Grey_Fox

That's profoundly disappointing. The reason I know about CM and bought the games is due to AAR videos on youtube created by the likes of @Hapless
I've created my own videos in a similar style, and it is an incredibly time-intensive task to load and reload saves in order to create recordings. The replay feature present in CMPE would make life an awful lot easier for people like me to create videos. I recently made a video which contained 11 minutes of footage, and it took approximately 3 hours to record and edit it, without any attempt at music or voiceover.
Making it easier to review game footage  would allow more videos to be made, which would then reach a wider audience and create additional revenues for you at zero cost beyond the implementation of the existing CMPE replay feature into the commercial games.
For PBEMs, the save files already exist in the incoming and outgoing email folders. Why not make use of them?
@Hapless

That's profoundly disappointing. The reason I know about CM and bought the games is due to AAR videos on youtube created by the likes of @Hapless
I've created my own videos in a similar style, and it is an incredibly time-intensive task to load and reload saves in order to create recordings. The replay feature present in CMPE would make life an awful lot easier for people like me to create videos. I recently made a video which contained 11 minutes of footage, and it took approximately 3 hours to record and edit it, without any attempt at music or voiceover.
Making it easier to review game footage  would allow more videos to be made, which would then reach a wider audience and create additional revenues for you at zero cost beyond the implementation of the existing CMPE replay feature into the commercial games.
For PBEMs, the save files already exist in the incoming and outgoing email folders. Why not make use of them?
@Hapless

Sensitive topic apparently; but I'm curious why it's not viable for commercial. I missed whenever it was explained in the past and having used it in CMPE it seems to work pretty well.

Glad to see how little you care about your community.
Just because you can't make use of it doesn't mean we the community can't.

I'll believe it when I see it...immensely frustrated at the utter baloney that occurred over the last year.  Next engine update better contain a replay feature or I'm going to scream.

I think the first campaign mission is pretty great. It's brutal, sure, but it's doable with minimal casualties, with a sound approach.

A quick sketch of the first part:



Each element in the Soviet scheme sets the conditions for what follows.

The CRP's first role is to find the enemy units on the near hill. This means taking up forward positions in the treeline, and also calling in fires on the obvious AT positions. Since AT 1 won't have line of sight to where the FSE is coming in, AT 2 is the focus of these preliminary fires.

The FSE will then turn up, and will start to engage targets. The gamism here is that these won't benefit from the spotting contacts from the CRP, but you the player can still do so, and should. The FSE should be able to fight it's way up, with the intention of forming a base of fire on the hill.

When the main body arrives, they have two potential avenues of approach. AoA 1 will be faster, and will push across the open. AoA2 is using the dead ground to follow the same axis as the FSE.

Again, each element enables the following. In this case, the FSE's base of fire includes getting line of sight to AT 1. AT 1 is far too large to deny with fires in total, so you need the ISR picture from the FSE to discover where things are, for the main body to exploit.

There are still some high levels of variance in this scenario - CAS and AA in Combat Mission don't offer much in the way of deep decision making, so the losses there will be fairly random.

So no, I don't think it's a bad scenario. I'm not sure it's a particularly pleasant one, and you may well take extraordinary losses, but you have an enormous force and all the tools you need, and I think it does a good job of making you use those core ideas in terrain that's pretty challenging. I don't think the scenario is without fault, but I've seen a lot of people rage at it, and I just don't think that's remotely deserved.

Oh sure, but there have been plenty of complaints about this since release - it's very rare to hear anything positive about it at all, and I think that's an enormous shame.

This campaign took me a couple months to get through. It's actually the only campaign that has kept my interest through to the end. if I had my way it would have more meeting engagements but it's still a lot of fun. Here's my two cents:
Take your sweet time when you can. You are always attacking into hasty/prepared defense so speed is not necessary. Dismount your infantry and find the tanks. Bring up your FO and drop some artillery on it. Once you figure out their defenses don't be afraid to do some off roading. Do anything you can to bypass the kill zones Don't be afraid to save scum. There are situations where your forward security element will arrive and gun down the enemy without taking a scratch. There will be times when your boys will be slaughtered. There's nothing wrong with rolling the dice over and over to get a good outcome. In the third mission YOU MUST SAVE SCUM. You have two forward observers that arrive with the FSE and if you lose them you WILL lose the mission. Don't be afraid to restart and try again to get a better result. This campaign to me is all about trial and error. There were quite a few times where I threw up my hands and refused to continue but I would go about my day and get a eureka moment and continue on. It's really a great campaign.
 

Fully agree with Domfluff, currently it takes I would estimate 1-2 hours of effort per minute of footage if one were to do an AAR style video, not counting having to spend 1-2 minutes loading every save for each turn in a battalion size fight.

The whole point of the US company team is that it's a combined arms team of specialists. No part of that team can carry things by itself, but in combination there's the tools to deal with everything.

Tanks in the US company are the jack of all trades, and as such they are the key enabler to allow all other parts of the team to do their job. The TOWs should be the main killing power of the company, and the infantry are the main defensive power, but the tanks can set the conditions for the other elements to get into position and get their job done - they don't hold ground as well as the infantry, they don't put out HE or smoke efficiently as the organic mortars, and they don't kill tanks as efficiently as the ATGMs, but they're the enabling glue that binds everything together.

That is until you get to M60 TTS, Abrams and Bradley, but since that's a generational change, that's really a very different discussion, and really the high-end of kit in CMCW can represent an entirely different game.

I've said before, but the replay feature would make content creation orders of magnitude easier, as well as being incredibly useful for learning what actually happened during a game, and improving.
To take the basic example - right now, the "easiest" way to make a CM video is to record you playing the thing, mouse clicks and all. There have been some really good content made this way (@Ithikial_AU), but it does result in 10+ hours worth of videos, most of which is pretty dull. The alternative is something like one of Hapless' AARs, which requires an awful lot more time and effort to put together.

With replays, the lowest-effort video would be perhaps a 30-60 minute replay, shot in one take, with someone narrating live. That's not the best possible CM video, but it raises the bar of the lower end significantly, as well as making the high end significantly easier.

As with many engineering questions, there's no best solution, otherwise everything would be that solution.

I do think it's interesting to consider what armour is actually for. Especially in any kind of modern period, any tank can and will die to a single hit from a suitable anti-tank weapon... so why armour?

Well, the US company team in CMCW is a good example of what armour is useful for. The variant of that in the NTC campaign is: 1x M60A1 platoon, 2x M113 platoons, 2x M150 TOW vehicles and supporting mortars and HQ elements. The M150s are your most important killing power. These have the accuracy, the range and the bunch to take on the heaviest Soviet armour.

So why have tanks? Well, aside from basic concerns like rate of fire, the main reason is that the tanks are mobile, armoured, and have enough of a punch to compete. Ultimately, someone sometimes has to roll the dice - something has to go over the hill first, or rush into contact. Sometimes that can be done with dismounts, but often the pace and size of a battle are too much for dismounted infantry to cope with. You certainly don't want to lead with your TOW vehicles - they'll die to a stiff breeze, and you desperately need them to stay alive.

So tanks give you mobile firepower, and the armour allows you a little more leeway in your actions. If someone has to go first, then it should be the element that stands a chance of not immediately being blown up. This means that for the US, the M60 needs to be heavily protected, it needs to be fairly mobile, and it needs to have some degree of firepower - in the case of the M60, the armour might be the most important concern.

This is in contrast to the BAOR Chieftain, which was central to the British defensive doctrine, which was a lot more static and in depth than the US doctrine of the 1970s. Because of this, firepower was the most important of the triangle for the BAOR. The West Germans instead created depth through counter-attack, and so mobility was their primary concern. The side that can move faster (operationally or tactically) can dictate the shape of the engagement, taking or denying key terrain and being proactive about where and when to fight.

So... no, insofar as the firepower/mobility/protection triangle is useful, I don't think you can rank protection as the most important in all cases. There are going to be situations where this is appropriate, but equipment and doctrine go hand in hand, and one of the really fascinating things about the Cold War was how many different ways there were to achieve the same goal.

Yes, this is correct - or at least by the definitions in FM-100-2-1.

Obviously from the Soviet perspective it doesn't actually matter all that much - the column is coming into contact in echelons, and whether the enemy is in a hasty defence or on the move is mostly just texture.

The important point - or at least the point I was trying to make - is that "meeting engagements" in CM terms tend to match that of traditional tabletop wargaming (say, DBA or the WRG moderns rules), and the desire that players seem to have to have equal forces battling over even terrain, which isn't common historically at all. I get the incentive to do that, but I don't think it tends to show off CM (or any serious simulationist game) at its best.

So I think the Free Whisky video shows the tactical-scale tempo quite well (John's article is good, but it flips between the tactical and operational, which especially for the soviets is quite different). Notably in Free Whisky's video, the US artillery was mostly hitting where I used to be, because even the really fast US call-in times are slower than a BMP.

Otherwise you're just talking about operational context. I definitely don't think that the NATO player is always in the right place (unless you're talking about Quick Battles, which are their own, warped environment, which will definitely have this problem among many others). There are plenty of possible scenarios where you're playing against a US hasty defence or cavalry screen, whilst the main body tries to sort itself out off-map.

 

@Battlefront.com Hey Steve, would you mind checking out the above video?  If you recall I was asking for the replay feature for the Commercial titles last year, this is the sort of content I could make much more efficiently and quickly if we had that feature in the Commercial versions!
 

I recently purchased this game and am thoroughly enjoying it.  It's something new and exciting to me.  I've only played WWII games prior for the past umpteen years, well along with War of Warcraft.  I am pretty sure this will result in me putting all my WWII games on the back burner if ever to return.  The new TO&E, advancements in and of equipment and tactics is just overwhelming and so interesting and to be honest quite exciting. On a sad note however, it seems now that I have the modern wargame bug, I will be buying CMBS as soon as the next patch comes out just to see what all is new in it since the jump from WWII to the Cold War was so great, I can't imagine the jump to the present-day improvements.  
 

@Free Whisky has just released this excellent video on the use of artillery, showing the results of his experimentation: 
Some great stuff, such as how many guns of given calibers are needed to achieve a rate of fire which will suppress a given distance, the distances from impact at which units will be "pinned", the effects of regular smoke versus WP (regular smoke is better at obscuration), and the effects of weather conditions on smoke (turns out only wind affects smoke in CM, rain does not), and the efficacy of general versus personnel fire missions on infantry in the open, woods, buildings, and fortifications.

?????????????????
This is exactly what soviet doctrine is all about - using templated battle plans to enable soviet commanders to get and stay inside of opponents' OODA loops.
This is an example of John Curry using it in professional wargaming settings: 
https://20thcenturywargaming.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/why-cold-war-warsaw-pact-tactics-work-in-wargaming/
It absolutely can be replicated in CM, as Free Whiskey's video shows, and as shown in the CMCW campaigns and scenarios.
If you want to read about Soviet doctrine, take a look at FM 100-2-1. If you can find the 1990 edition, that's better.

I generally feel like your typical cold war QBs should be Attack/Defend.
Even what would be referred to as a Soviet "meeting engagement" isn't the same thing as a "meeting engagement" in CM/wargaming terms, which typically means "an even fight" or something similar. Instead the term refers to an attack from the march.
With the points from an Attack, a Large qb has enough points for a full BTR MRB, with sufficient artillery support, and a huge qb has enough points for a full BMP MRB with some change.
This force was a little cut down from what would be ideal - an entire BMP company was left behind, and I had lass artillery than I'd like. 
Priorities though:
I start with the combined arms, task group formation.
It's important to have a mixture of infantry, armour and air defence. The pair of Shilkas I had here were very important, because the US had some significant air assets which weren't discussed in the video. You always want two.
Dropping a company as "off-map reserve" is fine doctrinally, sinve that force can exploit your success, so that's a reasonable option.
Dropping armour is suspect, you don't get a ton in an MRB, and you need them to do work.
Artillery then is the interesting bit. I've said before that I don't know how to attack with a red battalion with less than three batteries (a battalion, if you like) of artillery (that is 18 tubes of something).
The reason for this is that the battalion should be accepting three tasks, and each task needs to be enabled by artillery support.
Each battery should have a single FO.
The 120mm mortars are organics to the battalion, so should be taken - since the call-in times for those are reasonable, in my fires plan I often leave those as a "reserve", ready to be reactive, rather than proactive.
Next up are your standard regimental artillery, the 122mm self propelled gun battalion, and divisional artillery, the 152mm self propelled gun battalion and the battalion of rocket artillery.
The lower level assets will have less boom, greater rate of fire, and faster call-ins.
122mm should be your default in CMCW (in cmbs this is now the 152mm). A medium mission on max duration lasts something like 12-15 minutes, which is a lot of rounds going downrange, and a lot of denial.
The 152s have significantly more boom, and a mission there can last 30 minutes total, so is ideal for denying key terrain, or digging out handprints.
Rocket artillery is a specialised tool, and it's hard to use well in a cm context. Ideally it's doing counter-battery fire, or it's targeting fixed positions and hoping to actually kill things, where the other two can aim to suppress or deny. The best generic use-case I've found for it is to target an urban area - Soviets tend to find urban combat especially difficult, so a couple of BM-21 barrage can help a lot.
All of the other artillery is more highly specialised (the big mortars are bunker-busters, for example), so should mostly be ignored.
Ideally, I'd take the battalion mortars, and three batteries of artillery, possibly in a mixed load, with their intended tasks defined well in advance.
Artillery have four jobs - suppression, denial, destruction and obscuration, and each of those assets is good at different things.
In the above QB I have battalion mortars and two batteries of 122mm - less than I'd like, but still hitting that minimum of three groups of artillery.
One nice thing about thinking in threes is that you can continuously adjust and move around these fires having two hitting things, whilst a third adjusts in on to the next step.
One thing that you do see in the video is this continual adjustment of fires - the tempo gains that I'd made allowed the fires to be adjusting whilst free whisky was reacting, so they were able to start landing when he was just getting into position.
Likewise, the same advantages in tempo meant that I was frequently ahead of where his artillery was falling - he was forced to react to things that were by now firmly in the past.
 
 
 
 

Interesting article re sov tactics.  Thanks.

?????????????????
This is exactly what soviet doctrine is all about - using templated battle plans to enable soviet commanders to get and stay inside of opponents' OODA loops.
This is an example of John Curry using it in professional wargaming settings: 
https://20thcenturywargaming.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/why-cold-war-warsaw-pact-tactics-work-in-wargaming/
It absolutely can be replicated in CM, as Free Whiskey's video shows, and as shown in the CMCW campaigns and scenarios.
If you want to read about Soviet doctrine, take a look at FM 100-2-1. If you can find the 1990 edition, that's better.

Glad to have helped!
I think you will find that the M60A1 and M60A3 are more than a match for the T-62. Not a cakewalk, especially considering all the other assets the Soviets get (ATGMs, artillery, etc) but certainly much less of a "Panther vs Sherman" dynamic.

So this is why CMCW is set when it is - this is the turning point, where the US started to get it's act together and accelerate past the Soviets, for good. It's a really well chosen period - many Cold War games are set in 1985 or so, and if this was set in the sixties the Soviet juggernaut might very well have been overwhelming.

There were a number of reasons for this, one of the big ones was microprocessor technology, but essentially the US moves from stopgap after stopgap, to finally (finally) producing Abrams and Bradley, and moving a generation ahead. That advance, combined with the crumbling Soviet Union, was something that was never caught up to, and this is to a large extent still true.

For what it's worth, I think that CMCW is best played at 1980 or so (and in QB terms, with Strict rarity). The later you go, the more the game looks like Shock Force, and the less subtlety you'll see in the interactions.

T-62 being the most common is true for the core game. If and when we see BAOR forces we should see the best Soviet armour - Chieftain was traditionally the scariest NATO tank, so the heavier stuff was levied against it, on the best tank terrain. If and when we see East German forces, we're more likely to see more T-55s in play.

Love seeing Cold War get more videos, especially ones of such high quality. Loved the combination of graphics (really well done by the way) gameplay and commentary! I'll echo others in saying that Free Whiskey continues to raise his own bar with each video he releases. Just really well done stuff. Plus, I appreciated the short clip from my tactical doctrine training scenarios of the T-64s all firing on line. Great shot! The commentary from Dom is great as well! Very informative, clear, and well spoken. A fantastic overview of the fundamentals of Soviet tactical doctrine. I can see this video along with the one Hapless did a year ago being go to shares for any newcomers asking about the basics of how the Soviets should fight. 
Honestly one of the most satisfying things I have seen from Cold War is how much intelligent discussion it has generated. Talking about concepts such as Soviet doctrine, US Active Defense and AirLand Battle, higher level stuff, tactical intricacies, etc. Its all been great to see. Dare I say that CMCW might be the high brow CM title.

I asked Domfluff to help me out in creating a video about Soviet military doctrine in the Cold War era, and how those principles can be applied in a Combat Mission scenario/QB. He played a game against me as the Soviet Army, gave me an arse kicking, and then sat down with me and explained why he did what he did. The result is the video down below!