SimpleSimon
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Posts posted by SimpleSimon
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I played A las Barricadas and wasn't too impressed by it at first. I did grab La Battaile de France but by then I modified the rules of the War Storm Series to make more sense and clear up some oddities or translation errors.
Memoir 44 can be had with all of its (gigantic) set of expansions for free on Vassal Engine and tbh it's great that way. It's way more granular with its subsequent add ons but easy enough to play still. The DVG Board Games are also all great. Sherman Leader and Fleet Commander Nimitz I had tons of fun with, and they're solitaire based so you don't have to arrange anything like other players or make single player rules for them.
The trouble with a lot of these games is the BOX O DICE' stuff with way too much +1/-1 stuff going on in the rules. It's not always bad, but too much of it gets really grating. War games tend to work a lot better on cards I feel, and i've been meaning to try out Warfighter or at least give the rules a read sometime soon.
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On 7/19/2020 at 12:39 PM, agusto said:
MOUT operations in CMx2 titles have always been pretty bloody if not executed without exceptional care. I can not make a statement regarding your specific situation, but what i ve observed in the couple of years playing CMx2 is that clearing a building occupied by hostile forces is
- Best avoided if possible
- If avoiding clearing the building is impossible, destroy the building or its occupants using heavy fire power (tanks, aircraft artillery, what ever you' ve got).
- If destroying the building or it's occupants using heavy fire power is not possible, prepare it for infantry clearing by first spending a couple of turns suppressing it's occupants using at least a 3:1 force ratio and the target or target light command. RPGs and the like are wonderful tools for convincing an enemy in a building to leave it.
- After preparing the building for assault, keep suppressing it with a target-light command and a 2:1 force ratio an send a 1:1 force ratio troop into the building, carefully. Use the pause command and suppress each room with the assault element using target-briefly for at least 10 seconds before entering (this also leads to some grenade throwing, etc). If possible, send the assault element into the building using demo charges by blowing in a wall that has no windows and from the top most floor possible (because hand grenades work best if thrown from an upper to a lower floor). If heavy resistance is encountered in a room, retreat and try to destroy or at least suppress the enemy using your over-watch element from the outside.
Using above listed steps, MOUT against an inferior force as the Syrians in CMSF2 can usually be done relative casualty free. Fighting an equal enemy such as the Russians in CMBS, on the other hand, will always cause you some losses, there is no way around it. Just accept it and keep pushing forward towards your mission objectives.
Seriously. It's important to keep in mind that considerable firepower has been placed down in the hands of the infantry now, and this is much different from the platoons of 1945 maybe having a few light machine guns a rifle grenade launcher and a sharp stick they all share. Every man in today's infantry squad is a potential bullet hose, and he's backed up by liberal allotments of machine guns, grenade launchers, and rocket launchers all of which used to be much more rare or restricted to higher levels.
This also means that modern infantry squads have relatively short periods they can remain engaged for, since they burn ammunition so fast. That's why the US Army had to make the Stryker. The Humvee just wasn't tough enough to be right up front with the infantry portering all of their ammunition and supplies, it's too vulnerable and the armored versions suffer from chronic maintenance problems due to an overtaxed drivetrain. This is part of the reason the BMP is still so widespread among Eastern Bloc style armories.
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On 7/27/2020 at 1:05 PM, MikeyD said:
Huge maps tend to devolve into a series of typical CM-size engagements separated by long walks. You've got the editor at hand. Give it a try. Maps are as easy or as difficult to make as you make them, yourself. Give yourself a lot of real estate, snap some roads across it, paint some wood lots and rivers on it, and plop in some building clusters. Then drop forces onto it and have at it. That's how easy it is to make a scenario.
This is a big reason why im not in favor of avoiding or removing big stuff from the game in lieu of engine improvements or mechanical changes etc. The game's biggest scenarios fully develop the game's ability to create random, organic, and exciting encounters that affect each other in the abstract and in the direct. There's lots of player controlled context well outside a single squad and what they're up to now clearing out a house. In a way, you can almost view "big battles" as multiple interconnected "scenarios" just all happening in the same scenario. Except the effect of the map edges is much reduced. There's usually not enough context to explain why maps just cut off where they do for me. But in something like Blunting the Spear I define why A Company shouldn't pass beyond a certain line because its a minefield or an open kill zone T-34s are watching etc.
On 7/27/2020 at 5:07 PM, com-intern said:I'd argue that from a realism stand point the usual culprit is too large a force on too small a map. Rather than vice versa. The pain in the ass that is scenario design makes it clear why we have that problem. I've done some personal editing of scenarios and increasing the size of the map and adding/moving some of the supporting troops out of the immediate combat zone has usually worked although for obvious reasons the new terrain isn't terribly detailed.
A situation which invariably leads to a set-piece battle, where the defender is well postured and the attacker isn't, requiring the attacker to intricately and cautiously "solve" the map like a puzzle. (A strategy only made practical at all by the totally passive AI.) Save scumming is about the only way to achieve your objectives and have some kind of bloody tattered survivors left over you could charitably call a force. I'm ok with these kinds of battles for scenarios, but they're often in the campaigns too and even the most optimistic plans for solving them involve lots of ammunition expenditure or time consumption or plain bloodiness with consequences that carry over into....another set-piece battle?
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41 minutes ago, MikeyD said:
About casualty rates, when this comes up I usually bring up the Battle of the Bulge. Nearly 200,000 casualties on both sides (dead, wounded, missing), 1300 tanks lost, 1800 aircraft lost. All over the course of just one month and one week within in a relatively confined area. Statistics like that make it difficult to argue that a 20% casualty rate for your company engagement in CM is excessive.
6 hours ago, 37mm said:I'm not too sure that is correct... during large battles/offensives (where most CM scenarios take place) you have very high casualty rates where units are trying to stick to some timetable of objectives (if your unit fails to meet its objectives, both the flanking units are left in horrendous danger).
Indeed, it's only one perspective. However, the thing I want to point about the above is that they were both examples of an Offensive. Offensives change the nature of day-to-day activity at the front, and are indeed the events that induce Officers to be a bit more pushy because their CO is getting nudged from above and on and on etc to produce results.
Offensives and Major Battles got of lot of media attention during the war, and were often hyped up quite a bit by their planners. Sometimes this hype even spilled outside of the military and was taken up and carried by public media and politicians, who would often put even greater pressure on Commanders to exacerbate the circumstances of situations that lead to a Cassino or a Somme. Among the authoritarian states, the operational pressure would be coming from something much worse than the public, it'd be the Party now and they're prepared to shoot men who don't seem very motivated.
No Army could sustain a monthly 200,000 man casualty rate for the duration of the war. That'd be at least a Division per day. The Red Army might've come close to something like that in 1941 during Barbarossa but even they had to stabilize casualty figures at something much lower.
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2 hours ago, Flibby said:
To be honest the scenario played out with losing a lot of men to take the buildings which were occupied with a whole squad each.
I think it sums up how futile it can be to attack occupied buildings without high explosive shells in one form or another.
It sounds like there were a lot of them. Like too many for the attack to be reasonably conducted without more support, men, or both.
Most commanders in 1944 would've elected to just avoid this battle, and just feed back to their superiors that enemy resistance was too heavy to press on then maybe say they took lots of casualties to please the Party Representative or whatever. If their CO isn't a sod he'll understand.
We really need to score these battles way more heavily on casualties. Almost all of the scenarios seem to place objectives as a higher priority than casualties but objectives in wars don't exist unto themselves. They exist to create external-context to the game's battles in way that should compel commanders/players against 100% optimal play.
The Defender on this map should've had the hill as a hold objective. It is not immediately dangerous for them to lose, and they might chose to simply avoid defending it entirely so as not to split their forces. However, in the days following your skirmish with the enemy the hill could take on new importance in a follow up attack, or serve as spotting point for artillery later on. So it would really be unwise for the Defender to simply give it up to you. Could they? Sure. "Both sides declare victory" Oh wait, 45min into the battle a "Howitzer" reinforcement appears for the attacker hmmm maybe should've contested SBF after all.
As designed this battle strikes me more as a skirmish or a probe. It should be scored more with that it mind. "Do not become decisively engaged etc" just capture the ground around the Villa to make a follow up attack more favorable. The enemy will probably withdraw during the night anyway.
QuoteThe HMGs are best used from very long range. This is why I kind of find them less useful in Normandy (outside of defending), whereas in Italy they are awesome: You put them on some hill on the back line and have them hose away.
HMGs are useful at all ranges, although they are indeed more useful for picking off targets a km away. I'm sort of wondering if part of the reason snipers are such a problem today is because all those water cooled .30cal machine guns have disappeared from inventories, and those guns had some conspicuous advantages over their air-cooled competitors like greater effective range, continuous fire output, etc. Certainly they were heavy, complicated weapons that needed a mule team to keep fed with ammunition but vehicle mounts are everywhere and could easily accommodate all the ammunition, spare water, etc.
Did I just invent the Infantry Tank? Oh dear.
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The other thing I should ask Fibby is if he's playing Syria. I'm not sure if he's using standard icons and such. It's just that with REDFOR in particular you really don't have much to gain splitting your forces into a fire base and maneuver element typical of western infantry tactics. Needless complication of what should be simple straight on pummeling. Mass your whole force on the high ground and hope the guys can bag a few hits on the structure with their RPGs which can devastate buildings with thermobaric rounds. Then just advance straight on.
EDIT: Looking at it might also be Fortress Italy but tbh, there's just about no advantage to be gained that I can see from executing a Fix-and-Flank from the given position. The enemy is in a hardened structure with superior overwatch on both flanks. The disadvantage is that the enemy's position is obvious, and you should be able to overpower it eventually in a simple uncomplicated gun battle.
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13 hours ago, com-intern said:
Depending on the situation is often hard - if not impossible to get the SBF into position safely. Largely because many maps force the SBF to be overly close to where you want fires to go.
If its a small map I usually just have the SBF shoot their way into their position. Depending on the terrain you can also do a LOS trick where you have your men crawl to a location where they do not have LOS to the target and keep the on HIDE until their weapons are deployed. Then un-HIDE them so that they kneel and gain LOS to the target.Bingo. Map's too small for the given scenario and forces involved. The player doesn't really have many options and the one he has is very exposed to return fire.
The map i'm looking at seems appropriate for a squad+ size engagement at most. Even a pair of Platoons can make a 500m area pretty lethal.
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We're just the guys who post on the forum. So it's important to keep in mind we may represent only a small sampling of the customer base that BFC has other data on.
But as usual ma wishlist as follows,
1. Combat Mission Blitzkrieg. Warsaw to Moscow. 1939-1941
2. Combat Mission Fulda Gap 1970-1990.
3. Combat Mission Afrika Korp. Libya, Egypt, and Tunis. 1942-43.
4. Combat Mission Case Blue. Blau to Stalingrad 1942.
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On 7/1/2020 at 11:46 AM, z1812 said:
Napoleon has been romanticized to a great extent. In Britain, and most European countries, he was very much regarded then, as most regard Hitler now.
Napoleon incited nationalist movements which were both feared and opposed by local aristocracy and nobility. Contrary to the usual narrative, Nationalist movements were associated with the Liberal movements of Europe that began to emerge around the 19th century, as both of these entities were associated with reform. In Napoleon's time little of Europe was nationalized to any great extent, and a lot of it was still feudal. There was a real fear inside the landowning class that revolution would sweep Europe and this fear persisted for many decades after Napoleon's death. (Judson) It's important to remember during this era that universal suffrage for all men was considered an extreme idea, and division of rights along religious, racial, regional, and property owning lines were often common and variously enforced in many Duchies and Sovereignties. Nationalism promised emancipation for serfs and peasants by making them citizens of a state and guaranteeing them rights for that reason alone, although this process was rarely a straightforward one.
A lot of what we hear today about Napoleon is just the recycled reactionary version of events describing his as a despot, war criminal, etc some elements of which is true but most of which is just surviving detritus from land owners who resented the idea of an emancipated peasantry. Comparisons to Hitler are utterly groundless, and obscure Napoleon's reformist position on many issues that would've granted more equality to Europe's peasants all of which were bitterly resented by local nobility. The British only hated him since he organized a strong continental block, threatening Britain's security and giving the Empire a good scare. This is ironic since he was pursuing many of the same reform policies the British were, but Britain had a popular assembly and mechanisms by which these things could be obtained through legal due process and lobbying. France didn't, and the refusal of the Bourbon Kings to reform eventually led to revolt, leading to the revolution, to Robespierre, to Napoleon, etc.
After Napoleon was exiled Europe was still fundamentally the same, the entire Congress of Vienna was designed around re-imposing a status quo that didn't stay imposed for very long in many places. The emergence of the printing press and widespread newspaper circulation though means that there's lots of information coming from that era containing myths and falsehoods that is circulated to this day in what could be considered as the original fake news process.
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My own hunch is that you're taking position up extremely close to the enemy. If you want safety for your men than one of the chief ways to manage that is to maintain substantial distance from the enemy's position. Most CM's maps are fairly small for their allotted forces, so you often have to maneuver right up into the enemy and then try to organize your attack basically right under his nose.
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Oh god here goes Simon again...
If we widen our scope even more it's worth pointing out that even the Tank Division sort of falls out of consideration as a major innovation. The chief benefit it granted a combatant was in efficient use of manpower. Five men in a tank could go many battles and encounters and never suffer any casualties because armor plating means you're immune to 99% of the threats present on fragmentation and machine gun saturated battlefields. This would not be reflected by a simple glance at casualty figures suffered by Armored Formations, in fact you'd frequently see higher than average figures because Tank Divisions were frequently tip of the spear and this naturally meant the enemy would throw every kind of arm and the kitchen sink at them. That's a losing proposition for the enemy though, because the necessary investment on his part to stop an armored thrust is disproportionately higher than what you're paying for a Tank Division or a Panzer Corp. Remember the Soviets constructed a defense like no other and bogged themselves down quite a bit just to achieve a very narrow victory over German Tank Armies at Kursk.
This is where the big ideological split between Schwerpunkt and Deep Battle happens by the way. Because the German's idea of that manpower efficiency use was inherent to the tank's mobility and using that to stretch frontlines to such length that the enemy becomes overstretched and formations mutually unable to support eachother-thus enabling defeat in detail. The Soviet idea thought more from the former notion I listed above wherein the defender was simply overwhelmed by facing multiple simultaneous and catastrophic manpower shortages at critical points of the front, just crumpling and melting the entire frontline rather than unhinging it and swinging it open. Only at a level above the Wehrmacht's world (the world of politics) it was hoped that the enemy's leaders would crack and throw in the towel, that shock would prevail, because in fact if the enemy had enough time to start offsetting the German's tank/manpower advantage with their own tank/manpower investments the German Armies would quickly find themselves in the same unwinnable war-by-attrition that we all say was unique to World War 1. Well hmm sort of?
It's also tempting to highlight the airplane as a major innovation and again, from a military perspective it's a crucial difference between the world wars, but in fact it's another form of manpower-efficiency in wars of attrition. The chief benefit of the airplane was its reach. The ability to fly past the frontline and strike enemy targets or even the enemy's home itself required the enemy to again make disproportionate and costly investments into intricate anti-aircraft defense networks, as well as set aside huge reserve armies of workers to repair infrastructure damage.
It's true that on a rather conventional analysis of the 8th Air Force's performance, strategic bombing looked rather disappointing. It certainly fell far short of all the pre-war claims by lobbyists that bombing would win wars by itself. Lots of heavy losses in men and equipment failed to stop Germany's arms production from increasing every year right up until 1945 when the frontline finally began to overtake industrial centers. However, this sort of ignores the mere 200,000 men of the 8th Air Force were in fact pinning down over 1 million men in Germany who had to man AA batteries, and staff Luftwaffe airfields. That's 1 million men who might otherwise have ended up at the front. (Tooze) What's that not counting even, is the huge numbers of men being retained in cities to clean up and repair damage everywhere too for which i've heard numbers thrown around for that workforce of anywhere from 500,000 to one million.
In the First World War neither the airplane or the tank had proven sufficiently able to tie down large enough numbers of men and equipment to materially affect the frontline. Airplanes began and ended the war still fundamentally best for reconnaissance and tanks remained seen as self-propelled siege engines swatting individual machine gun nests so the infantry could advance. After the war politicians frequently seized upon strategic bombers to argue and push points about national defense though, but ironically they usually highlighted the capabilities of strategic bombing to point out how investment and rearmament was pointless and that war could only be prevented via diplomacy otherwise the bombers would flatten Paris and that'd be the end of it.
Without a way to sink manpower on other activities, it naturally tended to end up with the Army. This is why few of the Ground Forces of the First World War's powers were broken in battle. They were all more or less defeated by the outbreak of political instability at home (so called "stab in the back" mythology). Because strategic reserves were just so plentiful! There could be chronic manpower shortages but there'd never be an acute manpower shortage. The kind of shortage that would cause whole frontlines to collapse and roll up and induce million man Army Groups to retreat 500 miles all at once as they would in 1944. Not generally a problem until the Bolsheviks happen or the Czechs declare autonomy right?
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I think the big picture for me is that in the abstract, there was really no great difference in how fighting happened in 1917 vs how it happened in 1943. Tanks Divisions could prevent frontlines from bogging down and were why the front wouldn't remain static for years now, but frontlines and trenches and static fighting indeed still happened a lot and were little different in execution between the two wars.
The World Wars were fundamentally wars of attrition, World War 2 enabled more maneuver this time but a lot of that was also due to far different political circumstances of that war which were happening outside of the purist military perspective. There was less of some stuff in 1917 than there would be of it in 1943, but the only major innovation of 2nd World War as far as organization goes was the Division-Level Tank Formation. The Armored Division, Panzer Division, Tank Corp, etc. If you want "World War 1 CM" you seriously get 90% of that by just leaving out tanks and vehicles entirely and abstracting infantry movements in the planning phase as "dismounted cavalry troop".
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Well Napoleon failed to achieve any worthwhile allies in his campaigns, and the few partners he had proved better at getting him in trouble than out of it. Ultimately the very thing enabling Napoleon's strengths were enabling his enemies too, Europe's burgeoning population boom and the emerging proto-Nationalism were making it impossible to achieve lasting victory in one big battle and France couldn't spare the men to just annex Europe. Cracking a whole country's war effort required absolutely shattering its war making potential by occupying it, burning all of its cities down, and wiping out royal heirs none of which Napoleon was seriously inclined to do to anyone because he just wasn't prepared to be that ruthless. He was only interested in reform and wasn't really a revolutionary or extremist at heart even though his ideas sounded quite revolutionary to many people of the time. He was a sound tactician who turned out to be a bad strategist ultimately but he was faced by some pretty serious complications and nearby enemies he was either unable or unwilling to defeat decisively.
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24 minutes ago, whyme943 said:
Thanks for all the Replies in this topic!
I'll start with SimpleSimon:
I am, at best, a history enthusiast. Your post was thought-provoking, and I'll see about looking into WW1 situations that aren't 'Static West' or 'Fluid East'. Definitely, about as far as I've gotten past the 'Trench War' stereotype is 'There was also the Eastern Front'. Apparently that is incomplete.
There was also campaigning in the Balkans, Italy, Baltic Ocean, and African fronts as well. Little known is the great number of amphibious invasions that happened in the First World War which are usually overshadowed by all the British historians shrieking about Gallipoli. An example of such is Operation Albion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Albion
There was also lots of naval fighting in the Baltic during World War 1 as well and frequently the Germany Navy had to balance deployments of ships between that theatre and the North Sea. Contrary to the "Fleet in Being" inactive German Navy rhetoric, naval forces of the Central Powers were often very active. It's just that since the oceans they tended to be active in weren't where the Royal Navy was...you don't hear much about it lol.
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Well right off the bat you're sort of highlighting the importance of a mythbusting effort with "a famously static war at least in the west" because you're setting up a known premise here but not really addressing it. Why is the First World War known for being a static conflict?
Discussion about fighting in the First World War rapidly tends to degenerate into visions of either the static siege lines of the western front or of the more conventional maneuver warfare in the East, but neither of these interpretations ever proved strictly true. The highly mobile Battle of the Marne happened in France and the Kerensky Offensive looked conspicuously like the worst days of the Somme. The issue is that much of the war's history was written by British historians and those historians were mostly pre-occupied with the British sector of the front which was characterized by some of its infamously imprudent and disappointing offensives that often failed to deliver results that matched their hype.
Officers in 1916 were perfectly capable of appreciating the importance of the tank and the airplane, but would frequently find their optimism crushed by the grave limitations both of those weapon systems faced not only because of infancy of the combustion engine as a technology, but also because the circumstances for their employment were not universal, and not always ideal. The point is to understand that it's important to avoid stereotypes and understand the transient nature of all tactics and strategy throughout history as being independent from the story of the war happening around them, which was largely defined by news media and politicians for their own ends. It's why I take issue with the whole "trench warfare" stereotype for instance. Trenches were not a recent invention in 1915. Nor even was their existence limited to prevalence of firearms on the battlefield. What happened in 1916 was a siege plain and simple, it's just that up until then sieges had generally been things that only happened to cities and forts, not whole countries. With that in mind, why is World War 1 frequently described as "trench warfare" when the definition for that as often described would have to include many wars before and after the First World War?
If what we're getting at is the emergence of modern tactics, more or less definable as "infiltration tactics", it's important to understand that the scope of these questions could easily widen beyond the First World War and require parsing of details and sources that aren't necessarily "in" that conflict. Like how much fighting in the Second World War could in many places, surprisingly resemble the fighting at Verdun or look even worse than that. That is: artillery/infantry slugging matches in which the usefullness of tanks and airplanes could vary anywhere from useless to absolutely decisive all at the same time regardless of the year being 1916 or 1943.
SO
Before anyone can answer your questions (which are good questions) we need to find and have concrete examples and details of the fighting and avoid trying to shoehorn those examples into fitting melodramatic stereotypes while trying to spot real correlations between the examples. It would be useful for people to highlight or show us stories of battles that happened in concrete terms during The First World War and then perhaps comparing what was happening to similar battles before and after that conflict to establish a frame of reference.
One handy way to do this is to have a source, a "textbook" for our course which ideally we would all have access to somehow. We need a text that we can all see and discuss so we can see how our differences of perspective lead to the emergence of the lessons and rules that we refer to as...well...tactics. I suggest Infantry Attacks not only because Rommel's recollections of his actions in World War 1 are frequently very lucid, but also because of the audience's familiarity with him. His career exploits are well known, as are his potential pitfalls as a source. I don't have access to my copy right now due to the pandemic, but if anyone else has it or wants to jump ill grab a digital copy off Amazon and for a read along.
So if anyone does, I suggest that they get a source with lucid details of fighting, and just come here and talk about what they read. Get some impressions, make some observations! I will participate in discussions as much as I can using examples.
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Scenario design errors can potentially open some pretty interesting conundrums of "victory" and "defeat" tho lol.
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46 minutes ago, Hapless said:
That is kind of a quibble though. The question is whether it happens unrealistically frequently in Combat Mission. It probably does, but I'd argue that that's got a lot to do with players being more aggressive, less cautious and essentially untrained compared to historical tankers. Actual data on the frequency of gun damage from real games (ie. not setting things up in the editor) as opposed to anecdotes seems like a sensible way forward.
Which is sort of a wider issue all around with the scenario designing to me. Not so much the forces involved, but the awfully harsh mechanisms for scoring the player's performance. You're compelled to instigate total bloodbaths in most CM scenarios and campaigns in a way that could lead to a medal in very few Armies, dismissal in most, mutiny in all.
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8 hours ago, Erwin said:
Interesting points above. I never thought that the Soviets were serious about starting an aggressive war to "take Paris". I can't see how their logistics chain could survive. Seemed that their experience from WW2 was that it's better to attack than defend and that part of the world has long worried about being encircled and attacked - so it's a good deterrent if one can make the enemy think they'll be in Paris in a few weeks.
These days it would seem cheaper to field 10+ ATGM/javelin-armed teams for every enemy tank. Once the AFV's are gone, you have a WW1 infantry slog - no blitzkrieg. Am wondering if the Marines getting rid of some armor is the thin edge of the "tanks are obsolete" wedge.
Soviet planning rarely seems to have made much mention of Paris, or refers to it euphemistically but barring complete destruction in a nuclear exchange what choice did they have? Once you cross the Rhine why stop there? It's too easy to keep going, Europe's infrastructure is too excellent (home of the tank army) and you'd want to capture as much as of it as you could before it's wrecked in sabotage efforts. A NATO Allied France is simply intolerable for Warsaw Pact planners if they're at war. The Americans would flood the country with Minuteman ICBMs and B-52 wings if you didn't do something to stop that, on top of that France's own mobilization potential wasn't trivial either.
Probably lots of Soviet planning didn't continue beyond this point because it was expected that a full nuclear exchange was center stage by this point, but without one I think the objective was implicit ie: keep going. Whether or not Red Army leadership would be able to decipher that (implicit interpretation of instructions was certainly not widely practiced in Red Army circles) I don't know, but stopping invites annihilation just as much as moving on does. Hold all of continental Europe and maybe western leaders will hesitate about turning all of their allies into irradiated craters. Fortunately the Kremlin was more sober in this assessment than many others might have been. War meant nuclear exchange and a nuclear exchange meant likely destruction of the USSR. So the Red Army was leashed, tightly.
8 hours ago, IICptMillerII said:Agreed too! Although personally I believe that the fall of the Soviet Union had causes that ran much deeper than too much defense spending, but that begins to get too much into politics which I want to avoid.
Oh yeah it's a complicated subject worth a thread in and of itself, it's just worth highlighting that the enormous burden of maintaining a World War 2 size Tank Army was costing the USSR anywhere from 10% to 18% of the state's entire GDP. Such was the legacy of permanent readiness requirements left by the infamous debacle of Barbarossa.
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1 hour ago, IICptMillerII said:
Second, the Soviets were not a backwater military technology wise.I agree. Don't get me wrong, there was precisely no phase where a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact wouldn't have been a very frightening thing for NATO even if nukes aren't considered in the equation. Groups Soviet Forces was just huge, whoever happened to be right where the hammer was going to fall was truly unfortunate regardless of what NATO could equip them with. I just think that up until around the 1980s it was likely if not certain that Paris would fall, leaving western leaders with no alternative but a nuclear exchange unfortunately.
QuoteSoviet doctrine was also highly capable and modern at the time too, and the Soviet military was very proficient in executing said doctrine. So again, they were far from outdated in all aspects.
Indeed. Deep Battle didn't lose much value in the years between 1945-89 overall. The way the Red Army was equipped they were poised to execute a tank offensive of the kind Guderian, Liddell Hart, and Tukhachevsky could've only dreamt of in their time. The issue I see is simply the enormous expense facing Soviet leaders over maintaining this force and its readiness, which crucially they were cognizant of. Red Army Commanders were also fully conscious of the lack of initiative and independence in field leaders, and were trying to encourage those concepts in the men. This proved rather difficult though considering the high turnover rate of Officers. Soviet leaders weren't blind though, they were fully aware of the challenges facing them.
The lack of a strong computer industry in the Soviet Union however left its forces with a new disadvantage as they crested the 80s. It was one for which they didn't end up coming up with a good solution for before the Wall fell and it became a moot point.
On the technical side the BMP alone was a major shock to western observers. Nothing NATO had matched it or the T-62/64, and it turned out after years of confusion that the T-80 would have been a dangerous opponent for any western tank up to and including the Abrams and it for sure would've been tip of the spear.
QuoteThis game, and a few others. It would appear that games/wargames set during a hypothetical confrontation between NATO and Warsaw is becoming more popular. Which is great for me, because its one of the eras of military history I am most interested in. The more the merrier!
Years ago I used to really love World in Conflict but it was a multiplayer action game and there isn't much life in it anymore sadly. Wargame wasn't really the same, although it was often billed as a spiritual sequel. I had mixed feelings about the whole Wargame series games though. Those games at least weren't reliant on multiplayer.
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8 hours ago, Hapless said:
It might just be a perspective problem.
Looking at it sideways- how many times do US players run up against Tigers in Combat Mission? A lot, right? Because Tigers are cool and popular. But its shockingly unrealistic. That Pershing-Tiger engagement there is 1/3 of all the times the US Army fought Tiger Is in Western Europe. The Americans basically never fought Tiger 1s in the entire period covered by CMBN and CMFB up to the end of the war. It's a historically negligible event. But in games, of course, it happens all the time.
Leaving aside the fact that we've already seen enough photos spread out around the threads to show that gun barrel damage is more common than US-Tiger engagements in the historical record, it stands to reason that any reliance on "it seems like a rare event in real life" is about as effective an argument as "my panzer's mighty armour should let me do whatever I want with it."
The bottom line is that the enemy has to be shooting at you to damage your gun barrel. If you've put your tanks in a position where they're getting shot at, either accept the risk or work out where everything went wrong.This. The games lend their scenarios to melodrama, and one of the war's most dramatic events was invariably CLASH OF ARMOR type stuff. So the designers like to throw in tanks, lots of tanks, lots of the heaviest tanks, a lot. I don't blame them I mean the toys are cool and certainly one of the reasons why I signed up for the game but like on top of what Hapless here is saying I also think it's worth pointing out that the excessive reliance on the heaviest hardware in the games leads to many scenarios suffering from a sort of "Panzer Fatigue". I realized the effect this was having on my own method of play years ago in that it was making me excessively cautious and meticulous in ways that most certainly would've led to my relief from the front for "nerve shattered" or "lack of moral fiber" etc. Because I expected to run into a Tiger behind every freaking hedgerow, and the way campaigns were designed I actually would.
Tanks lead to bloody battles period and they will invariably inflict many casualties and mission kills on each other when they encounter other tanks. This is why im getting a bit miffed when people suggest new ways to nerf tanks in the game when it seems to me like they're teetering on over-nerfed. The trouble is they're around too much and too many of the scenario are reliant on them either in support or as the set-piece.
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On 6/19/2020 at 3:02 PM, Bil Hardenberger said:
All good points.. however re: the Gulf War, it also took the planners in the US Army by surprise, as all wargaming predicted around 30,000 Coalition casualties during Desert Storm.. so even the professional wargame algorithms were miles off from reality even in the early 90s.
In my opinion Fulda would have been a Warsaw Pact blood bath (after 1983 anyway), and the North German Plain would not have been much better with all of the river crossings and village sized strongpoints the WP would have had to cross... fascinating subject though.
I also seriously doubt nukes would have been used, not at least until one side or the other was on the ropes.. but biological weapons? Oh yeah, those would have been used by the WP (Soviets mainly) and they were the one big trump-card the WP would have had in their toolbox that could really hurt the western allies... but would it have been enough? Doubtful, though the cost in western military and civilian casualties would have been astronomical.
Bil
I also think that by mid 1980 or so, the Warsaw Pact would've defeated itself in an invasion of Western Europe. I don't know if it'd be one sided, Group Soviet Forces Germany was simply huge. They were basically a 1945 "Front" but alive into 1989. One of the Second World War's absolutely titanic formations sort of anachronistically still around in a time where the sort of gigantic manpower commitment it represented was becoming increasingly questionable as sophistication and automation enabled downsizing in NATO.
Crucially it was dependent upon all the same mechanisms of Command and Control that were vogue in 1945...and now extremely vulnerable to precision munitions. Originally it had been believed that destruction of a Soviet GHQ would require exorbitant firepower because of how heavily defended they'd be, leading NATO planners into the whole "tactical nuke" dead end of the 1960s. NATO was scrambling into the 1970s, and my own belief is that prior to 1980 or so NATO's situation was legitimately dire, and an attack on any part of West Germany would've been calamitous. NATO simply didn't have the size or sophistication to stop GSFG back then, but the digital revolution changed that. It didn't just lead to the Tomahawk, but also the Abrams, A-10, Apache, F-15 etc. The first complete generation of computerized weapon systems. The Soviet response to these computerized weapon systems was....to increase production of old stuff further exacerbating the military spending problem.
By 1985 the tide was indeed against the East, without a shot having been fired. The extremely fragile Soviet C3 networks would find their own self defense questionable, and GFSG's unwieldy mechanized formations could quickly be immobilized by the many low-cost options now available to NATO to attack and destroy HQs, supply dumps, artillery bases etc. NATO weapon systems were actively practicing multiple-engagement concepts while Soviet Arms and formations were basically still oriented around overwhelming destruction of single point targets. It was fully expected of the Abrams to be able to engage a pair of T-64s, then another, then another, then another etc in rapid succession. Soviet thinking was still the 1945 notion of everyone bombarding and deleting a given grid square and then moving on in the proud All-or-Nothing tradition. That was just the position Soviet War planning had left itself in though. The sort of cost-efficiency stuff that had always been normal in the west now became crucial because computers meant that precision could legitimately substitute for power now in a way it had proven inadequate for in 1945.
It's interesting now because as I look at it Group Soviet Forces Germany was literally a time-travelling Army. Teleported out of Berlin in 1945 to find itself in 1989 where it doesn't get the local customs and norms and sticks out. Get the time machine Marty!
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The Marine Corp sees itself as an amphibious landing force and longs for its Iwo Jima days but the way it's been organized for the last 30 years looks way more like a Panzer Corp, and they're so overburdened with heavy equipment and weaponry the whole Fast-Reaction Expeditionary Force notion became sort of problematic. That said. The new preferences are revealing striking reliance on rocket artillery, naval fire and drone support which are some pretty ambitious assumptions to make in the face of a serious opponent.
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Exits are a cool idea I think just need to be used differently than they usually are. One of the ways i'd really like to use them is to recoup some of the points invested in my force by allowing broken units or vehicle crews with no vehicle to simply exit the play area and perhaps make up a little of the difference for some other KIA tags.
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Yeah what Zaloga couldn't tell you in that same program was the absolutely lamentable the state of western-arms. The French had cut all infantry divisions down to Brigades over the previous 20 years and the British were actively de mechanizing Armored Divisions back into Infantry Divisions. The Patton, and Leopard 1 tanks still made up a good number of vehicle stocks and even the Centurion was still around! Not sure if Zaloga was allowed to peek at a T-80 even. By the 1980s digital technology and smart munitions had gone quite a ways to balance the difference in all of this but in the 80s lots of it was still classified and no one could talk much about much and certainly not with any idea of capability. "Second window from the left" for a cruise missile was now truth but not widely known in 1984. That's why the rapid defeat of Saddam Hussein's Army sort of took even the informed western commentator by surprise. It was unclear until 1991 how profound the rise of digital technology had been for weapon systems.
Any tactical level boardgames played by CM owners?
in Combat Mission - General Discussion
Posted
It should. Remember you'll have to dig a little for the expansions too but they're all great and absolutely worth it. They make the units more distinct and even include insanity like Spanish Civil War scenarios.