SimpleSimon

We were instructed to not use laser rangefinders when possible. Because of time you lose by using it (around a second or two) and the new detection systems. CV9030s bushmasters APFSDS-T rounds are so fast (near flat trajectory) that you can set the guns range to 700m and hit any AFV sized target from 0-1500m when aiming center mass. We called this "battle sight".

The above plus make sure to swisscheese the building before entry, the higher caliber the better. It's always better to enter a building with all the occupants dead.

The BMP's fire control is entirely manual and its optics are unenhanced. It does not surprise me that the Bradley, a much newer and more expensive design, comes out on top more often. 
The BMP is supposed to have a 3 man crew but I believe when the squad disembarks one of those men is the vehicle's commander. I am not sure if this is intentional, it would not surprise me since the vehicle is supposed to cooperate closely with its' dismounts. The BMP is a first generation IFV meant to provide protection and fire support for the infantry. It can fight armor but really is not intended to duel anything much heavier than an M113. It caused a major stir in the west when it came out but much of the thinking behind it is very 1945ish, aside from the NBC protection which was a major selling point of the vehicle not covered in the game's scope. I personally like it quite a bit, and actually prefer the BMP-1 to the later models myself. The BMP-2's autocannon is undoubtedly better against armor but I prefer the Grom against soft targets and light vehicles that are so common amongst BLUFOR. 

The user community. I have more content than I could possibly play so there’s always another scenario or campaign awaiting.  (Even though I mostly play QBs)  
And many of these volunteer efforts are magnificent. 
Hat tip to anyone who takes the time to make content. It’s the best part of these games.  The people.  Even the whiners. 😎. 

The scale of the games, breadth of options available for constructing and playing through a wide variety of scenarios, and the nebulous relationship between the two of them. The decisions involved in play are often both meaningful and meaningless, a difficult paradox to replicate artificially but one true enough to the realities of tactics and war. Captured in a way most video games cannot construct convincingly because of their sterility and excessive fixation on the superficial. 

The scale of the games, breadth of options available for constructing and playing through a wide variety of scenarios, and the nebulous relationship between the two of them. The decisions involved in play are often both meaningful and meaningless, a difficult paradox to replicate artificially but one true enough to the realities of tactics and war. Captured in a way most video games cannot construct convincingly because of their sterility and excessive fixation on the superficial. 

whining means people care

The danger of having a split squad is that each individual team will Rattle, Shake and Panic quicker when taking casualties than a combined squad. This is due to the percentages. 1 man KIA in a 4 man team is a 25% casualty rate, whereas 1 man KIA in a 12 man squad is...well you do the maths!
There is a case to be made for keeping a squad intact for certain specific tasks. Although this increases the risk of higher casualties from explosives, it can be useful when you want that extra bit of punch and resilience.
I will use a combined squad against a weakened position that I want gone but have no other means of getting it done other than to send in the grunts, and am confident that the position has been isolated.
Additionally splitting teams in a green or conscript squad is the best way to ensure everyone runs away at the first sign of trouble. Also if you split a squad that is Nervous (when not under suppression), you will have 1 or 2 of the teams become Rattled when split.
To add my 2 cents into the 'Fire and Manoeuvre' debate, I think that the concept would be clearer if the drill were renamed 'Fire, Fire, Fire, Fire & Manoeuvre'. The reason that this drill fails in game is typically because equal weight is given to each component. That is to say that a typical way of interpreting 'Fire and Manoeuvre' is to have 1st squad firing and 2nd squad manoeuvring (or 1 team firing and 1 team manoeuvring)
If the 80/20 rule is used, then Fire and Manoeuvre becomes much more successful.
Therefore;   'Fire, Fire, Fire, Fire & Manoeuvre'
 
 
 
 

The value of splitting units depends heavily on the side you're playing and what you're doing, and in my opinion it is often done in the game for the wrong reasons. 
Personally when I can help it, I don't split my units. Some of the advantages like more eyes for spotting are offset by the decreased firepower, making individual teams less able to defend themselves and certainly unable to engage many kinds of targets. For some sides, especially the Allies and Soviets, compromising your advantage in firepower should be done as minimally as possible. You need as many men as you can muster for any firefight so you can completely overmatch a reasonable target. I'm not talking a 2:1 or even 4:1 to advantage in firepower. I'm saying if you're doing it right you never fail to ensure the firepower of an entire Platoon comes crashing down on a pair of lowly Volksgrenadiers in a knoll or in an unfortunate French Farmhouse. 
Just about the only units I ever split off from Allied infantry are scout teams, sometimes assault teams too, but even then they're just playing armed recon. The point is you should always be able to put your fist through whatever is dumb enough to lash out at your force. In this way, you make it totally impossible for them to do their job which is kill your men, and put them in a position where even their own self defense is in question. Splitting your own units too frequently does not generally assist this in my experience, as it creates many small groups of mutually unsupported and unsupportive teams who spend most of their time being the target instead of making targets. You're doing your enemy's job for him when you excessively split your force and ensure that no element of his defense will be excessively task saturated or overloaded. Way of the closed fist, not the open palm, grasshopper. 
Now that's just my own experience, it fits the circumstances of the average Allied/Soviet task force in my opinion and it's not universal. If you prefer to split units a lot and the micro management of small teams is how you like to play than my friend never fail to load up scenarios as the Wehrmacht as you will be rewarded for that kind of play style with them much more frequently than you will as the Americans or British or Russians. 

I think the issue they had with the Bradley was that it cost more than many tanks, western IFVs generally did though. There would've been no way to keep the Bradley's costs down too with the broad set of mission capabilities that were being demanded of it. The media of course went to no effort to explain any of this. That wouldn't make it a story and many journalists' careers hinge on making this molehill a mountain! 
That was my attacks for years too until I stepped back and soberly evaluated exactly what was happening. That I was demanding a bunch of nervous, barely literate farmhands armed with late 19th century repeating muskets to seize and plant my nation's flag upon a given knoll or izbas,. It took stacks of bodies before I realized that this was not reasonable and if the game was real I would have either been relieved and sent back to Iowa/Vladivostok/Lincolnshire for a desk job by my superior or fragged by one of my own men the next time I thought the latrine was safe. You could say that the Germans/Americans/Russians just put up a tough defense but honestly if it that knoll had been held by the Italian Mafia or the Zulu even, the results would not have been much different.
So step back and think about how badly you really need it and why you do. If you do, then you also need to remember that you are wielding the resources of a nation and should not send men, average men, to achieve Hollywood miracles when instead you could detail it to a mortar or send a tank instead. The men can go after that and then go around telling everyone what a pitched battle it was afterwards, just look at all those smoking craters I made with my bayonet! 
The point is they're alive to tell that. 

I think when people get bad results with infantry fighting from half tracks they would've had bad results from their dismounted infantry assault too. Lots of players seems to expect miracles of their infantry. "I attacked a prepared, motivated, heavily armed defender from disadvantaged ground guys what am I doing wrong?" lol. 
I do think there's some excessive vulnerability issues with riders and gunners in the half tracks, for the most part though they do exactly what I need them to do. Protect my infantry from bombardments. I think for the most part men weren't too crazy about fighting from within the vehicles. They were barely bullet proof and were designed primarily with splinter protection in mind. IFVs were a long ways off. 

I've posted Combat Mission on Pornhub. No one can stop me.

Light infantry in open air positions without top cover of any kind. 
Soft targets in minor entrenchments, small structures, and heavy weapons. HE rounds stand a good chance to wreck crewed weapons. 
Most targets lighter than a tank. Very profitable caliber when used against weapon crews and makes short work of most structures. 
Anything. A really ubiquitous caliber for the most part that makes sense against all targets. Good for use in suppression or destructive fires. Airbursting rounds will cause casualties over a wide area. 
Destructive. Even heavy armor should proceed with caution. Will level most structures and wipe out entrenchments with ease. 
See above in most cases. 
Grid square removal. In the old days this caliber was the lighter end of siege guns and naval artillery. I actually think this range starts to become counter productive at the tactical level. The rounds are so dangerous that your own men need to keep well away from them. Best used against map rear areas. 
Angles of fire. Also organization. Mortars are almost always left to the infantry although sometimes heavier mortars will be Division or Corp assets. Field guns trace their lineage back to the age of cannon and musket, being useful in both indirect and direct fire roles. Few exist today. They were usually lighter guns, prioritizing mobility over power but these descriptors varied widely by Army. Howitzers are typically large guns intended for destructive, indirect fire into and behind enemy positions. In the old days there used to be Siege Artillery too and it was used quite frequently up into the Second World War. Aircraft and nuclear weapons took over that job and now precision munitions are replacing both of them too. 

Light infantry in open air positions without top cover of any kind. 
Soft targets in minor entrenchments, small structures, and heavy weapons. HE rounds stand a good chance to wreck crewed weapons. 
Most targets lighter than a tank. Very profitable caliber when used against weapon crews and makes short work of most structures. 
Anything. A really ubiquitous caliber for the most part that makes sense against all targets. Good for use in suppression or destructive fires. Airbursting rounds will cause casualties over a wide area. 
Destructive. Even heavy armor should proceed with caution. Will level most structures and wipe out entrenchments with ease. 
See above in most cases. 
Grid square removal. In the old days this caliber was the lighter end of siege guns and naval artillery. I actually think this range starts to become counter productive at the tactical level. The rounds are so dangerous that your own men need to keep well away from them. Best used against map rear areas. 
Angles of fire. Also organization. Mortars are almost always left to the infantry although sometimes heavier mortars will be Division or Corp assets. Field guns trace their lineage back to the age of cannon and musket, being useful in both indirect and direct fire roles. Few exist today. They were usually lighter guns, prioritizing mobility over power but these descriptors varied widely by Army. Howitzers are typically large guns intended for destructive, indirect fire into and behind enemy positions. In the old days there used to be Siege Artillery too and it was used quite frequently up into the Second World War. Aircraft and nuclear weapons took over that job and now precision munitions are replacing both of them too. 

Indeed, German field accounts frequently emphasize captured ZiS and other heavy guns of various caliber after attacks. I suspect in most of these cases though the guns were not seized by close assault (an inevitably bloody affair) but after their crews abandoned or surrendered them. I often get the sense the scenario designers are characterizing the respective Armies backwards. The way Axis Defense scenarios are frequently designed it feels like a Soviet or British officer planned them. Densely packed infantry holding obvious terrain objective, defense lines, Battalion and lesser HQs huddled in back of map, etc. 

Issue to me is that the guns are usually too common than that they're too fragile or not. It's not uncommon for many of the game's scenarios to have 2 Pak40s covering a 500x1500m map with spare heavy AT assets. Players are usually not informed enough to realize that no one would realistically expect them to fight their way through defense lines as deep as usually encountered in a CM scenario. 

Them and Russian Tankodestantniki are outrageously deadly on the assault. Only trouble is they burn through their ammo very fast, so it's advisable to use them only for the most decisive thrust of a given plan. They will last only one or two firefights before they need to resupply usually. 

You would think from how certain segments of the wargaming community go on about fighter aces, panzermen, tank armour, StG 44's and so on that the Wehrmacht had won the war.
 
The better military is the one that wins. Depicting how they won makes for good wargames. Better a Sherman or T-34 that's there than a Tiger with a broken transmission in a separate panzer battalion, 200km down the front.

What's about "Hammer's flank", in real life 1-st guards division was in 2-nd echelone. It's battalion made reconnaissance in force before assault, probably that's why German sources say about this division. And campaing author was using German sources, I guess. Inaccurate, but it doesn't change a much. What is more important, there is no solid trench line... If Germans would set such defense with seperated platoon sized positions, Soviet recon units would infiltrate through gaps at night. 

The problem with any discussion of OBs or TO&E's for any scenario, especially for the WW2 era, is that there is seldom any clarity as to what exactly was present at any particular location at any particular time.  On the Eastern Front in particular, even identifying the correct participants down to the battalion level is typically an impossible task because the documentation simply doesn't exist.  Even in France or Italy where Western Allied and German records are typically much better there are still a lot of unknowns.  The Germans had a lot of ad hoc units where it can be virtually impossible to know what equipment was present or not present and even standardized TO&Es are not so standard once you have first hand accounts or unit specific equipment descriptions available.  I seem to recall that the Hermann Goering Division had one support unit in Italy that was supposed to be an engineer battalion, but only one company was actual engineers.  The other two companies were self propelled artillery and a recon company or something - I don't remember the specifics off hand.  Suffice to say that if you were using a standard TO&E for that unit for a scenario you would be inaccurate in your depiction of the forces involved.  Aside from unit strengths in quiet sectors just before a major attack, virtually no unit on the Eastern Front was ever at full strength with most German and Soviet units being somewhere around 50 percent strength on the high end.  Strength returns for most German battalions were typically much lower than 50 percent, but if a designer chops 50 percent strength off their battalion they are more likely than not to be in the ball park of what might have been present if the exact figure is not known.
I seem to recall Jason complaining about King Tigers, Panthers, and other German tanks being too common in scenarios and I think it can serve as a good example of the problem with that kind of argument.  If I have a book about the 505th Tiger battalion and from that book I manage to find enough material to create four scenarios all with Tigers in them, well then those scenarios are historically accurate.  At least as accurate as I can make them given the reference material that I have available to me.  Saying that out of twenty scenarios there are four scenarios with Tigers in them and that's inaccurate is a faulty argument on its face.  If I recreated four scenarios with Tigers in them and I used reference material from four actual battles that took place that had Tigers in them, the fact that there are four scenarios with Tigers in them doesn't make those scenarios inaccurate.  That's just a ridiculous position to take.
There are so many battles in WW2 that took place and accurate information down to the battalion level that includes specific equipment strength figures is so hard to come by, it is without a doubt more difficult to prove that something is inaccurate since any battle that any designer chooses to create could theoretically have taken place on the battlefield at some point in time during WW2.  With regards to the Red Thunder campaign I think a fair question to ask would be whether anyone can prove that the situation depicted in the first scenario never took place.  There are literally thousands of miles of frontlines to peruse and for someone to sit there and say with any level of confidence that the situation in the scenario is absolutely a false depiction of events is going way out on a limb no matter what 'facts' they are basing their objections upon.

I actually used the Campaign Decompile tool and modified the opening mission of Hammer's Flank. It was some months ago that I did this and I did a playthrough but didn't store it. I'll be doing one again as an AAR sometime to illustrate how much better that mission can be with some simple fixes in player support and mission timing. I didn't even, but should, fix the objective scoring too. 
I'm also a long time customer of Battlefront and war games and a post count is not a good measure for determining the value of a community member. So it's difficult to see exactly how you can frame a comment like that a "right" way at all. It's a forum and feedback is what it's for. My experience with these forums is that they frequently end up as echo chambers for a select minority of pig headed bullies who want to lobby the developers to make products for them that confirm their narrow ideas. I am eager to be proven wrong. 
Gate keeping is a good way to prove me right. The values you have named are the hallmarks of an honest community, not a toxic one. Which will the CM forums be I wonder? 
Many are not. Their work will speak for itself more frequently than I should the scenarios "speak" in ways that imply anything but knowledge. 
Quite, but the German campaign in that game was much more consistent in its design and played better. I have never felt it required editing of any kind. Was it designed by the same team? 
I'm working on Fortress Grosshau in Final Blitz right now. Kari Salo's scenarios don't usually need editing though, often being really fun and playable right off. I'm rebalancing that scenario mostly for fun and not really function anyway so next time i'm in the mood to play Red Thunder and see what I changed i'll make an AAR or something. It'll happen sometime, I don't know when but since i'm not looking to prove some kind of silly grognard cred to the community and don't much care what they think of me I don't know when that will be. 
Where? What part of the line? When? If you're pursuing a background in law of some kind I suggest you save the money and drop out of school. It isn't working. What i'm talking about is when I try to play a scenario only to find that the exits from all of my deploy points are covered by planned fires and that I cannot maneuver around  because of impassable terrain like thick forests or creeks. 
Take objective B, the back of a 2000 meter long map with 3 companies of rifle infantry, their under supplied mortars which will arrive late, and 4 Shermans/SU-76s. If it's supposed to be believable that recce missed the number of Germans comprising the defense or the heavy guns they've got sighted over meticulously thought out lines of sight, or the large craters that were left by what was clearly Corp guns trying to plink the recce, it's not. When I hit "cease fire - total defeat" because all 4 of my tanks were knocked out by bogging, mines, the Pak40s and I took over 100 casualties and see that not even 500m behind my deploy is an entrenched, reinforced company of infantry supported by what must be their *entire* Regiment's mortars (fully supplied!!!!), mines, bad weather, TRPs, and a whole battery of Pak40s I think we have a problem here. The mission briefing might make some excuses like  "you don't have any artillery because it was busy suppressing the enemy's guns or firing all day" but it sure doesn't look like that, if the scenario designer even bothered to explain why an asset you could normally expect per those lovely ToEs he cites isn't here today because hell with it. That's what i'm talking about. 

I actually used the Campaign Decompile tool and modified the opening mission of Hammer's Flank. It was some months ago that I did this and I did a playthrough but didn't store it. I'll be doing one again as an AAR sometime to illustrate how much better that mission can be with some simple fixes in player support and mission timing. I didn't even, but should, fix the objective scoring too. 
I'm also a long time customer of Battlefront and war games and a post count is not a good measure for determining the value of a community member. So it's difficult to see exactly how you can frame a comment like that a "right" way at all. It's a forum and feedback is what it's for. My experience with these forums is that they frequently end up as echo chambers for a select minority of pig headed bullies who want to lobby the developers to make products for them that confirm their narrow ideas. I am eager to be proven wrong. 
Gate keeping is a good way to prove me right. The values you have named are the hallmarks of an honest community, not a toxic one. Which will the CM forums be I wonder? 
Many are not. Their work will speak for itself more frequently than I should the scenarios "speak" in ways that imply anything but knowledge. 
Quite, but the German campaign in that game was much more consistent in its design and played better. I have never felt it required editing of any kind. Was it designed by the same team? 
I'm working on Fortress Grosshau in Final Blitz right now. Kari Salo's scenarios don't usually need editing though, often being really fun and playable right off. I'm rebalancing that scenario mostly for fun and not really function anyway so next time i'm in the mood to play Red Thunder and see what I changed i'll make an AAR or something. It'll happen sometime, I don't know when but since i'm not looking to prove some kind of silly grognard cred to the community and don't much care what they think of me I don't know when that will be. 
Where? What part of the line? When? If you're pursuing a background in law of some kind I suggest you save the money and drop out of school. It isn't working. What i'm talking about is when I try to play a scenario only to find that the exits from all of my deploy points are covered by planned fires and that I cannot maneuver around  because of impassable terrain like thick forests or creeks. 
Take objective B, the back of a 2000 meter long map with 3 companies of rifle infantry, their under supplied mortars which will arrive late, and 4 Shermans/SU-76s. If it's supposed to be believable that recce missed the number of Germans comprising the defense or the heavy guns they've got sighted over meticulously thought out lines of sight, or the large craters that were left by what was clearly Corp guns trying to plink the recce, it's not. When I hit "cease fire - total defeat" because all 4 of my tanks were knocked out by bogging, mines, the Pak40s and I took over 100 casualties and see that not even 500m behind my deploy is an entrenched, reinforced company of infantry supported by what must be their *entire* Regiment's mortars (fully supplied!!!!), mines, bad weather, TRPs, and a whole battery of Pak40s I think we have a problem here. The mission briefing might make some excuses like  "you don't have any artillery because it was busy suppressing the enemy's guns or firing all day" but it sure doesn't look like that, if the scenario designer even bothered to explain why an asset you could normally expect per those lovely ToEs he cites isn't here today because hell with it. That's what i'm talking about.