domfluff

What the hell? Why would you be so brazenly offensive, for no reason?

Indeed. Sometimes it's like herding cats, but I do think it's a valuable resource. The most valuable bit is the connection to other players - whether that's to find opponents, or to discuss things. To take Saturday as an example - Bil hasn't updated his Battledrill blog in a while, so hasn't yet gotten around to publishing a Platoon tutorial scenario, in the same manner as his Squad and Tank platoon ones. Since this came up in conversation a couple of times, I put one together, published it there in demo form, and spent a bit of time in the morning talking through the mission with someone who was giving it a go. He failed badly the first attempt, but aced it on the second, which is pretty much ideal. Later that day, following a previous conversation on the subject of scenario design (and what "balance" actually means in CM design terms), I was voice-chatting with someone about a CMSF scenario they had recently won in a PBEM game, where their opponent went wrong, and what was good and bad about the scenario design. During that conversation (which was mostly us two, but had a few other people dropping in with their thoughts), his opponent joined, and we were able to stream turns from both of their perspectives, and talk through what each party was thinking and why at different stages. That definitely takes some effort, and it's not without fault, but then that's true for literally any medium like this.

Oh wow, how did that one pass playtesting?

Immediacy, voice chat, streaming. It's an awful lot easier to discuss a particular tactical problem with people if you can show them directly and/or talk them through it. There's some advantages in activity as well. There are advantages to every medium - Discord is a bad place to reference anything for the long term, but in many ways a forum isn't ideal for that either (a wiki would be the better option for sharing guides, relevant field manuals, training films, etc.). On the other hand, it's great for some immediate feedback - either in interacting with other people who play the thing, or in terms of things like testing and map design.

The QB maps in general seem to have been a lower priority - the majority are CMRT or CMBS maps (which also share maps). Having said that, *making* QB maps is pretty simple, at least for PBEM. I'm currently playing a QB on the master map which makes up the first mission of the Soviet Campaign. Further, making the maps "NTC" is a single mod tag - every map can be an NTC map, if you want it to be.

Your assumptions are incorrect.

I can't find any negative discussions about time zone on the discord at all. A reasonable expectation for PBEM in general is 1 turn/day, and that should be fine regardless of where you are. Inevitably though, PBEM games are an expenditure of time, and things can go awry - I know my first experiences of PBEM were unusually bad, but people dropping, etc., are just going to happen. CM is a hobbyist game, and like many such things it can come down to assembling a good group of people for you.

In CMSF I still have a sneaking suspicion that the T-55MV is one of the better value for money picks in the Syrian lineup - night vision, GL ATGM, etc. It's still not going through an Abrams, but that's true for most Syrian tanks.

It's not awful versus the M48 (the matchups look like WW2 fights, with missed rounds everywhere), and it'll go through an M60A1, but it's pretty outclassed in that matchup.

The prices are presumably decided by a formula. The T-55A loses the bow machine gun that the T-55 has. You could reasonably argue that the bow machine gun has no real purpose and what you gain (extra ammo) is worth more, but it's also definitely a capability that has been taken away. "Clearly better" is a bit strong. It definitely seems odd that the base level T-55 is more expensive, but it's not just a straight upgrade.

It's not limited to CMBS. People have suggested that you need to be running in admin mode to overwrite, but I don't know if this is correct. The other alternative is just to delete "Savefilename 003" before you save another file named "Savefilename 003".

Just some notes on this list: Assault is from 1983, and Mech War from 1975 - our understanding of the Soviet army has increasing tremendously since then, and there are much more reliable sources than the designers had to work with. MBT has a similar problem, and both MBT 1 and 2 have a further issue, where the setting is 1987 - where the balance in force combat has swung significantly towards the US, and ammunition has improved leaps and bounds, specifically to counter the newer Soviet tank designs. There are even Abrams in MBT with the 120mm cannon, which is going to further confuse things. I can't speak for the treatment in Lock n' Load, but as far as I recall it's a pretty light system, and not all that high on simulationism *** A couple of other thoughts: I agree the CMCW treatment of the T-64 is better than most representations of the thing, but it seems to accord well with the reality, circa 1979-1982, at least as far as any source I've been able to find. Hit location is going to be determined by CM's ballistic model, which seems plausible to me. The ranges given (1500-200m) are large, but firmly within the range that the US tanks should be performing well at. The Soviets should often have a clear advantage at the 1500m-2000m range for the most part, model and ammunition depending. From the sound of it, the Soviets were not hull-down in those tests, which would have naturally skewed things upwards. Personal note/aside/rant: The thing that actually stuck out the most to me is the fact you had 100 hits on T-64s with zero in return. That's horrendous, and shows how much the thermals matter. The M60A3 TTS is currently woefully undercosted in Quick Battles (it's the exact same price as the M60A3), but even without that, in general I think the more thermals you add to the US, the more like Shock Force the game becomes. Shock Force isn't a bad game, but I play Cold War to play Cold War. My current thinking is that the best format for Cold War QB is actually 1980 with Strict rarity - that way you're fighting M60A1 versions against BMP-1P, and you've a far more interesting and subtle relationship between the involved elements.

The M150 is a TOW launcher stuck on top of an M113. The crew need to open up to fire, since the launcher is on the roof. The gunner will open up themselves to fire, but you're usually better off using the open up command in this case, since they'll spot faster.

TOWs are huge missiles, very capable from CW to the present day. Wikipedia has estimates of 430mm-900mm. Compare that to the MGM-51 Shillelagh (on M60A2 and Sheridan), which is supposed to go through 390mm of RHA. Dragon should cope with 330mm. Obviously penetration stats like those are both estimates, and assume an impact at zero degress, real conditions will vary, and generally to the armour's benefit.

That's also why TOWs (and off-map assets) are so fundamental to the US side - their tanks can't cope 1:1. and Dragons have a tiny warhead. Both armour and the Dragons are vital supporting tools, but they're not the centre of mass of a given US formation.

To put some hard numbers on that: (Numbers from Wikipedia) T-62 Turret 214mm turret front, 242mm after 1972. T-64 Turret 370mm-440mm vs APFSDS 500mm-575mm vs HEAT The RHA penetration of the APDS rounds for the M60A1 (M728) are about 300mm, if I recall correctly, and obviously the spaced armour makes HEAT rounds worse.

Result is exactly as expected, welcome to the Cold War. The T-62 should trade fairly evenly with M60 (and Leopard 1, and Chieftain, when those are things), but the T-64 represents a major uptick in armour, particularly on the front turret. Since the tank is so low, a large percentage of incoming fire will hit the front turret. This is partly why the M60A2 Starship was obsolete for this period - when that was designed, there was debate as to whether kinetic penetrators or HEAT rounds (with the latter being best delivered by ATGM) would be the main tank armament of the future, but the introduction of everything T-64 or higher made that obsolete.

Yes.

That map in particular is unusually complex - the save files are massive, which is typically more complex geometry. I haven't had a major problem with it (any more than any large map), but the file size did make PBEM uploads slower, and is a likely culprit for poor performance.

Cold War games on that scale aren't common. Two spring to mind though: Fireteam https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2699/fire-team Firepower https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3692/firepower The latter was Avalon Hill, and seems to have been fairly popular (I saw a copy in a charity shop not long ago).

An aside, but I still chuckle at Schwarzkopf's quote about Saddam: I do agree that the basic strategy was sound. Its implementation was not, and a lot of that practical application seems fundamentally unsound even before taking into account the revolution in weapons technologies.

It could, and the M60A3 TTS is basically an Abrams turret on an M60 hull, but that hull is the issue - you're moving from a glass cannon, which can out-spot everything Soviet, but will die to everything it's engaged with, to one which can out-spot and survive being shot. That's a massive uptick in capability. "Abrams worship" is a stupid way to put that, of course, but it's more the point of capability - the transition from M60 to the M1 is a generational one, and it's as much of a leap as T-62 to T-64, and probably more.

Aside from the usual caveats of seeing the Russian export equipment being used by non-Soviet actors, T-62 was certainly effective against the Chieftain (as it should be against the M60 and Leopard-1). Indeed, the BMP-1's 73mm main gun fires a HEAT round which is sufficient to penetrate the three main NATO tanks of the period frontally. There was, after all, a reason why the Abrams, Challenger and Leopard-2 existed. In Cold War, the T-62 is pretty much in the same class as the M60A1 - they should be a fairly even match for each other, and trade with each other fairly well. The later M60's gain better optics and ultimately thermals, but the armour protection remains - it took until the next generation of NATO tanks for that to change, The same can't be said for the T-64. There is a massive uptick in armour capability between the T-62 and T-64 - it's not uncommon to see a T-64 shrugging off multiple hits to the turret for no appreciable effect, and the same applies to the T-72 and the T-80 variants. The Abrams is cheating, obviously, and represents a generational leap that the Soviet equipment never caught up to.

Yup. COIN operations are not high-intensity invasions of Europe - a given squad in a BTR might *never* make small arms contact ever, but IEDs were a constant threat. It's also not the most pleasant ride in the world, and it gets pretty warm - I could see it from an ergonomic point of view as well.

I'm 100% okay with this feature not being in Shock Force or especially in Cold War. I'm also okay with it not being in the other WW2 titles - it's just not tactically relevant to anything besides the Eastern Front. I'm a little surprised it's even in Final Blitzkrieg, really. US armoured infantry did ride directly on tanks sometimes, but not into actual combat, as the Soviets did out of necessity, so it's a nice-to-have, and not something that adds significantly to the game. The one title which actually might benefit from it, counter-intuitively, is Black Sea. It's remarkable how well the various "lessons learned" reports from the real conflict in Ukraine match up to the experience of playing Black Sea - many of those hard-won lessons (like the importance of drones and their correct usage in the Russian context) match up extremely well. One that does not is the field-expediency of riding outside the IFV, rather than internally. Clearly NBC concerns are low in Ukraine, but lethality and tempo are high, so there's apparently been a movement towards IFV-riding, to increase the speed of dismount on contact. That kind of tactical decision is relevant on CM-level scales, and despite being a terrible idea, might also make sense as the least-worst option, given the circumstances.