domfluff

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.

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.

I recently purchased this game and am thoroughly enjoying it.  It's something new and exciting to me.  I've only played WWII games prior for the past umpteen years, well along with War of Warcraft.  I am pretty sure this will result in me putting all my WWII games on the back burner if ever to return.  The new TO&E, advancements in and of equipment and tactics is just overwhelming and so interesting and to be honest quite exciting. On a sad note however, it seems now that I have the modern wargame bug, I will be buying CMBS as soon as the next patch comes out just to see what all is new in it since the jump from WWII to the Cold War was so great, I can't imagine the jump to the present-day improvements.  
 

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 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 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 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 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.
 

I asked Domfluff to help me out in creating a video about Soviet military doctrine in the Cold War era, and how those principles can be applied in a Combat Mission scenario/QB. He played a game against me as the Soviet Army, gave me an arse kicking, and then sat down with me and explained why he did what he did. The result is the video down below!
 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

First off thanks to all those who have supported the Battlepack by purchasing it, and a shout out to those who have provided their support in the creation of this project – and a huge shout out to those who have freely given their feedback and additional support publicly via various means – online streaming vids, DARs, AARs and various forum posts etc, Its truly heartening to read and see these. 

It’s just as well, being Scottish, that we are renowned for being slow to anger and not prone to unprovoked outbursts. On a personal note a mahhoosive amount of work went into the battle pack, at my end. Work of which I am truly proud off. The lion’s share of research, mapmaking and AI plan stuff was devoted to the two campaigns and the Rakow and the Dying Sun scenario. These all involved painstakingly creating huge new maps from primary sources. Research turned up several ‘loose’ ends regarding accepted historical narrative and I’m as chuffed with these as the scenarios!

I digress… In short this sucked up a huge amount of time and I was also involved in several other projects (which I was keen to be involved in including CMFR and CMCW). Creating new content, AI plans etc for the Battlepack was a significant endeavour. So yup I used bits of various previous maps (which were my own creations and made available publicly) which I then significantly tweaked – mainly because I could not positively ID RL locations, or the fact is I thought the map – like Der Ring (which by the way took nearly a year to produce) to have a new life after some major tweaking. I’ve done this on previous game families with other maps. A few astute observers might have spotted them. 

But, and I should stress this, in the case of Der Ring it was heavily reworked and I created brand new AI plans (I had to as I’d chopped and reused bits) etc. So yes whilst some stuff is based on sections of der Ring they are more the offspring – rather than the map wearing a false wig and a pair of dodgy specs…

Re the rather offensive swipes about scamming, well,  re the master maps it’s pretty clear that as stated on the BFC website that they are “New maps based on maps from the Battle Pack missions”. 

Years back I used to be with a punk band – another life another story…. One of the bands (way more successful than we were) we did some gigs with, had their singer on one of their records state this quote, it was along the lines of – “Whatever you do they’ll slate you off and criticise you to the ground…” It’s stood me in good stead through life.
So aye happy to take the constructive knocks, but I’m less inclined to give credence tae whingers.
 

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).

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.

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.

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.

Yup.

HQ support teams (XO teams) are your C2 links to other formations.

Imagine if you had a (weirdly stripped down for the purposes of clarity) force like this:


An infantry battalion, consisting of an Infantry company, and an armour battalion consisting of a single armour platoon.

The armour and infantry in this case are part of different battalions, and so will not share their C2 network with each other. Spotting contacts that the infantry see may never get to the armour, and if it does it will not do so swiftly or efficiently.

However, all units will share C2 horizontally within four action spots. This means if you do this:



Then the Battalion HQ will remain in contact with both their XO and the infantry company via their radios, and the XO can keep the armour in C2 via horizontal sharing. That way the armour can benefit from the spotting information that the infantry can do, and you can do that whole "combined arms" thing.

MOS's excellent thread on how C2 works in-game.

The main purpose (but not only purpose) of the command and control model in CM is to share spotting contacts. Existing spotting contacts help units spot faster, so you always, always should start an engagement with the maximum amount of information available to the engaging units.

Essentially, spots share vertically. If you have a platoon, and squad 1 has the spot, but you need squad 3 to get it, then that information will travel:

Squad 1 -> Platoon HQ, then from the Platoon HQ down to Squad 2 and Squad 3.

This is "vertical", since it goes up and down the TO&E formation.

Platoon HQs talk to company HQs, and company HQs talk to battalion HQs. That means the further separated you are, the longer it'll take to spread. It's also why dedicated recce elements tend to be embedded high in the org chart, so that there's minimal steps from them to the company HQs.


In addition to this vertical sharing, there is horizontal sharing, where any two units will share within 4 action spots (32m). That's close audio range, so that's two unit who can talk to each other. Two units of any kind will share regardless of organisation, and taking advantage of this mechanic is what the XO teams are for, since you have a unit who has a direct line of communication with the top-level HQ unit, and can be given a direct communication to a supporting asset (typically tanks or atgm teams or whatever).