Grey_Fox

This is the kind of mission that was attempted in 2003 Iraq, and which led to some A-10s being severely damaged before they were forbidden from low-level missions. They became missile trucks restricted to high altitude, and that's a mission damn near any airframe can perform.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

The A-10 requires a permissive environment to operate in successfully. In a contested environment, it's a death trap.

CM does not calculate LOS from five heights.
The Target tool calculates LOS from five heights, and populates a look-up table at the time the map is built. This is why the Target tool can, and has always, operated without lag, since it's only checking a pre-filled table.
This is also why the Target tool isn't the best measure for when a unit actually has line of sight. It's usually pretty close, but it's not actually correct.
Actual LOS is tracked from eyes/sensors. Where those are defined on the model is the question in this thread.

From a fixed and arbitrary height, and not necessarily from where the optics are.

You have LOS, it's just that your spotting checks are being heavily penalized. If you wait long enough the units may spot each other. Even when the target line shows no LOS through trees units can sometimes spot each other. That's why you shouldn't  trust trees to hide your units unless there is a LOT of foliage between you and the enemy.
At least that's what I think is most likely happening. The lack of 1 to 1 graphical representation of tree canopies make it difficult to know for certain how LOS is being affected in any situation.

There is some wackiness going on but it is due to the way foliage affects spotting. Judging from your screen shots I suspect LOS is being degraded by tree branches, despite appearances to the contrary and despite what the LOS line says.
In Combat Mission tree trunks are accurately represented visually but tree canopies are significantly abstracted. In my experience tree canopies are both less opaque and lower to the ground "under the hood" than their visual representation suggests.
This unintuitiveness is compounded by the target line lacking LOS context. When checking LOS with the target command the LOS line is binary -- you either have it or you don't. But under the hood LOS through trees is non-binary. Tree branches and leaves degrade LOS proportional to how much tree canopy the line passes through "under the hood". The target command line will show clear LOS up to a certain amount of degradation, then at some point will change to show LOS blocked even though spotting is still possible.

How else would you suggest to model the spotting process? As I tried to outline, the "outliers" are probably in no way special, just the results of a statistical process. For simplicity, let's assume you turn your head with constant velocity, making a full sweep of the horizon every 10 seconds. You can, of course, remove the randomness completely but how is that realistic, there is never a 100% probability to spot something. Perhaps you blink in exactly the wrong moment. So, instead it makes more sense to give this "spotting test" some probability p. If you do it like that, you end up with a probability to not have spotted a target sitting there somewhere after n sweeps that is something like (1-p)^n. Now, if you do the math, you will see the probability drops exponentially but is never 0, even if you set p to 99.9%. So you will still end up with events where you haven't spotted a target after 3.5 minutes. It just won't happen as often. Now, you suggest that 3.5 minutes are a problem but are they just happening to often or should they never happen at all? If the latter then you would have to introduce some kind of cut-off. How would you justify that? There is no law of nature that says that after having looked in the direction of something you have to spot it, no matter what, after max. 30 seconds. Even were you to suggest that the individual probability to spot the target were to increase with every sweep (and I don't see why you should be more likely to spot something with the 101st try that you didn't see the last 100 times), you would still have a non-zero probability that it takes 3.5 minutes. 
I'm not saying that this way of modelling spotting is the best way to do it but so far, nobody here has come up with a more convincing model...

Let's calm down a little, shall we?
This unpleasant "discussion" made me dig out a test I did some time ago. I've been doing data analysis for basically all my professional life, so I always suffer a bit when reading these threads. So, as we've been discussing on page one or so, anecdotal evidence ("here look at this battle, spotting is broken!!!!") is meaningless. But also doing "experiments" is only as good as the experiment itself plus the evaluation afterwards. First of all, if you do experiments, control the variables! Eliminate everything you are not directly interested in. If you want to look at spotting, do it on a flat surface and make both opponents hold fire. Because, as I often see, if you measure time until first shot, or kill, you are skewing the spotting process. Next, don't look at averages or medians alone. Look at distributions. And don't eliminate outliers. My text book about statistical data analysis said that, eliminating outliers, although done often, should really only be done if you know what you are doing, e.g. when you know that your outlier is actually some measurement error and not some rare event.
So, here's what I did:
I put an M60 TTS and a bog standard T72 (the exact models aren't relevant for the method) on a flat map with paved ground, roughly 2 km apart. I set both vehicles to hold fire. I then measured the time it took for each tank to first get a partial contact and then a full contact.
Here is the raw data:
t72 = [84, 17, 78, 4, 174, 65, 77, 321, 289, 444, 31, 3, 290, 2, 40, 120, 40, 159, 57, 69, 15, 54, 80, 95, 19, 58,
       23, 672, 154, 154, 17, 14, 342, 12, 386, 43, 84, 12, 378, 123, 30, 44, 240, 311, 110, 2, 68, 181, 137]
t72_id = [7, 21, 7,28, 7, 35, 14, 0, 56, 0, 35, 0, 7, 70, 42, 7, 35, 35, 0, 49, 0, 7, 0, 0, 0, 63, 28, 7, 14, 0,
          7, 7, 7, 49, 7, 21, 14, 21, 14, 0, 7, 14, 28, 0, 14, 7, 28, 56, 77]
m60 = [89, 68, 41, 38, 71, 10, 73, 0, 20, 9, 4, 55, 91, 34, 31, 8, 14, 116, 64, 4, 18, 63, 116, 38, 3, 18, 71, 132,
       39, 73, 43, 73, 116, 210, 207, 36, 180, 27, 88, 48, 102, 3, 52, 77, 176, 22, 18, 80, 24]
m60_id = [7, 7, 7, 0, 14, 14, 0, 14, 14, 7, 14, 0, 7, 14, 35, 14, 7, 0, 7, 14, 7, 0, 14, 7, 7, 7, 14, 35, 7, 0, 7, 0,
          0, 7, 0, 7, 14, 14, 7, 7, 7, 0, 7, 0, 0, 7, 21, 7, 7]
Times are in seconds, the entry t72 is time until partial contact for the T72 trying to spot the M60, the one with  "_id" is the difference between partial and full contact. The same for m60. And in order to get the distributions I made histograms with 30s bins for plots 1 and 3 and 7s for plot 2.



So, what do we see here? Well, first of all, I should have taken at least ten times the data or make make larger bins. I didn't have the patience for the former and doing the latter would mean that we don't see much of a distribution. 😉 Anyway, from the raw data we see: time until partial contact can be any number, time to ID (which is what I call time to go from partial to full contact) is always a multiple of 7.
The histograms tell us the following: Although it is not possible to get the exact distribution, this is definitely not something symmetrical where average or media are easy to interpret. If you look at the bins with the highest counts, those are at low times. That means, players will usually see that their T72 or M60 are often quick to spot their target. Nothing to complain about or make a forum "rant". But for both (!) tanks it is quite possible that it takes several minutes - more likely for the T72 but also the M60 TTS had an event with over 3.5 minutes. The time until partial contact is consistent (no more, no less) with an exponential decay which you would expect when counting the number of dice rolls necessary to roll a specific number - only that the M60 TTS rolls with a D6, while the T72 rolls a D20, so to speak.
Now, is spotting "broken" or not? For me, this is really not a meaningful thing to say. Because by "broken" people usually mean "takes too long" without saying what "too long" is and why. With the above distributions, it is possible to never spot the target. Right? Wrong? Broken? This is a game/simulation and as any such thing, at least if you want it to run in reasonable time on a consumer machine, it is simpler than real life and abstracted. A meaningful discussion would be "Is this spotting model adequate? Could CM do better by applying model XYZ, instead?". I'm not sure if the long tails (what some call "outliers") are working as intended (although I find @The_Capt analogy with the barrel quite convincing) or if it is a model that is just designed to get the "center", the common situations, right, accepting that every now and then it produces something odd. But getting the tails of an exponentially decaying distribution right is brutally difficult - in fact, come to think of it, my whole PhD thesis was about modelling the tails of a similar distribution correctly.
 

Careful. You're comparing maximum outlier vs. maximum outlier to get that number, essentially cherry-picking the two most extreme numbers out of a 100 number data set. Using that to claim a "300% difference in spotting" is incredibly misleading. The typical difference is about 22%.
Not all Soviet vehicles are worse at spotting than all US vehicles. For example the Shturm-S is very good at spotting, much better than a M60.
I am going to reiterate that the CM spotting model has worked this way in every CM game from Shock Force 1. There is nothing "abnormal" about the spotting in CMCW compared to other CM games.

Ah well then clearly this is nothing more than a bitter-drive by.  You are not really here to help, just resurrect old gripes. 
As to "old tanker" if you could point that one out?  As you can see, I was heavily involved in both of those posts - dbsapps (may he rest in piece) pretty much tried a lot of weird stuff to try and prove "CM spotting is broken!" and really did not get anywhere with it.  A lot of us ran extensive tests (again) and found the spotting was pretty much in line with reasonable expectation for the equipment and era - not perfect but there you go.
The major difference between you and me is that I am one of three game leads for this title and actually has a chance to get things changed, if it is merited. And I am totally open to this, we have a list of fixes and outstanding tweaks.  However, it has to based on solid data, not anecdotal drive bys.  Why?  Well because the fastest way to get caught in a CM-Karen loop is to correct one way and then be yelled at by the next person that we are doing it wrong and to go the other way.  That is a fools errand and incredible waste of time. 
I personally think that if BFC scrubbed the outliers from the game they would pull the life right out of the simulation.  War is outliers, a lot of weird stuff that everyone remembers.  They not only enhance the experience, they add to combat friction - war is chaos and a lot of the fun in playing is embracing that.
Back on topic.  VAB results are a solid representation of what we should be seeing.  A T72 did not have the same spotting abilities as an M60 - technical, ergonomic or even training and doctrine.  Given even ground an M60 should see a T72 first, they were designed to do this because the Soviets had a lot more T72s.

Following a round of testing done primarily by @Millien on the unofficial CM discord server (link in signature I believe), it appears that the CITV on an abrams is not drawn from the CROWS viewer:



 
Nor is the Primary Gunner's Sight used to draw line of sight from:

 
Instead, it appears that the line of sight for both the PGS and the CITV is drawn from the main gun barrel.
Additionally, the CITV does not provide a 270 degree field of view - instead it would appear to effectively act as a repeater for the gunner's thermal imager. Unless the turret is facing towards an enemy, the CITV does not appear to be used. Testing instructions are to use non-multispectral smoke between tank and hostiles, hostiles should be at a 90 degree angle, and wait.
As such, this would appear to throw into doubt the perceived wisdom that Abrams should be used turned-in to take advantage of the tank's thermal imagers.
Thanks to @Millien for performing the tests.

Thank you for posting some of this on the forum, although I want to add a bit more context and information about my own thoughts on this.

First, I am not going to make any conclusion on whether it is better to be turned out or not at this point in the M1. None of my tests indicated anything that would appear to indicate one way or another. However, neither the CITV nor CROWs system appear to scan around the vehicle as would likely be expected. Instead they seem to remain fixed forward in line with the turret front like the gunner's main sight. This isn't seen by the tests above though but with some smoke tests I had done prior:


These M1A2 SEPs are facing away from the smoke screen, one facing at approximately 90*, the other 180* away. Both vehicles are turned in, where the commander is presumably using the CITV or CROWs system to spot targets. Neither is able to identify any partial contacts on the BMP-2 platoon sitting on the far side of the smoke screen about 400 meters away though. These BMP-2s drove up about two minutes after the smoke screen started and have been sitting here for about a minute with nothing from the M1s, this will continue as well:

It isn't until nearly 5 minutes that anything happens when a BMP-2 that was facing towards the smoke screen managed to spot and engage one of the M1A2 in a gap in the smoke after the mission ended. As can be seen here, the vehicle that is being hit still hasn't ID'd any partial contacts even though it's taking fire at this point, and the subsystems and soft factors are not at fault here as far as I can tell.
And in case anyone is wondering that for some reason that these tanks are unable to spot targets through a smoke screen this intense, let's run it again and allow me to turn one of the tanks toward the smoke screen and see the results:

The M1 spotted the BMP platoon basically instantly as it rolled over the ridge and was engaged and destroyed in less than a minute, the BMP-2s never saw a thing.
So in my conclusion, the CITV and CROWs system does not scan around the vehicle, these vehicles can still get spots on targets coming up behind them without a smoke screen so the commander or loader is inherently keeping their head on a swivel but the moment the smoke screen is up they are entirely blind until the turret faces the smoke screen, or the smoke clears enough to see through it with the Mk 1 eyeball.
What about the second part with the line of sight though? Well, that's more interesting and it makes me wonder about some of the deeper parts of the game as a result.
We saw above the M1 was unable to ID targets over the wall, is that a problem with the wall though?

Simply put, no. The stryker here is quite close in terms of height to the M1, the CROWs system is about the same height too, but the stryker can not only ID but engage targets on the other side of the wall while the M1 remains oblivious apart from possible horizontal sharing of contacts. The M2A3 here is quite tall and can look over the wall with the 25mm bushmaster, so it can happily engage the BMP platoon as seen here.
So why does this happen? This is more speculation on my part and I can't infer beyond these three vehicles. But what I think is happening is that the LOS checks on the turret are tied to the main gun. The big difference here is that the M2A3 and the Stryker have main weapon systems that are taller than the wall, so they can draw LOS. While the M1 main gun is blocked by the wall, so it is unable to draw any LOS beyond it, even if the sensors, CROWS weapon system, and the commander are able to physically see over the wall.
Now it's possible that this is due to the testing conditions, the wall might work differently than other terrain and I didn't test that. It's also possible this is something specific to the M1A2 SEP in black sea. But here's my theory: IF the main weapon system on a turret is unable to draw direct LOS to a target, then it will be unable to see that target regardless of any other factors.
Now I hope both of these results are specific to the M1A2. Cause if either is more universal that would actually be somewhat troubling. Especially the second as I have done a lot of turret-down positions with commanders peering above walls or hills but if that actually doesn't do anything that's wasted effort and misleading. Regardless I welcome additional perspectives and tests here, and if anyone is interested you can try the scenarios I created to test this out here:
wall test v3.btt smoke test.btt

Following a round of testing done primarily by @Millien on the unofficial CM discord server (link in signature I believe), it appears that the CITV on an abrams is not drawn from the CROWS viewer:



 
Nor is the Primary Gunner's Sight used to draw line of sight from:

 
Instead, it appears that the line of sight for both the PGS and the CITV is drawn from the main gun barrel.
Additionally, the CITV does not provide a 270 degree field of view - instead it would appear to effectively act as a repeater for the gunner's thermal imager. Unless the turret is facing towards an enemy, the CITV does not appear to be used. Testing instructions are to use non-multispectral smoke between tank and hostiles, hostiles should be at a 90 degree angle, and wait.
As such, this would appear to throw into doubt the perceived wisdom that Abrams should be used turned-in to take advantage of the tank's thermal imagers.
Thanks to @Millien for performing the tests.

T34/85 has a crew of 5, T-72 has a crew of 3, and the technology difference in optics probably wouldn't have been that different. 
CMCW for many cases is modern weapons (ATGMs, etcs) with WW2-era optics (mk.1 eyeball and binoculars).

The TPN-3 is not a thermal optic. It does have passive night vision out to a decent range, which a lot of the earlier models lacked, but it's not comparable to a thermal optic.

Direct comparisons of those are always a bit deceptive - in the below case, this is looking at something a tiny number of metres away, which isn't really indicative of any kind of real situation, but it gives you an idea of how much of an advantage a modern optic gives you:
https://packaged-media.redd.it/lqjq2oe3zzu81/pb/m2-res_720p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1683761911&s=fce3986b5d013acede59eb3727f2b360cced2c80#t=0

(Ukranian T-64 with thermal sight, compared to the regular one).
The thermals in CMCW aren't going to be of the same resolution to pick out details, but they'll certainly be similar in terms of contrast, and finding hot tanks against a cold background.
 
Of course, none of this minutia is actually the point of this post. The Soviet tanks do indeed have worst situational awareness than the US ones in CMCW. They also have significantly better fire control systems, a much scarier armament, and superior protection. They are in most respects superior to the US tanks, until the generational change that happens with Abrams and Bradley (and to a lesser extent, the M60A3 TTS). This naturally leaps ahead of the Soviet designs, and this was late enough such that it wasn't something the Soviet Union ever really caught up with.

I've mentioned before that I think the best way to approach CMCW is about 1980 or so, and with Strict rarity, if you're playing a QB. The more thermals you add, the more the game looks like Shock Force.

Yes, tanks have very narrow fields of vision, which means that the closer they are to something the less likely they are to see it. Remember, you're essentially looking at things through letterbox-sized periscopes or viewports, and in the case of the gunner through a straw.
To overcome this, they should be used en-masse where possible.
Western doctrine is to fight with the commander at least partially turned-out. Soviet doctrine was to fight turned-in and en-masse.

Yes, tanks have very narrow fields of vision, which means that the closer they are to something the less likely they are to see it. Remember, you're essentially looking at things through letterbox-sized periscopes or viewports, and in the case of the gunner through a straw.
To overcome this, they should be used en-masse where possible.
Western doctrine is to fight with the commander at least partially turned-out. Soviet doctrine was to fight turned-in and en-masse.

It's also night-time isn't it? Bradleys have thermal optics, while the T-80s don't, they have IR lamps which only provide visibility out to something like 100m. And I'm not even sure if they're used.
Edit: yeah it's 4.30AM, so visibility would be very low for non-thermal optics.

Ok, pre-Alpha disclaimer so details are subject to change but this is the first map in the Canadian campaign "On the Weser" - got big plans for this one. A Pete Wenman original:

Just southwest of a little town called Boffzen and south of Hoxter (From Google Earth):

Blow up of Canadian AO with rough zone of this map: