domfluff

The TPN-3 is not a thermal optic. It does have passive night vision out to a decent range, which a lot of the earlier models lacked, but it's not comparable to a thermal optic.

Direct comparisons of those are always a bit deceptive - in the below case, this is looking at something a tiny number of metres away, which isn't really indicative of any kind of real situation, but it gives you an idea of how much of an advantage a modern optic gives you:
https://packaged-media.redd.it/lqjq2oe3zzu81/pb/m2-res_720p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1683761911&s=fce3986b5d013acede59eb3727f2b360cced2c80#t=0

(Ukranian T-64 with thermal sight, compared to the regular one).
The thermals in CMCW aren't going to be of the same resolution to pick out details, but they'll certainly be similar in terms of contrast, and finding hot tanks against a cold background.
 
Of course, none of this minutia is actually the point of this post. The Soviet tanks do indeed have worst situational awareness than the US ones in CMCW. They also have significantly better fire control systems, a much scarier armament, and superior protection. They are in most respects superior to the US tanks, until the generational change that happens with Abrams and Bradley (and to a lesser extent, the M60A3 TTS). This naturally leaps ahead of the Soviet designs, and this was late enough such that it wasn't something the Soviet Union ever really caught up with.

I've mentioned before that I think the best way to approach CMCW is about 1980 or so, and with Strict rarity, if you're playing a QB. The more thermals you add, the more the game looks like Shock Force.

They do not have no memory of previous spots. This is (partly) what spotting contacts are, and why you upgrade from a partial spot to a full one easier.

If you paint a setup zone, they will set up there.

If you do not paint a setup zone, but you paint a deployment zone and start them inside it, they will set themselves up randomly in that deployment zone.
If you place them outside a deployment zone, they will set up there.

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.


 

Also, of course there's an RNG aspect to spotting - that's how spotting has been modelled since there have been models for spotting.

As the basic example, Koopman in Search and Screening (1946), who theorised that the detection rate is proportional to the solid angle subtended at the point of observation of the target.
Since your chances of finding something is going to be harder the larger an area you're looking at, that's a base-e relationship of some kind. The Koopman probability of a detection in time t is P(t) = 1 - e^(-yt), with your y in Koopman theory being y=kh/r^3, h and r describing the height and distance to the target, and k being a value for how complex the search operation is.

Call that a "dice roll" if you like, but that's how modelling this kind of thing usually goes.

 

We know that the spotting model in CM is done from pairs of eyeballs (so an infantry section will have perhaps 10 different chances to spot something), and that there's a larger chance of spotting directly ahead of the spotting eyes, than to the periphery. Moving targets and large targets will inevitably be spotted faster. The individual optics for each position are modelled, so (for example) a tank with a decent thermal optic on the gunner's sight will have the gunner spotting better than the driver. Depending on the vehicle, commander's often have access to the gunner's sight, and sometimes have an independent sight of their own (to a large extent that's what the M60 cupola is doing).
Plenty of other factors will be at play here, including the individual line of sight of each spotter (it's entirely possible for a tank commander to see something and the gunner's sight to be blocked by complex terrain). and the soft factors involved, not to mention the spotting contacts that have been shared across the C2 network.
So sure, all things being equal, a stationary unit should tend spot a moving unit before the moving unit spots a stationary unit. I cannot imagine what hoops you'd need to jump through to engineer a situation where all things were actually equal, and even if this was the case, it can only be a probability and a tendency, there will always be outliers.

In the case of armour specifically, the chances of spotting is also going to be atrocious (even in something ultra-modern like an Abrams or a Bradley, by comparison to infantry), so your initial chances of anyone spotting anything are going to be terrible. Your baseline in all situations, but especially in CMCW and the WW2 games, are that tanks are blind. Infantry are your spotters, and that's one of the many reasons why "combined arms" is a thing.

No, I'm sorry, you're 100% wrong.

A spotting contact *is* the unit's memory of a previous spot.
A unit with a spotting contact will upgrade this to a full spot faster than one without a spotting contact.

The spotting contacts are then the representation of a unit's "memory" (or, equally, intra-unit communication, or more broadly the ISTAR picture in general.)
Now, that's the system as presented. Taking exception with that system is one thing, and one can certainly have opinions about that from a design perspective - any wargame design is a conflict between fidelity of representation and how that fidelity will end up being used, whether that's "playability" or something to do with the questions being studied - but to claim that this doesn't exist is just nonsense.

The specific claim was "CMCW units cannot remember what they have spotted". This is trivially simple to disprove, and if you're using as a basis for an argument, your argument can carry no weight.

We know that the spotting model in CM is done from pairs of eyeballs (so an infantry section will have perhaps 10 different chances to spot something), and that there's a larger chance of spotting directly ahead of the spotting eyes, than to the periphery. Moving targets and large targets will inevitably be spotted faster. The individual optics for each position are modelled, so (for example) a tank with a decent thermal optic on the gunner's sight will have the gunner spotting better than the driver. Depending on the vehicle, commander's often have access to the gunner's sight, and sometimes have an independent sight of their own (to a large extent that's what the M60 cupola is doing).
Plenty of other factors will be at play here, including the individual line of sight of each spotter (it's entirely possible for a tank commander to see something and the gunner's sight to be blocked by complex terrain). and the soft factors involved, not to mention the spotting contacts that have been shared across the C2 network.
So sure, all things being equal, a stationary unit should tend spot a moving unit before the moving unit spots a stationary unit. I cannot imagine what hoops you'd need to jump through to engineer a situation where all things were actually equal, and even if this was the case, it can only be a probability and a tendency, there will always be outliers.

In the case of armour specifically, the chances of spotting is also going to be atrocious (even in something ultra-modern like an Abrams or a Bradley, by comparison to infantry), so your initial chances of anyone spotting anything are going to be terrible. Your baseline in all situations, but especially in CMCW and the WW2 games, are that tanks are blind. Infantry are your spotters, and that's one of the many reasons why "combined arms" is a thing.

Also, of course there's an RNG aspect to spotting - that's how spotting has been modelled since there have been models for spotting.

As the basic example, Koopman in Search and Screening (1946), who theorised that the detection rate is proportional to the solid angle subtended at the point of observation of the target.
Since your chances of finding something is going to be harder the larger an area you're looking at, that's a base-e relationship of some kind. The Koopman probability of a detection in time t is P(t) = 1 - e^(-yt), with your y in Koopman theory being y=kh/r^3, h and r describing the height and distance to the target, and k being a value for how complex the search operation is.

Call that a "dice roll" if you like, but that's how modelling this kind of thing usually goes.

 

Also, of course there's an RNG aspect to spotting - that's how spotting has been modelled since there have been models for spotting.

As the basic example, Koopman in Search and Screening (1946), who theorised that the detection rate is proportional to the solid angle subtended at the point of observation of the target.
Since your chances of finding something is going to be harder the larger an area you're looking at, that's a base-e relationship of some kind. The Koopman probability of a detection in time t is P(t) = 1 - e^(-yt), with your y in Koopman theory being y=kh/r^3, h and r describing the height and distance to the target, and k being a value for how complex the search operation is.

Call that a "dice roll" if you like, but that's how modelling this kind of thing usually goes.

 

Doctrinally, when they do dismount, the Soviet infantry do it 300m away from the enemy position (just outside short ranged AT fire such as the RPG or LAW, as well as effective small arms range).

If there's heavy AT defences (and Dragon counts as that), then the dismount range is 1000m (so outside medium AT range - Dragon or AT-7).

In practice, I think both are actually fairly suspect. Dismounting at 1000m is a good way for your infantry to be neutered to no great effect, and any momentum you have to be nullified. Even 300m is a bit hopeful, I think, and I think it's a good idea to exit as close as you can get away with, when you do so at all.

Dismounting shouldn't ever really be plan A, but it can be a useful plan B, and it's important to know how to get the most out of the platoon.

As ever with the Soviets, the mechanised platoon shouldn't be acting alone. They should be preceded by armour, and that armour should be preceded by artillery. The attack has to be an an all-arms affair if it's to have any chance of success.

On ISR as a force multiplier:

I generally think the term "force multiplier" itself is a bit suspect, because it presupposes reducing combat strength to a single value, and then affecting that value with modifiers, which is a gross simplification. A useful fiction, perhaps, but shrug.

As to the self-evident utility of ISR though, this (or any other enabler) were described by Clausewitz, in "Operating against a flank"
 
 
Essentially, any enabler doesn't actually achieve anything by itself. I can put myself on your flank, but if I can't actually do anything with that, I'm not achieving anything. If I have perfect ISR, but no means to prosecute that, all I've learnt is exactly how screwed I am.

The above would be the options for "Close mounted, dismount on or near position".

When there was "an obstacle to mounted movement" or "strong defensive positions that cannot be suppressed", then you're dismounting, before closing with and destroying:

Oh, quite, but the player role in CM isn't a squad leader - control is usually two layers down, so the CM player is representing a Platoon leader in the lowest bound.
This is naturally also the reason why there isn't more explicit control over other small-scale decisions, like ammo choice, and why building interiors are abstracted - it's just not a game which offers that level of fidelity. If it was, then controlling a battalion and perhaps even a company would be extremely tedious.

The above would be the options for "Close mounted, dismount on or near position".

When there was "an obstacle to mounted movement" or "strong defensive positions that cannot be suppressed", then you're dismounting, before closing with and destroying:

I've made some updates based on feedback so far (with thanks to @domfluff )
What I've done is added an additional mortar battery and a 1 x 2 x122mm SP howitzer tube module and also beefed up the BMPs to BMP2s (so more supporting firepower) and added additional breach teams and sniper team to each platoon (so Delta mech plts have 3 x squads/2 x breach teams/ 1 x sniper team/ 4 x BMPs) so bit more oomph for bashing a way into houses but still requiring some careful management. Shame no way can add a supply vehicle with additional demo charges cos the 2 each breach team carries is a tad light! Still adds up to an extra squad and the sniper teams could be useful.
Updated file below.
Cheery!
 
 
TV 98-3 Attack in Brandenburg REDFOR_v5.btt

So yes, but that's besides the point
Scimitar in particular is an excellent platform for precisely the task it was designed for - a small, fast light recce vehicle with the power to overmatch Soviet recce if necessary. That should be something demonstrable in cmcw, but not really something you can see in cmsf.

Warrior is outside the timeframe without serious bending. Challenger 1 might just slot in there, with the usual "+/- 6 months" thing, although the rarity should be very high in 1982. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not in.

What we should see is the full CVR(T) lineup, which is pretty exciting.
 

One of the cool things about CMCW is that we'll be able to compare NATO doctrine.

The British, the West Germans and the US were all trying to solve the same problem, but did so in very different ways. Where the US were attempting to create depth through elastic defence, up-front, then rotating back, the British were more about static defence in depth and counter-attack. Where the TOW is really the centrepiece of US defence, for the British it's Chieftain, and anything armed with Swingfire is in a more supporting role. They also tend to embed recce assets down to the company level, so perhaps a pair of Scimitars in front of a mechanised company team.

CMFI has so many TO&E options that it's hard to pin that one down, and in addition you can have units which start at less than 100% strength, which will complicate things.

Still, the point here is that the "SMG" guys are really "binocular" guys (who carry around a light weapon, so that they don't have nothing), and having a chap with binos paired with a sniper has been standard practice forever.

CMFI has so many TO&E options that it's hard to pin that one down, and in addition you can have units which start at less than 100% strength, which will complicate things.

Still, the point here is that the "SMG" guys are really "binocular" guys (who carry around a light weapon, so that they don't have nothing), and having a chap with binos paired with a sniper has been standard practice forever.

We are looking for a wargame developer at Quantico Virginia. If you have US citizenship (or a green card), a Secret clearance, and are in any way interested, please read the below, and PM me with any questions. 
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Gotcha. The ATGMs show up after 25 minutes, during which the US can hit the entire Soviet deployment area with TOWs.

They start with three Bradleys, along with 4x TTS M60 - that's a lot of thermals for the T-62s to deal with in long-ranged, wooded map.

Advancing into TOWs is an interesting problem, and working out how to take the bridge against this defensive position is potentially really interesting... but the end result is that you can't actually move in any direction without being sniped. If you go forward, the forward-deployed Bradleys, hull down and in the woods can get you. If you go left and over the river, the TOWs can snipe you. If you go right to get fire on the Bradleys, you're exposed to TOWs. If you stay where you are, you're exposed to TOWs.

Now, perhaps this is mostly as it was a PBEM, and the setup position allowed for this? The scenario is not listed as being vs AI only.

I'm interested to see if there's something I'm missing here, but I can't really see how a scenario where you're losing vehicles in spawn from the first turn is something I'm doing wrong.

This scenario really disappointed me.
We just abandoned a PBEM after about five turns. The map is fantastic. The tactical problem from the Soviet side (aggressive recon and attacking through a chokepoint) is superb, but the forces given and arrayed against you really hurt this - the briefing tells you you're a second line force, running into other second line forces.
From the situation, it's clear this will involve marching into TOWs. The bridge is the key terrain, and the situation (a small cavalry force defending a chokepoint) is plausible and should give them a similarly difficult problem to solve.
Instead, the US start with three Bradleys and four TTS M60, so a ton of thermal optics, with the Bradleys sited well forward and in hull down positions against a line of advance.
The end result is that the Soviets have three possible lines of advance, and all three are covered by fires - either from the TOWs down the valley, or from the flanking Bradleys. The only element that the Soviets can have is the T-62 platoon, which cant get angles on the Bradleys without coming under fire from the TOWs. 
Further, the TOWs in the town can shoot into the Russian deployment zone, so not only are all three possible lines of advance covered from turn zero, they also cant stay where they are. If they did, they'd have no chance of winning a duel against TOW launchers at a multi-kilometer range, since they're only T-62.
Then you have the Russian forces themselves. Zero TRP, artillery is limited to 120mm mortars, and a tiny force - two companies is not sufficent for this size of target, and I'm not sure why the ATGM assets arent alongside the main force. I'm also not sure where the BRDM scout teams are, and I have some issues with the formations chosen, which will hurt their c2. This is also a scenario where you could legitimately have T-72, so there's that.
It's such a shame. This is halfway to being a *fantastic* scenario. The map is incredible, and the tactical problem the soviets have to solve is very thorny. It's just that the US forces dont have a similar problem to solve, and the combination of forces and placement really wipes out any interesting decisions to make.
I'm very tempted to do an alternate version of this scenario. I'm expecting the US to have a much smaller force - perhaps an armoured cavalry platoon (or two), in 1979, with maybe M60A1 or M48. I'd need to do something about the sight lines.
The aim would be to give the US a similarly difficult tactical problem - how a small, mobile force can use terrain to constrict and defeat a larger one.
I wouldn't be upset about this if it was so nearly brilliant - this map could easily be the basis for one of the best scenarios in the game, but currently it feels like a passive tower defence.

...in the seventies and eighties, sure.
If you take a look at the Slitherine releases anytime recently, you'll note that the Normandy games far outstrip the Eastern Front ones.
It was indeed a sales tactic to stick an SS officer on the cover (Up Front is the most blatant example), or as many swastikas as you could physically fit into the game (Eastern Front Tank Leader, among others).
Fashions change. "Miniature wargaming" used to shorthand for "napoleonics", but now means Warhammer 40,000 by default.