domfluff

I assume surrendering enemy still count as occupying, I haven't checked that.

CMSF is fantastic, possibly still the best introduction to CM (because the US offers you a lot of safety nets), and generally smaller battles. Asymmetric warfare is the draw - Syria is a couple of generations behind, and the irregular forces even more. As a multiplayer experience, it's a bit lacking - playing Syria vs the US is the kind of thing where you can do everything right and still lose. Partly that's down to scenario design - it's an awful lot harder to design asymmetric scenarios that work really well, compared to CMBN where you could plop down an infantry company on each side, give them an objective in the middle, and have a reasonable outcome. Typically where that works in CMSF, you'll have a blue side which has all the advantages, but can't afford to take losses, versus a Red side where losses aren't important, and the gains are huge. Blue vs Blue is obviously fine, but doesn't simulate anything real. Red vs Red can be great, but there's still the technological disparity - without some house rules the multiplayer game can be dominated by precisely four pieces of kit (TURMS-T, T90, AT-14, AT-13), which isn't really great either. There's tons of content, and it references Afghanistan and Iraq, so there's lots of historical stuff to draw on. The modules are generally a lot more challenging. The USMC, British and NATO forces do not have all of the advantages (read: Javelins) that the US does, so there's plenty of challenge there. Cold War is high intensity modern warfare, and is a superb look at what could have been. Cold War is probably going to be the best option for multiplayer games, and has some really superb campaigns - I do think it's one of the strongest Battlefront releases full stop. Black Sea is an insight into the ultra-modern near-peer conflict that the US army is preparing to face if needed. This is going in gloves-off, but is nowhere near the scale or intensity of a Cold War fight. A large number of the "lessons learned" documents that have come out of the real Ukraine are things that could have been learned playing Black Sea (like the best use of the Drone/Forward Observer pair in Russian doctrine). Shock Force is a vehicle for the low intensity wars that the US has been fighting since 2001, so it's the closest to a modern "historical" game. It's a great introduction to CM, and also offers you something which no other Combat Mission title does.

Yes, sorry that wasn't clear - the 25mm and the MG will be able to fire without response, which isn't as much of a threat as the TOW, but doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

Smoking the Bradley will stop the TOWs, but won't stop the Bradley seeing you. Notably, it will also stop your ability to see the Bradley. That will mean that the Bradley will be able to see and shoot you whilst you can't target it. That means that it's not a bad idea for covering an exposed movement, but if you're actually trying to fight the thing, that's still a fight the Bradley will likely win.

That's an NVIDIA thing, not a CM thing. Apparently deleting "nvdrssel.bin" from "C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\Drs" will sort it, or resetting your nvidia 3d settings in the control panel.

There are no on-map 25pdrs. There are a number of that kind of asset which would be great to see in CM for scenario reasons as objectives (SCUD launchers in CMSF, for example), but they're not there, since they're mostly off-map assets.

It's worth mentioning that in the first mission of the Soviet campaign, you'll have pre-battle intel, and enough artillery to lay down a decent fire mission. This is doctrinal - about 10-30 minutes (which isn't a long time!) before the Forward Security element, you'll have a combat reconnaissance patrol to find enemy positions and routes of advance. That's partly simulated with pre-battle info, and partly explicit with the BTR platoon in the Soviet campaign. Those pre-battle spots should be hit with pre-planned barrages. When the FSE advance guard arrives, they immediately attack. The intention is that they engage with the known enemy straight away, and try to break through by themselves. If they can, great, but if they can't then the FSE will act as a base of fire for the main body when it arrives. Implicit in this is that there will be some *unknown* enemy positions, and that's the licks you'll have to take. If the CRP has failed to do its job, then the FSE needs to do a probing attack instead, and pretty sharpish. This is the "flexible" side of Soviet tactical doctrine - there's not much in terms of small unit tactics, since platoons tend to act as one, and on-line, but the how you use those platoons in concert, especially coming off the match, is really important, and can be very sophisticated. To illustrate, an example of a successful FSE attack from The Russian Way of War (Grau, 2017): The Russian Way of War is focused on modern Russian operations, but the principle is identical to the Soviet method (and the diagrams are great). Again, "How to Soviet" is a combination of Firepower, Speed and Aggression. Push, push, push. Keep them off-balance and reeling from the amount of fire you can lay down, and then use your speed to destabilise and not give them the chance to recover.

Ah, gotcha. There you go. Mortars are an obvious one, but really this was any kind of HE.

"Running forward from cover" was a crude way of explaining the Engine 4 bugged behaviour. What it really was, was the pro-active HE avoidance that engine 4 introduced. That's all fine in the open - if mortar rounds start falling, then you want your troops (and especially the AI troops) to get the hell out of there - but the original behaviour could manifest as a single mortar round making an entire trench line run away, in the extreme case. After this initial bug, there were still some issues - most visibly around bocage. They would displace from the bocage towards the nearest piece of cover, which sometimes was forwards. This has now been resolved about as well as I think it can be (after what was presumably a monumental effort) - they behave much more convincingly now, and tend to shelter in place behind cover when they have it. What you're describing doesn't sound like that. I've not seen the scenario in question, so I can't suggest anything more directly, but it seemed worthwhile to define what actually was happening with the previous bug.

Haven't thought about doing it in a more formal sense, just notes, but might well do if I develop it a bit. Some of it is just the shortcuts, but some are notes on behaviour/intention, as above.

1) - If you give them no setup zone, and outside a deployment zone (if there even is one), they will set up exactly where you left them - If you give them a setup zone inside a deployment zone, they'll set up there (semi-randomly within the setup zone - If you give them no setup zone, inside a deployment zone, they'll set up semi-randomly within the deployment zone 2) Brief notes on AI order type (I have a more extensive list I've been working on) Type - Typical usage Dash - Movement Out of Contact, and all together. Quick - Contact unexpected Advance - Long range contact Assault - Short/Medium range contact Max Assault - Short ranged attack on an objective The further down that list you go, the fewer elements will move at any one time. This is what "max assault" really means - it means sending forward a squad or fire team, whilst the rest stays put. In the abstract, this might be in place as a base of fire, and perhaps will have move into position using stealth (ambush stances, perhaps). and stance: Active - Prioritise shooting over moving Normal Cautious - Prioritise moving over shooting If you're setting up in the houses, there's probably no need to do anything further, unless you want to set a specific ambush range. If you do a move order, especially max assault, then they'll move around, perhaps one squad at a time, over several minutes. This does not sound like what you want. 3) Whether these groups should be separate is a question of nuance. The nice thing about large (or discontinuous) zones are that you can't know precisely where they will end up, giving you a small amount of variance in the execution of the plan. This could also be a problem, naturally. They usually try to spread themselves out evenly. I'd suggest that you generally don't want the squads to be in different groups, and instead to trust to the AI to do a lot of the smaller scale work. If there's an element whose positioning is really important - e.g. a specific weapon system, or a transport vehicle that needs to withdraw - then break that into a smaller chunk, but typically you just want to think of the group as "1st platoon" or whatever.

The tank scenarios are a lot of fun, yeah - much more interesting than the equivalent all-armour fights in CMSF. The 1982 scenario loses a lot of the nuance (and challenge), because the Abrams is so dominant, but it does a good job of showing the contrast. I can think of many choice words to describe the NTC campaign, but "relaxing" isn't one of them.

Experience levels are a long-standing problem of wargame design, since that kind of thing started to be modelled. The classic example is the 101st on D-Day - should they be "Veteran" to account for their better training, or "Green", since this was the first time they saw combat? Both answers are viable, depending on what system you're using to model this. Typically in CM they'd be Veteran, but that's not necessarily true for everything ever. Soft factors are not an objective measure (unlike armour penetration or rate of fire), so any modelling of something subjective is going to have an inherently subjective outcome. "Artificially inflating the difficulty" is the least charitable way of saying that. Scenario design is game design, and game design is harder than people think it is. The map, forces and soft factors are all altered to produce the desired outcome. This is especially true for historical scenarios, because you have a real outcome that you'd like to see on-screen. For example, if you're doing the opening Desert Storm, you'd need to set Iraqi motivation to awful, because taking thousands of surrenders is a major part of that narrative. There's no table you can look up to show what level of experience and motivation the Iraqi soldiers should have historically, but you can start with the intended outcome and work backwards, tweaking things to suit. This is the essence of "Design for Effect", and you'll see it up and down wargame design. So, yes, I haven't played through enough of the campaigns (or scenarios) yet to get cross at anything specific, but you will see a range of soft factors, in every CM title, even when representing the same forces. Call this "artificially inflating the difficulty" if you like, but it's really just modelling the scenario. It's viable to take exception to the choices made in modelling the scenario, naturally, but "these troops should be +1 leadership" is not really firm ground to stand on - the definitions of each soft factor and how that pertains to the real world is subjective and fluffy.

The best bet for doing real stuff is to take the CMSF approach, and do hypothetical stuff that can translate. There's not really enough scope in the Falklands land war to fill a CM game, but if you have CW period BAOR, then you've got the kit - you then need the appropriate terrain. The opposition are a little trickier, but perhaps not so important a distinction, and you can do Goose Green or the like. Likewise, a (later) module that focused on a hypothetical US involvement in the Afghanistan war would allow you to sneak in a CM:A2 by the back door - you could have historical scenarios and ahistorical ones side by side. You already have most of the kit to do a fairly accurate Yom Kippur - Centurion might be the biggest thing missing. That kind of thing.

Yeah, fortifications can be AI grouped, but not reinforcements, sadly. That's not a major issue for bunkers and the like, but it'd be nice for TRPs and perhaps air-deployed mines

Oh, and the NTC campaign is a single-company campaign, so there's that. I do think that that might be the best avenue to push smaller scenarios whilst keeping them on-theme.

Yeah, there's a variety of battle sizes, but the trend is towards the larger end of the scale. Mechanised forces are easier to divide up than infantry forces - a tank company is much easier on the cognitive load than an infantry company - but it's still on the larger side on average. If we end up with airborne scenarios, or more fringe actions in later modules, there will be more scope for infantry-only or smaller scale stuff, but seeing a Motor Rifle battalion rolling over the hills is sort-of the point of the thing.

Ian's NATO mod uses NATO symbols for both sides. Ian's Soviet icon mod uses Soviet symbols for both sides. the combined mod uses NATO symbols for the US, and Soviet symbols for the Soviets.

So, not necessarily. If the situation warranted it, then certainly, but there's no reason to expect that all deliberate attacks will be meat grinders - if everything is working as planned then the enemy can't put up a reasonable defence - there's a reason why the doctrine of Active Defence was a way to "Lose a battle slowly", and that may well have been the best they could do in the period depicted in the first half of CMCW. The structure is certainly simple, as befits a conscript army, but there was room for tactical flexibility, particularly outside of the deliberate attack on line (and naturally the fire missions and especially operational complexity were well developed).

Yup. To put this rather more succinctly: Every other CM game has generally taught the lesson that Quality is better than Quantity(*). In 1979, the US has neither. (*) Actually, this is more like "quality is easier to use than quantity" - mass can still be a useful and important tool in the other titles, but it's an awful lot easier to lean on the crutch that a Big Cat, MG42, Abrams or whatever gives you. You have a much bigger safety net there, and especially the modern titles can teach you some really bad lessons (see: how many posts on these forums include things like "hull down is pointless in the modern titles", for example)

The Training missions do illustrate this well, if you follow their instructions correctly. The fundamental principle is one of combined arms, and layers. The emphasis is on speed, aggression and overwhelming firepower. The Soviet army was an artillery army - the artillery mission is extensive and sophisticated, and does the main job of suppressing or destroying enemy AT assets, most of which are soft-skinned or man-portable. This would be supplemented with the supporting weapons, like the ATGM platoon. Whilst that artillery is still falling, the tanks advance in line. The advantage of being in line is that you can make up for your relatively poor spotting with numbers - you don't need all of the tanks to see the enemy, just one or two of them is enough to give you a considerable advantage. Then finally the infantry come, the emphasis at every stage is on overwhelming force, and gaining safety through excessive firepower. Each stage needs to work in concert to be effective, but there's really not much you can do to stop it when everything is working correctly.

Scancade works for me.

There would have been a number of reasons, naturally, but a large part would be that the eighties were the end of the Soviet Union. Around this period there were a "Twilight of the General Secretaries", where multiple elderly leaders came to power, and died within 24 months or less. This is also one of the reasons why the war in Afghanistan continued on for quite as long as it did. Gorbachev was the first General Secretary to be born since the creation of the USSR, and he was the last. That meant that if the US did gain an advantage, even if the Soviets could have adapted or caught up, I suspect that there wasn't really the leadership for that kind of change to happen.

The multiple-year scenarios exist to show off one of the core thematic points of the game - the change in technology was incredibly significant. The US went from being perhaps the most technologically behind it has ever been, to gaining an unassailable lead in a couple of years. The Armour scenarios are a really good demonstration of that - the map means that the early scenarios have plenty of scope for manouevre and use of terrain - really stretching how best to use the three tank platoons, both internally and in concert with each other. The 1982 scenario is basically a joke by comparison - you're given two platoons of M60 and a platoon of Abrams... and you don't need the M60s. The Abrams is dominant in this timeframe, and this is the worst possible version of the Abrams. CMSF teaches some bad habits, given the force disparity - one thing the NTC campaign is really good for is demonstrating the problem with that.

So you're either just trolling, or you have no idea what this is trying to achieve, or what a typical scenario count is for a CM title. Either way, it's just noise.