IICptMillerII

Great shots! Looking forward to seeing the assault go in.

Great stuff Beeron! Always love seeing new people creating high quality AARs. Plus, you've got some great OPFOR to fight against there I'll be following along with interest.

Its ok, its more for the benefit of the passers by and new forum members who do not understand the full context. Wouldn't want them led astray!

@The_Capt out here doin the lords work

Yeah so just for the record, again, he was not in the British army during the Cold War, and was not in the BAOR. And, at no point in the video does he claim to have been in the BAOR, or staring down the Soviets in Germany personally.

Theoretically yes, in an emergency. But tracked vehicles are not supposed to drive over barbed wire. It gets caught and tangled in the treads and wheels real bad, and worst case scenario can even tangle the tracks so badly that the vehicle is immobilized. CM actually simulates this too. If you drive over barbed wire you’ll notice the condition of your tracks will be degraded, and if you do it too much your vehicle will become immobilized.

Matsimus is a British Army vet, but was not actively serving during the Cold War or part of BAOR.

The peanut gallery is weaponized and in cahoots with the enemy! Silliness aside, that is annoying. Forum block feature might be in order. Great screenshots and mission graphics for the first turn of action!

Great job! Always love seeing another high quality AAR. It is a lot of work but I always find it to be worth it. Those arrows can be much more of a pain than some may think. I'll be following along. Ignore the peanut gallery and carry on. Looking forward to seeing this play out!

What was the designation for the HEAT round? And what is the source for this? It is worth pointing out that the Gen 1 Abrams had anywhere from 600-1500 RHAe equivalent protection against HEAT on its frontal aspect. Soviet 125mm HEAT shells from the mid to late 80s would have had an extremely difficult time penning the Gen 1 Abrams frontally, let alone a much smaller 76mm HEAT warhead. In fact, most contemporary sources have the PT-76 using the BK-350M HEAT round. A round from WW2, that had only ~280mm RHAe of penetration. And on the other end of the scale, the Soviet BK-21B, BK-29, and BK-31, which were all HEAT rounds for the Soviet 125mm gun, and fielded in the 80s, only top out at around 760mm RHAe of penetration.

It was. Snorkeling a tank was never meant to be done anywhere near a battlefield, so it is well outside the scope of CM.

Great footage. Bad day for the (notional) crew though.

There is no snow in CMCW. The fall months are there though.

Great stuff!

The Tac AI will pop smoke and reverse all on its own. The player follow up to that should be to then relocate the vehicle to a new firing position.

Warren gave a great breakdown. I would add that one of the most common complaints I see everywhere about CM games set in a modern setting is that the maps are too small. "Knife fighting in a phone booth" is a phrase that is usually thrown around quite regularly. I sympathize with that assessment to a degree. I think that Cold War goes a long way of showing that with the proper sized maps, you can get real maneuver in a modern setting. Of course, the double edged sword here is that some people prefer those phone booth knife fights. I think that Warren is correct that Cold War currently is mostly the larger fights and does not have many smaller fights, and that going forward it will be important to try to include more of those smaller fights. But I think it was the right call going with the larger battles for the first game. After all, this was to be a massive mechanized fight, and I think it was important that Cold War capture that feeling and sense of scale out of the gate. All that said, I do think that Combat Mission has an issue with what I call administrative burden, or overhead. The player has to give so many orders to so many individual units, that it can get really tiresome keeping up with everything. Just getting a single company to road march can take hundreds of clicks and pause commands, etc. Reducing the admin burden on the player I think would go a long way to facilitating the playability of the larger battles. But that is completely in the hands of Steve and Charles, and is well beyond the scope of a game or module.

After the M901 has fired both its missiles and is reloading, if it can still see enemy targets (specifically tanks) it will generally execute a reload drill, which is popping smoke and reversing. It is a case of a Tac AI one size fits all solution, that does not always fit the situation. But I do not think it is the worst thing in the world. By and large I would rather have the behavior in the game than not. It is also worth mentioning that after a reload drill, the M901 should be moving to an alternate firing position to confuse enemy gunnery. Constantly moving back up to the same firing position is not the best idea. I know it can be annoying, but there it is.

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.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Clearly a troll. On a positive note though, a lot of the other people in this thread have been very positive and had some good discussion.

This thread should be renamed to "Grammar nazis: A Case Study"

Combat Mission runs in 4K, but there is no UI scaling. Some people don’t mind, some people consider it game breaking. YMMV.

This is a good point. I will see if I can get a note added into the game manual to let players know about the limitations of the TOW missiles despite having thermals.

I can assure you that Dom does not mean it in a disparaging way. I've talked to him at length about the scenario (and CM in general) and he has a ton of great insight. There is no ill will or intent here. I'm kicking myself for not getting a chance to play this while still in beta. If I had the chance to get to it there are a few recommendations I would have made. I love the map and I think there could be a few changes made to the Soviet forces that could turn this scenario into a "how the Persians could have won at Thermopylae" type thing. This speaks a little to what Dom means when he talks about a tactical puzzle. He does not mean that it is some game like chess or something that has a code to crack it, he means it in the military sense that the bridge is crucial key terrain that must be seized in order for the Soviet advance to continue, and that it is the obvious bottleneck. Overcoming this bottleneck as the attacker, and properly defending it as the defender despite being outnumbered, is the tactical "puzzle." Do you think it would be worth the time to converse (perhaps in the beta boards) about some recommendations I have? Again, this is partly my fault. I meant to get to this during beta but was not able to, for which I apologize. If you would rather move on I completely understand. Just let me know! I really do love the map by the way. Hot damn is it great!

This is a good summary of the question. Pretty much nails it on the head.