domfluff

Confirmed, Womble would have a significant advantage in desert combat.

(Able Archer was annual, but the scary one was 1983. The point still holds, mind you).

Cheers, I appreciate that. Of these: 1) Sounds like it could be modelled effectively by allowing Emergency missions to be called from out of line of sight. That would require some restructuring of the order of things (i.e., you'd presumably have to select target, with a text prompt for out of LOS, and if this position is out of LOS, you'd only have Emergency available to you, with the other options greyed out). 2) I think I can see why this isn't done. TRP + adjust seems like it works very well right now (it's clearly the best way to use DPICM, for a start), but with the current system I don't know how you'd select the TRP and then a displacement off that point, without a fairly major rework. Both options sound good to have, mind you, but the former sounds like it would be less of a pain to add.

Yep, the fundamentals are the same. The existence of TOWs does shift this equation to an extent, as well as DPICM and the like, but it's still "how can I best play a weak hand". You can download it as a PDF from the same source. Direct link to the download: https://books.google.co.uk/books/download/The_Tank_and_Mechanized_Infantry_Company.pdf?id=My8-u2rYNVoC&output=pdf&sig=ACfU3U06Zb4xV8A0m8XvTa5ggK0pkajSZQ

So, a couple of thoughts/clarifications here, because I'm curious. I'm not referring to anything that Chuckdyke has talked about in this thread. The original post was asking if there was a difference in-game between the physical location of the mortar team, the observer and the target, in particular for spotting rounds. So: (I'm mostly considering this in the context of the modern titles, so potentially all of the available kit) 1) With an FDC, I was under the impression that the whole spotting round-adjust-fire for effect cycle wasn't required. That means that the closest representation in-game of this capability would be a TRP, would it not? 2) The question that was originally posed in this thread is whether the physical location of the mortar, the FO and the target matter, and whether these are better lined up. Without an FDC, TC 3-22.90 (Mortars) is pretty clear that the FO should be within 100m of the mortars if possible, or else within 100m of the gun-target line. That seems mostly to make the trigonometry easier to do - there's no real reason why that couldn't be done as accurately with any degree of displacement, but that would make the sums a lot more fraught, and require an accurate idea of your relative position - so this is presumably done for reasons of practicality. In-game, if there was any difference in this to be seen, then presumably the difference you'd see would be in how quickly the spotting rounds get turned into fire for effect? If the FO was more than 100m off-line, then the accuracy of their adjustments would have an increasing amount of error to them (since the basic trig fudge will get increasingly wrong the more you deviate from the G-T line). If this was something the game models (and my brief testing seems to suggest that it is not), then the spotting rounds for an Observer that wasn't on the G-T line could be all over the place, no? And if those spotting rounds were wild, then the time it would take to adjust them onto the target would be greater, so the effect modelled would be (should be) that an FO not on-line would take longer to turn a mission into a fire for effect. Actual call-in times would be similar - there will be a minor effect of having an FO in shouting distance, particularly in EW scenarios, but that's a secondary, and much more minor point.

Sorry, I meant the time between the initial spotting rounds to calling Fire for Effect. Again, brief, non-definitive tests, but so far there hasn't been an obvious difference.

Have done some quick, non-definitive tests, but I can't see a difference in-game, sadly. Clearly having the FO close to the mortar will improve the C2 connection - this would be especially important in a high EW environment, but the call in times all seem to be about the same, no matter what the orientation of FO, target and mortar.

Original point is an interesting one, and is worth pondering. TC 3-22.90 goes into some detail - the chapter "Fire without a Fire Direction Center" is the appropriate one, because this is best represented by non-TRP fire missions in game. (We should have far more TRPs than we typically get in CM scenarios, but that's a whole different argument). But the maths for adjusting for the situations where this is not the case is pretty simple: O-T = Observer -> Target line, G-T = Gun -> Target line. The point that this stresses, however, is that where the FO can't be within 100m of the mortars, they should be within 100m of the G-T ine. Partly I suspect this is because it's going to make the maths easier, but whether there is increased accuracy from this in CM is worth testing. I know I've rarely given much thought to my relative positioning of FO and artillery before now. Staying within 100m of the mortars should decrease call-in time, if nothing else.

If CM has expressed one single idea over the years, it's that quality is better than quantity. In 1979 at least, the US has neither. It's partly the ATGMs, but it's also that the T-64 and later had much heavier armour than was expected (the early M60 trades well with the T-62, but suffers against the later tanks, and this armour development was why the Starship looks so anaemic - the concept wasn't so much flawed as it was built for the wrong war), but also in fundamental things like the lack of laser rangefinders on US armour of the period - the Soviet tanks were more numerous, smaller, lighter, more heavily armoured and had more powerful main guns, with a much higher muzzle velocity, which with the rangefinders will mean more accuracy. I don't believe that the US was badly trained or motivated over this period, but they're firmly in second place technologically. They're perhaps about as far behind the curve as the US Army has ever been. This is part of the reason why choosing this period for CM:Cold War is very clever - you get to see this generational change in hardware and doctrine, and how this created an advantage that the Soviets were never able to match.

Oh, actual-last thing, a training video for the same: It's nowhere near enough by itself, but it does a pretty good job of introducing some of the concepts.

Oh, last point - the M60's armour is much lighter than you're used to (this will also be true for Chieftain and Leopard 1, if and when they surface). The tank can be penetrated frontally by anything the Soviets have - including the RPG-7, and the 73mm HEAT round fired from main gun of the BMP-1, since that weapon was designed for that purpose - giving the motor rifle squad a medium-range AT option, inside ATGM minimum range and before the RPG can close the distance.

The NTC campaign has a few unusual quirks - one of which is that the soft factors for Opfor are very high (since it's simulating the actual NTC). The main thing with spotting is that it's a percentage game, and if you're exposing yourself to a large number of eyeballs, you're going to be seen by at least one of them. BMPs feel exactly as blind in CW as they do in the other titles, but there tend to be a lot more of them, at much higher concentrations. As a quick example of the maths: Imagine you have a US M60, which we will arbitrarily give a 60% chance of spotting the enemy first, and getting the first shot off. Facing this are some Soviet armour with terrible optics - we'll give them a 30% chance of spotting the US tank first. Getting the first shot off is usually enough to win a fight like this, so this is a reasonable enough fudge for a "kill". Clearly 1 vs 1, the US armour will usually spot and kill the Soviet armour before they can do the same. The issue is that there won't be a 1vs1 - the Soviets outnumbered the US 6:1 in some cases, so you're going to be fighting outnumbered. If there were three of those Soviet, 30% tanks coming into view doctrinally in line, the chance of any one of them getting the spot and the first shot off is 66%. Mass is absolutely the name of the game, and how you manage your resources to concentrate force in a way that benefits you (and only you) is a huge part of the deal.

For a more detailed look, this is the field manual: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=My8-u2rYNVoC&hl THE TANK AND MECHANIZED INFANTRY COMPANY TEAM (FM71-1, 1977)

With difficulty. The US Mech inf company is: 1x Tank platoon 2x M113 platoons 1x M150/M901 TOW platoon 1x 60mm mortar platoon Since the US in this period (especially 1979) are behind both in quality and quantity, you're forced into using tactics which are most similar to the Syrians in CMSF- getting the most of of this combined arms unit is the goal, and relying on a defence in depth, supported by artillery fire and close air support. With the highly mechanised environment, the anti-tank weapons are the most obvious component of this firepower. These come in three distinct bands. Your long ranged firepower consist of the TOWs and the M60s, which have an effective range of approximately 2km. Your medium range firepower are the Dragons, which have a 1km range, and finally the LAWs, which are sub-300m. There are (typically) enough Dragons for one per squad, and enough LAWs for one per man. Your tank platoon is the most powerful and mobile of the company, and is really the core of your firepower - the infantry are there to define space and protect the armour, but the deployment of your tanks, supported by your TOWs are the central problem. Shock Force teaches bad habits. In that game, an Abrams platoon can sit on a ridgeline and dominate - you really have to do something wrong to take serious Abrams losses. This isn't the case for any version of the M60, especially the earlier ones. Cold War in particular is often about relative mass - you're talking about US tanks that don't even have laser rangefinders - you're fully on WW2 gunnery here - so getting maximum guns on target at one time is the key, but you also need to make sure that you're engaging the smallest proportion of the enemy that you can. This usually means using terrain effectively to control the enemy's position - having them advance into prepared killzones, etc. On a broader level, Active Defence was the doctrine. This was an elastic defence, a fighting withdrawal. Typically each company team would act as an independent unit, and would withdraw to a secondary prepared position as the enemy got into medium AT range. A second company would then take up the long-range fight as the first is repositioning, and then this would repeat. In terms of supporting fires - the company has an FO for a reason. The 60mm mortars don't have many good targets for themselves. They're good at keeping BMPs and BTRs with exposed gunners buttoned, and smoke missions can be useful to shape the terrain. When the Soviets are forced to dismount they can be useful, but they're a bit difficult to justify in general. Air-launched cluster rounds are stronger than artillery, since the shells are larger. 155mm clusters are best used as point targets with maximum duration, and with the FO adjusting their fire over the period of the mission. The best targets are forming-up points - areas where the BMPs are going to concertina before building up for an actual attack.

Not really much that's conceptually different. The Soviet method characterised smoke into three types of mission - blinding, camouflaging, and decoy. The first is used on the enemy to shape the battlefield (you see a good example of this in the first Tutorial missions, as you block out the wings, limit the battle to the centre and create your own local superiority there. The second is used on yourself to gain freedom of movement, concealing your own movements and shaping the terrain to suit. The last is used to deceive the enemy to the main point of attack - in CM that's limited to a human opponent, but can firmly be useful in that role.

There was commentary about this, particularly around Market Garden, for obvious reasons - but I think it's mostly out of scale, and it's more a question of scenario/campaign design (e.g., if you hold the bridge at the end of the mission, you can go down the route with the destroyed/not destroyed bridge, as appropriate).

Artillery I believe is the only option.

I do agree that it's a bit of an odd choice not to include a formal tutorial campaign or scenario in this title. The Soviet ones do a great job of that, but it would be good to have a similar thing for the US, perhaps one which shows you how to perform the Active Defence doctrine correctly, in an idealised manner. Even just the training scenario from CMBS and CMSF (the Stryker/Bradley platoon attack) ported over would be a good start, perhaps. The theory behind the real NTC is that it's supposed to be a trial by fire - you're supposed to be pushed against an enemy who is tougher than any you're likely to face, so that actual combat comes easier. It's the equivalent of running with training weights or the like, to push yourself in a safe environment. That's the context that the campaign should be seen in. It does a really good job of expelling a lot of the bad habits that CMSF teaches, certainly, in a number of ways. One of the more subtle is that you have to read the terrain without easy context clues. You can't control a hedgerow, city or low wall, because there aren't any, so you're looking at finding and using possibly-indiscernible folds in the ground, and defining space where you can. That alone is inherently much more difficult, and that kind of thing is one of the reasons why CMBN is an easier introduction than CMFI is, for example, since hedgerows provide far stronger context clues than hills.

If you got this kind of impression from my comments above or elsewhere, then that was not my intention. The NTC campaign is brutal, and it's supposed to be, as is the real NTC. You are supposed to treat it like a proper training scenario - failing forward, and potentially retrying different approaches. As a quick point- almost everyone I've seen has gone for the hasty attack option at first. The briefing mentions that you'll have "more room to manoeuvre", which is presumably the appeal. Manoeuvre with what, precisely? You're essentially a platoon of tanks in a supporting combined arms company, and you're trying to attack into a Motor rifle battalion. One side there needs more room, and it 'aint you. This is the kind of lesson it's trying to teach. As a personal anecdote, which obviously is entirely relative - for comparison, I lost a total of one TOW launcher in the first mission, and one tank and an empty M113 in the second - all losses which were avoidable. The first was me not being aware of how bad an idea ATGM duels are, and the latter because I was hasty and didn't cover a specific sight line. This was done blind and without reloads, but there was a lot of planning involved, including reading a couple of field manuals for preparation. The third I had trouble with, but that was pre-patch, so I was stuck with the option I didn't choose for the third mission - so two total victories and a minor defeat - the latter mostly due to the enemy air. The NTC campaign was one of my favourite experiences in Combat Mission, ever. It was very testing, and it forced you to learn a whole bunch of things really fast - most notably, that Shock Force teaches some really bad habits. If the tanks in NTC were replaced with Abrams, with no other changes, I imagine there would be very little challenge in that campaign. Cold War is definitely pitched more difficult than usual for the CM games. There are no safety wheels - you can't use your M60s like Abrams, nor rely on Javelins (or Panthers, for that matter) as a fix-all solution to every problem. Even where there's an advantage, like the quality of the Soviet armour, using them correctly is far from simple. The Tutorial missions are something which I think CM really needs more of. I've seen many comments of things like "Jackals are awful" in CMSF, or "2 inch mortars are pointless" in CMBN. Having a presentation of the thing working as it's supposed to work doctrinally gives you a good intro to the basics - as in, a textbook WW2 British platoon attack, supported by the 2 inch - if there was a scenario which could show how it's supposed to look, and if you can't win this, then you fundamentally don't know what you're doing. The Soviet attack scenario is supposed to teach two things above all - the priority of mass, and the need for coordination between armour and massed fires. This is the baseline Soviet stuff, but doesn't represent a scenario you're ever really likely to see. The Meeting engagement tutorial is a far more realistic scenario, and does a good job of taking those principles and applying them to a vastly more complex and fluid battle-state. It's still a textbook engagement, so you shouldn't come close to losing when you understand what you're doing, but this represents a baseline that the scenarios and campaigns can build from. The first scenario of the Russian campaign is extraordinarily brutal, but it's fundamentally the same tactical problem as the second tutorial, just much more complex, with a far more active opponent. "It's like this, but..." is the foundation of most tactical problems. So no, I don't think Cold War is "out of touch with reality", or even "too hard". It's hard, certainly, but the challenges can all be overcome, with the time and effort. Obviously that challenge may not appeal, and that's completely valid, but I don't think it's correct to claim that this is anything more than your opinion, and not some kind of objective measure of the thing.

Definitely winnable. It's much harder as red, partly as the soft factors are mostly green, and they're against thermals, so spotting is very one sided. I first saw this from the US side, and was very surprised to only see one tank platoon - I was expecting to see a second or third tank platoon, and at least some 122mm artillery. I can see basically two approaches - either you spend the early minutes scouting, and mass all of your strength on the other side of the hill for a single push, or you charge into the town straight away. The latter I've seen work, and also utterly fail, so it's clearly a huge dice roll. A bit too risky for my blood, I think. The former tries to solve the optics problem with numbers, but this can still not be enough, given the soft factors and especially when smoke and dust starts getting kicked up, where the thermals will win the thing. For a more balanced version of the scenario, downgrading the TTS to later version A1s and increasing the Soviet soft factors a little (perhaps just to regular) might be enough. As-is, the Soviet force is basically a doctrinal FSE, and this is a pretty big ask for an FSE to clear all by itself, especially with no real artillery support - a typical target for that might be a platoon or so.

According to the manual, area firing is the lowest priority AI task, so everything else should override it. Haven't tested this, mind you. "It is important to note that the Fire Zone is the lowest priority task for the AI Group. Other tasks, such as moving, unloading, attacking a spotted enemy unit, etc will take priority over shooting randomly at the Fire Zone"

The AI will not area fire by themselves, they need a solid spot. There is now an Area fire command, so you can get around this to an extent, with Ctrl-left click. An obvious use case would be to match this with a trigger - if you had a situation with an obvious base of fire, set up as a trigger, and then letting the AI open up with area fire on that location.

Staying in place and hiding is a little suspect, I think. The enemy AI still gets spotting contacts, and if they have a spotting contact on that location once, it'll be easier to get another one if they don't move. That can still be the best option - if there's no possible secondary position then you pretty much have to suck it up, but I can't believe that's the best Plan A. It's the same reason you never move forward from a hull-down position - if you've been firing from a location, then you're giving them a spotting contact on that spot, so moving forward makes you vulnerable, in a position where they know exactly where you are.

Printable is what I'm after, so I think that's fine.

Cover is always a percentage game. If you can be seen, you can be killed. Good cover shifts the odds towards your favour, but the goal remains identical - you win a firefight by gaining and maintaining fire superiority. If they're cowering and you're not, it doesn't matter what kind of cover either of you are in, and all cover really does, conceptually, is passively limit the incoming fire, to an extent. So if the above situation is happening, and you're taking no action to develop the situation to *stop* the incoming fire, then you will eventually all die. The LOS tool relies on the underlying grid. It'll give you the LOS from that square to any other square, at one of five different heights. It's not what the actual soldiers use to plot a firing solution (that's derived from the individual's eyes), so it's never going to precisely match up. Indirect MG fire is a bit suspect in general, so I'm not surprised it's not included in CM. The other two concepts you mentioned are the result of physically modelling MG fire, so CM models those just fine.