domfluff

The overlay will stretch to fit the map size. Ideally you know the exact dimensions of the full source photo, and then set the map to those dimensions. If the source photo is too small, then you'll need to create an image of the correct size in an editor, with a blank area around it, so that the overlay is representative of whatever the eventual size will be. If the source photo is too large, you'll want to cut it down in an image editor to suit the scale you want to represent. If the source photo represents everything you want to represent on the map, then you just need to change the map size to suit whatever the scale should be, and you'll be fine.

If you're sitting inside a BMP or BTR when it goes up, the chance of survival is pretty low - they're tough to get out of quickly, and full of explosive and burning things. Weapons tend to be rather more powerful in Cold War than in WW2 - calibres are higher, more automatic weapons and the like. You'll see similar casualty figures to the WW2 titles in pure infantry combat, but when you start mechanising things the figures can shoot up significantly (or reduce significantly, if you are doing things properly, and using the advantages in protection and mobility offered).

Yup yup. I think that last point actually bears some expansion. A soviet plan should be top down and preordained, but that doesn't mean it's inflexible and doesn't have options... They're just options you've previously planned for. Equally, "go down the road until you explode" should never be plan A, but the key is to set up the overall plan such that you can still get good information, even if that's the eventual result.

BRDMs are excellent reconnaissance assets, but they're divisional assets, not battalion ones. Their job would usually have been to scout ahead of the main body, confirm the route is still valid, bridges are intact and unmined, and to find approximate enemy position - essentially they're there to let you know that there are enemy forces somewhere on the map before you start, so for a red player in a cm context their work has typically already been completed. Recce then is done throughout, but typically initiated by a mechanised infantry platoon, sometimes reinforced with a single tank. These are not dedicated recce assets, these are just guys from the battalion who are taking point. In the Soviet context, you start with a centralised, top down plan. The entire battalion will have a single task, with perhaps three objectives - an initial objective, a further objective, and a line of further advance. Thinking of things in this structure forces you to always think of "what's next?", you always have an idea what you're doing afterwards, which helps to avoid being paralyzed with choices. Importantly, it also helps gain and maintain tempo (used in the chess sense of the word, of being some moves ahead of your opponent). The problem with this kind of top-down structure is that it can be a big gamble. If you roll the dice on a single COA, then you can win big or lose, either way pretty quickly. One of the methods to round out this dice roll is to echelon - have successive elements, where each element can set the conditions for the following, and each following element can adapt to the preceeding. These aren't "reserves", these are committed troops who are working towards the same goal, just not all at once. The role of Soviet recce is then to set the conditions for the following element. At game start, the divisional recce has let you know there are enemy somewhere on the map. The battalion recce (CRP) then have the role of finding specific lines of resistance and enemy locations. Their job is to scout aggressively, take key terrain and find enemy positions. This is not necessarily "recon by death", but it's fast, and it's risky, and the entire crp dying isn't a major problem, if that uncovers key information. Recce will be both mounted and dismounted. You do want to survive long enough to report back information, but the important thing is that it's fast. A winning state here is spotting the enemy, regardless of your losses. A losing state is if the CRP is wiped out and no information is gained on enemy disposition. This is why recce screens are so important for blue, and why a tank may be part of the recce force, to overmatch blue recce elements. The following element to the CRP should be a combined arms company. This will be tanks, mech inf and artillery. A mech inf version would be a tank platoon, infantry company and one artillery battery. This is a strong, capable force, but it's not the main effort just yet. This forward security element (FSE) will have the job of setting the conditions for the follow-on force. If the CRP has died leaving no information (read: you are losing), then the FSE needs to take over the recce job. The FSE typically follows the same route as the CRP, but not always. If the CRP vanished, then the FSE needs to transition into a cautious, probing attack to gain the same information, for the main body. In an ideal situation, the CRP has found the enemy, possibly with their face, and the FSE then can set the conditions for the main body. This FSE ideally creates a base of fire to fix the enemy, restricting their movement and controlling their possible responses. You cannot do this effectively without sufficient information, so the CRP sets conditions for the FSE, which sets conditions for the main body. All the while, the FSE is also gaining information, and this all feeds into where the main body goes in. That decision will likely be pre-planned, and there will be multiple COAs defined. One could be to attack along the same axis as the FSE, one could be to flank elements that the FSE is engaged with, or to attack in a completely different sector, since the FSE will be fixing the enemy somewhere else. Again, all of these decisions will be based on the recce picture built up by the lead elements, but the tension here is that this is all *fast* - it's important to keep moving, keep pushing, and keep steps ahead of the enemy at all times. In an ideal situation then: Lead platoon finds enemy positions through any method they can. Lead company then fixes these positions. Main body then uses this recce and fixing to win the battle. CMCW is most interesting in 1979/1980, since the later stuff ends up looking more like CMSF. Thermals and any of the later kit make this a little harder, but they do not change the fundamental scheme or what the battalion has to do. Relying on equipment to spot for you is nice, but ultimately dismounts with binoculars in good concealment are always going to be an invaluable asset, regardless of your time period or level of equipment.

What you start with are the reconnaissance elements. Their job isn't to attack main battle tanks, but to set the conditions for the later attack. That means the two companies of tanks are your leading element, supported by your artillery. In terms of that artillery, you have a battery of 120mm mortars and six batteries of rocket artillery. I'm going to say that again for some emphasis. You have 36 BM-21 Grad self propelled 122mm multiple rocket launchers. So the real answer of "how do I fight M60s with BMPs" is that you don't. If you were forced to, the BMP-1 can penetrate M60s frontally with both the ATGM, and the HEAT round from the 73mm cannon. Neither is a great option, which means if you're forced to then something has gone wrong, but you do have the tools to do it, if you can create situations of local superiority. One of the ways you can do that is by using some of the 1440 barrels of 122mm rocket artillery that you're given.

I've long felt that training missions were a good idea - something above a simple "how to play the game" tutorial, but below a full scenario. Ideal would be something that wasn't necessarily all that challenging, but still allows you to lose - essentially a "if you can't do this, you don't understand it" check. Once you have this ideal situation locked down, the scenarios and campaigns proper can then give you the "real" version, on less than ideal terrain or with additional complexities. That kind of thing would answer an awful lot of criticisms of various platforms and systems. At various times people have expressed frustration with Stryker, ifvs in general, the Italians, the British 2 inch mortar, halftracks, combat in urban and wooded terrain, etc. etc. The soviet tutorials in cold war do a good job of expressing some of the core tenets, and the second develops on the first. The halftrack tutorials in the bp do a similar job - I got more use out of the mortar halftracks as a combination of mobile direct and indirect fire than I've ever done before, and tutorial 3 might be my favorite scenario in the battlepack, for all of the above reasons.

Looks like this was from 2.10, and this has subsequently been fixed. Shrug, happens to the best of us.

Nah, of course it is. That's why it's faster to call in battalion mortars than regimental fires, and faster to call in regimental assets than divisional or corps level assets, for the same soft factors.

I don't think I fully understand this sentence, but the mortar platoon HQ calling in one minute faster than the rifle company HQ (which is what I assume you're implying here) makes hand-wavy sense to me, since there's one fewer step to communicate with. Again, plenty of scope to discuss about artillery call-in times in general, but that's specifically not the question here - we're working with what we're given. I just rolled up a US rifle company in CMBN, with Veteran and Leadership +1 across the board. Baseline call-in times for the rifle platoon HQ and company HQ are 6 minutes, and the Mortar platoon HQ does this in 5 minutes. Shaving off that additional minute doesn't sound stupid to me in the context of what's presented, since the Mortar platoon HQ wouldn't have to relay each order twice - both responding to the fires order from their superior, and relaying that to their inferior.

So, whether it should actually be four minutes or not is really a different question, and there's certainly arguments about why that should be shorter, but that's the baseline we have, so that's what we're working with. My confusion is that the mortar team in this scenario can't see the target, so the exact same ranging information needs to be communicated (in the US system this is a six step process, iirc), and that would be the case whether the mortar team and HQ are communicating through radio, vocally or tin cans - the actual information that needs to be relayed back and forth will be identical in every case. The longer call-in times for higher level assets (battalion mortars or the like) are because the communications have to be relayed through more intermediaries, but in the case of the 60mm, it should be the same connecting thread regardless of comms method - the HQ will be talking to the mortar HQ, who will be talking to the mortars. I could imagine some savings in time - there's no buttons to press, for one - and it could also waste time, since you're trying to shout from a distance, presumably over gunfire, and make yourself understood. I'm not sure in either case if the time difference would be meaningful, even in aggregate. Obviously the answer to the question: "What am I missing here? Why can't I get them bombarding enemy units much, much sooner?" is that the OP is likely better off using these in direct lay, if timing is an issue.

Why would there be a difference in timing?

Why would directing indirect fires be faster for being in voice contact?

The Assault command can genuinely be useful, but it's always optional. You typically really want to use it in a less than optimal situation, where you have to move your squad under fire, and need to supply your own fire support - i.e., when your situation is that you're pressed for time, out of position, and you need to accept risk to turn the situation around. Things have *gone wrong*, and you need to fix this before this scenario becomes permanent. It's worth experimenting with it to understand how to use it. If you plot Assault command moves, with target lines from each waypoint, then as soon as the moving element stops, they will open fire. This way, the squad keeps up a continuous volume of fire at the target, rather than hoping that the stationary element can spot things in time. For this, you generally want to use it over short distances, and perhaps with multiple waypoints. It can be extremely useful, especially for things like Soviet dismounts, who should have their IFV also providing area fire at the same time - this way the squad is only ever moving a single team, whilst the other team and the ifv are mag-dumping into the targeted building or the like. This will be extremely wasteful for ammunition, but that's sort-of the point - if you're doing this with a soviet section, they're performing their duty correctly. The ifv will have enough rounds to give them a single full reload, so you can do this twice a battle, but it's clearly an effective and useful way of doing things, and works well even with poor quality troops. This is the kind of thing you really can't do manually, but it's a narrow use-case, and isn't the most efficient thing in the world. If I was using infantry in a more precise mode, I wouldn't touch assault, and instead just spilt squads myself. This will be a lot slower, and the volume of fire will be less exuberant, but you won't end up spaffing thousands of rounds against an empty farmhouse.

Assault is automated fire and manoeuvre between teams.... each element that moves is one of the elements you get from "Split squads", i.e., one of each of the two-three defined teams. Now, should teams be able to subdivide? Maybe, but CM's scale has the team as the lowest element.

Speed not affecting bogging is forum wisdom, not Steve wisdom. It might be true, but we don't know.

You'll have picked it up from Bugs Bunny. Nimrod is the name of a king, famed as a hunter in the bible. Bugs calls Elmer Fudd the name ironically, because he's an awful hunter. Since the cartoons have been around forever, and the reference was pretty obscure to begin with, the term was mostly understood to mean "idiot", and has passed into common parlance as such. This didn't stop the British giving the name to their maritime surveillance aircraft. I'm not really sure why this is a "general cm" post though, but shrug.

Ah gotcha, so not the M113 then. Yeah, I don't think that was caught or reported.

Getting the same thing unbuttoned or buttoned. Unbuttoned they will be using NVGs, so it's not impossible there's some outstanding weirdness around that, but it's not what I'm seeing.

Mine too.

...and that's how one starts to arrive at Soviet doctrine. One of the core tenants of the Soviet way of way is a mathematical adherence to firepower-above-all. You can indeed create situations where firepower alone is sufficient to get the job done, but it's a narrow and single-minded point of view. It can certainly be powerful, but it's successful if and only if you can remain in control of the broader variables, and can successfully shape the engagement to your liking. As soon as you run into situations where things aren't going your way, you'll start running the risk of such an approach being badly exposed. In those situations, you're often better having some more depth to your thinking, and giving yourself more outs. There's an analogy I like about this kind of thing, about mountain climbing - one school of thought gives the climber a bunch of different backup ropes, so that they can lose half a dozen of them, and it doesn't matter. This is wasteful of resources, sure, but this kind of redundancy can severely reduce the risk you're willing to accept. The other gives the climber just a single rope, but focuses on making it a really good rope. In this situation, you're following the straight line path to the goal, and if you're not hitting anything outside of the parameters you expect, you're doing it with maximum efficiency and economy of effort. So yes, it's a viable approach, but it's not necessarily uncovering some deeper truth - rather it's one possible way of thinking, which will sometimes be the best (or least-worst) course of action, but not always, or in every situation.

So this is an opinion entirely unmatched by the totality of military history, historic doctrine and current practice. I'm honestly a bit curious where it's pulled from.

Welcome to the concept of Shaping. Crew served weapons are primarily about suppression (in fact, most weapons are primarily about suppression), so the challenge is how you create conditions such that you can deploy them effectively. In this particular case, you're advancing across mostly open ground against a dug-in enemy, including trenches and bunkers. This is pretty much a worst-case scenario, and as such there's an expectation of casualties. It also means that this isn't the most interesting or representative of scenarios, and not a great example of this kind of concept, but shrug. You need to identify your win-states - imagining what an advantaged position might look like, and then work out what conditions are required to construct that. This is neither easy to define or do, and there's an art to this. In the specific case of that CMBN mission, you might identify that the bunkers are the enemy centre of gravity. You might decide that you can effectively suppress these bunkers if you're able to get sufficient MG and mortar fires onto them, but you have the issue of how you can get your crew-served weapons set up to get that suppression in place. That means that you're looking for what conditions you can change to shape the battlespace, and give you the freedom of operation you desire. In this case, if the bunkers are the problem, then a smoke mission to blind them should allow you a window of time to get your crew served weapons set up. This pre-supposes a couple of things: 1) You have determined that the bunkers are the enemy centre of gravity 2) That your solution to the bunkers is setting up crew served weapons 3) You need a solution to give you the time to set these up. That may or may not be a valid course of action, and that's something which you can debate, or seek out alternatives. In a more general sense, and to answer the original question, "How to create fire superiority", you're looking to create unfair situations on a local level. To use the terrain and your forces to construct situations where you can bring your strength against a minority of the enemy. If you have a platoon, and the enemy has a platoon, but you manage to attack their platoon one section at a time, with the full weight of your platoon, you're going to have overwhelming fire superiority, three times in a row. "But what if they move", yes, so the important thing is to consider the situation from the enemies perspective, and to control your battle-space such that you can deal with this reaction. You might have a section of your platoon dedicated to suppressing the enemy, another section moving for the assault, and a third section providing security, guarding the main line of reinforcement, and isolating the enemy you're focusing on. The entire purpose is to control the space, to give yourself maximum freedom of movement and available options, whilst denying those to your opponent. That's far, far more important than the set-up time of an MG or whatever the kill counter says - if you can shape the battlefield correctly, then you can get yourself in a situation where you've won long before the first shot is fired.

I'm always curious, what do you want a "move to contact" to actually do?

In what possible context did you think this was about Quick Battle points? All points-buy systems are bad, and CM's is no different - typically they're a least-worst option for design. If you're going to shift the goalposts to discussing the formations in QB efficiency terms then sure, only a minority of possible units and formations and unit are actually going to be worth taking, this is why they're bad. Quick battle points have no influence or meaning on the CM model, campaigns, scenarios or any PBEM which are outside of the context of Quick Battles. That might be the only thing that matters to you, but it's a minority of what CM actually is.

So obviously the response was a more generic one than for any specific formation, there will always be exceptions. Stryker Cavalry is firmly not one of them. They absolutely have disproportionate firepower for it's size - as Cavalry they'll typically have far more CAS and artillery support per-man than that of the rifle formations, but even on the level of an individual platoon, you're looking at three five man squads with two M240Bs, and one javelin per squad. That's 16 men, two GPMGs and three ATGMS, not counting the Strykers themselves. Compare that to the Stryker infantry with 37 men and the same number of weapons, and the cavalry unit is disproportionately powerful for it's size - it has twice as many weapons per man as a Stryker platoon. The Bradley platoon comparison becomes even more stark, since the Cavalry Bradley squads are four men, with the remaining space being taken up by extra TOW missiles.