Bozowans

Cold War and Fire and Rubble are out and here I am playing SF2. I am determined to finally finish the Task Force Thunder campaign. No distractions! Here is a missile flying right past (and partially through) some dude's head. The missile clipped through his helmet and possibly his skull a little bit. Or maybe it missed his skull by an inch or so? Hard to tell. Never seen anything like it. He should have at least been smacked in the face by those tail fins, or burned in the face by the rocket exhaust. I wonder what that would have looked like IRL. There were two AT-14s fired at this guy almost at the exact same time. Both missiles flew right past him and then exited off the map without exploding.

Yeah I wouldnt want the game to be totally realistic. War is boring. It's just a bunch of guys hiding in a ditch all day. Firefights might last for hours. It could take hours for hundreds of men just to clear a single apartment building. War is a dull, miserable, boring and exhausting slog. What might take hours or even days IRL might take just minutes in CM. It took the Russians a couple of days to clear the reichstag building for example. The game could always be improved though. I wish units would rout off the map. They could in CMx1 but they cant in CMx2 for some reason. Units get pinned against map edges and wiped out. And I wish units could withdraw off the map voluntarily without needing an exit zone. Anyone remember Shock Force 1? Broken troops would get an exclamation point appearing over their head and then vanish into thin air, to represent surrendering, routing, or otherwise going missing. It was realistic in a way. I can see why they changed that so that units would physically run away but they still dont get routed completely.

I don't think this is true. At least not according to the manual. The manual says that units using Move have good overall situational awareness, and that the faster a unit is moving, the more their awareness is reduced, especially to their sides and rear. This does make sense, because someone who is running or jogging is probably not gonna be focused as much on looking for the enemy as they are on watching where they're going, so that they don't trip on something or whatever. Squads using Move are also likely to stop and fire at any exposed enemies they see. IMO though, if your guys are getting shot at by unsuppressed, unspotted enemies at close range, it doesn't make a lot of difference which movement command they're using, since they're gonna have a bad time regardless. So Move isn't really much worse than anything else. I don't usually use the Move command anywhere close to the enemy, but using the Move command in view of the enemy is not always a bad idea. I use it especially often with scout patrols at long ranges from the enemy. Units who are lying prone might not always have a good view of the map because of dense underbrush, tall crop fields in the way etc. This can be a problem in CMRT for example, with a lot of big, open, mostly flat maps covered in tall crop fields. Your troops lying prone in the fields can't see anything, but if they are standing up, they can see over them. If you have your scouts run through those fields, they will have only a momentary view of what's around them (with reduced spotting ability), and then when they get to their destination, they will stop, go prone, and then lose sight of everything again. So running around isn't very good for scouting. If you just have your scouts walk around though, they can see things pretty well. Since they are walking, they go slowly and have more time to spot things. If you have a bunch of small, widely dispersed scout teams walking around in full view of the enemy at very long range, there isn't much they can do about it. Shooting at the scouts isn't gonna do much except give away their position.

I just finished this mission tonight. Went not as bad as I expected! At the beginning I ran my cut-off platoon into one of the walled compounds on the south side of the map and just sat them there for the whole mission. I didn't want to run them toward the trench objectives by themselves with no support, because I figured they would be well defended. Plus I wanted to ambush the enemy troops as they came in. There were buildings several stories tall in the compound, so I put observers on the top floors and had the rest of the men hide at the bottom until I knew what was coming. My plan was to at least harass the advancing enemy, and if things got too hot, I could move everyone down to the lower floors where they were hidden by the tall wall. I was expecting multiple enemy vehicles or even tanks, but turned out it was just one BMP. I had the platoon open fire from the second and third floors at the advancing troops. The BMP got wiped out by AT-4s at close range and the platoon caused quite a bit of damage from up there during a long firefight, but took one dead and two wounded, including the platoon commander himself. They were almost out of ammo by the end of the mission. When the rest of the company arrived, I had them attack the north trench first and then swing to the south. I figured they would come under a lot of fire the moment they crested the ridge, so I kept everyone pretty close together to support each other in the tight spaces of the city. I slowly started clearing the buildings toward the other trench and eventually ran into that huge nest of enemy resistance in the buildings next to the south trench. Even though there were a lot of enemies, my two full-strength platoons still outnumbered them and were able to overwhelm them with a rapid assault through the buildings at point blank range. I took a few more casualties, but got a total victory with just two dead and five wounded.

Here is a grenade exploding literally right in a dude's face.

I always thought it would be cool if they brought back command delays. They had them in the CMx1 games. I don't know why they got rid of them. Back then, a veteran squad might take a couple of seconds to get going, but conscripts might take 30 or more seconds. Buttoned-up vehicles with no radios might take even longer to get going, making it a nightmare to coordinate 1941 Soviet tank units for example. The command delays would vary from unit to unit, so you wouldn't have every single unit in your whole force start moving at the exact instant you hit "go" as well, making the movement look more natural compared to CMx2. They should bring back command delays, and then maybe make it so that the delays are longer when HQs get wiped out. Why not make it dependent on morale state as well? A rattled squad should take a little bit longer to collect themselves and get going. A broken squad out of contact with HQ should have such a long delay that they are basically useless.

If you want a challenge, try playing as the Syrians! You don't always have to play as the 1st world army. Playing as the Syrians will give you a very different perspective on things than any other CM game. Even as the western armies though, the game can be very challenging. The Syrians are not defenseless. From the briefing from the US Army Task Force Thunder campaign: "Approach every situation with caution until you know what you are dealing with. The Syrians are not the backwards, militarily inept pushovers the blowhards rant about. They are motivated, adequately trained and armed, and quick studies of our tactics. The unconventional forces arrayed against us are, perhaps, even more formidable. Many are veterans of fighting against our forces and they have no fear of dying for their cause. While they might not have a chance at the strategic level, at the tactical level every Syrian unit is perfectly capable of bloodying the nose of your task force." Shock Force is one of the more interesting games of the series IMO, and it's also interesting looking back at it now after everything that's happened since the early 2000s. I feel like one of the reasons they made the game in the first place was to kind of push back against the myth of US invincibility that was so common in the early days of Iraq/Afghanistan/GWOT. It's like they wanted to demonstrate through their game that the US can still be tactically defeated with ease if the conditions are right. I remember back during the times this game came out, plenty of people were clamoring for war with Iran and how it would be a cakewalk and only take two weeks or whatever. That said, some of the missions ARE pretty easy. Some of them are like Iraq-style turkey shoots against poorly motivated conscripts in the open desert, where you barely have to do anything except move your troops forward and watch them annihilate everything like a bunch of cardboard pop-up targets. But I think that's the point - to illustrate the strengths of the US military in ideal conditions, while other scenarios illustrate the weaknesses, where you go up against Syrian special forces and fanatical insurgents in dense urban areas with IEDS and suicide bombers or whatever. This game certainly made me fear RPG-29s. Those things are very accurate at long range and can knock out almost anything. SF2 does have a ridiculous amount of content now. I've been playing since the SF1 days and I still haven't finished all the campaigns. There is a huge amount of good user-made stuff including a lot of Red vs Red stuff, which is one of my favorites. Syrian Army vs insurgents is always fun.

I think the devs prefer that there is uncertainty and confusion about what LOS actually is for a given unit. More "fog of war" that way. You can usually tell at a glance what a unit can see (and thus can be seen by the enemy) from any given area, but you can't REALLY know with 100% certainty. So you will get some unpredictability and sudden surprises, like when one of your tanks suddenly explodes from an unexpected direction, from an enemy tank firing straight through a forest that you were certain that they couldn't actually see through.

Just finished my second playthrough. First as the US, I destroyed the Soviet force and got a total victory without too much trouble but a couple of the M60s got heavily damaged with their guns knocked out. I don't remember if I lost any of the M60s outright, but a bunch of my infantry got killed by artillery. Second playthrough as the Soviets and it went surprisingly well. Way better than I thought it would after I stupidly ran one of the recon teams right into American pre-planned artillery at the start. After that, one of the T72s started taking potshots at an M60 from the far edge of the map. The M60 popped smoke and pulled back after a couple non-penetrating hits. Then two more M60s popped smoke and reversed. I took this as an opportunity to charge my entire force at full speed ahead to some dead ground in the center of the map. There I hid them until the moment was right. I had my air support set to come in after a delay, and when they finally came in they proceeded to do jack. One of the planes circled around, did nothing and then left, then the other blew up a standard M113 with a missile and then got shot down. Every single one of the US MANPADs survived the bombardment. No matter though, because after that, all my reinforcements had arrived and I had every vehicle in my force charge forward from the dead ground in one giant mass. The Americans didn't stand a chance. I overran the American right flank, wiping out their entire force within minutes. There were still 20 minutes left on the clock. I lost only 7 dead and 4 wounded, with 3 tanks lost and a few more damaged. One tank stuck in the mud. The Americans only had 4 men remaining out of 80. Very fun scenario and good game.

Tank Rider by Evgeni Bessonov. He was in the war from 1943 on to the end, eventually becoming part of the spearheads going into Germany and encircling Berlin.

Have you ever tried Steel Panthers? There is Steel Panthers WW2 and also Main Battle Tank for the modern era. They seem like a middle ground for what you are talking about. They are very old-school turn-based, hex-based tactical games but they use little tank and infantry graphics. I had been getting into them recently. It is interesting to see how the battles play out compared to something like CM. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to each type of game. The 2D abstraction of Steel Panthers allows it to simulate almost every conflict I can think of from the 20th century onward. There are hundreds of scenarios covering everything from the Russian Civil War through every year and theater of WW2 to the Arab-Israeli Wars, Cold War, Vietnam, or even battles between Kurdish YPG fighters and ISIS in 2014. That's something I've never seen in any other game. Meanwhile, it takes years to produce CM games covering just one battle, and that's with them re-using assets from their other games. They chose Bagration for CMRT so they could re-use their 1944 German stuff and not have to make everything again from scratch. I like hex-based stuff in general though, operational or tactical. I don't see what anyone would have against them (except in FoG 2. Squares work much better for that). I loved the old SSG wargames like Korsun Pocket or Battles in Normandy. They tell their own epic stories of whole armies getting encircled and destroyed and so on. I agree with your larger point though. Traditional wargames or hexes aren't objectively better than everything else. There is no "true wargame" or whatever. The CMx2 games are some of my favorite games, yet they do have limitations. There are things that hex-based games can do that CM can't.

The typos you find in the briefings are all historically accurate. This kinda makes me want more scenarios that give you as little information as this. Reminds me of a book I was reading by a Russian platoon leader on the WW2 eastern front. Often the only orders he would get were just "Go take that town over there." His company commander also liked to go missing for long periods at a time, leaving the platoon leaders to do everything themselves. Vague orders might come down straight from battalion, skipping the company commander entirely. The war was bizarre and confusing, filled with things like units going in circles or wandering aimlessly for miles in the wrong direction, zero coordination between different companies/battalions/tanks/infantry/whatever, or even friendlies launching entire assaults on their own positions by accident. To me, it would be interesting to see more CM scenarios that deliberately try to put the player in a very confusing situation that they have to think their way out of.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that that kind of stuff is even real. The four sniper teams I had in that scenario took down 14 Germans by the end though. Anyway, I am very glad I got Fire and Rubble when I did, because soon afterward my internet got knocked out for a week due to storms. I didn't have much else to do but play it. The Night at the Opera campaign is good. Very atmospheric. Seeing green tracers flying across Konigsplatz was bringing back Red Orchestra memories. The amount of firepower that the Soviets could bring to bear is kind of terrifying. My biggest concern in this campaign so far is not casualties but ammo usage. A Soviet assault team comes over a rise only to run right into a couple squads of Fallschirmjager at close range: The fight didn't last long though. After a couple seconds of heavy shooting, a 122mm shell slammed into the building, killing or wounding several Germans. Five of the Germans surrendered after that. That was a typical encounter. Germans would reveal themselves only to be completely plastered by a massive storm of bullets and explosions. My casualties haven't even been that heavy, but I'm going into the second mission of the campaign with ammo problems. There are multiple entire platoons that are basically out of ammo. I also should have conserved my artillery ammo, because now I don't have anything to blow up the Reichstag with. Except tanks.

That makes sense. I was wondering if it had something more to do with that one particular scenario or if it was something that all the games had since the beginning. I guess I hadn't noticed the behavior in a while for a number of reasons. The player is usually attacking instead of defending, and tank crews might not survive long enough or the scenario might not go on long enough for them to recover their morale and then continue their advance on foot. It was especially noticeable on the Between Two Fahrbahns scenario though. Most of the Soviet tanks were knocked out early with 30+ minutes left on the clock, and the lack of Soviet infantry meant that the tank crews were almost all that was left at the end. It was amusing seeing 6 or 7 tank crewmen all running together on foot alongside one single ordinary infantryman toward the objective at the end. They were driven off by small arms with a couple minutes left on the clock.

I just got CMCW and played Between Two Fahrbahns as the US. After destroying most of the Soviet tanks, their bailed-out tank crews began charging across the fields trying to get into the objective area to capture it all by themselves. Is this a bug? I remember this behavior happening all the way back in early versions of CMBN. I remember bailed-out German AI tank crews single-handedly trying to continue their attack, suicidally charging forward for hundreds of meters toward objectives, as if the tank crews were trying to continue the AI plan they were assigned to at the beginning. I hadn't seen this behavior in the other CM games for quite some time (or at least hadn't noticed it), and thought it had been patched out. But maybe not?

I always thought Star Trek ground combat would be interesting in the CM engine. People think of space battles when they think of Star Trek, but Deep Space 9 in particular had a lot of ground combat. The show's combat scenes were usually kinda slow paced, with soldiers hiding behind cover, exchanging phaser fire back and forth, ducking down and cowering when they get suppressed and so on. There is even a scene with characters running from mortar fire. The shows budget would prevent them from ever showing anything on a large scale, but they would allude to things like planetary invasions and ground combat on a huge scale. A significant part of the shows plot was also about the Cardassians' Nazi-style occupation of Bajor, and the Bajoran resistance fighters that fought against them for decades out in the mountains and countryside. So it would be interesting to see what something like that would look like simulated up to platoon, company or battalion level, and what tactical possibilities that would bring. One problem though would be a lack of vehicles or tanks. Star Trek is always light infantry focused, but perhaps you could have things like FO teams calling in precision orbital strikes or something, as well as electronic warfare jamming enemy weapon systems and communications. Or you could have reinforcements beam directly down to the front lines or even into flanking positions. That would be cool but I dont expect to ever see any game like that ever actually made, though maybe one day a game can be modded enough to look like that.

I just started up Fire and Rubble for the first time, and the very first casualties of the module were caused by one of my Soviet sniper teams. They took down two Germans within seconds, one shot each. These Soviet snipers are awfully lethal. Meet Efreitor Kapitonov: The battle had only just begun, and I had an infantry company advancing toward a German-held village. I was taking some sporadic MG fire here and there, but nothing serious, and no casualties yet. Kapitonov himself took a burst of MG fire as he was moving into position. Eventually some Germans were spotted. Kapitonov's partner took a shot at a German rifleman at 320 meters, taking him down instantly. The German was hit less than a second after he fired his rifle. It looked like he was hit right in the gut. Ouch. Only two or three seconds later, Kapitonov himself took a shot at a German machine-gunner at 400 meters. The last thing the German saw: It looked like he was hit through his left shoulder. Lying prone, the bullet probably would have went through the shoulder and down his back.

I don't think that's a bug, just something that they never added into the game in the first place. Vehicles, destroyed or not, will block bullets and shells, but not LOS. I think vehicles will even block shrapnel from explosions, but units can still see through them, and thus try to shoot through them as well. I'm guessing it was either not a priority for the devs to take the time to implement, or it was too much trouble for the game to constantly be updating LOS calculations for every unit with a ton of moving vehicles all over the place.

Yes it's just a cinematic video with no commentary or anything, but it does show that it's possible to get large numbers of infantry right up into the enemy's faces in that scenario, and that infantry is not useless. Soviet infantry can be difficult to use though. Of course I do agree that Hollywood visions of human wave attacks and brainless hordes of Soviets is silly, but honestly, massed attacks DO work. I find it hard to imagine that they never would have happened in reality. They work in the game even. It's not just a Soviet thing either. I've done stuff like that with the other armies as well. The circumstances and the timing have to be right, but the results can be devastating when you have massed infantry, tanks, and artillery all smashing the same target all at once. The Soviets do lend themselves well to massed attacks though, not because they are brainless, but because of their weapons. IMO, bolt-action rifles are kind of useless in CM. If a German squad gets its MG taken out, that squad is effectively decapitated. Taking bolt-action rifle fire feels like I'm taking little mosquito bites or something. They might hit someone here and there, but it just isn't effective. The Germans can't afford to take a lot of casualties, not because they care so much about the sanctity of human life, but because if they lose just a few of their MGs, their firepower is dramatically reduced and they will lose the fight if they don't pull back. How many players get frustrated in CM when the first guy that gets shot is their German MG guy? As for the Soviets, the material conditions of their armies are set up in such a way where they can take heavy losses and continue fighting effectively. The Soviets are gonna have a hard time gaining total fire superiority by plinking away at the Germans at a distance. Soviet MGs can suppress, but they are not gonna out-shoot the Germans, so they might need to overwhelm the Germans with massed attacks to get in close with those brutally effective SMGs.

A very, very long time ago I made a video about that Burning Bunkers mission. It doesn't show half the battle but it showed my big final human wave infantry assault. My infantry got quite a few kills in there. We are the Soviets here, comrade. We don't have time for any silly bourgeois niceties like "tactics" or "finesse". We just have to throw ourselves at them. The courage and indomitable spirit of the working class shall always prevail!

I want Combat Mission: Star Trek. Gimme Bajoran resistance fighters against Cardassians. Or Starfleet against the Dominion. Or the Borg. That way you won't have to worry about "Borg spotting"

There was an interesting paper written some years ago called "Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer" by US Army Major Thomas Ehrhart. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA512331.pdf It argued that small arms fire from modern US troops was not effective past 300 meters. Since the Vietnam era, US equipment, training, and doctrine had been optimized for firefights on level terrain at less than 300 meters, and most effective at less than 200. I don't know if anything has changed at all since the paper was written, but according to the paper, about half of all engagements in Afghanistan occurred at ranges beyond 300 meters, and US troops were often at a disadvantage against the Taliban. Taliban fighters liked to park themselves on high ground extremely far away, and then hammer US infantry down below with mortars and machine guns, outranging them. The Taliban were usually lightly equipped as well, and could maneuver easily through the rough terrain. By contrast, the US infantry were loaded down with heavy equipment and were not set up properly for the high altitude. So the Taliban could both out-gun and out-maneuver US infantry. Some guys would be equipped with M240s and whatnot, but about 80% of a typical US infantry company could not effectively return fire at the ranges involved. Based on that, a 500 meter engagement range for US infantry in CMCW seems excessive. WW2 US infantry could certainly do that though.

It always bugged me how easy it is to spot fortifications, but not the guys inside them. I can usually spot foxholes from very far away, but not the enemies in them until I get much closer or they open fire. It doesn't seem quite right. If I know that there are holes in the ground over there and I can see them, why would I not be able to see the big group of helmet shapes and faces sticking up over the top of them? Unless they are all literally hiding down at the bottom of their holes, which is rarely the case in CM. Seems like it should be the opposite. The foxhole positions themselves should be more difficult to spot than the infantry inside them. If I were looking at enemy positions from a long distance, like through binoculars, I would imagine that the first thing I would see is those little helmet shapes or heads sticking up out of the ground looking back and forth. Maybe I would only be able to see the top of a helmet or two, but the exact nature of the position itself would be harder to tell. Like if they are foxholes, trenches or something else entirely.

IIRC there is a 1 in 4 chance for a wounded casualty to die after the scenario ends if not buddy aided. So if you have four wounded men, chances are at least one of them will die. Eight wounded, two will probably die, etc. You just got unlucky with that one guy. It doesn't affect anything otherwise, but it can be fun to see how far you can keep your KIAs down during a scenario. Wounded casualties can also be killed during a scenario too. I've seen wounded casualties get hit by bullets and die, or get killed when an artillery shell lands right on top of them, etc. I've even seen pixeltruppen shoot wounded casualties on the ground and kill them almost like they did it on purpose. It can be kinda funny sometimes.