domfluff

I do have some issues with that testing method, or what it's actually showing, but it's interesting. Like many things in that vein, I do think it's worth being extremely cautious what lessons you're extracting from it.

The whole point of the US company team is that it's a combined arms team of specialists. No part of that team can carry things by itself, but in combination there's the tools to deal with everything. Tanks in the US company are the jack of all trades, and as such they are the key enabler to allow all other parts of the team to do their job. The TOWs should be the main killing power of the company, and the infantry are the main defensive power, but the tanks can set the conditions for the other elements to get into position and get their job done - they don't hold ground as well as the infantry, they don't put out HE or smoke efficiently as the organic mortars, and they don't kill tanks as efficiently as the ATGMs, but they're the enabling glue that binds everything together. That is until you get to M60 TTS, Abrams and Bradley, but since that's a generational change, that's really a very different discussion, and really the high-end of kit in CMCW can represent an entirely different game.

"Rounded" is one way to put that, "Excessive" is another. The US company team is a collection of specialist elements - TOW launchers, armour, infantry and mortars. Each element is important, and every element relies on every other element to do their job. The Soviet company is a lot more single minded.

I've said before, but the replay feature would make content creation orders of magnitude easier, as well as being incredibly useful for learning what actually happened during a game, and improving. To take the basic example - right now, the "easiest" way to make a CM video is to record you playing the thing, mouse clicks and all. There have been some really good content made this way (@Ithikial_AU), but it does result in 10+ hours worth of videos, most of which is pretty dull. The alternative is something like one of Hapless' AARs, which requires an awful lot more time and effort to put together. With replays, the lowest-effort video would be perhaps a 30-60 minute replay, shot in one take, with someone narrating live. That's not the best possible CM video, but it raises the bar of the lower end significantly, as well as making the high end significantly easier.

As with many engineering questions, there's no best solution, otherwise everything would be that solution. I do think it's interesting to consider what armour is actually for. Especially in any kind of modern period, any tank can and will die to a single hit from a suitable anti-tank weapon... so why armour? Well, the US company team in CMCW is a good example of what armour is useful for. The variant of that in the NTC campaign is: 1x M60A1 platoon, 2x M113 platoons, 2x M150 TOW vehicles and supporting mortars and HQ elements. The M150s are your most important killing power. These have the accuracy, the range and the bunch to take on the heaviest Soviet armour. So why have tanks? Well, aside from basic concerns like rate of fire, the main reason is that the tanks are mobile, armoured, and have enough of a punch to compete. Ultimately, someone sometimes has to roll the dice - something has to go over the hill first, or rush into contact. Sometimes that can be done with dismounts, but often the pace and size of a battle are too much for dismounted infantry to cope with. You certainly don't want to lead with your TOW vehicles - they'll die to a stiff breeze, and you desperately need them to stay alive. So tanks give you mobile firepower, and the armour allows you a little more leeway in your actions. If someone has to go first, then it should be the element that stands a chance of not immediately being blown up. This means that for the US, the M60 needs to be heavily protected, it needs to be fairly mobile, and it needs to have some degree of firepower - in the case of the M60, the armour might be the most important concern. This is in contrast to the BAOR Chieftain, which was central to the British defensive doctrine, which was a lot more static and in depth than the US doctrine of the 1970s. Because of this, firepower was the most important of the triangle for the BAOR. The West Germans instead created depth through counter-attack, and so mobility was their primary concern. The side that can move faster (operationally or tactically) can dictate the shape of the engagement, taking or denying key terrain and being proactive about where and when to fight. So... no, insofar as the firepower/mobility/protection triangle is useful, I don't think you can rank protection as the most important in all cases. There are going to be situations where this is appropriate, but equipment and doctrine go hand in hand, and one of the really fascinating things about the Cold War was how many different ways there were to achieve the same goal.

The recce formation in the editor are a good representation of the higher level recce assets (so regimental or divisional). The formation recce would have been made up of the battalion, so (as in the above video), I just pinched a platoon from the Forward Security Element and used that.

Yes, this is correct - or at least by the definitions in FM-100-2-1. Obviously from the Soviet perspective it doesn't actually matter all that much - the column is coming into contact in echelons, and whether the enemy is in a hasty defence or on the move is mostly just texture. The important point - or at least the point I was trying to make - is that "meeting engagements" in CM terms tend to match that of traditional tabletop wargaming (say, DBA or the WRG moderns rules), and the desire that players seem to have to have equal forces battling over even terrain, which isn't common historically at all. I get the incentive to do that, but I don't think it tends to show off CM (or any serious simulationist game) at its best.

So I think the Free Whisky video shows the tactical-scale tempo quite well (John's article is good, but it flips between the tactical and operational, which especially for the soviets is quite different). Notably in Free Whisky's video, the US artillery was mostly hitting where I used to be, because even the really fast US call-in times are slower than a BMP. Otherwise you're just talking about operational context. I definitely don't think that the NATO player is always in the right place (unless you're talking about Quick Battles, which are their own, warped environment, which will definitely have this problem among many others). There are plenty of possible scenarios where you're playing against a US hasty defence or cavalry screen, whilst the main body tries to sort itself out off-map.

So, firstly it's worth mentioning that a competitive game wasn't necessarily the priority here - it was supposed to be illustrative first and foremost, rather than a "look at how great I am at CM" - I'm not really interested in showing off. However, T-62s would be the standard here, and the strategy wouldn't really change - particularly at these ranges, the T-64's armour is mostly going to be irrelevant anyway, so there won't be a massive difference between the T-62 (1975) and the T-64 in practice. The T-64 is obviously a better tank in a vacuum, so this will affect the outcome, but not the intent. Similarly, the exact same approach would apply if the infantry were in BTRs or MTLBs. The low-level specifics would be different (e.g., the BTR formation would use on dismounted ATGMs), but the broad concept would be identical. There might be more losses, and there would be differences in mobility, but the basic structure would be the same.

I definitely believe that concepts like "Speed is Armour" or similar are nonsense, and always have been, but I've seen quite a few situations recently where having higher mobility than an opponent has been crucial to the fight to dismiss the concept out of hand. The advantage is subtle - it's certainly not the case that you can just make something faster and it's automatically better by the same degree, but greater mobility means you can often choose which battles you take and where those battles are fought, when the circumstances allow. This might well mean that it's only important sometimes, or for certain applications (e.g., cavalry), but I do think tactical mobility is worth something - it's just far too easy to put outlandish claims on the effect it can have. So yeah, Leopard 1 made sense for the German cold war doctrine, which was heavily focused on counter-attack and manoeuvre. It would have made zero sense for BAOR, whose static defence in depth was built around Cheiftain. The M60 plays more of an supporting, enabling role in US doctrine, so it needs to be somewhere in between, because it needs to be able to protect and exploit. (Obviously doctrine and equipment are a chicken and egg situation, and just because something "makes sense" doctrinally, doesn't necessarily mean it was a good idea - this is the kind of thing that can be explored with CMCW)

This is correct, at least for the Tank battalion formations (MRBs have the full choice of armour) but QB selections are always a bit suspect. I've no idea why they aren't a 1:1 match for the TO&E in the scenario editor, in all titles. In that context, at least in 1980, both variants of the T-62 are "Standard" (zero rarity), as is the T-64A. The T64-B is "Common", so starts costing you rarity points.

A highly debatable point, but it's one of the core questions that CMCW can inform, once it reaches its final form. M60, Chieftain and Leopard should all end up being represented (you'd assume), and each comes from a very different approach to the same problem. Whilst you shouldn’t really look at any of them in isolation, it's an easy point of comparison, and they each represent a very different philosophy, which will be fascinating to dig into.

I generally feel like your typical cold war QBs should be Attack/Defend. Even what would be referred to as a Soviet "meeting engagement" isn't the same thing as a "meeting engagement" in CM/wargaming terms, which typically means "an even fight" or something similar. Instead the term refers to an attack from the march. With the points from an Attack, a Large qb has enough points for a full BTR MRB, with sufficient artillery support, and a huge qb has enough points for a full BMP MRB with some change. This force was a little cut down from what would be ideal - an entire BMP company was left behind, and I had lass artillery than I'd like. Priorities though: I start with the combined arms, task group formation. It's important to have a mixture of infantry, armour and air defence. The pair of Shilkas I had here were very important, because the US had some significant air assets which weren't discussed in the video. You always want two. Dropping a company as "off-map reserve" is fine doctrinally, sinve that force can exploit your success, so that's a reasonable option. Dropping armour is suspect, you don't get a ton in an MRB, and you need them to do work. Artillery then is the interesting bit. I've said before that I don't know how to attack with a red battalion with less than three batteries (a battalion, if you like) of artillery (that is 18 tubes of something). The reason for this is that the battalion should be accepting three tasks, and each task needs to be enabled by artillery support. Each battery should have a single FO. The 120mm mortars are organics to the battalion, so should be taken - since the call-in times for those are reasonable, in my fires plan I often leave those as a "reserve", ready to be reactive, rather than proactive. Next up are your standard regimental artillery, the 122mm self propelled gun battalion, and divisional artillery, the 152mm self propelled gun battalion and the battalion of rocket artillery. The lower level assets will have less boom, greater rate of fire, and faster call-ins. 122mm should be your default in CMCW (in cmbs this is now the 152mm). A medium mission on max duration lasts something like 12-15 minutes, which is a lot of rounds going downrange, and a lot of denial. The 152s have significantly more boom, and a mission there can last 30 minutes total, so is ideal for denying key terrain, or digging out handprints. Rocket artillery is a specialised tool, and it's hard to use well in a cm context. Ideally it's doing counter-battery fire, or it's targeting fixed positions and hoping to actually kill things, where the other two can aim to suppress or deny. The best generic use-case I've found for it is to target an urban area - Soviets tend to find urban combat especially difficult, so a couple of BM-21 barrage can help a lot. All of the other artillery is more highly specialised (the big mortars are bunker-busters, for example), so should mostly be ignored. Ideally, I'd take the battalion mortars, and three batteries of artillery, possibly in a mixed load, with their intended tasks defined well in advance. Artillery have four jobs - suppression, denial, destruction and obscuration, and each of those assets is good at different things. In the above QB I have battalion mortars and two batteries of 122mm - less than I'd like, but still hitting that minimum of three groups of artillery. One nice thing about thinking in threes is that you can continuously adjust and move around these fires having two hitting things, whilst a third adjusts in on to the next step. One thing that you do see in the video is this continual adjustment of fires - the tempo gains that I'd made allowed the fires to be adjusting whilst free whisky was reacting, so they were able to start landing when he was just getting into position. Likewise, the same advantages in tempo meant that I was frequently ahead of where his artillery was falling - he was forced to react to things that were by now firmly in the past.

I definitely think it can be useful and viable to play single player scenarios (also, you paid for them...) There are also scenarios which are *better* single player, especially ones where the opponent has few or no choices to make. Multiplayer CM is great, and a human opponent is a wonderful thing, but it's also a (very) large investment in time and effort. You can knock out a battalion level scenario within a single (perhaps long) day if playing single player, but multiplayer that'll typically take months.

So this is why CMCW is set when it is - this is the turning point, where the US started to get it's act together and accelerate past the Soviets, for good. It's a really well chosen period - many Cold War games are set in 1985 or so, and if this was set in the sixties the Soviet juggernaut might very well have been overwhelming. There were a number of reasons for this, one of the big ones was microprocessor technology, but essentially the US moves from stopgap after stopgap, to finally (finally) producing Abrams and Bradley, and moving a generation ahead. That advance, combined with the crumbling Soviet Union, was something that was never caught up to, and this is to a large extent still true. For what it's worth, I think that CMCW is best played at 1980 or so (and in QB terms, with Strict rarity). The later you go, the more the game looks like Shock Force, and the less subtlety you'll see in the interactions. T-62 being the most common is true for the core game. If and when we see BAOR forces we should see the best Soviet armour - Chieftain was traditionally the scariest NATO tank, so the heavier stuff was levied against it, on the best tank terrain. If and when we see East German forces, we're more likely to see more T-55s in play.

Yes. T-64 had composite armour, and the T-64B had even thicker armour. Composite armour is extremely effective at dealing with HEAT rounds, to the point of making them essentially ineffective. Wikipedia gives the T-64 a protection of 440mm RHa versus sabot, and 575mm RHa versus HEAT, and that's before taking slope into account. The M60A2 fires the enormous six inch MGM-51 Shillelagh, which Wikipedia lists as being able to penetrate 600mm RHa at zero degrees... since you'd be unlikely to get a zero degree angle on the front of a T-64, that's very likely not to penetrate. M774 APFSDS (a sabot round from 1980 or so) is similarly listed as having a penetration of around 440mm RHa, but this will drop off with distance and angle, so is equally likely not to penetrate. So even if all of the figures above are wrong, you can see the problem. The T-62 was considered to be more or less an even match in the literature, and the T-64 and T-72 took the west by surprise. This kind of logic is why the Dragon was considered a weapon of last resort in the Gulf War - there was no expectation of that ATGM dealing with even the Iraqi export version of the T-72, let alone top of the line Soviet equipment.

Yeah, same thing for AT guns - you can move them in their deployed state, and the pack up/deploy times will be in seconds. The downside is that they'll move very slowly, but it's fine to do for small moves

A tripod mounted heavy machine gun is a complicated piece of machinery, that needs to be correctly sited to be effective. This is what the "deployed" state represents - it's not only on the tripod, but properly levelled and firmly positioned. CM adds a time penalty to setting up machine guns inside buildings. This is supposed to abstract the difficulties of preparing the position - knocking out windows, moving furniture, creating a stable and raised base to fire from, etc. Obviously it can still be a good idea to fire from buildings whilst deployed, but you need to allow for enough time to do it. The UI will show you this additional time.

Good question, and I don't know the answer. With ground vehicles, the game will only play sound if the vehicle is spotted (unless the difficulty is low), and aircraft have a physical presence on the map, so it's not impossible that it won't play unless something sees it. Obviously you're quite likely to spot an aircraft in general, and the noise could be masked by other things.

I don't believe that's been stated anywhere, but there are some fairly obvious contenders that would seem likely.

Yes, that's about right. The Russian Way of War is an excellent source, but it's sources aren't all Russian - a lot of them come from cold war US field manuals (the whole section on artillery nomograms, for example). Artillery in CM can do all the tasks artillery is good for in reality, and a 10 minute barrage from 120mm mortars would indeed destroy an infantry company, assuming you were using a sensible density of fires (e.g., as per the above artillery nomogram). The artillery effects (especially secondary effects) against armour are perhaps not what they could be - there's no overpressure modelled for one - but m-kills are extremely likely under any kind of barrage, and light armour will be devastated by any decent attack. In any case, HE is not a tool you'd want to use against tanks to begin with. You might be forced into doing it, but it should never be plan A. Excaliber rounds are an exception, of course, as is DPICM in Cold War, but then both of those are specifically designed to deal with main battle tanks. So no, I don't think artillery in CM is weak. It's modelled far more accurately than is typical for wargames in general, and the effect allow you to perform all of the four main tasks that artillery is useful for.

Popping smoke and slewing to face is a function of the laser warning receiver, so even non-laser guided ATGMs won't trigger that behaviour (Javelin, AT-13, etc.). So the lack of that behaviour isn't surprising. Off-map artillery has a specific direction, and comes from a designated map edge, so it's not impossible sometimes that this can be a mistake and produce a weird result, but this doesn't look like artillery. That really leaves two options - either a hidden ATGM team in an area that you have bypassed, or air assets. Air assets also use a friendly map edge, but they do multiple passes, and are represented in physical space (albeit invisibly). That last point means that geometrically you'll sometimes see some long ranged attacks come in very low - the aircraft might be at high altitude, but at maximum range, so the angle of incidence might be very shallow.

Oh, and a side point on "the only leveller the Russians have" The artillery superiority is certainly powerful, but the advantage in air defence and EW are significant as well - Russia can dominate the ISR fight in CMBS fairly easily. EW is a bit awkward, because it either has to be a scenario design point, or agreed before a QB - it does cost points, and it's very powerful. How common it should be is another question - the kit exists and is deployed at appropriate levels, but turning on the EW gives away its position, so it's not clear how common these should be. It's well worth using though.

I don't think artillery in CM is weak. CMBS often has too little artillery (as do many scenarios in the WW2 titles), but some of that is down to wargaming habits, I suspect. CMCW, and the recent CMRT battlepack are firm exceptions to this, where you often have appropriate levels of artillery for the formations depicted. The six batteries of the brigade would be unlikely (but not totally impossible) to turn up in support of a single battalion tactical group. More likely in practice this would be split between the two btgs the brigade or regiment is expected to provide.

So, you're not wrong, it would be great to have more control over artillery ammunition loads, and have a deeper artillery model in general. What's in CM is significantly better than most representations - it's broadly a good model for how things work - but that doesn't mean it's without fault. I do think it's worth doing some numbers on this, however: A BTG might typically be supported by a regiment of artillery - so three batteries of something long ranged, alongside it's own organic 120mm mortars. The supporting fires would typically be a mix of 152mm Howitzers and MLRS in the modern period, but since we don't have rocket artillery in CMBS we're left with the SPGs. 122mm howitzers would be more typical for Cold War, and these do exist in CMBS, but are being phased out. 2S19 is then the standard artillery piece for CMBS, either the base, M1 or M2 versions, which all have the same ammunition loads and similar characteristics. They all carry: 180 Rounds HE 18 Rounds Precision 60 Rounds Smoke Per battery. Maximum rate of fires differ, but their sustained rates are all 1 round per minute. Medium fire missions are the lightest fire mission that actually maintains the sustained rate (after starting at a "medium" ROF, whatever precisely that means), so should be your default. and this works out in-game to a 152mm battery fire mission that lasts 16 minutes. It's interesting to compare this to other close-support artillery historically, at a similar scale. During the Somme, 4th battalion, Duke of Wellington's Regiment was part of an attack that had a supporting fires plan in two phases, one to support the trench they were assaulting, and one to suppress the trench behind that, to fix any supporting assets. This first phase was a three minute bombardment, and the second was an eight minute bombardment. And this was the Somme. As a rule of thumb, you essentially need artillery as an enabler to do anything, or at least to do anything properly. Part of the reason for the three-battery approach is that a BTG should be able to take on three sequential objectives in the space of a CM battlefield, and as such each of those moves should be supported by an artillery battery, whether that battery is providing suppressive fires, denying fires, obscuring fires or actually destroying things. These tasks should be pre-planned, either literally with the interface, by laying down TRPs on the needed areas, or just giving yourself enough time in the plan to wriggle an FO forward safely and call in fires. "pre-planned" doesn't have to mean "fixed" - those three objectives might actually be marked with five TRPs: 1, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, with branching paths and flexibility as to how they're used. So... yes. Whilst it should be possible to stockpile more ammunition beside the vehicles, the hand-waved explanation is that SPGs have to remain mobile, so can only carry what they actually have with them, particularly in the context of CMBS which is a significantly more mobile and high-tempo operation than actual-Ukraine has turned out to be. In general though, 3+1 batteries of the stuff is doctrinally correct, and usually gives a good representation of what this should actually look like.