hattori

I will disagree with you on this one. I've followed this thread for a while. The discussion is good sometimes, and you and others make great points, or get me to look at things slightly differently. However, I do think the last few pages of comments have been particularly attacking Vlad above the normal. I'm not trying to deflect any attention, I'm just pointing out before you aggressively attack Russia for it's actions, remember your country has also been really brutal. Keep it more civil and nice (not you specifically, but others), and I won't think of you being too hypocritical. Like I said, from my perspective, I disagree with Vlad about most things he says, but I can see where he is coming from as a Russian patriot. He sounds just like an American patriot just years after 2003 Iraq, refusing to admit wrong or apologize for illegally screwing a country over.

Many of you are ripping Vlad a new one for Russia's actions in Ukraine -- I understand, I also am utterly opposed to what they are doing. At the same time though, it is very hypocritical to get as aggressive as you guys are getting considering how illegal and wrong the 2003 Iraq invasion was. Utter chaos in the area now, infrastructure and economy totally destroyed, 500 000 Iraqi civilians dead, and a power vacuum that allowed Iran and Sunni extremist movements to rise to the top. Guys, the west is far from perfect, and I can see from Vlad's point of view how ridiculous it is that America can do these things, and then freak out when Russia does, especially in his mind that his cause is far more justified. I didn't notice anything worth commenting on, but it is also hard to parse through your messages when you start getting lazy with your english (and it's your first language? I know when you put the effort in your english is as good as everyone else's here). When it's really bad, a lot of time I don't bother reading it now.

Gold star for you, but I expected you of all people to have read about it on wiki after our previous discussion of it. Also hilarious how american you can be sometimes, assuming someone in another non-english speaking country would have bothered to watch an american war movie from 1977. How many Russian war movies have you watched?

In all fairness, the west in turn completely glosses over the Soviet contribution to defeating Japan. I don't know too many people that can describe in any sort of detail of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and it had an immensely bigger impact than Operation Market Garden.

@VladimirTarasov haha -- yes, I can only imagine how frustrating it is to be constantly cast as the "evil" one in global politics (from the western perspective), but it is what it is. I didn't write that to accuse you of anything, only to tell you how things are with western public opinion. The west does not trust Putin or Russia one iota, and assumes he is generally up to something that is not in our interests. (and yes, I do think the west poked the bear too much with things like pushing it's missile defense systems too close). As for making up our minds -- cold war, we were terrified of you. Collapse of USSR, we saw a ton of incompetence, and wrote you off, and assumed you would want to field a military and flex your muscles more in line with what your economy and GDP are capable of. Pretty much most people forgot about the threat of nuclear war. Then Putin started rattling the cage again to make sure the west paid attention to Russia, and people woke up to the fact that you still have a ton of equipment, nuclear weapons, and a chip on your shoulder. You are totally messing with the past 20 years of the U.S. feeling they are THE power broker in the world.

@VladimirTarasov I'm not sure you appreciate that with Putin's saber rattling, it has revived some of those old feelings from the cold war when Russia was THE threat to future existence. The west also sees a lot of Putin's actions as being similar to Hitler's in the 30's when he was constantly pushing the boundaries. I don't think there would be any problems with motivation in the west fighting any Russian aggression. Oddly, we might be even more motivated than you should Russia attack.

@antaress73 I would also like to thank you for the information and testing work, much appreciated.

I didn't point it out to ask if you knew about keeping a team in the BMP -- you post on here a ton, I would be shocked if you didn't. I said it because I can't recall in any post or DAR that you regularly kept teams in your BMPs to improve spotting -- knowing and doing are two different things. Remember, we are looking for reasons why you (well, me included) are having such crappy ATGM firing luck. Your implication seems to be there is a bug in the code, mine is that there isn't, and that there are other good reasons your ATGMs might not be firing. If you recall, I also had the same problems as you. I also said, "I can never get my 2Ms to fire their Kornets in battle". Then I ran some tests, and realized, yes, provided nothing is firing back, they will dual launch. I've repeatedly done it. I personally would be absolutely shocked if testing in another game mode showed any other result. I've done a ton of coding, and there is no way I would NOT have the exact same game engine for all game modes if I were the development team. Feel free to check it out, but I would guess that would be a waste of time.

Interesting points. To throw some more numbers at the economic situation, Russia spends about 5% of it's GDP on it's military, while the U.S. spends about 3.5% of it's GDP. The key difference though, is the U.S. GDP is more than ten times bigger than Russia's, 18 trillion a year to around 1.2 trillion a year. This ends up meaning the U.S. spends about 600 billion a year on it's military (sorry, that is insane) to Russia's near 60 billion. The U.S. can definitely afford to pay and keep more experienced soldiers, and for all sorts of new toys and tech (and to research all the new stuff too).

I guess we could keep the platoon leader, machine gun team, and sniper team that come with Russian platoons in the vehicles instead of splitting the infantry squads and putting the teams with the leaders in. It gives you the choice of whether your fire support is going to be vehicle based or not.

Out of curiosity, how dependent is each side on GPS and GLONASS? I think both sides could easily jam / spoof / meacone / insert bad timing or orbit data / destroy the satellites themselves if it came to a shooting war. I imagine it will get back to old school maps very quickly.

Well, Antaress kinda makes my point. If Antaress was seeing 2Ms firing from the beginning, then they obviously always could. It would seem the test that was done was flawed then if it showed they were not firing. I see in the 1.03 patch notes, "IFVs (such as BMPs or Bradleys) are now better at choosing the optimal weapon system for engaging enemy IFVs. In most cases this means that they will favor immediate use of autocannons over ATGMs." This means they've actually toned down how often 2Ms try to launch their Kornets -- perhaps this is where things really started to take off that 2Ms just wouldn't fire Kornets. I think Antaress also did a test recently that showed that BMPs spot much, much faster if you keep a 2 man scout team mounted inside? Perhaps all your 2Ms are completely dismounted, and you are constantly losing the spotting -> aim -> fire -> kill race.

I don't think it would be difficult to program. The code would calculate odds to kill with cannon, and odds to kill with ATGM. Whatever is higher, go with. You could add a modifier based on experience to see if they actually select the correct choice.

Why do they fire now? I'm not sure anyone did any real testing before, we were all saying, "I've never seen my 2M fire it's Kornets in a battle". In testing, I've gotten the 2Ms to salvo fire and destroy Abrams ... only if the Abrams has nowhere to reverse and hide, and if it has a short cover arc so it won't fire back. Every other time, I trigger the laser warning in the Abrams and/or it spots the 2M and destroys it before the 2M can pop off one (and especially a salvo) Kornet. Also frequently with the good American communications, a lot of times the Abrams are aware 'something' is in the area from other units spotting, and ready to quickly destroy. I think that is the real issue. The 2M has no chance of spotting and salvo firing on an Abrams before the Abrams will spot the 2M and destroy it. Perhaps a platoon of 2Ms swarming one Abrams they might get some missiles off? I'm also not sure anyone has done any good testing on the effects of trees or any other obstacles that could potentially be in the Kornet flight path -- which might force the 2Ms to use their cannons (in the software code)

As I was saying, it is really difficult for people to not believe the propaganda their own government puts out

The American citizens who were against the war were far in the minority, and basically portrayed as unpatriotic cowards. The legislation to go to war passed with two thirds votes in congress and the senate. My point is it is more common than not for citizens to believe their country's propaganda, including all western countries. You had previously asked how a Russian could believe some of the things the Russian government was telling them -- the exact same reason some Americans believed everything the U.S. government told them in 2003, and continued to believe for quite some time. If you're going to predict what a country is going to do, you do have to make attempts to be very empathetic and put yourself in their shoes, from their viewpoint, not your own. That's personally why I value Vlad's opinion. He is the closest person to a native Russian that I hear from that talks about their point of view. For example, it is interesting to me that he views Ukrainians still as "brothers" despite their differences. It gives you a measure of how much war weariness the Russian population will accept over a fight for Ukraine -- they will probably have a much bigger stomach for losses than NATO's countries civilians.

@kraze In all fairness though, how many Americans believed the line about WMDs in Iraq, and for how long? How many believed that Iraq sponsored al-qaeda, and that also made the 2003 attack legal? I wouldn't be too quick to rush to judgement on others for believing their government's propaganda.

In the news I have read about it, it seems to be more of a bureaucratic issue, than an actual issue with money. I deal with government contracts all the time, and there are constant stupid delays with funding, and it has nothing to do with America or Canada not having the money. The issue is important to Russia strategically. They could print off $4 billion in money if they wanted to to finish it, and it likely wouldn't cause that much inflation -- I mean the U.S. has printed off trillions of dollars in the past few years with 'quantitative easing'. Russia also has almost 400 Billion in USD in foreign currency reserves alone, it's not like they are remotely close to being bankrupt. Once oil goes back up, Russia is going to be laughing.

Oleg said he was "lying on purpose", and that the only reason he was defending Russia is because basically so he can "grab his part of the pie" and that he will be "miserable and unwanted" if the regime falls. I think a comment like that about a poster is totally out of line. Some Russians are going to have a totally different viewpoint on things because of the society they came up in. It doesn't make them a "liar". I fail to see how it is helpful to the conversation, and am surprised I was the one to say something, not a mod. While I disagree with a lot of Vlad's points, I also appreciate hearing a pro-Russian viewpoint. It is not unlike listening a staunchly pro American from the south. I do not approve of Russia's actions in the least, but I can't exactly claim innocence considering how much America (and Canada as their tight allies) have meddled in other countries affairs, and doled out our own regime change when the local ruler didn't suit our needs. It has worked out relatively well for us, but we are not innocent. I also wouldn't frame Iraq as the country "thousands of Americans died to liberate and rebuild". First, promotion of democracy is NOT the reason America invaded Iraq, that's ridiculous -- if that were the case, why aren't they invading every non democratic country that has dictators that abuse their subjects. Second, America completely broke it, they better rebuild it.

@Oleg I hate to say it, but that is an awfully arrogant attitude. If he is Russian, clearly he is going to see things through a Russian lens, and have a different viewpoint. If one of you were ripping on Canada, it would be very hard for me to be able to objectively criticize my country, and would likely just make me dig my heels in to justify myself, and my country, without really realizing it. I would actually guess the truth is somewhere more in the middle of all these opinions.

@John Kettler The Russian GDP growth rate is negative over the past 2 years, but Russian GDP itself is not negative. I'm not sure that is even possible. Two very different things. The U.S. economy itself fluctuates between negative and positive growth at times. In fact, Russia still has something like the 6th largest economy, an insane amount of resources, a large labour pool, and most predictions have them coming out of the recession next year. I think they will be okay. They actually might want to be a little less capitalist and shrink their income gap more -- lol -- something weird to say about the former head country of the communist movement.

I'm pretty sure Russian forces destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure is a sure way to make Ukrainian society even more anti-Putin. Does anyone have examples of where a country invades another, destroys a ton of infrastructure and actually manages to win over the populace? That seems to fly in the face of human nature. (I am feeling extra dumb today, perhaps I am overlooking some obvious examples). I think Ukrainians would rightly blame Russia for all their problems if Russia tried this stuff. I actually think a unifying force in society is a common enemy. I could be very wrong, but I would suspect any real Russian attack would actually temporarily bring Ukraine together, drive them more into the arms of the West, not what Putin would want.

I personally tend to only use the scout platoon out of that headquarters company, and ditch the snipers. I usually make my scouts crack or elite. I don't want them doing any fighting, I just want them to find enemy vehicles, or through deduction, reduce the posibilities to where enemy vehicles could be. I'm pretty careful with them at first, and don't like to expose the vehicles right away. I will have the headquarters units grab javelins out of the bradleys for spotting purposes, but I give them short target arcs. If I manage to spot a stationary tank, it's going to receive some precision 155 rounds. If my scouts see a bmp or two in an area, I'm going to pound any area around them that looks good to hide infantry. That russian tunguska is cheap and death to drones, so I don't even bother with drones when fighting as the Americans now. If my scouts are in a good spotting position and see nothing, I might bring up a hummer (opened up so he is using his thermal imaging equipment), to try and get a better look -- they seem to be great at spotting things ... or attracting fire themselves. Basically, most maps have some decent overwatch positions near where the attackers start. I get some scouts onto them, see what is or isn't out there, and adjust my plan accordingly. I will rarely attack with them. If my scouts do see things I want to take out with my Abrams, I do like to let what the scouts spot to percolate up an down the chain of command to my Abrams before popping them out of cover. I can be pretty patient scouting in BS. In perhaps a weakness, I rarely play full city maps, and assume most buildings in villages and farms have a defender in them, and hose them down with fire anyways. To me, the only thing that really concerns me about Russian forces are other tanks. ATGMs for the most part ... I usually get a laser warning on my Abrams, they fire off smoke, and I've usually got a good idea where about the ATGM could be hiding -- I'll plaster that location from another angle, maybe arty it, maybe use my limited infantry. My personal experience is Russian tanks are the biggest killers of my tanks, not ATGMs (I also try not to play with APS for the Americans, that is just ridiculously unfair)

Thanks for posting the link to that thread, that was a really interesting take. The only things I would add to it are that I believe most of the Russian tank divisions were missing something like 50% of their logistical support vehicles when the fighting broke out in 1941, which does support his theory. I also remember reading somewhere that in a russian tank division of 300 tanks (in 1941), only 7 were equipped with radios. That has to be absolutely disastrous for command and control.

It was actually sympathy "sorry" as I know this issue is a big deal for you. Perhaps you need to be Canadian to understand we apologize for things that aren't our fault -- sometimes it is purely to show empathy, yes it is weird.