Grey_Fox

So, after Neuhof was the fight to interdict the Soviet Column moving through the valley and I annihilated them there scoring a US major victory!  The battle after that was the find, fix and destroy and I also won a major victory.  I don't know if that was luck or what but I scouted the map and guessed on their objectives and then just raced them to those spots.  I occupied the town on the top of the hill and waited for them to come over the ridge where I was in a reverse slope defense again.  On the far right I scoped out some great positions along the lower end of the hill and raced to take up those positions and then knocked out the Soviets as they pushed for the town on the far right of the map.  It started with an E, can't remember the name of it!
The campaign ended in the fight after that.  Marborn, and the sewage plant.  Here I suffered a minor defeat but I knew I was being cautious at this point and was really trying to conserve my men and equipment.  I pushed along the left and reduced a bunch of their positions guarding approaches to Marborn but then balked at how well defended the town itself was though.  I did cause quite a few casualties in the fights around Marborn and by making some long range kills with my TOWs against vehicles out by the highway bridge and the buildings close by the sewage plant, but never took any of the objectives out of fear of taking more casualties.  I had already committed my whole force around the left to try to go backside into Marborn but after all the fighting in the woods at the top of the hill there and drawing some of their tanks out of town towards me I just couldn't justify my losses I would take going into Marborn with the much too short of time I had left.   I really balked at committing my armor as I knew I was coming close to the end and really didn't want to lose any more of my brave and tired men.  
Final aftermath was a US Minor Victory but I felt proud to do my part in stopping the invaders and ultimately leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  
Final Stats...
US
96 KIA
33 WIA
0 Missing
13 Tanks lost
10 Armored vehicles lost
3 Other vehicles lost 
1 Aircraft lost
 
Soviets suffered
639 KIA
107 WIA
0 Missing
35 Tanks lost
93 Armored vehicles lost
3 Other vehicles lost
4 Aircraft lost
 
So yes, I feel we really put a hurting on them and ended any dreams of theirs to walk into the West.  
 
I have to say this was the most fun CM campaign I've ever played!  I don't know what it is, the familiarity of the time, the facing off the old enemy of my youth, or what but Cold War just checks all my boxes for wargaming fun.  This one really felt like the intense short invasion we all feared back then and I felt the responsibility of leading my combat team to victory and putting a stop to it right then and there!  It was a slog and felt like it and I was always dreading the big red bear coming to eat me!  Their artillery was brutal, and so according to their doctrine, and man those T-64s!  After brushing them off because of CMSF, fighting them in the actual time period, toe to toe with M60s was EPIC!!  I have a whole new respect for them now.  I watched one turn, maybe it was two turns, where a T-64 sat at about 2000m with a couple M60a1s and just shrug off 9 frontal hits.  Just awesome!  I can't wait to give the Soviet side a go now and use those tanks for myself!! Ha!
I really want to thank you and Bill for bringing this title to us.  It really is my favorite and I just think it sparkles in every way!  Amazing job. Thank you.

I love playing the Russians in Black Sea. I enjoy playing a modern army that doesn't have Javelins. It makes the game much more of a chess match and the Russian hardware is too sexy.

This one is so tough because ultimately it's more about what mood I am looking for.
That being said, I adore Black Sea.  Modern is just so much different and "better" in my opinion.  I really do fight different too depending on what side I am playing.  As the Americans it's so much fun to play with the tech and you really do fight a precision, high tech, low casualty, surgical type warfare that is noticeable.  However, on the other hand and to me, whenever I play the Russians or the Ukrainians it devolves down into some real bloody destructive warfare.  I guess I am less cautious with both and fight to their doctrines.  I really really enjoy playing both and have a thing for the Russian/Soviet tanks.  I love the modern T-72, as blind as it is, it does a superb job.  T-90s are just as fun and then playing the Ukrainian modern T-64s and 80s just does it for me.
Second, the BMP-3M.  I just LOVE the thing and it's insane firepower.  Too much fun.  I am ANXIOUSLY awaiting new content for Black Sea, can't wait.
I have a saved file of somewhere along in the Russian campaign of a T-90 backing up, under fire, shrugging off 3 incoming rounds with the ARENA system, and killing two and damaging a third UKR tank all in one minute, going backwards with all hell breaking loose in every direction.  Survived the whole thing without a scratch.  Good times.  I can only imagine the crew freaking out at their luck. 
But running closely behind all this is my love for SF2 as well.  All the different armies as well as the USMC is always soo much fun.  And now Cold War has immediately vaulted up very high as well.  I am highly anticipating more additions to come for CW too.  The funny thing is this all goes back to CM1 and playing only WWII.  Now, I hardly ever play WWII stuff. Modern all the way now. 

CMCW. Hands down. 

Same bug or related to the one where all the M113s have thermal sight spotting capability? That one made me give up on playing the Soviets until it's fixed. 
 
H

Idk about you, but I've been using ATGM BRDMs and AT-4Bs to great effect with little obvious shortcomings. Granted they don't have thermal sights like the Dragon, but they aren't bad weapons systems either.
Turning out BRDMs so the hatches are open improves spotting greatly. On mission 2 of the Soviet campaign in particular you can get these BRDMs to volley fire missiles at US tanks, and it looks amazing.

That's a mistake. It is good and as you say, the spotting is complicated. Sometimes the Soviet tanks don't see anything, and then I am in a PBEM where my TTS M-60s are losing badly to T-64Bs at 2000 meters.
At the very least the focus on range for spotting issues is misguided IMHO.

Idk about you, but I've been using ATGM BRDMs and AT-4Bs to great effect with little obvious shortcomings. Granted they don't have thermal sights like the Dragon, but they aren't bad weapons systems either.
Turning out BRDMs so the hatches are open improves spotting greatly. On mission 2 of the Soviet campaign in particular you can get these BRDMs to volley fire missiles at US tanks, and it looks amazing.

Yes. You're misunderstanding some key ideas here, most notably about game design.

I find GNS theory to be a useful (albeit flawed) tool to talk about game design - gamism, narrativism and simulationism, and defining games by their intent.

A simulationist game, which Combat Mission is, has to prioritise the model above all, then fit things around the model. It would be anathema to the concept to, for example, increase the penetration of the 75mm Sherman because they're having a hard time getting through the front of a Panther - this kind of gamist change would be fine in something like World of Tanks, or something similarly arcadey, but not in something simulationist.

Now, things are on a spectrum, so nothing is purely one or the other, but the CM model is simulationist by intent. Compromises to gamism therefore mostly do not arrive from compromising the model, but instead in scenario and campaign design - selecting or crafting scenarios to demonstrate a tactical problem, a historical action or a conceptual point.

The point on Soviet doctrine was a "this is how this equipment is supposed to be used, and therefore why this deficiency doesn't need to matter". Soviet equipment is typically pragmatically designed, and typically very good, if it's being used for the specific task it's intended for. Outside of that context, it starts to look a lot worse - if you use a Soviet equipment like American equipment, you're going to be frustrated. A BMP is not a Bradley, they are two different vehicles with very different capabilities, use-cases and effects.

This mentality is due to a number of things, but primarily it's down to pushing command and control decisions centrally, rather than distributing them - it means one can manage a large army, including a large number of conscripts, and train them well in specific and narrow fields. The contrast is that the US method was to push down combined arms and C2 to the lowest levels possible.

So, no, I don't think that Battlefront has a pro-US agenda, and I believe that your constant declarations that they do are wholly without evidence or reason. The point of this response is that you've taken something I've said as being in support of this ideological position, which it most definitely is not.

That affects the local user, not other users. If you imply that it could be an issue for multiplayer games, where one person gives themselves an advantage by modifying local files, that's been a solved problem in games for decades now. 

So if a series of bugfixes have been ready to release for a few months now, why haven't they been? Is there a cost to releasing a patch?

@The_Capt Ngl I'm kind of annoyed that bugfixes which were completed months ago haven't been made available to customers.
@BFCElvis not long ago you said PBEM++ was the only thing being worked on for the next patch.

@The_Capt Ngl I'm kind of annoyed that bugfixes which were completed months ago haven't been made available to customers.
@BFCElvis not long ago you said PBEM++ was the only thing being worked on for the next patch.

So if a series of bugfixes have been ready to release for a few months now, why haven't they been? Is there a cost to releasing a patch?

Fixed for next patch, hopefully on Steam release.

So for anyone still interested.  The War thunder forum (these guys are as bad as we are) has a pretty interesting thread on tank ammo performance center on the Gulf War:
https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/446384-m829-and-l26-shell-effectivness/
The Desert Storm report by the GAO (always watch the accountants) is pretty definitive (i.e. the Iraqis were unable to manage a single tank to tank kill, pg 4), it is tragic that your colleagues were having heart attacks over this just 5-6 years before.
Dunno what to tell you John, I would love to see a picture of a Soviet 76mm penetrating the front of an early M1 too.  Regardless, you can see how hard it is to really unpack true performance for some of this.  There will always be outliers but they are just that.  The trick is to make sure we don't take those outliers as the center of the bell curve.
The other thing to watch out for is myth.  I was a young troop commander in central Bosnia in 1994 during the war and there was this lunatic in the hills who would take old JNA aerial bombs and turn them basically into V1s, they made a helluva bang but he could only manage about one every 6 months.  That whole thing got way out of hand with legends of German scientists and V1 stocks armed with mustard gas.
The truth is often stranger but also more mundane at the same time.
desertstorm.pdf

Be prepared for a doozy of a discussion: 
 

As much as I have been trying to stay out of this, I think this brings up a interesting background info point on "How to Research for a PC game". 
I am not going to weigh in on the specific argument, except to say I don't think we are going to see modeling of the current ammunition characteristics change dramatically - if for the reason alone that it basically feels about right.  We may see minor tweaks but right now we are not advocating for major mechanical changes to weapon systems (we would like to see some shifts in ammo types but that is another issue).
So as to these CIA documents.  Well first off, as impressive as the CIA is as an intelligence agency (and here movies and media have probably done more to promote the myth than anything), it is in the end a government agency.  Being government means that any information you glean immediately must take into account the broader context, and all of it with healthy grains of salt.
So John's first link I have actually seen before and it basically lays out the "threat" as they understood it in 1984.  It is a "memorandum" and as such is probably one of the better sources one could draw upon.  It really lays out the Soviet "tank position" and is not bad.  My only concern is that I am left wondering if it is a "say nothing new...because" report that sticks to the party line that the current administration wanted to hear...remember it was 1984 and the US was trying to attrit its way out of the Cold War, which turned out to be a good strategy.
The second link I take with a lot more critical eyes.  First off, it is a "thought piece" which the agency clearly puts at arms lengths ("the opinions of the authors"), so this is a trick that gets played all the time.  When one is trying to make a big argument, get some reputable senior folks to write an "opinion piece".  If it works, great.  If it creates blowback we just say "well it was their opinion".  Further, any "thought piece" sponsored by the agency that basically promotes "a modest improvements in intelligence..." (pg 2) set off that little yellow light. Was this real or was it a promotion piece to try and get more CIA funding. 
Then when one starts to dig a bit and open the aperture, I get more odd smells.  This piece was written in the Carter administration and that was not a great time to be in the CIA (we allude to this in the CMCW backstory), or National Defence for that matter.  Finally, the Director of the CIA at the time was ADM Turner ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stansfield_Turner) who not only was a big fan of technical intel (and put HUMINT in the back seat) but was Navy through and through.  This thought piece is very technical - play to the boss - but also very Army who were competing heavily to get their AirLand Battle concept off the ground and fighting for tenuous funding, all after Vietnam. 
In this context that paper really should be taken cautiously.  It does lay out what was a dangerous situation.  We know the US had fallen behind both technologically but also in over all mass, all the while with no offset strategy beyond nukes...not good.  But is it possible that an Army General is over-polishing the threat to simultaneously promote agency and Army funding...absolutely. 
In the end, when researching one has to remember that we can only see snippets of a much larger game being played at the time...and that matters.  Probably some of the best historical references that I found (and used) weren't locked away in TOP SECRET CIA drawers (and trust me, government overclassifies everything) they are in minutes from appropriation meetings: https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Department_of_Defense_Appropriations_for/llZ5mbGatSYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=US+defence+spending+TOW+missile&pg=PA534&printsec=frontcover
These are not dark assessments, made in the shadows...this is the money trail of what actually happened.  The "truth" is far more mundane in reality and is largely guarded by accountants.

Considering there are a number of bugfixes waiting on the CMCW patch (e.g. M113 .50 cals being able to see through smoke), is there any chance of releasing the patch without PBEM++?

Right this is getting silly.  Bottom line is that John made a couple of sweeping statements about the Matsimus video.  The first was that Matsimus had claimed to be in 7 Armoured Division during the Cold War.  That was debunked by @IICptMillerIIand acknowledged by John.  I then pointed out various things about BAOR/1 (BR) Corps in relation to comments that John had made which has now resulted in the frame of the debate being shifted around a bit.  From my perspective, this is not a personal attack on John, it is an attempt to frame this discussion on the basis of facts.
The lesson here is that when you're in hole, you stop digging.  That point was reached when @IICptMillerIImade his observation.

Considering there are a number of bugfixes waiting on the CMCW patch (e.g. M113 .50 cals being able to see through smoke), is there any chance of releasing the patch without PBEM++?

Considering there are a number of bugfixes waiting on the CMCW patch (e.g. M113 .50 cals being able to see through smoke), is there any chance of releasing the patch without PBEM++?

Considering there are a number of bugfixes waiting on the CMCW patch (e.g. M113 .50 cals being able to see through smoke), is there any chance of releasing the patch without PBEM++?

Suvorov's writings are at best debatable - in fact Glantz, who is reputable scholar of WW2 is very critical of Suvorov's writings about that war.  Others are, albeit less so, critical of his works on the Cold War era.  As an intelligence professional I certainly do not assess Suvorov as credible.  As to agents of the Carpathian Military District reporting every movement of Chieftains - a quick look at a map has to tell you that this is a dubious claim.  Image below shows the distance between the HQ of the Carpathian Military District and HQ 1 (BR) Corps.

 
That sort of data would more likely be tracked by fused IMINT and ground reporting by SOXMIS which reported to GSFG/WGF and not the Carpathian Military District.  In the case of the latter, I worked for seven  months at the desk in BAOR that monitored SOXMIS touring activity and I'll tell you for free that it could not and did not track 'every movement.'

I have been on this forum for a while now and one thing that has been crossing my mind a lot after reading more and more of John Kettlers posts is how many times he has claimed to be a Soviet Threat Analysist, yet he has never backed up the claim with any credentials. I would normally not randomly ask someone for their credentials but,  there has been many times where Kettler has said something, or claimed something, then falls back on his claimed experience as evidence when presented with sources that contradict him instead of providing sources himself. This is obviously potentially very harmful to the collective integrity of Combat Mission itself, considering the amount of input this forum has. So @John Kettlerplease provide credentials as to your experience please.