mbarbaric

The last information to go away, as the game strips out detail, is the color of the ground. I've appreciated maps where the designer used ground color not just to represent terrain naturalistically, but as a signal to the player. I'll tend to line edges of wooded areas with light or heavy forest; to mark breaks in fences and walls with gravel or red earth; to use brown grass on high elevations and green grass on low.

The second mission is the hardest, i have ever played. (I play combat mission since the very beginnings)

1. In the first try i lost a lot of infantry to the german artillery, because i left my troops for too long at one place. I had not expected such a amount of ammunition on the german side. So i tried again.

2. In the second try, i manouvered my troops (one unit after another to give no great target to the enemy-artillery) to the right and at this edge of the map up the hill. Every unit stayed only short at a firing positions an then moved on to escape the artillery-fire.
I was even able to fight across the street and up to the main hill. Problem was, the introduction tells you, that your attacking company is also used in a second mission of the campaign and i had not enough troops left for such a task. New try!

3. Now i knew the main positions and also, where the mortars of the enemy were on the map. So i destroyed them with the first artillery-strike, set my pre-arrangend artillery firing points at the right spots and fought up the hill with 22 dead and 2 halftracks lost. 2 platoons are in good shape, so i will go on to mission 3 now.

What i really did not like:
Normally you need a 3:1 advantage as an attacker, especially in such a uphill fight, but there is nothing like that. It´s o.k so far, makes it more challenging.

But... if you get not enough troops by the designer, he has to give the player troops with much more experience, not mostly green or regular with bad leadership marks. I often had the chance to attack a single enemy positions with a superiority number of troops, attacked tactically correct, but failed, because my soldiers did a crap-shooting, were easily supressed and retrieted after a minute. The biggest problem were the canon-halftracks, which were of no use, when they got some enemy traces (from the front!) on there armoured-plates.
The only vehicle, that was kind of senseful, was the halftrack with the 50 cal. MG.

To summon it:
Very interesting and challenging scenario, but not senseful with the wrong kind of toops on the US side. I dare say, that no one of the players, who normally play a campaign without savegames, ends this scenario succesfully in the first try.
Successfully means, at the end, he has enough troops left to fight another scenario of the campaign. No chance in my opinion, even if we have tactic-gods around here.

Greets, MARS42

If you play the interview backward you will hear secret message.

Does he mean the Finland, Balkans and N. Africa part?

But they didn't, you did.
I'm already messing around with them in the editor.

Excuse me. We Canadians can be pretty hostile. The ref blew a call on a flagrant high stick in last night's game in OT - you should have heard the chats of "You suck REF!!!"
 
Quite the spectacle to behold.

Having been to the USSR and afterwards to Russia, I never had the sense that the "ordinary folks" were much different than in the west - they liked going to parties and nightclubs (Tallinn was the USSR's Las Vegas).  Altho' I read that historically, Russia/Russians have had a more dour and perhaps more paranoid outlook.  
One has to think how we in the US would feel if surrounded by a hostile Canada and Mexico as well as Cuba.  

Well that is an amateur interpretation to be honest.  In fact all of those factors (more or less true, except maybe geographical) are really reasons why the Soviets would take a forward leaning stance as opposed to a more passive one.  You are describing the exact same strategic position that Germany had before both world wars.  History does tend to show that nations at strategic disadvantage tend to see the world as very dangerous and that a good offence is the best defence, largely because they know they cannot sustain a protracted war.  Particularly for those in the center of the Soviet Union/WP, the Russians who lost 25-plus million in  WW2.
Soviet forces and posture reflect this as well.  60k tanks and 70k-odd guns in the WP, a very offensive based doctrine and a whole lot of political warfare action going on around the globe, there was that whole Cuban Missile crisis whoopsie.
Now one could argue that for the Soviets this was largely strategically defensive in nature, not sure if I ever bought into the global communist conspiracy, the West was (and is) far more aggressive with respect to ideology.  But I don't believe the evidence points to the Soviets passively accepting anything and there was always a risk that simple misunderstanding (or how about just plain fear?) could escalate a local action into a full on conflagration...you know, like 1914?  It is not like we humans need really good excuses to fight, ever, and I doubt the situation in Europe was any different. 

Never thought that such level of ideological indoctrination is possible outside of laboratory environment, but you proved that I was wrong.

I thought these commies were tough? Turn 4, first contact with the enemy and this traitor has already had enough!

is that a fact? can someone confirm this? seems really strange that on 2080 the game looks like it is missing half of the map.

Lots of other big maps in the other titles too though. Blur and lack of detail has been a constant issue with these games since I started playing about 8 years ago. Lots of posts about it too. It's not something that started with CMCW.

hello,
i find it quite restrictive how the level of detail disappears as you zoom out of the battlefield. and frankly, it looks quite ugly not having trees or ground detail on the far side of the map. 
I have all the details on max but i find this still not enough. I wonder if someone knows if there is a way to force the game to use more generous levels of detail?
 
Thanks!

This is my first completed CMCW scenario and I'm hoping that it will be the 1st scenario in a campaign I am writing up the outline for. It does fall outside of the 79-82 CMCW module timeline (is set in July 1985). More details will be found in the Designer's Notes but in the end, I hope all who played this scenario got some enjoyment out of it. I welcome any feedback people are willing to provide.
It's designed for "Play as BLUE vs AI only (only the RED force has AI plans - x3). At some point I would like to tweak it for play as either side and H2H but we'll see as I'll need to learn some more stuff I'm sure.
Full description and download link are at: CC-s01 Baumholder Army Airfield!
 

Combat regulations of Ground Forces USSSR
Part II. Battalion, company [1982]
Alas, on Russian language. 
 

Guilty as charged on this count and proudly so.  The Soviet campaign is. by-design, for advanced CM players; if you are playing it you are already in a smaller group of devotees.  This is why I had no compunction on taking the gloves off and leaving them off.  I also fully expected some to be downright angry...and that is ok.
If you can finish it with a win, particularly March or Die, well that puts you in truly rarified air in my books.  That all said, it is still very realistic and built pretty much straight from Soviet doctrine, with abstractions of course.  You are totally correct in the recon compression, originally I had it as the 30 min window right out of the manual but the feedback during testing is that is made the front end really a drag and kinda boring (which CM should never be), so we compressed it for shock factor.  We tightened up several other scenarios in the campaign as well for that reason.
Hey, when you get to Alsfeld, send screenshots.  I haven't seen anyone make it that far yet.

I'm a little disappointed that all the screens during the scenario loading, feature only the imperialist forces. I haven't seen even one image of Soviet forces. You may say it's irrelevant but since some scenarios load for ages, I'd like to have some variety in this field 😉 I guess we'll need to wait for the mods, but I'm just curious why only one side is featured on the images? If I recall correctly, in other CM games there has been always a greater variety and both sides were represented. 

That 2nd pic shows a (most pedantic mode) bug. The spoon of the grenade should have been thrown off when the grenade left the hand of the thrower. As it is that grenade is totally safe...
 
H

Well, not really.  Scenario designers put reinforcements where they think the Soviets would have put them in the scenario.  The shock effect is organic based on where the scenario designers also think the US would put troops.  I mean there is a bit of drama at play here as well but nothing you are seeing is really unrealistic for a Soviet FSE/Advance Guard on the move to establish a breakout in the Fulda area.
The player can crack this one successfully, even if they take loses.  In the Soviet Campaign overcoming these types of tough challenges was kinda the theme.  It is also why we suggested the Soviet campaign be played last, but players are free to play anyway they like.  Way back when we started pulling the campaign together some of the old timers said "AI will never truly compete with a human player, the best you can hope for is a Draw".  So we worked hard at building a campaign that challenges that assumption but still employs realistic doctrine on both sides.  Some players might see some "gotchas" but hey it is all in the spirit of good fun.  

There's only a driver.  There's no gunner for the MG.  That's the reason the fire commands are greyed out.

Well it really isn't apples to apples even in the time frame.  Grozny was something closer to hybrid warfare in a dense urban setting with the Russian military a shell of its former self.  Desert Storm was a large mechanized fight between two "peer" forces with the US at the top of its game...and the Iraqi's who were frankly bafflingly bad.  
In reality Gulf War probably gives enough of a hint at where things would have stood in a late 80s fight but in 82 things were very different.  The US was still rebuilding in the post-Vietnam era.  Goldwater Nicols had not passed yet and Airland Battle was in its infancy.  The US definitely did not have either a quantitative or qualitative edge yet.  As to troop quality comparisons, again really hard to do, there isn't much point to it really as it becomes a philosophical discussion really.  You can argue both sides without a definitive answer, so we have best guessing and play balance considerations at the end.  

I like that video. It would be nice to have the 2S1 122mm SP gun on-map in the modern CM titles at some point, as the video states that they were to be used in direct fire against ATGM's. Could throw in the 2S3 as well...
I suppose the Soviet tanks' smoke laying capacity would be too hard to code, but it seems like such an important capability for them. 
Kind of funny that the Soviets get some frightening Stravinsky as background music and the US Army gets a sort of wandering porno jazz theme. 

Some great feedback from Combat and Dom which I am going to piggyback on. 
The best way to think about the Soviet advance is leapfrog. A motor rifle battalion that is forced to deploy/dismount its infantry will be bypassed by follow on forces which will continue the momentum of the advance. The dismounted battalion will consolidate and reorganize itself and will eventually fall back into the leapfrog chain moving forward. Another way of thinking about it would be a conveyor belt.
Its important to remember that the Soviets did not assume that their combat formations would have been obliterated in frontal assaults and that they would just overcome the enemy with sheer numbers. Overwhelming an enemy by weight of firepower is not the same as overwhelming the enemy by weight of bodies. No one thinks the latter is viable.
Its also important to mention that Soviet doctrine is actually quite flexible. It is supposed to flow like water, avoiding serious opposition while finding and exploiting weak points, all the while hammering enemy positions with ungodly amounts of artillery support. The second training mission is meant to show this off a bit more, as the whole battle is a bit more freeform, and the Soviet commander needs to develop and shape the battlefield on the fly, without all of his combat power from the start. 
So, if you are commenting about how air units in general are handled, then I do agree to an extent. In the case of Soviet CAS, all of it was to be provided by the gunships. But it is important to remember that there were only a limited number of helicopters to go around, relative to all of the ground combat formations. Helicopters would only have been committed to supporting attacks considered to be of the highest priority. This is the reason I did not include them in the first training scenario, as the scenario is trying to depict a very simple, ideal, typical deliberate attack by a motor rifle/tank battalion. In that type of typical deliberate attack, helicopter CAS would not be expected. 
If it was a river crossing or another tactical problem that is much more inherently difficult, then helo CAS would be much more likely to show up. 

Well it depends which version of the Soviet Campaign we are talking about.  Standard actually allows the player to lose the first battle (i.e. they get a second chance).  March or Die...well sorry but as the name suggests...win or die.
Scenario one is tough (though not the toughest) but it is built straight from Soviet doctrine for an ME (less main force):

The trick on this one, at least as I saw it, was to advance up the right hard and fast with the FSE.  You are going to take loses but if you can get infantry in those trees on the first small ridge you are in a good position.  You need to keep clearing up on the right until the Adv Guard shows up...and from there I wish you luck. 
If you hate to lose "anything" I am not sure the Soviet Campaign is for you then.  The overall strategy here has to be "lose enough but not too much", which is a really hard balancing act.  I specifically designed the Soviet Campaign to be a significant challenge for the advanced player, it is also one of the more realistic set of scenarios for the Soviets in the game.

I'm thinking about designing a campaign that sort of uses a US Battalion Task Force as the core unit BUT, the player will only command a single company/team during a mission. The rest of the Task Force (portions of it depending on the storyline) will provide the supporting assets for that company/team in their mission.
Another option would be, the same core task force concept but, the player takes command of different parts of that task force at different times during the campaign. There would be decision points where you would select your force for a mission from one of the tank heavy or mech heavy company/teams. 
There are other options/configurations I'm considering but the player's active force would be  be basically kept to a company/team size.