Artkin

It's not like the first two titles were modern or anything.

What do you know about HERA - Hunan ERA? 
UKR Javelin team of 14th mech.brigade hit Russian BMP with embarked infantry on the top. This is Syn'kivka area, Kupiansk direction. Red marks - previously destroyed Russian armor
PS. Extended version of this video (but with violence warning) - it's seen how first BMP has driven some dozen meters forward and halted, and how infanryman of teh second BMP was hit directly by 120 mm mortar shell
 

Old Chinese proverb says : “three Stooges top one Zhuge Liang”
OK, guys, looking for some advice on this scenario. This is the third mission of campaign Regaining The Initiative. I achieved a tactical victory in mission 2 , so that brings me to mission 3A Romistrov's Onslaught. Well, how to say this mission 3A…. If this battle happens in real life I will curse General Rokossovsky for the rest of my life (and probably I will be shot by NKVD in two hours 😊 ) . All I want to do is to finish this scenario asap, go back to mission 2 , suffer a defeat and goes to infantry focused mission 3B. Bunker cleaning mission might be easier compare to a head-on clash with elite German panzer force.

Here is the map. After 40min recon and skirmish battle with German screening force I have a clear pic of battlefield now. I am facing 24 Pz IVs plus 5 Nashorn. There could be more panzers just arrived battlefield as a reinforcement, my IL-2 is shooting something at the map edge. ATG is a concern.  German Panzer’s main battle line is about 1300m away from Soviets planned jumping out position, their forward defense position is about 500m away
In next 1 hour I have to defeat German Panzers, cross two rivers, reach the mission objective at the far end of the map. Oh, yes, forgot to mention that there is a huge flood plain between two rivers. There is no way around.
To achieve a breakthrough. I have a IL-2, the pilot randomly shoot things on the map , I am disappointing to see the cannon rounds fail to penetrate anything but the same time I am glad he has not mistaken my T-34/85 for Panthers so far. I have total 31 T-34/85s (lost one during skirmishing battle)  , 5 SU-85 and 5 SU-122 (short barrel one, not ISU-122 with long guns). I also have one recon infantry co. one rifle co. and one SMG co. Fire support side I have 3 section of 76mm guns/82mm Mortar. Their HE are low, I spent a lot of ammo on suspected ATG position, later try to use mortar to kill Nashorn but didn’t achieve any hits. They have total 98 rounds of smoke rounds left.
One thing for sure, I cannot move my infantry units any further, they will be slaughtered in the open field by 75mm cannon fire. I must use tank force to lead the attack. I don’t have enough smoke to cover the whole front. So I must use smoke to block part of German Panzers LOF, jump out of my position defeat the other part of Panzers. Then next step can be flexible, I can either wait for smoke to disperse, winning a long range shoot out game in round 2. Or cross the river, mud, engage the Germans at close range.
Question is: Where I should drop smoke ?
Wind is gentle , from west. That means it is upside down blow smoke from German position to Soviets.
 
Option 1

Use smoke to block the German’s right wing. Smoke barrage marked in RED. My tank force concentrate on the left wing, defeat the German forward defense and part of the German left wing defense (circled in BLUE)? The smoke should hide my force from 5 Nashorn’s LOF  
 
Or Option 2
Drop smoke on center right, block German left wing plus Nashorn’s LOF. Soviets jump out through three different directions and trying to defeat German right wing plus the forward defense first?

 
Which one is better?
 
Thx

No, that's the standard way of referring to riverbanks BECAUSE rivers meander all over the place, and different rivers flow in different directions. The Left refers to the left side of the river if you were standing in it looking downstream. In the case of the Dnepr that's generally - but not always - to the north and east. The right refers to the right side of the river if you were standing in it looking downstream. For the Dnepr that is generally - but not always - to the south and west.
Where ever you are on the river, regardless of which way it twists and turns, the left is always the left and therefore always refers the same side of the river.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_(geography)

They look like standard ecwcs level 7 to me. Super cheap and super warm. 

Fixed a bug related to the new ability to use different brush sizes that crashed cmautoeditor.
https://github.com/DerButschi/CMAutoEditor/releases/tag/2.3.1
Thanks to @FRO71 for bringing the issue up. 🙂

I just released CMAutoEditor 2.3.
https://github.com/DerButschi/CMAutoEditor/releases/tag/2.3
The main feature is a new profile, CMBS.
In addition there are a few QoL and performance updates.
Default foliage and ground settings: This was actually ninja-added earlier but I slightly improved the feature and added made it possible to switch them off. If you either add entries with tags ["default", "ground"] or ["default", "foliage"] and set their priority to -999, you can use these settings to replace the default tile mixture you get when starting a new map. I personally don't always like the patches of yellow grass and like to have a random tree in there every now and then. Every other item on that position will overwrite the default settings. Brush sizes: For things like ground tiles and some others (where appropriate), CMAutoEditor now uses larger brush sizes if possible. This greatly speeds up e.g. large areas of farmland. Minimum pause now selectable in GUI. This parameter is the minimal pause between two actions (e.g. clicks) in CMAutoEditor. If you encounter CMAutoEditor leaving out tiles that should be there (most likely visible when setting elevations on Steam), increase this parameter. Improved post-processing. The post-processing is the final step before writing results of osm2cm to file. If there is conflicting content for a tile, it takes care of properly sorting it out w.r.t. priority settings. It sometimes produced weird results and generally didn't communicate much. While working better now it may also be slower, so if you experience an excessive increase in processing time, let me know. Fixed a few bugs and missing features for selecting bounding boxes when running osm2cm. This significantly improves using osm2cm standalone, i.e. without loading a grid file from dgm2cm. Enjoy!

I searched some LA data of drone attacks and found, but only for Russian side. 
You can see that since August- September Russians rapidly increased usage of FPV drones (I repeat, this is just spotted video confirmations, real number of attacks are much bigger) And November became a champion with 657 FPV spotted strikes. 
From this total number of FPV attacks videos (2508) they give next results (results, alas, don't reflected on the diagram, so I write from the text of LA): 
Targets destroyed - 373
Targets damaged - 385
Successful hits, but result is unknown - 1093
Result of strike unknown - 336
Misses - 184
So low number of misses can be explained, that usually Russian servicemen post a video of successfull strikes (or successful by their opinion), it's strange if you will post 100 % miss. This will reduce your chances to get donations. According to UKR "Magyar birds" unit they manage to supress/destroy about 60-70 % of drones (both FPV and recon Mavics), but they have special unit with special EW equipmnet for this
What Russian FPV operators have been chosing as targets:
Positions - 916
Infantry out of shelters - 353
logistic vehicles - 345
armored vehciles - 257
buildings - 293  
 
 

Some more pictures :

Destroyed Russian Grad. Very nice form, could stand in some New York gallery.
 

Exactly.  Right now, this company has a distinct 'boys club' vibe, at the expense of the product itself.

Low cost, carbon fiber? Wtf lol

Who would have imagined this man would prevail like this when he was first elected?
No, Zelensky isn't perfect and depending on which Ukrainian you ask, he is more or less liked.
But damn was Ukraine lucky to have a man of his caliber in office. It could have been much, much worse. Beside a few minor hiccups in diplomacy (e.g. the missile debris in Poland) he and his team find the right words. Most western politicians wish they could be half the leader he is. 

Pal, sometime when I read your last posts I recall Denetor, who looked at palantir during a siege of Minas-Tirith %) Of course, we had very hard year and broken hopes, but I not shure that all go to complete bad scenario. What I fully agree - when Russia asks "Iran, give me 1000 Shakeds!", Iran answers "here you are!", when Russian asks N.Korea "Kim, give me 10000000 shells", N.Korea (China) answers "Here you are". But when Ukraine asks "Allies! Give me... Patriots, Leos, Abrams, shells" aliies answer "well, we will support you till the end! But... we need to gather Ramstein through two months, conduct discussions, discuss all pro- and contra... And memento escalation of course" 
And only small Denmark silently says "Psss... I heard you need arty? We have some cool stuff. Take all wahat we have. We anyway will not make war with Norway or Germany"

That is a deeply unfair and frankly insulting post. You are talking about a man who is living inside Ukraine and who bases his pessimistic view on his assesment of war weariness level of the ordinary Ukrainians. Something you by definition would not know about, and the Western press would not report about - not newsworthy enough. Frankly, In this forum on this subject only the opinion of Haiduk and Zeleban matters, as they are the only ones who can take a measure of that metric. And you are saying that Zeleban thinks that people he meets every day are losing the will to fight not because he sees the symptoms of that, but because he has been "inadvertently convinced by Russian propaganda"? What hubris!
Shame on you.  

Another one of those things I would not think I would ever see in my life .
Neat. 🙂

I just finished a 1941 german infantry division table of organization for CMRT (requires f&r) a couple hours ago. Kursk would be easy to do given the quality of the source materials. Technically we pretty much have all the assets in the game already. The hard part is getting all the mapping done. 
I'm more than willing to pump out some 1943 flavored tables of organization if it sparked peoples interest. Even though the battles were ****ing massive, it should be a cleaner job than my previous works. 
If interested: 
 
46_Infantry_Division.btt

Yeah that's always a possibility too, but cutting down on the mods would be my first priority. However I use your Barbarossa mods for the motorized/panzer divisions, no getting around that one!
Unfortunately I need a complete battalion, otherwise I'll be tripling the visual size of the TOE and it will be confusing/units will be out of c2 if I don't use whole battalions.
No winning without official support!

Cmrt has pak 36's hidden away. Panzerfausts have been limited to 1-2 max per platoon. Panzershreks were deleted. All squads should have (A single) mg34's with an occassional mg42.
The only real issue was not being able to incorporate a 4th squad in the platoons, I could add pioneer teams (Since they have 2/3 rifles) but then the squads would be bloated and have explosives.
Take a look

I fully agree. 30 days for actually 60 turns (it's always mirror matches!) is pretty tight, especially when you have a job (I mean in contrast to many here who are already retired), are not available e.g. over the weekend and/or your opponent lives in a different time zone.

Watch until the end. 😄
But seriously nice to see that bad weather obviously also impairs the bad guys in their own country, not just the good guys defending their country. 
 
 

Here is an updated version to work with version 218
CM Black Sea.CT

A rare occasion, when Excalibur ricocheted
 

ezCMBN German Uniform Mod
If interested, you can find the last full set ezCMBN uniform mod at the below link. It is not packed in a .brz file, so after unzip you can see what is in the mod, just no helmets.
Down Load Link
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ib6l1fwzhs76vq75x701t/CMBNGermanUniforms.zip?rlkey=t1kxxdlbqauzc5d012v55iceo&dl=0
 
ez
 

The CMBN campaign "Operation 'Coup de Main'" has been completed and posted at FGM's Scenario Depot.
This is my final contribution to CMBN scenarios, campaigns and mods.