domfluff

Core principles of Soviet everything is massed fires and speed of action - gaining overwhelming firepower against a minority of the enemy, and pushing before the enemy has a chance to properly react. A really good example of this is the design of the BMP, with the BMP-3 being perhaps the clearest example of that. The BMP-3 has an obscene amount of firepower at all ranges, and a surprisingly decent amount of protection... but only from the front. It's designed to point at and close quickly with a defending enemy, and put out a ton of firepower whilst doing so. It's dominating when it's performing that specific role, but can be worse than useless when it has to act outside of that controlled context. Compare with the Bradley - that's a vehicle with superb situational awareness, optics and comms, and a suite of weapons to be useful at any range, but not necessarily at the same time. It's very powerful, very flexible and very expensive. It's capable of dealing with any situation, but it's not specialised with a single purpose like the BMP is. The same principle applies across the board - Soviet doctrine is quite mathematical, and a lot of it comes down to maximising the efficiency of engagements, and coordinating fires of all arms to create an overwhelming effect.

It absolutely depends on context. Fundamentally: two tanks working as a pair are significantly better than two tanks individually. This concept is what everything else is based on. 5-tank platoons (e.g., WW2, US Cold War), they split into two teams of two, with the HQ tank floating between them. This means that the platoon has the option of remaining behind as a C2 link, or joining one pair or the other to make a set of three (more on that later). 4-tank platoons (e.g., Modern NATO, Soviet tank platoons in the mechanised infantry battalions) obviously split into two teams of two, so the HQ tank needs to be part of one of those teams. In the case of the British Sherman platoons in WW2, the command tank would be the Firefly with the 17pdr, so they would be brought up to deal with heavier armour. Having two teams of two maximises small unit flexibility, and allows the platoon to act independently of other tank platoons. 3-tank platoons (mostly Soviets and Russians, but also BAOR and the UK sometimes, as well as others) can't be split into two pairs. Three is mathematically the most efficient number - the theory goes that there's minimal wastage, since the chance of two tanks targeting the same enemy are lower, whereas larger platoons get diminishing returns with each additional tank. Because the three tank platoon can't be split down, the three act as one unit, and you're relying on a second platoon to do your fire and manoeuvre. That kind of thing suits the Soviet fires-first mentality well. So in general, there's a good argument for keeping your HQ out of the fight, but that's not always desired in practice. The five tank platoons give you diminishing returns, and everyone's moved away from that concept over time, so the platoon HQ is intended to fight. That's not necessarily true for the company HQ or higher, mind you.

There is nothing inherently different about the different types of QB map. The mechanical differences are: Attacker Force Ratios Meeting Engagement: 1 : 1 Probe: 1.5 : 1 Attack: 1.65 : 1 Assault: 1.8 : 1 Terrain/Casualties VP Meeting Engagement: 400/600 Probe: 500/500 Attack: 650/350 Assault: 750/250 When you load a map as a QB, it takes all of the terrain objectives and converts them into Occupy objectives for both sides. The points are adjusted by ratio until they fit the above - so a map that had one objective worth 600 points, and another worth 200 points, and saved as a Meeting Engagement, would be adjusted to be worth 300 and 100 points respectively, since ME Victory points total 400 for terrain objectives. The only other mechanical difference is that Assault maps give the attacker some prebattle intel. Now, that's not to say that the same map will work equally well in all modes. It'll work from a mechanical standpoint, but there are clearly some maps which are better as attack/defend maps. Typically this has to do with the distance to objectives and the size of the setup zones, but it's not an exact science.

Economic effects will take time to manifest, but given that there's been a Russian propaganda push to get them ended, I think it's reasonable to assume that they're having an effect.

This is a concept that Rooks and Kings is developing, initially intending to use CM Pro to take advantage of the stats and replays generated. The basic idea is that of a narrativist campaign - generating a single scenario at a time, with all of the results being complied and submitted. Those combined results being used to inform and generate the next, with the result being a linear campaign, albeit one which is open-ended. The further intention is to see if this format is useful to answer specific questions (e.g., the utility and correct use of Ajax) and to generate this data in a crowd-sourced sense. Since the core concept is to lean on a narrativist approach, the resolution doesn't have to be limited to only using Combat Mission - Steel Beasts, Command, etc. could all be potentially involved. This approach is distinct from some other approaches to this kind of thing in the CM-space, where there are more gamist approaches to campaigns (e.g., using a second game as a strategic layer). These have some fairly obvious design problems, and I could rant about some of the problems with that approach for a while. If this ends up with a reasonable outcome, then there's no reason why the concept couldn't be expanded.

Leaving aside that infantry ranges haven't really changed since WW2 (which is obviously not true for tank and anti-tank ranges), the point is that you *don't* always have armour, ATGMs, artillery or the like, and that's as true for WW2 as it is for anything modern. Why wasn't Brecourt Manor dealt with by counter-battery fire, or a tank platoon? Both would have been significantly easier than doing it with small arms, but the option just wasn't there, they had to go with what they had. At Goose Green, the artillery was limited to three 105mm guns, and zero armour support. The British had a battalion of light infantry, who were attacking uphill over open terrain against a dug-in opponent with nearly equal numbers. Why the resources weren't available is down to a number of failings, but in terms of the tactical situation they had to go with what they had, and make the best of a bad situation - to take a disadvantaged position and turn it into an advantaged one.

For CMSF, Armour Attacks, and the British and German equivalents are fantastic for that.

The fundamentals are really no different - the conceptual approach is the same no matter the period. The ranges might change a little (although not in small arms terms), and the equipment will change, but the fundamental approach and the core concepts involved are the same. The current fighting in Ukraine has seen an awful lot of footage of light infantry combat, and those fundamentals are identical. Brecourt Manor is notable because it was an exception - an action which was necessary to perform, where the ideal resources weren't there to do it. There's no fundamental conceptual difference between the attack at Brecourt Manor in 1944 and, say, Goose Green in 1982. Both are trying to attack a fixed position with light infantry, and trying to create advantages from a position of initial disadvantage.

Yup. Indeed, to quote the reduced-to-bullet-points part of FM71-2:

It was mentioned that a CMCW module was likely coming later in the year, in a thread after the main bones thread. "Later in the year" naturally should be interpreted liberally - "being worked on" is perhaps an accurate way to put that.

An interesting recent anecdote on this one: "Rowland, in The Stress of Battle, showed that weapon performance in the ranges (and by implication, the sales brochures) were an order of magnitude better than realistic field exercises (using lasers) and the latter were again an order of magnitude better than actual combat. For example, as a I sniper I get 95% hits at 300 metres on the range, in simulated combat I get 9% hits and in actual battle I get 1% hits." - John Curry, History of Wargaming Project http://wargamingco.blogspot.com/2022/03/ukraine-2022-why-are-our-wargames-wrong.html

Oh, and in terms of my personal preference - I'm pretty confident that CMCW will end up being the strongest CM title in general. It probably needs a module, it could do with those mysterious "performance improvements" slated for engine 5, and it certainly needs a significantly better selection of QB maps, but there is so much about the scale of the game which makes total sense in CM.

Arbitrary distinctions don't really help anyone, and clearly the answer is "both", but: Based on what Steve has said previously, WW2 outselling Modern, outside of CMBN, isn't true at all, and this has been hinted at being quite the reverse. CMBN is likely to be the best seller individually, certainly (although the lack of CMBN on Steam might have cut into that for the time being). In terms of comparison: It's an awful lot easier to make a workable scenario for a WW2 title. You can throw a US rifle company and a German rifle company onto a map, stick an objective in the middle and have a decently interesting game. That means the floor is a lot higher, and it's a lot harder to get it wrong. The problem with the WW2 titles though is that you're answering questions that are extremely familiar, and all have well-trodden answers. There's little mystery to engage with, and few high concepts to grapple with. One of the most interesting experiences with CMBS was reading some of the Lessons Learned from the fighting in Ukraine since 2014 (e.g.: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316122469_Karber_RUS-UKR_War_Lessons_Learned). It's very interesting how many of those lessons are learnable using CMBS - a testament to CM as a valuable tool for simulation, as well as how some or most of the assumptions made by BFC were correct, or at least along the right lines. So with the modern titles you can engage with some Big Ideas - some of which have no real-world solutions. There's a Stryker brigade sitting in real-Europe as a quick reaction force, which could be brought into action against a peer opponent (or as recent experience suggests, possibly a peer opponent). How well could that do in a near-peer situation? Black Sea can give you some answers to that. The Modern titles allow you to solve novel problems that haven't been solved hundreds of times before. That means the potential ceiling is significantly higher. Now, that brings with it some other issues. Specifically because the ground is not as well trodden, the scenario and map design is significantly more difficult. All of the modern titles are asymmetric to some degree - CMCW is the most balanced in power level between the factions, but they play extremely differently to each other. The more asymmetric a scenario, the more difficult it is to create something that's interesting. Also, if the aim is to explore unanswered questions, then it's more than possible that the tools provided are not appropriate. So, no, I don't think it's an age thing (aside from the short-term situation, where only the modern titles are on Steam - that will skew things). I also don't think it is or should be an either/or thing. Preferences are personal, naturally, but it does seem a bit daft to limit yourself in that way, since it doesn't seem to serve a particularly useful purpose.

Indeed. The point, naturally, is that this kind of thing is a building block. It's very easy to look at a tactical problem (indeed, any problem), and to throw your hands in the air and claim it's too complex to solve. This is both very tempting, and very common. The way to counter that is to break this down into sections, get a good understanding of the fundamentals, and then apply those fundamentals to ever more complex scenarios. To give you an excellent CM-relevant example: In CMCW, there are a pair of Tutorial scenarios, which are intended to teach you Soviet Doctrine. The first is a basic attack, which is intended to teach you the Soviet principles of combining mass with the support of massed fires. This exact situation is *not* one which you are likely to see, either in CMCW, or even historically in Soviet doctrine, but the principles taught are applicable to everything that follows, because they represent two of the most fundamental pillars that everything Soviet is built on. The second then is an attack from the march (a "meeting engagement", in Soviet terms). This is necessarily a more fluid and complex scenario than the former. The fundamentals of mass and coordination with your fire plan remain identical, but the application is significantly more complex, especially as troops will be arriving in sections, and the enemy position is not known at the start of the engagement. In Soviet thinking, this kind of battle would represent the most common form of engagement, so this is teaching something that is a lot more directly applicable than the former. Then, after you've learnt these fundamental principles, the first mission of the Soviet campaign is another meeting engagement. The structure is firmly recognisable, but the situation is more difficult still. The terrain is significantly more complex, and the enemy are a lot more active in trying to compete with you and prevent you from winning. Jumping straight into this scenario without the grounding of the first two will mean you're missing a lot of the nuance and sophistication that the former two will bring. You have to learn the alphabet before you can spell. Without the former education, the more complex stuff is impossible to correctly parse, and it will not be possible to solve this to an acceptable degree.

Good question. That's certainly true for squad and platoon level manuals, not so much for the higher level stuff. The difficulty is that the higher you go, the less practical and the more abstract the concepts inevitably get. The first point is that it's important to recognise and accept that what you're describing is a disadvantaged position. If you are literally forced to walk into a kill-zone, then you're going to suffer for it. In the extreme case, where all other options are exhausted, the only option you'll have left is pure attrition - sending in a force which can put out overwhelming fire all at once, and just pushing through head-on, accepting the inevitable casualties. This is obviously a worst-case scenario, so the challenge (and indeed, the point of manoeuvre warfare as a basic concept) is to do everything you can to maintain control of your options and the situation as a whole. The concept then is to use manoeuvre to gain an advantage. I'm going to sketch out something overly-simple, but that illustrates the fundamental points I'm trying to make. Your question is around Black Sea, but really the fundamentals are applicable to everything ever. A basic killzone in a town environment. L-shaped ambush, two elements which are either obscured from the approach, or close to it, until the point is reached. Clearly if the blue forces walk up the road here they are in trouble. Scale here is intentionally fuzzy, but it's probably something like a platoon. So, the application of manoeuvre: With this kind of approach, the terrain will mask the fire from the far element. The red forces will be unable to get both elements firing at the same point, so blue will be able to put their force against a minority of the enemy at any one time. However, this isn't really enough. This action creates an advantage, but that's not really enough to turn that advantage into something decisive. A basic rule of "how to win" is "Take an action that forces an enemy reaction, then ensure that this reaction cannot happen". In this case, this might look something like this: In this case, the enemy should move the blocked element to a position where they can support by fire. You can't know in this instance which direction they will move in. If you can prevent this movement by application of your supporting elements (example here might be the platoon MG teams), then by manoeuvre you'll have isolated the enemy near element from any support, and can defeat it with your force. Obviously an ideal example, but that kind of principle is the thing you're looking to achieve - working out ways to control the battlefield, to isolate portions of it and to create locally-advantaged situations. The above example implies a close-ranged light infantry fight, but there's no reason why this would have to be the case. Equally, the above example involves squad or platoon movement, and the same principles can be applied to other elements. Artillery is a big one - if the far element was supressed with mortar fire, then the blue forces could overwhelm the near element in the exact same manner. The same thing can apply to obfuscation via smoke - smoke used in this case can create blocking terrain, and in general terms "shaping the battlefield" is one of the primary roles for artillery. Clearly suppression is a temporary and uncertain state, and smoke even more so, but these are the kind of trade-offs and decisions which are important to consider at this level.

Sometimes the scenario will enforce this, but often in CM they are fairly lax, and will allow you to get away with doing things badly. Quick Battles naturally only penalise you in relative terms - if you and you opponent both throw away all of your forces, then you're not necessarily any worse off. As a ballpark figure, 20-30% casualties in the real world are typical for assuming that something is combat ineffective. That means that if the scenario assumes that the formation given is supposed to have subsequent objectives after the scenario is complete, then the scenario should also penalise numbers higher than this. It also means that the 20-30% should be an absolute maximum, with the intent being significantly lower than this. To put that in real terms - that's losing less than a platoon in a company sized scenario, or less than one squad per platoon. The logic behind that is obvious - a platoon has three squads because each performs a different role (e.g., Assault, Suppress and Reserve). Each of those squads has a job to do, and if you lose one of those squads, the platoon cannot operate at full effectiveness anymore. The same thing would apply to a Company or a Battalion for their equivalent scales. The real aim (and indeed, the realistic aim) should be for "as few casualties as possible", whatever that actually means. It's correct to aim for zero - there should never be the thought process of "taking this hill is only going to cost me five men" - but not to give up when that number is non-zero, because some casualties are inevitable. This kind of thing is pretty common to wargaming - I've seen a few naval games where every battle plays out like Jutland in terms of mutual devastation. That kind of thing can be "fun", but it has little bearing on reality, at least in terms of typical experience.

All of the MoD posts have been cautious, and I can see why. Far better to under-estimate than to go over the top with things.

I think so. Having access to Ukrainian airspace shouldn't even be a question 24 days into an offensive campaign, so if the aim here is posturing (and it probably is, in some manner), then this is presumably an expensive and extreme way to do that. Whether that posturing is "we can get into your airspace", "look at our advanced kit" or even "imagine this was carrying an NBC warhead" - any of those options are pretty desperate.

If there's a genuine value in Russia expending assets to prove that, I suspect that's indicative of much bigger problems.

I'm a fan. It's not in any sense a simulation, and it's about as realistic as the Expanse is (which is to say, not very, but also much harder sci-fi than average). It's really cool though, and the EW warfare model is simple, but works well.

Option 1 is certainly viable and acceptable in-game. It's often not realistic, but it's a consequence of the gods-eye view of the player. It's a gamism, but it's only about as gamey as something like a map edge existing - it's the kind of limitation that wargames (or indeed, all simulations) have always had to deal with. Option 2 is the more realistic version, but it's not just an affectation - engaging a target for which you already have spotting contacts gives you a significant advantage in the resulting fight (partial contacts upgrade to full spots faster, blind area fire is less accurate). It's not just roleplaying, it's something which the game mechanically supports and incentivises. So, yes, I suspect you're missing something fairly critical here. Paying attention to the C2 network is a crucial part of how Combat Mission works, since it's one of the key pillars of the model. In addition to the above, you *can* roleplay this. One thing I've done before is to only allow area fire against known targets or spotting contacts. That house-rule has some heavy limitations (recon by fire becomes tough, or needs exceptions to work), but I think it's a good-enough houserule for most purposes. I wouldn't try to enforce that on a human opponent, but it's been interesting solo.

In what world would a website called "anti 5g" be a remotely credible source.

The UK law (and I'd guess the Canadian one as well) dates back to 1870. It's never really been enforceable. It was aimed at George Orwell and others during the Spanish Civil War, but didn't hold then either. There have allegedly been prosecutions around the fighting in Syria though, so who knows. I don't expect to see much real fallout over this.

A few general rules of thumb here. The first is recon. The Soviet method is a command push - that is to say that you are using an element (typically an infantry platoon) to advance on the same axis that your main force will follow, perhaps 10-30 minutes ahead. The purpose of this reconnaissance element is to find the enemy position, and to report back. They may well find it by dying, but that's not a requirement - the important bit is an aggressive probe that takes risk, but reveals the enemy efficiently. When you know this, you have a couple of things - you have a target for your artillery, which should start being called in immediately, and you have spotting contacts which can be transmitted to the rest of the force. The recon platoon is usually one of the infantry platoons for this reason - they'll send contacts up the C2 chain to the follow-on forces. The artillery is not necessarily being called in on the spotted targets (although it might be). The aim here is to shape the later tank engagement, either by suppressing or destroying the targets, or by denying the supporting positions that the targets will need. The core of any US position in CMCW are the TOW vehicles, which are extremely squishy (even if artillery doesn't destroy them, any fragmentation on the M901's hammerhead will usually take that out). It's then important to target those, or where they could be (or more accurately, where it would be terrible for you if they were). So the endstate here is that you're not running into the position blind, and expecting your moving, blind tanks to out-spot the stationary, prepared tanks with good optics, because you're never going to win that fight. The second point is the use of terrain. The Soviets want to create situations where they have relatively short ranged engagements (sub-1.5km) and enough space to mass fires. You want to be engaging with a line of tanks all at once, so that they maximise their chance at spotting. That means you need a covered approach, and enough space to operate in. Smoke can be useful here, and would form part of the fireplan which you have been calling in since the recon elements first made contact, such that they will start falling when the main force arrives. The Soviets had three defined uses of smoke (blinding, camouflage and decoy) - on your own position to conceal your movements (i.e., creating "terrain" to mask your movements) on the enemy to blind them (using smoke to shape the engagement, cutting out sections of their line such that you can put maximum force on a minimal portion of the enemy - don't fight through your own smoke), and deception (to confuse as to the actual direction and shape of the attack). Clearly that last point only works against a human opponent. Smokes can be Frontal, Oblique or Flank, depending on the situation. So, the current position: - You know where the enemy is, with a fair degree of certainty, and you've shared the spotting contacts with everyone. - You've worked out what axis you're going to attack on, with as covered a route as possible - You've been planning and preparing your artillery mission(s) to support the move. A really important point at this stage is not just to plan the target of the move, but the direction of further advance - you need to know where you're going afterwards at all times. When the shells start falling, you move up the armour. Tanks-first. You already know the locations of some of the armour, so they will start getting spots, but there's also nothing stopping you area-firing to supplement that. "Maximum fires" is the go-to, since you're trying to overwhelm the enemy with a sudden, devastating attack. Further, once this starts, you *keep moving*, at least on the macro scale. You need to press forwards, and not get bogged down. It's very, very easy to focus on the one objective, and then to get stuck aimlessly, coming under artillery fire or counter-attack. This does mean that when you commit, it's important to commit fully, and to follow-through. It's very tempting to hold back and to lose confidence, but "audacity" is the term in US military parlance - you need to be bold and confident in what you're doing, and force a situation where you're the proactive party, and the enemy has to react to you.