Panzerpanic

Some illustrations for the above.


Note you can split unit before mounting a tank. Give the tank a move order and a infantry unit a dismount order before mounting the scout unit. The units will remained split on the engine deck. It takes experimenting before you will get it right. The split scout gets a minus 2 his comrades a will keep their plus 2. Note the radio icon the C2 will pass on also to the ISU 152mm where the other members of the platoon are mounted. 
 

As far as I can tell it doesn't make any difference. WW2 RT becomes a game changer by placing infantry on engine decks the C2 becomes on par with other allied units. Tip let the armor travel on hunt and give the infantry a dismount order. The moment a tank receives full contact it stops, and the infantry dismounts automatically. Soviet attacks should be armor based with tank riding infantry. Spotting ability depends on experience veteran are best in this role. Equipment re binoculars troops with a minus are beneficial for scouting they evade the moment a hunting tank stops. 

Not sure what the offensive “bad taste” element is here but it is very realistic.  This stuff happens all the time on exercises and we develop all sorts of methods to try and control it.   The lesson here is that spotting in a buttoned vehicle RL is much harder than a lot of people believe.

As an aside, I do think it's ironic that this comment about US bias was on a youtube video that might have included some of the most positive and pro-Soviet tactical discussion that I've ever heard in relation to Combat Mission. Or at least that was my intent when I was recording my part of it.

I'm aware that Hapless is personally still not currently 100% convinced that the Soviet approach can work, and that the deficiencies and limitations can be overcome in the context of a Combat Mission Quick Battle.

I am convinced that the Soviets can work, and work well in that context, particularly in the 1979-1980 period. The more advanced kit you add (broadly, the more thermals you add, but there's more to it than that), the harder time the Soviets will have, and the less like Cold War and the more like Shock Force the game becomes. In addition, the better Soviet kit in this earlier period exceeds the capabilities of US kit by all of the most basic measures (mobility, firepower, armour, etc.), and quite a few of the softer ones as well (the RPG-7 is an incredibly important and versatile weapon in this time period, the Soviet man-portable ATGMs are equally effective to TOW in practical terms, but significantly more agile. The BMP has a ludicrous amount of firepower in one space. The mentality is quite different - you need to be proactive, and your role as top-level commander is more difficult, because more weight is being put onto you to conceive and manage the battle on the large scale.


I've never wanted to leave a dismount in the BMP for spotting. This is not doctrinal, and it's also not a good idea, since you need to make the use of the limited squad that you have. BMPs shouldn't dismount at all in an ideal situation, and when they do dismount (close terrain, strong AT opposition) it's vitally important that the squad and BMP remain within close supporting distance of each other, within four action spots. The infantry are your eyes, and when the BMP is fighting in this supporting role, it's primarily going to be area-firing at partial contacts or suspected positions. "Fighting mounted" doesn't mean using the firing ports as a primary weapon, and nor is it primarily an NBC concern - dismounting takes time, and the one thing the Soviets really lack is time.

It may be an interesting document indeed, but the part that you cited didn't contain anything about optics. I asked you about this but you didn't reply (yet).
 
The issue some people may have with your posts is that you are aggressive in tone claiming that CMx2 is very biased towards US and that everyone who says anything else is blind/biased etc. You make broad sweeping statements but don't follow up when the actual bolts and pieces are discussed. 
This is sometimes called 'seagull management'; as in someone (in the example a manager) comes flying in, makes a lot of noise and **** on everything than flies away. 
When you get pushback (which is to be expected when utilizing the form and tone of communication you favor), you start acting like a victim and cry about ad hominems on your person and than project your own discussion style onto others. 
To get back to the point (although slightly OT): in game m60 is perceived to have better spotting and targeting capabilities compared to T-62. Do you assert that is wrong? If so, on what base?
Simply shouting that T-62 is blind because m60 can see it while T-62 can't see m60 isn't proving anything. Posting an interesting document about how some researchers who have written stuff in the past might have come to wrong conclusions also doesn't proof anything to anyone.
Most people on this forums understand that, but you seem to believe you have excellent scientific empirically valid dissertation about why CMx2 has stuff wrong.
Which you haven't. Basically you make a lot of noise, but often not much else.

This is a 2-hour conversation between @Hapless, his opponent @Rice, and @domfluff, who is the admin of the unofficial (but extremely active) Combat Mission discord server.
They go into detail about their thought processes going into the game, how they responded to what happened during the match, and how Soviet doctrine can be used successfully in CMCW.
Figured it's worthy of its own thread because of how fascinating it is, and I hope we see more like this in the future.
This is a link to the unofficial discord server if you want to interact with more people in the community: https://discord.gg/SXkQ6rUuJN

They should have standardized their equipment and gone for a production-line style process, like the US did with their equipment.
It might not be a "positive", they might have had more equipment, but they would still have lost the war.

Well I think you may be onto something wrt fragmentation of airburst, and maybe ground burst.  Having seen what can happen in RL, it does look anemic vs tanks at least.   Cluster munitions, particularly the US DPICMs are showing a lot of sub-system damage (HMGs etc) but they are modelled individually.

You've got to be kidding me...
 
50+ 130 mm guns do not damage a single subsystem other than tracks to yellow. This weight of artillery falls onto these 3 tanks and yet every AA MG on the three tanks remains intact.
 
I just ran a quick test in Black Sea and showed the same issue unless I'm expected to believe that 12.7mm machine guns are made of Unobtainium.





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What seems to be happening is that fragmentation effect will not do any damage to tank subsystems^1 . I've tested that by dropping a stupid amount of artillery onto tanks in airburst mode. After hundreds of rounds the tank can just drive off as if nothing as occurred.

I've also ran tests using general and again tanks will not take subsystem damage^1 when a round lands nearby. A shell landing onto a tank will sometimes cause subsystem damage but its not 100% (might be due to ERA?) but that also seems sorta incorrect.



^1 The only subsystem that will show any damage is tracks. No other subsystem will.

As you said, the density of fire doesnt match what would be normal in a PBEM. This is a lot more than a few tubes. 
Artillery can kill soft skinned vehicles, but not as easily as it should. And tanks are pretty much immune. Which was pretty much the point of the OP's post. 
There was a highly referenced post on these forums of an abrams taking numerous precision artillery rounds and surviving. 

The interactions shown here not only show the bug in question but also make me question exactly how fragments are being modeled. If you notice the BMPs that are knocked out have no system damage and are just destroyed. That makes me think that the game isn't model any sort of fragments as projectiles but instead use some sort of blast radius calculation. Since a fragment hitting the vehicle would cause some sort of system damage or possible crew casualties.

My guess is that modeling fragments explicitly in 2008 was seen as prohibitive so they are abstracted out.


@The_Capt

Yes, tracking down info on this is generally difficult and I don't really think vehicle destruction is that far off from what I've been able to find.

This is from the Dupuy Institute which puts armor losses during WW2 around 12% although I'm not sure how trustworthy they are as a source. One of the obvious questions (in relation to CM) is how concentrated are these losses are. 12% across a multi-day battle isn't huge but its possible that they could be concentrated in several CM scale engagements in which case they might be significant for our purposes.
Anyway... I generally think that too much focus gets put on kills in this discussion when I'm more interested in the effect of artillery during and immediately after a barrage. What sort of non-fatal damage might be caused^1, what sort of suppression might be caused^2, how does artillery impact target engagement^2.

^1  I think this is question is far more important in Shock Force and Black Sea but not without merit in Cold War. 40 artillery shells might not be concentrated enough to kill a tank within the barrage area, however, it might knock out the thermal sight which is not unimportant. Obviously in BS and SF you have modern tanks within even more equipment on them that could be knocked out. And CM is the sort of game where the destruction of a smoke launcher could be critical later.

^2 Suppression not only in the sense of the crew themselves being knocked around by blast effect and being worried by the shells falling/fragments clattering off the vehicle reducing their capabilities, but the crew making the decision to lower armored shutters over thermal sights and so on.

CM is often a game of minute details mattering which is why I don't think this is unimportant.

Artillery in CM has two key weaknesses that make it suspect within the context of a mech heavy environment. The first being (as I've been told) that CM does not model vehicles closing up vision ports when under artillery fire. The second that the game does not model fragmentation damage to vehicles.^1 Combined this is causing artillery to under perform against armor. I'm not sure by how much it is under performing but my suspicion is that its not a meaningless loss.
Part of my reasoning is that, as you have said, the Soviet forces are often at a 2:1 to 3:1 advantage. Within this context you might have a M60 TTS platoon against a 2-3 platoons of Soviet armor and the reduction of even a single TTS's capability to effectively engage results in a significant drop in combat power for NATO.

Now this can be worked around but it requires that you use artillery in a way that I suspect most players don't readily take to. For example, you have located a TTS platoon astride the advance of your FSE. A player might drop a large number of shells over 8-10 minutes only to find that no damage has been done at all to the opposing armor. Not only that but during the barrage their spotting ability is not being reduced. The player has therefore expended a large amount of firepower and a significant amount of time for no impact on the enemy. I think this fairly leads to frustration on the players part.

^1 Documented bug but I also have a suspicion that how CM would model fragmentation might be doing a bit of a disservice to them.


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Overall though I actually disagree that the Soviets don't work. But I do think that the peculiarities of both the Soviets and CM work against players having initial success with them.

The Soviets never intended to use fixed wing aircraft in a Close Air Support (CAS) role. CAS is defined as having some level of direct coordination with ground controllers, meaning that a ground controller is calling in and directing strikes in support of troops in contact. The Soviets did not ever intend to do that. Fixed wing aircraft were meant to carry out strikes along the enemy's depth, including targets that were farther behind the Forward Line of Troops (FLOT) than conventional artillery could strike. Nearly all of these targets were briefed, as in they were designated before the strike as opposed to having the pilots find their own.
Helicopter gunships had more of a CAS-like role, in that their role was more about supporting troops in contact with air support, but even here it was not directed by ground controllers. The gunships job was to fly in, strafe enemy positions and then bug out. It was expected that helicopters would do a better job of engaging enemy forces in close proximity to friendly forces.
There is a strong argument that the Soviets should have no fixed wing aircraft in CMCW. The reason they are included is because players would be up in arms about a feature being stripped from the game, and because there are some limited use cases for them to be present. All Soviet air support (helo and fixed wing) should be used as pre-planned strikes during the deployment phase. This best simulates how the Soviets would have used them in reality, as an opening pre-planned strike in support of an attack. Anything else begins to really stretch the definitions of Soviet "CAS."

Yeah I'm not sure I would agree with some of the analysis here. The M60 shouldn't bee seen as a restart of American tank design or even a break from old designs. Like Herr Kettler suggest, really the M60 is just the M48 mk2, the M48 being an M47 but good, which is itself an M26/46 hastily upgraded thanks to the crises of the late 1940s. If there was a missed generation of tank development during the early Cold War, it was for the US equivalent of an T-55, a role which the M26/46 struggled to fill. The M-48 did a great job in countering that generation of Soviet tank, and likewise the M60 was an excellent tank in its generation, which also includes the T-62. As anyone who plays my first By the Book scenario will quickly learn, in a lot of ways the M60A1 and T-62 are good matches for each other, with the T-62 maybe holding some edge but not a decisive one. And of course the M60A3 itself will smoke a T-62 more often than not. 
In the early-to-mid Cold War US development programs were highly iterative. Unlike in the late Cold War or today, the US never tried to develop wunderwaffe, weapons capable of delivering a knockout punch and imparting a decisive advantage. Such programs are often high-risk (in that the program may well fail)/high reward. Through the 1950s the US had conceptualized a number of 'cutting edge' high tech tank designs, including swimming tanks, submarine tanks (lol), and atomic powered tanks (also lol). Ultimately though the Army consistently chose low cost, low risk programs which would maintain a relative parity in capabilities and which delivered improved but proven technologies. Unlike the Abrams, nothing about the M60 was earth shattering. But it did its job well enough and maintained a rough parity with most of its early adversaries. All this fell apart in the 1960s. Kennedy and Flexible Response, plus late Vietnam, rescued the Army from the horrors of the atomic budgeting process. If the Pentatomic era spelt the end of the American tank, it wasnt because the tank itself was a bad idea but because Congress and the public didn't want to fund anything that didnt have a rocket motor or an atomic payload. Right around the Kennedy era this changed, but you also see the way in which program planning changed too. This was the era of the dreaded 'Systems Analysis.' Ask anyone in the Pentagon, even today, and theyll shudder at the mere mention of that accursed concept. Making distilling something super complicated down into one sentence, SA was the attempt to flatten all kinds of complicated and political budget questions into simple data points, charts, and computer models. Rather than have some guy with a shoulder full of stars tell the engineers what he wants, the design gets fed into a million computer simulations to figure out if five road wheels or six produce better overall combat performance. Or if metric sized bolts or standard produce a higher kill ratio. The horror, the horror, the horror...
Combined with Vietnam, which sucked in the majority of the Army's focus and funding, these budgeting processes shifted procurement from low risk/proven reward to high risk/high reward type programs, ala the MBT-70. Lot more to this story. But if the US missed a generation of weapons development, it was in the mid-to-late 60s. The MBT-70 would have been the tank to take on the T-64, if it had worked. But it didn't, and so the M60 had to do that job when really they should have been phasing out. Things got better after 1968, Vietnamization created a mini peace dividend which found its way back to weapons programs like the XM803, eventually the XM1, and the TOW, among many others. But the problem was the failure of the Johnson era programs created a break. Unlike with the M48&M60, there was no longer a good platform to build on. Iterative development was replaced, permanently, with innovative development. Upgrades to the M60 then, including the A2 and A3 packages, were intended only as stopgaps until the new revolution was delivered. Problem was the while the US puttered around from the 1960s until 1980 trying to draft that revolution, the Soviets continued to pump out their own iterative programs, which ultimately gave them a major advantage against the now long-in-the-tooth M60. Comparing the M60 to the T-64 or T-72 is a bit unfair as neither were a twinkle in a Russian eye when the M60 and its competitors were drafted. Nobody realized it at the time, but the M60 was a tank that was going to have to last several design generations. But in its time and in its place, the M60 was a good design. Not fantastic, but not bad by any means. It was a match for the T-62, its first rival. Unfortunately Vietnam changed a lot of things, and in ways people at the time had a hard time grasping. It wasn't until the war was coming to a close that people in the Army started to realize what exactly the war cost them. 

Glad to see another JK thread has run it’s usual course. 
 
Friendly reminder that everyone’s favorite Australian pup doesn’t even own Cold War, has no intention of buying it, and is not discussing anything remotely related to the topic at hand. Not that he ever does, but I digress. 
 
This thread should be locked for elder abuse. Not that it isn’t warranted, but still.

Speaking of fighters, if we focus on the air war in Central Europe both the MiG-31 and the F-14 are out of the equation. The first was a PVO interceptor whose sole purpose was the defense of mainland USSR from strategic bombers/cruise missiles, the second would have been busy with fleet operations, everywhere in the world save for the IGB.
Thus, the only NATO air superiority assets, available at start, to fight over Central Europe would've been those of the TWOATAF and FOURATAF. And, even in the mid-late '80s, the only all-weather and BVR capable units were the Eagle equipped 32nd TFS and 35th TFW (USAF) the Hornet equipped Squadrons No. 409, 421 and 439 (RCAF) and the Phantom equipped 92th and 19th Squadrons (RAF). Period. All other NATO fighter units in theatre were equipped with "light" fighters (F-16, F-104, F-5, Mirage 5 etc.) with no BVR capability. Thus, even against the maligned MiG-23, these fighters, while capable dogfighters, would have to dodge volleys of SARH AAMs before the merge.
Moreover, NATO fighters had also the burden of escorting air strikes deep behind the frontline in a SAM-rich environment and against a redundant GCI radar net (no possibility of a stealth surprise airstrike against A-50 AWACS à la Clancy to clear the way, simply because... there were no A-50s in Central Europe, the few existing ones at the time were also a PVO only asset). If someone is thinking: why bother with deep strikes over enemy airspace, just defend over your own airspace... well, I presume that without some serious FOFA, NATO airplanes wouldn't have made the difference in WW3.
And Western air forces had to manage this after (literally) tons and tons of explosive hurled against NATO airports and SAM sites in the form of ballistic and cruise missiles (and, possibly, bombs).
Of course the Red Horde (TM) wouldn't have emerged unscathed from this ordeal, quite the contrary. But, probably, they had the numbers to better survive this attrition war, if the other Warsaw Pact assets were able to reduce/delay US reinforcement in the theatre.

CMCW for me.
I always wanted a cold war combat mission though i wasn't sure what time would have been better.
The 79-82 timeline is a great choice.
I like playing with mechanized troops so the choice was simple!

CMCW. Hands down. 

I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of spotted cats on the CMCW battlefield.  I am pretty sure we mentioned a time line of "2022" for delivery, with all the usual caveats you have come to love.

Leos for everybody!

Well I think that is your hypothesis but:
- You have done nothing beyond a single SB vs CM test to try and prove it (you did repost a report first posted by John Kettler on another thread).
- You have provided no clear concept of “what right would look like” beyond “I think it is bad”
Every time I think we might see daylight we come right back to the fact that all of this is built solely on your opinion.  That, and some weird strung together logic threads [aside, the tanks in my AAR thread were T62s, which we have not even touched].  
So despite numerous people running exploratory in-game tests that refute your initial premise, we come right back to “what you think” instead of what you can prove.  Here is the thing (the same thing I tell students)…your opinion does not matter.  Sorry to be the one to break it to you.  It is what you can prove with facts that matters here, even in game facts.  The only person not running in game testing (or at least putting them up here) is the person who started the conversation in the first place.
On the rest of the internet saying something a lot of times might make it true but not here,  not in our little corner of it.  If you seriously want to make the game better and provide constructive feedback, stop posting your opinion and actually do the work to prove your point.

Lending credibility to this document, Paul Gorman is legit. He was a TRADOC guy all the way back to DePuy's tenure in the mid-70s, so hed had over five years working on solutions to this very problem. I'd argue hes was a bit more willing to.... instrumentalize his analyses for the sake of pushing an agenda (usually based on the gear he was hoping to get the Army to acquire), but overall pretty good. 
The analysis, though, like most US analyses, overrates the T-72 in glaring ways. Take, for example, the fact that on pg. 12 he bases part of his conclusion on the fact that the T-72 had a laser rangefinder. As weve discussed, it didn't. It used coincidence, less quick and accurate. The information you cite from page 14 is something you see pretty commonly in these documents. "Oh no! The T-72 is 63% better than the M60A3! See my numbers!" Except that much of that assessment is based on soft factors which are nearly impossible to quantify, and even if they were almost always tend to overrate strengths and ignore or downplay weaknesses (because, I'd argue, theyre sales pitches. But thats another conversation entirely). 
This document, I think, is really trying to get at what Gorman thinks is "faulty intelligence" regarding the capability of the T-72 and the potential detrimental effects it might have had on US R&D at the time. Hes especially concerned that if the armor and strength of the T-72 had not been revised upwards, the US may not have proceeded with the "XM1-E1" upgrade program (we would know it as the M1A1) or the I-TOW, and instead focused on the Dragon and bringing the M60s up to snuff. I would suspect, though I dont know for sure, that this has something to do with the sudden realization in the west that the T-64, -72, and -80 were indeed all separate designs of progressing quality. For many years the T-64, for example, was called the T-70 and the US was a bit unsure as to what its relationship was to the T-72. This only cleared up around the late 70s, though that hadn't filtered down via TRADOC training documents. I have an old edition of FM 100-2-3, think its from 1980, that calls the T-64 the T-70 and only hypothesizes about better armor (if memory serves). 
All this is to say its an interesting document, but being used out of proper context here. The US didn't know at the time what the later T-series tanks were all about, nor did they have a good grasp on equipment and capabilities. Keep in mind the last tank the US had gotten a hold of were T-62s from the YK war. I dont even think the T-72 came westward until Desert Storm. This led to an analogous to WWII "Tiger mania," T-72 mania. Desert Storm really shattered that illusion because so many officers had grown up in the 70s and 80s fretting about the T-72 just to find out that it wasn't as good as they one they had planned for. That is to say, Gorman's mostly actually wrong here. Now I think the pendulum often swings too far the other way, the T-72 was still pretty good especially in Soviet hands. And Gorman is allowed to be wrong because hes living through the fog of war, and anyway isn't quite trying to do what the title makes you think he is (classic Gorman). BUT I think that also makes this document, for our purposes, suspect. 

C2 can make a big difference in spotting times. Units with a contact marker on an unspotted unit will spot that unit around 50% faster.

This is top tier schizo posting. 
 
All warfare is based. Sun Tzu