Zveroboy1

If you haven't already had a look, the wikipedia maps of the conflict are quite interesting. They get updated often and you're able to see the direction, size and width of the penetrations a lot more clearly than lieveuamaps for example. I don't know how accurate this is of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine.svg
I get Glantz's flashbacks poring over these. Looking away from Kyiv at what appears to be secondary thrusts, it is hard to tell obviously how deep some of these are going to go, whether they are going to stall or not. They very well might go nowhere or not deep enough to achieve anything. But I have looked at enough operational east front wwii map to know that sometimes an offensive appeared to be going nowhere the first couple of days, only to develop much faster suddenly. Different conflict and era of course.

If you haven't already had a look, the wikipedia maps of the conflict are quite interesting. They get updated often and you're able to see the direction, size and width of the penetrations a lot more clearly than lieveuamaps for example. I don't know how accurate this is of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine.svg
I get Glantz's flashbacks poring over these. Looking away from Kyiv at what appears to be secondary thrusts, it is hard to tell obviously how deep some of these are going to go, whether they are going to stall or not. They very well might go nowhere or not deep enough to achieve anything. But I have looked at enough operational east front wwii map to know that sometimes an offensive appeared to be going nowhere the first couple of days, only to develop much faster suddenly. Different conflict and era of course.

Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for an invasion army. I just feel bad for those staff officers.
I had a very busy week on work, so I can totally understand how frustration it is: Your CO. yelling at you , he needs a new offensive begin tomorrow. BTG 001-005 reports they are low on ammo, BTG 008 requests fire support from Arty Bde. BTG 011-013 says the need fuel. BTG 015 reports they lost three tanks due to enemy fire, but they are not burning, needs recovery bn's ARV support. BTG 006 cmdr reports no one protect his flank. OK, good news, you still have BTG 007 on your hand. Now you got to do calculation (and lots of calculation), check out the latest location of those who needs supplies  , send out couple convoys from Army's depot (probably 50km away from the border) travel 150km distance . Then communicate with those BTG commanders , ask them to meet with convoy x at certain location at certain time.
Good luck with that, a tiny error could causing a disaster to the supply convoys and the BTGs at the frontline.
 
If I have been assigned to this kind of job, I'd rather 躺平 (lying flat)    

Honest question here : how can Russia not achieve air superiority with the disparity in the numbers of planes on each side?

And the Ukrainians should just knuckle under to a dictator who enforces his will with draconian measures and flat-out lies, because the West is leaving them to swing (which they aren't)? The Ukrainians aren't fighting Putin because the West wants them to, they're fighting him and his gangster buddies because they don't want to be ruled by them. This battle isn't about getting Crimea and Donbass back it's about resisting international criminality.

I'm going to guess that they actually have air superiority, just not quite full air supremacy. 
From AAP-6. I definitely don't see any stories about the Ukrainian Air Force laying waste to Russian battalions - the kills seem to be from ground forces. BTW air supremacy is:
In fact, they might be here too. Air supremacy's definition, apparently, does not insist on a condition of Insta-Death for any enemy formation that moved.

Win or lose, they are likely to be treated as a pariah state by the international community for the next twenty years. And what's disturbing is that they probably took this into account and still went for it in the end.

Win or lose, they are likely to be treated as a pariah state by the international community for the next twenty years. And what's disturbing is that they probably took this into account and still went for it in the end.

Jesus.
I never imagined they would be actually going for Kyiv. This is really bad.
All this affair and the military exercises and force buildup at first sounded like some sort of negotiation attempt where you create a problem yourself then offer to fix it in exchange for something. Or some plain bullying and intimidating.
When it began I thought they would try to perhaps cripple the Ukrainian military, maybe create a land bridge to Crimea, even just score a minor tactical victory for domestic purposes in order for Putin to claim he didn't back down and stood up to the west. But this is scary.
You don't send VDV forces to take an airport if you don't intend to later relieve them with ground forces and the thrusts around the capital shown on these graphics speak for themselves.
Was this all planned from the start or did Putin consider backing down would make him appear weak? As much as it is tempting to think of Putin as a madman, this sounds more like some cold and cynical calculated risk.
What's worrying is that can Putin even stop now? If the whole thing ended now, then it sounds likely that strategically it would just make NATO's resolve stronger and Ukraine more likely to join than before which sounds precisely what Moscow wants to avoid.
 

with all due respect to my friend Aragorn (et al), I don't agree this is somehow the fault of the west from a military perspective.  No majority in any country in the west was ready to go to war over Ossetia or Crimea.  The only thing we could've done was sanctions.  And now Putin is warning us that he has nukes if we interfere. 
The choice for the west was get into WW3 or not over Putin's previous agressions.  So exactly what was the west supposed to do other than sanctions? 
Wokeness?  Really?  are we really talking about this absurd strawman when a megalomaniac is invading other countries?  This is all about Putin. 

Ideally you'd need to have two different versions for each scenario : one against the AI and one for H2H play. Simply because you have to beef up the AI side to make it challenging for a human player. And as a result it would often be too easy for one of the two human players. And so two versions means twice the amount of time spent playtesting it.
But yeah you could easily add a quick briefing for the other side anyway and add a disclaimer stating it is unbalanced. The thing is often it might not simply be unbalanced, but just a cake walk for one side.

CM is great because it’s the closest you can get to seeing what actual combat looks like from the battalion on down. You could play Arma but then you have to deal with other people wait forever to get things organized. 
 
Combat Mission is kind of like a Van Gogh painting. If you look closely it’s just a bunch of dots that don’t make sense, and they don’t look very aesthetically pleasing but once you zoom out you start to see a cohesive picture. Once you accept the jank, it only gets better.

Great video, a Combat Mission: Fall Blau would be so fun, I mean, look how great it is just with what a handful have modders have done with the base game?
 

Assault team fragging and clearing an apartment building. With limited armor support it's the only real way to progress and with proper suppression it's pretty safe.

A Stuka drops it's bomb a bit too close and knocks out a Panzer II, the battlefield went dead silent after with the battlefield filled with smoke and most of the men on both sides instantly pinned.

Mortars hit a friendly trench wiping out an entire squad in seconds except for a single Oberschütze. 

Scheiße (sh*t). 

As you can see...

Numbered modular building versions need EVERYTHING in order to show up. You miss one item and the game will just ignore it.
That means you need the lower and upper windows and picture window, you need the roofs, you need the balcony, you need the interior, you need the door. Its been awhile since I touched CMRT, you may need both the peaked roof and flat roof version.

FR Rumble at Reitwein
2304x976
This in an out-take from Fire&rubble that didn't get time to have tested to standard (though I have done many runs on it in Scenario Author mode, and in my own playtesting).
Meeting Engagement just to the west of Reitwein between Soviet 370 RD and attached armor elements versus elements of Reitwein area Volkssturm, Panther-Battalion "Brandenburg", a KG from the "Kurmark" Division, and attached stragglers from 9th FJ Division.
The scenario is fictional, but is derived from actions and forces in the area in attempting to enlarge/reduce the Soviet bridgehead over the Oder.
Play as either side. 1 plan for Axis, 2 for Soviet side. May also be suitable for HTH.

FR Rumble at Reitwein.btt

Alright, 50 days until X-mas. The gauntlet is down for you guys, especially you "cherries", to make a scenario, your first scenario...?, before Christmas. Let us swamp the community with some scenarios. Use or modify an existing map if you need to (and give polite credit in your briefing or designers notes to prevent accusations of being a dreaded parasite!). Make your own simple map! No Rembrandts are required! Dial it down to 208 x 208, the teeniest tiniest map you can make. Playable from only one side is AOK. Just make sure to say that guidance in the main cover description. Use just a tiny force. Put the AI on defence and the AI plan is very rudy..rudo..ruddimuntary..it is EASIER! Use just a small timeframe of 10 minutes!  I (and a butt ton of others) am here to lend a hand to answer questions or go and have Turkey in a few weeks and read the famous JonS scenario guide pdf in your main install folder. All these different titles can use some new juices.
 
 

So I had been planning on making this post for a while but I haven't really had time to do it properly until now. I wanted to showcase some examples of how I tried to incorporate real architectural elements into the mod to make it as true to life as possible. All the photos below are from Syria.
First all of I wanted to talk a bit about mosques. Some of you probably saw the in game picture of the mosque with a greyish silvery looking dome and might have asked yourself "but Zveroboy aren't the domes of mosques all colourful with flashy teals, greens or gold?" And of course you would be right, some are just like that. But actually in Syria in particular plenty of mosques have this silvery or greyish looking dome as you can see in the photos below. But I included two alternative dome textures that you can use if you don't like the default colour.
The first picture is actually located in New Aleppo, just 100 m to the west of the area I mapped, alongside that large avenue in the southern part of the map.

Aleppo mosque details :

A school I based an extra building on :

A roll down door :

Balcony and facade details :

Window :

Doors :
(Almost all the door textures are based on real Syrian doors)


That's all.

Yes the areas in between blocks of buildings are super maze like.
I thought long and hard about how to best represent them in the editor. Not sure I took the right decision but from looking at satellite images and photos it soon became obvious to me that first it wasn't simply regular back alleys and that there shouldn't be unobstructed lines of fires across them.



And secondly that vehicles had no way of getting there. So with that out of the way, the next decision was about infantry movement. I didn't really like the notion of making it so infantry could cross laterally and from buildings to buildings parallel to the roads unhindered everywhere. That didn't seem right. Then again not being able to cross anywhere wasn't going to work either because even though it is not easy to tell with these pictures, it is an area that is often accessible with gates as shown in the second photo.
So in the end I opted more something that's not uniform everywhere and which is a bit messy and chaotic which I think might be about right for an urban setting. But yes it means that if you want to avoid streets and go from building to building you have to get down to ground level with the camera and check for doors and gaps in walls etc.
Anyway this is probably not particularly interesting to anyone except me lol but maybe people might like seeing what the place actually looks like before they turn it to rubble.

Nice, glad I could help. At one point I thought maybe I was just tripping and imagining things.. This is going to give me a little sanity boost.🙏

Probably true for me.
Though I'm tempted to say Shock Force overall. Some players don't like it because of the force imbalance, but that's exactly what I find interesting about it. The Syrians are the ultimate underdog of all the CM games. It's always fun seeing them pull off some fantastic ambush against overwhelming odds, wiping out a good chunk of the western forces before gloriously martrying themselves in the process.
I like the Middle Eastern setting, the modern stuff is fun to play with, and the gameplay is quite different from the slow, grinding industrial warfare of WW2. The insurgents/uncons are unlike anything in any other title. You get interesting units like technicals, IEDs, spies, suicide bombers, small bands of guerrilla fighters with stealth bonuses. Some of my favorite content is the Red vs Red stuff.
The game has become more interesting after everything that has happened IRL since the game was released. After spending years seeing real life major battles playing out over places like Aleppo or Raqqa, it's outright bizarre to see similar battles playing out in the game.

Now I can try to answer the other part of your question. Are tactical wwii tabletop wargames obsolete if you also play CM?
It is tempting to say yes because CM scratches the same itch without having to burden yourself with reading and learning a 40 pages rulebook (or a lot more for ASL) and it probably models most aspects of infantry and tank combat much better. Let's just take armor penetration for instance. You're clearly not going to have the same level of detail with a 6 sided die or even a 10 sided die than a computer algorithm gives you. The PC simulation is going to be much more fine grained and accurate provided it is fed the right data.
There is something to be said about poring over a good old fashioned paper map though instead of staring at a computer screen. And even though it sounds a tad quaint, it has its appeal especially if you already spend a long time in front of a screen for your job for instance. The tactile aspect too is not completely irrelevant : rolling the die, fiddling with counters etc. You'd think it is in a lots of ways a throwback to a bygone era and just nostalgia but you'd be surprised by how popular tabletop wargames have become in the last 10 years.
There is actually a golden age of tabletop wargaming these days caused by a generation of grognard designers who have grown up in the heydays of the hobby in the 70's and who have now reached some sort of peak after having honed their skill for so long. New designers too are coming up with LOTS of new systems and there is plenty of innovation with the addition of cards (to add political elements or randomness), impulse movement (you only activate and move a part of your total force, usually a formation then your opponents does the same), and even simply doing away with the hex grid which is replaced by a point to point system or simply areas etc...
Now if you're purely interested in wwii tactical then it'd be a hard sale to try to convince someone that tabletop is better I have to admit. I have stopped playing ASL the day I discovered CM. Mostly because the rules overhead doesn't translate into a more realistic simulation. Sometimes though, I feel like CM scale is too constraining. You might want to expand your horizons and command several battalions instead of a company or two for instance. What if instead of trying to capture a village, you want to cross a major river and encircle a whole enemy division?  That's why I mostly play operational or grand tactical wargames these days. They scratch a different itch and there is no doubt in my mind that tabletop wargaming does it better at that scale than computer games.
No it is not the same at all. They don't attempt to simulate the same elements. There is a lot of micro management in CM, sometimes it feels too much of it. In Fields of Fire you are clearly in the boots of the company commander only. You pick the avenue of approach, you allocate assets to the different platoons, set up a base of fire, reserves, decide when to push, when to disengage, when to launch the assault, where to setup an evacuation spot for casualties etc... you don't pick the exact piece of cover you want the men of the first platoon to use; you tell them to head for this built up area or this patch of wood but not behind which tree trunk they need to hide. It is zoomed out. It doesn't mean that there are no hard decisions to make, it is just not on the same level. For instance your soldiers once they open fire will keep firing and in order to tell them to cease fire, you either need to have your XO there or use pyrotechnics, a red flare for cease fire for instance.
It is all about orders and command and control. You can give a limited number of orders each turn. But you can set up a sop at the beginning with the different flares and colored smokes at your disposal for when you are not in range or when you run out of command points and your troops will react according to the pre-planned orders. You also have handheld radios, field telephones whose lines can't be damaged by artillery thus severing your communication network, you can dispatch runners etc. It is a deep game but a bit involved.
I haven't tried these rewritten rules. But I'd say if you are interested just go for it. It is a good mental workout and I see you already know about bgg. It is a rather popular game so you won't get stuck if you have a problem, someone will probably already have asked the same question somewhere. I mean the rules are not easy but it is nothing impossible. The box is jam packed full of components, cards, counters and rulebooks but it fits just fine.
 
 
 
 
 
 

I play tabletop wargames from time to time, but not so much wwii tactical. I have Fields of Fire though. It is a good game, I think the designer is serving in the Marine Corps and he has published several wargames; his Musket & Pike series is very good. I have the first edition covering Normandy, Korea and Vietnam, not the one about the Pacific theatre that you are interested in but it is the same rules really.
The game deals with command and control issues with some interesting and unique mechanisms. It is not at all like ASL and takes a much broader view of the topic, putting you in the shoes of a company commander. The "board" is actually made of rows of cards that you pick randomly according to scenario instructions.
One of the Hue scenarios below :

I hesitate to recommend it as your first foray into tabletop wargaming because the rules are a bit of a mess to be honest even though this is technically the third edition. It is not for the faint hearted and you should be prepared to invest a lot of time browsing the game forums trying to decipher the finer points of the ruleset and be ready to face lots of ambiguous situations. But it is a rewarding game, eminently replayable that models elements of command and control and company level engagements that almost no other wargame tackles.
edit :
Oh and I forgot to mention that it is a purely solo game. The enemy is setup on the board and reacts on its own without you having to play both sides if you don't have an opponent.

Cold War AT ranges are fairly consistent across both factions, and are in basically three bands.

Short range is dictated by the range of the RPG-7 and LAW, and are about 300m.
Medium range is defined by the range of the Dragon and AT-7/SPG-9, and is about 1000m
Long range is defined by TOWs and AT-4/AT-5s, and is 2000m+

Armour in this period slots in between the medium and long range, so engagements at around 1500m are fairly typical. The gunnery is still WW2-level for the most part, so longer ranged shots will be very inaccurate, and kinetic penetrators will lose much of their energy at extreme range. I've seen tank duels at 3-4km between M60A1 and T-62 (tanks which can typically kill each other pretty easily) where the kinetic rounds are mostly bouncing off, simply due to the distances involved.

That's the basic answer to your question, but it's worth discussing some complexities:

The Soviet tanks in 1979-1980 are, broadly, superior to the US armour. The T-62 (1975), for example, has similar armour to an M60A1, but has a laser rangefinder (rather than the optical co-incidence rangefinder than the M60 has), and a gun with a significantly higher velocity. That will mean a flatter trajectory, so greater accuracy and penetration. The situation for the US broadly gets worse with the T-64 and up, since there is a significant uptick in armour, and the composite turret makes the available HEAT rounds mostly ineffective from the front. 

The HEAT rounds do not rely on kinetic energy, so weapons that can deliver HEAT over distance are obviously useful - the most accurate way to deliver a HEAT round over distance is an ATGM, and this is the logic behind the development of the M60A2 Starship. This vehicle was obsolete pretty much by the time it was deployed, owing to the changes in Soviet armour with the T-64, but the desire to take these extreme-range engagements is a reasonable one.

Those NTC training scenarios are the only all-armour scenarios I've actually enjoyed in CM, mostly as the terrain is excellent, and the opponent has a chance to actually win. The point of them really is to show the development of armour across the period, and partly to show quite how ridiculously dominant the Abrams are in 1982. That latter scenario is neither particularly interesting nor fun, but I think it's an important step in the conceptual process behind CM: Cold War.

In terms of tactics, the US is really built on these combined arms companies. Something like two platoons of mechanised infantry, a tank platoon, a couple of TOW launchers and some organic mortars. This unit is a self-contained, self-sufficient fighting element, which is useful since the assumption was that these would be overrun.

This is a really good reference for that, in this period:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=My8-u2rYNVoC

Broadly though, the TOWs define your area of influence, since they're your long ranged firepower. The infantry define the space you're fighting in, protecting flanks and holding ground, and the armour is a mobile concentration of power, either the thrust of your main effort, or a mobile reserve.

The 5-tank platoon should typically split into two fireteams of 3 and 2, with one covering the movement of the other. It's important especially against the Soviets to use terrain to mask your movement, and to use the terrain to control your engagements - there will typically be more Soviet tanks than US tanks, and they're superior to your armour, so you can't take them head-on. You need to set up situations where you have local superiority in firepower and numbers.