but there are firm use-cases for it, particularly on titles with larger maps like Cold War. The dream would be for some more extensive formation movement options, which you'd imagine the convoy command could be the start of. Being able to spread a platoon and have them keep an approximate formation would be very handy for this kind of behind-lines busywork. Neither convoy, nor a hypothetical formation move would be a combat order, obviously, but there are still many situations where that would improve things significantly.

As an aside the ranges are a large reason why Cold War is such a strong title, assuming you're playing on a sufficiently large map. 1km for squad-level ATGMs means that on a map that has at least 3km in one direction, there's suddenly a ton of room for manoeuvre. You don't have the CMSF problem of your Abrams platoon rolling out from the deployment zone to a decent hill and just sitting there until the match is over. The 4km maps that CM can manage are arguably a little too small for Black Sea and Shock Force (and most of their maps in game, especially Quick Battle maps, are far too small - 6km might be fine), but they suit Cold War perfectly, and give you plenty of room for a battalion-sized Soviet force to do it's thing.

Cold War AT ranges are fairly consistent across both factions, and are in basically three bands. Short range is dictated by the range of the RPG-7 and LAW, and are about 300m. Medium range is defined by the range of the Dragon and AT-7/SPG-9, and is about 1000m Long range is defined by TOWs and AT-4/AT-5s, and is 2000m+ Armour in this period slots in between the medium and long range, so engagements at around 1500m are fairly typical. The gunnery is still WW2-level for the most part, so longer ranged shots will be very inaccurate, and kinetic penetrators will lose much of their energy at extreme range. I've seen tank duels at 3-4km between M60A1 and T-62 (tanks which can typically kill each other pretty easily) where the kinetic rounds are mostly bouncing off, simply due to the distances involved. That's the basic answer to your question, but it's worth discussing some complexities: The Soviet tanks in 1979-1980 are, broadly, superior to the US armour. The T-62 (1975), for example, has similar armour to an M60A1, but has a laser rangefinder (rather than the optical co-incidence rangefinder than the M60 has), and a gun with a significantly higher velocity. That will mean a flatter trajectory, so greater accuracy and penetration. The situation for the US broadly gets worse with the T-64 and up, since there is a significant uptick in armour, and the composite turret makes the available HEAT rounds mostly ineffective from the front. The HEAT rounds do not rely on kinetic energy, so weapons that can deliver HEAT over distance are obviously useful - the most accurate way to deliver a HEAT round over distance is an ATGM, and this is the logic behind the development of the M60A2 Starship. This vehicle was obsolete pretty much by the time it was deployed, owing to the changes in Soviet armour with the T-64, but the desire to take these extreme-range engagements is a reasonable one. Those NTC training scenarios are the only all-armour scenarios I've actually enjoyed in CM, mostly as the terrain is excellent, and the opponent has a chance to actually win. The point of them really is to show the development of armour across the period, and partly to show quite how ridiculously dominant the Abrams are in 1982. That latter scenario is neither particularly interesting nor fun, but I think it's an important step in the conceptual process behind CM: Cold War. In terms of tactics, the US is really built on these combined arms companies. Something like two platoons of mechanised infantry, a tank platoon, a couple of TOW launchers and some organic mortars. This unit is a self-contained, self-sufficient fighting element, which is useful since the assumption was that these would be overrun. This is a really good reference for that, in this period: https://books.google.ca/books?id=My8-u2rYNVoC Broadly though, the TOWs define your area of influence, since they're your long ranged firepower. The infantry define the space you're fighting in, protecting flanks and holding ground, and the armour is a mobile concentration of power, either the thrust of your main effort, or a mobile reserve. The 5-tank platoon should typically split into two fireteams of 3 and 2, with one covering the movement of the other. It's important especially against the Soviets to use terrain to mask your movement, and to use the terrain to control your engagements - there will typically be more Soviet tanks than US tanks, and they're superior to your armour, so you can't take them head-on. You need to set up situations where you have local superiority in firepower and numbers.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

The nice thing about it is that it allows the commander to rotate and engage independently. The shot trap is an obvious concern, but giving you 360 degree vision and the ability to quickly engage a flanking unit is pretty nice in CMCW.

Would you mind expanding on that? "Not working" and "behaving weirdly" aren't terribly precise, and I'd be curious to know what they actually mean.

Well, the best approach is to have performed effective terrain analysis and reconnaissance, such that you have scouted out likely AT gun positions, and destroyed or suppressed them with indirect fires. The second best approach with a tank platoon with 4 or 5 tanks moving into open ground would be to split them into two groups. One should be in cover (for example, if you were cresting a hill to get into the open ground, then this first group could be in hull down positions on this crest). When this first group is in position, the second group would move. Ideally, this move would be to another piece of cover, but that can be situationally dependent. This second group probably wants to cross this open ground as fast as possible, so as to minimise the time that they are exposed. In an ideal situation you never want to fight on the move, and your stationary group needs to have line of sight to the areas where AT assets could be hidden. This is what will determine the limit of advance of the moving element.

Not firm numbers, no. It's tough to test - you'd want something that could run at least hundreds or perhaps thousands and accumulate comparative data that way. We do know that experience level has many effects in-game. It does affect the speed of spotting, the speed at which spotting contacts are shared, firing accuracy and the rate at which you recover from suppression, at least

http://fighting-vehicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Centurion-Tank-Target-Vehicle.jpg This one had a non-notional crew. It was a Centurion, with incredibly thick armour on one side, painted white and fired at by warhead-less ATGMs on Salisbury plain. Footage at timestamp:

Welcome to the Cold War. For the last few months, something I've found useful to repeat quite a few times is "Shock Force teaches bad habits". The fundamentals of how you manage a tank platoon have not changed since the Second World War, but you can get away with being incredibly sloppy in Shock Force and to a lesser extent in Black Sea - the technological advantage carries a ton of weight for you. The NTC campaign is a really good example of that. You're usually fighting an Opfor battalion, and you're doing it with a platoon of M60A1. A platoon of Abrams in the same situation would destroy all before them, but the M60A1 needs to be used carefully, masked by terrain, setting up flank shots, etc. The Soviet optics are significantly worse than the ones on the US armour, but spotting is a percentage game, and if you're taking the kind of lopsided engagements that you can get away with in CMSF, you'll be spotted and killed easily in CMCW. Each Soviet vehicle will spot worse than yours, but the first vehicle to spot usually wins the fight, and the Soviets only need *one* of them to get the spot - if you're taking engagements where five of your vehicles can see twenty of theirs, you'll die very quickly.

It looks like the link is currently broken.

You're probably better off with the guns not being assigned to an AI group at all. If you have a Setup zone defined for an AI group, they will try to spread themselves evenly over that zone. If you do not have a setup zone defined, but you start them in a deployment zone, they will set up randomly in that zone. If you start them outside a deployment zone and with no AI group setup order defined, then they will start wherever you put them in the editor. This obviously means that their positioning won't be randomised each time the scenario is played, but it's still probably a good idea for static defences that need precise positioning, like AT guns.

The Russian Way of War is a good primer on the changes to the Russian army since the Cold War, and does a good job of informing CMBS. The various "Lessons Learned" essays coming out Ukraine also include a lot of points that you could glean by playing CMBS, particularly around how drones are best used for Russian forces (pre-planning massed fires, rather than the point-destruction that the US leans towards).

Well done man. Yeah, the mental tax is real in this kind of environment. Your approach sounds valid - broadly I think you really want to choose right or left and commit to it. I think both approaches are valid. It's definitely a grind, but it's a very well done urban map. The main thing you're looking for in urban maps is variety in terrain - you want constantly changing geometries, where turning a corner presents you with a whole new set of problems. Breaking the Bank does this really well.

I don't think I have any of those still around. I do have a youtube video of a 1:1 thing from Force on Force Road to Baghdad, so it's a single Marine squad (as mentioned, scenarios need scaling up). I did a few Combat Commander conversions, and decided that the sight lines were mostly a problem, but was keen to see how it looked. Oh, I did start working on a conversion for Cold War, mostly because it was silly. There's a Cold War Gone Hot module for Force on Force which is split into three - Fears, Realities and Fantasies, for the Cold War as we thought it would be, some realistic scenarios as it perhaps might have been, and then scenarios from the movies. One of those was based on the base assault from Dr Strangelove. It's not all that interesting as a scenario, but it was mostly just messing around.

Worth pointing out that the CMCW Bradley was specifically listed as being Amphibious in 1.0 though.

One issue you have with that line is that the majority of miniature systems tend to be more about the miniatures than the game. There are a number of reasons for that, and part of it is that there is a hard limit to how much information can be conveyed by a miniature, when compared with a counter or block. This tends to mean that if you're looking for a serious, detailed look at a subject from a technical or TO&E level, you typically want a "boardgame" wargame, rather than a miniatures game. There are some excellent counter-examples to this, but it's a fairly typical trend. The scenarios can still be useful as a basis for conversion - Force on Force is a modern miniatures game, and one I have converted scenarios from in the past (although the nature of that game means that scenarios tend to be a platoon at most, which means that things need scaling up.

I definitely think that tabletop wargame scenarios can be a useful base for CM - they can have exactly the same problems, in that their veracity or tactical depth depend very much on the designer, but it's certainly not a bad idea inherently, I just think it needs to be done with eyes open.

I honestly think that a direct conversion isn't really where you want to be. There are some inherent assumptions which the games make which differ - the most obvious are things like national characteristics, which are not a function in Combat Mission. When I've tried doing similar things before (I've converted some Force on Force and Combat Commander scenarios before now), I've used the scenarios and map design as a guide, and then used the force as presented in CM, with the CM TO&E and Typical values, only adjusting if deemed appropriate after some testing, or if the tactical problem demands it (e.g., if the point of the scenario is that you're trying to hold out against armour with limited AT assets, then clearly you want to delete those as appropriate).

I'm fully onboard with the Stryker concept, at least with the core vehicle itself - a light infantry transport with excellent optics, comms and networking makes a ton of sense to me. It's not a front line fighting vehicle, and isn't intended as such. Certain aspects of it haven't worked out - the supporting weapons (TOW Strykers, MGS) seem a bit lacklustre or awkward, and the air mobile part of it (similar to the earlier CVR(T) concept) hasn't really played out. It's also far easier to see how the formation works in defence than an offensive action - the latter still being a mostly unsolved problem, as I understand it. I'm less clear on the wheeled/tracked choice. One of the more amusing things that happened to me after the release of Cold War was that for the first time I caught myself sounding like a reformer. I was playing a CMSF match, and one of my Strykers bogged in a really awkward place, on a random patch of sand. "This wouldn't have happened if that was an M113" was what I caught myself thinking, which made me giggle. I've also had far more luck with the M150 in Cold War than the Stryker TOW Variant. I think part of that might be the speed it can reverse, popping smoke, dropping behind cover and keeping itself alive longer. I have a terrible track record with the M1134 TOW. The wheeled/tracked argument is primarily a logistical one, and therefore mostly out of scope for CM, outside of campaign scripting. I know I'd rather have tracks on the tactical level. The Stryker's performance in CMSF seems to match up well to accounts from Iraq. Like many things in Shock Force, that means that it teaches bad habits, and some of those are that you can roll up your Stryker to outside RPG range pretty safely. This isn't something you can get away with in Black Sea, which the battle pack Stryker campaign does a really good (and challenging) job of illustrating. I don't think that CMBS campaign is a mark against the Stryker, so much as it's the game punishing you for doing things badly.

If you think that the MoD are paying only $1,000 for CM Professional, I don't know what to tell you...