wyskass

This reminded me of another mistake/reminder. Being too focused on the objective, discounting other possible important enemy positions, and getting flanked.

Exploitation after a breakthrough in a major operation would be its own separate scenario in Combat Mission. But an infantry company pulling back from defending a village would be under pressure from the moment they start pulling out to the few hundred meters they may need to pull back in order to break contact. That is well within the scope of a single scenario.

Well, in practice I wasn't willing to continue with losing multiple vehicles, so "willing abandoned the objectives" and went to bed. LOL. End of game end of battle. Mostly a joke but in effect it incentivized my withdrawal from conflict. But the idea of having retreat choices is quite interesting, as a way to disengage and engage in more favorable conditions later. Does the existing "surrender" option not equate to retreat, by not meeting objective and triggering a different following scenario? Would be odd to surrender to a defender you're assaulting though.
To the point of competitive vs war movie observers.. It's interesting to consider that some people can disassociate with their actions to enjoy watching it as a movie. In my case, I wouldn't call it competitiveness as much as meeting intentions of actions. It's not so much to "win" or beat another, but to enjoy the satisfaction of well planned and executed action. Like designing and building something that works well. Without getting too philosophical, are we playing to feel like being in a real battle, or as exploring outcomes of different actions as how real militaries use war games. The latter may be enjoyable in the learning aspect itself where the "mistakes" are just another explored path. So maybe that's along similar lines of the war movie analogy
As to tutorials and guides, I tend to prefer to read rather than watch tutorials, due to controlling my own faster pace past what I know, and slower to think about what's new. But I'll check out the ones suggested. 
It's also interesting to hear about considering WW2 titles in the series. I've played HOI4 (quite different domain than CM of course) with WW2 and generally know more history about it so wanted to go with more modern stuff to complement CMANO for tactical level. It actually sounds like going further back in time to WW2 rather than Black Sea may be better to improving under my circumstances.  Black Sea sounds brutal.
It seems that maybe it's the random aspects of things such as artillery risk as well as the integral part of unknowns of enemy, which is more amplified than most all other games, increasing frustration.

You'd need to do more than just incentivize the player to take/hold their objectives with minimal losses (that's pretty much how it works right now). You'd need to find a way to incentivize the player to eventually choose force preservation over taking/holding their objectives. For one, it would need to be possible for the defender to retreat. That means exit zones would need to be present in every scenario. An attack against a defender that fights to the last man is pretty much guaranteed to suffer unusually high losses. Beyond making retreat possible, I don't know how you incentivize the player to actually do it. You might be able to program the AI to call off an attack or abandon a defense under the right circumstances. But how do you incentivize a player to willingly abandon their objectives?

That kind of strikes at my main issue with CM campaigns: not that I'm competitive, but that you're so in the dark about what the consequences will be of anything but a total victory. I'd be fine with leaving walkover on some missions (e.g. Into The Valley in the Task Force Thunder campaign) because I regard them as unrealistic to even start due to previous losses, what I'm tasked with achieving vis-à-vis what force I have, etc.
Losing every now and then would be less of an issue if there wasn't an unknown risk that doing so would end the campaign in a loss.

For what it is worth, relating to the OP, I am with a number of folks here, expect to take some casualties regardless of side being played, try to suck it up when I make a poor choice and my pixeltruppen pay the price, but occasionally do replay a turn 'if the game did something wrong' e.g. I improperly accounted for some aspect of how the engine was going to deal with a specific situation.
I find most of my casualties are infantry in infantry fights, built up areas, heavy forest, and that when I am honest with myself it is pretty rare for, 'the game to do something wrong' that I wasn't aware of and already knew how to counter.

I never replay turns that don't go well for me. My feeling is that if I make a mistake in real life I'd have no choice but to live with it, so I force myself to live with any mistakes I make in-game (the point is to recreate real war after all, at least as much as the technology allows). I do save every turn, but that's mostly because I like to go back and re-watch old battles from time to time, and because I like to imagine that one day I'll go back and make Hapless-style videos of them (not that it's terribly likely that I'll ever get around to it). When I do make a costly mistake I console myself with the knowledge that even the professionals blunder from time to time. I do my best to recover from the mistake, make the most of the troops and resources I have left after the mistake, and try to understand why that particular set of actions was a mistake under those particular circumstances so I'll do better in the future.
Casualties are inevitable in war. I'm playing through the WW2 titles right now. That was a high intensity peer vs peer war, so the casualties that I'm experiencing in the scenarios I'm playing these days are higher than what could reasonably be expected in CMSF2. CMSF2 is still high intensity, but much more asymmetric. So the NATO player can usually expect to take fewer casualties. But even in CMSF it's rare that I take no casualties. With some skill you may be blessed with the occasional zero-casualty mission, but that will not be the norm. I'd advise aiming for lopsided casualties, rather than zero casualties (obviously zero casualties is best if you can manage it, but it's usually not realistic). In CMFI I'm happy if I can get 2:1 (maybe 4:1 if I'm fighting the Italians), but in CMSF2 you should probably be getting at least 10:1. If 10:1 gets to be too easy for you, then try shooting for 20:1 or higher. Aim for a loss exchange rate that's high enough to be challenging, but low enough to be attainable. Keeping in mind that some scenarios will be more challenging than others.

I recall an anecdote. At some point following operation Cobra Patton's advancing army lost contact with the Germans. So he turned to his subordinate and told him 'Take that jeep and drive down the road til someone shoots you, then report their location back to me', or words to that effect. Patton's troops didn't like him much because he tended to conduct his battles like a CM player. 😬

Both the above solve 90% of the challenges.  In CM1 one could make a lot of errors and still have an enjoyable game and win.  CM2 is MUCH less forgiving and requires a higher skill level.  CM2 can be a lot more boring than CM1 as many times one needs to recon and wait (and wait) for arty and air to do its job and only get into the "fun" assault stage in the last quarter of the Mission.  It depends on the skill of the designer as to whether the level of "fun" is maintained all through the mission.  

Exposure times and angles.
Where would you put ATGMs if you were the enemy? Get eyes on those areas and if you have the assets hit them with arty or airstrikes. Minimize exposure of your vehicles by moving them down covered routes and don't expose them long enough to be spotted, aimed at, and have ATGMs guided onto you. Suppress spotted enemy elements and those 'really good' locations before moving into the open. You'll still lose units, but fewer of them. Don't advance into obvious kill zones w/o stacking the deck in your favor. 
H

Even doing things ‘correctly’ bad stuff still happens. I thought I’d eliminated all enemy units in this vid clip. Moved up a BIFV to dismount some guys to clear woods. A key holed unsupressed, unidentified RPG 29 team did their job. 
sometimes you just have to roll with the punches. Doing saves to eliminate poor decisions or unlucky events teaches bad habits IMO - which will bite you on the arse the first PvP game you play. 

Generally, the same tactic works for all CM2 games.  Recon and lead with inf.  Locate the enemy's primary threats, ATGM's or ATG's (more WW2).  Kill them with arty.  Then the AFV's can blast away at buildings and troops.  In CM2 the tanks seem rather delicate.  While we read about geat tank assaults, leading with AFV's etgc. designers usually make that a suicidal tactic since the designers create defenses specifically to make that tactic suicidal. 
It seems common that one spends perhaps 75%+ of the game prepping the battlefield and the last 10%-20% actually rolling out the assault.  So, patience is critical. - much more so than in CM1 games.

Same as @Bulletpoint, I used to replay frequently when I felt that the game hadn't been "fair" to me. Ultimately though I've realised and accepted that that is a bad attitude to have to the game, not least because it takes the fun away. The only times I save and replay is when e.g. bugs/engine limitations cause absurd events or certain missions pressure me to follow unreasonable paths.
E.g. "Into the valley" in the Task Force Thunder campaign: there's no way on Earth that a tank company supported by a single understrength mechanised infantry platoon with zero indirect fires or air support would go ahead and push through a textbook "ATGM ambush" valley known to be brimming with enemy SF equipped with state of the art ATGMs. But the briefing didn't inform me of what the consequences would be for forfeiting the mission instead of completing it (would I lose the campaign? Would the units in the mission be delayed and not available later on or even be lost for the duration of the campaign, or would they find another path "off screen" between missions?), and too much depended on clunky/unpredictable game mechanics to make it work, so I replayed to get around those issues without using it too gain unfair advantages, and so it worked out enjoyably though time consumingly.
The Cold War training campaign has also helped get me into the right mindset/"role play" for especially Shock Force: even if you're playing as a modern Western army pitted against a third world, third rate military, that doesn't mean that you would be sloppy IRL; you'd both train as if that enemy is very capable, and behave as if they were. And even then, you're going to lose some people every now and again.

Sometimes in a campaign, I will take so heavy casualties that it makes it impossible to win the mission or even continue with the campaign (for example, key AT units lost, etc). What I do is not to reload the turn before it all went wrong, but to force myself to start the mission over from the beginning. Maybe it sounds masochistic, but I will then avoid targeting enemy positions I revealed in my last playthrough, at least not before I properly spot them.
Not saying my way is the "best" way of playing, but just my two DKK.

Playing CM requires a certain degree of fatalism. Bad things are going to happen, sometimes its going to be your fault, and oftentimes it was preventable. You just have to accept it.
My advice playing CM (though I haven't said it for awhile) is to play as though YOU are one of the soldiers on the ground. Would I stand up and walk across an open field into the teeth of un-suppressed mg fire? Heck no! Then don't expect your pixeltruppen to do it either.
CMSF2 is a snapshot of history, of a time and a (fictional) war where minimal Blue casualties are expected and a victory with a high body count is considered a grave political disaster. You often receive stiff penalties in-game for exceeding max allowed Blue casualties. You're supposed to feel bad about it. Compare it to CM Red Thunder where life is cheap.

Yes.
Yes. In war, there will be casualties, even with the best planning.
No.
But I understand it can be really frustrating. In the beginning, I also reloaded every time something bad happened, like an unexpected barrage, or friendly fire. But then I realised that it's much more enjoyable to take these things in my stride and try my best to continue with what I have left, trying not to lose my cool.
So I began only reloading when something bad happened that wasn't due to my own decisions. For example, a tank refusing to go straight from A to B through good terrain but making some long weird detour for no reason and getting destroyed. Or troops refusing to enter a house through the back door, instead running all the way through streets and getting cut down.
I also found this way of playing made me better at the game. Which is an advantage against a human player where you can't just reload. I played several PBEM games where my opponent started out very sensible, but then there would be some mass casualty event on his side, and all of a sudden, it was clear that he got frustrated and started giving all kinds of risky orders that just made things worse. It's easy to fall into the trap of "oh man, I just lost a half platoon to that barrage, so the game is over.. I better gamble now".
But what he doesn't know is that I also took lots of losses. So we're actually still equally matched, but it's his rash decisions that end up costing him the game.

It is usually quite possible to accomplish CMSF missions with minimal casualties.  It takes practice and an understanding of how the game system works, and that takes experience.  CMBS is much worse in that one error can cost you the game.  I found CMSF be be a huge "shock" after playing CM1 games for 7-8 years.  The CM2 games are all very "sensitive" and errors are heavily punished.

In general, I don't try to play thru w/zero casualties. I will redo turns if I make a bonehead mistake, but I generally only save each 5 minutes or so. 
Suppression is the key. You've got a lot of ammo, use it on spotted enemy positions & suspected enemy positions, and on places where you would put a position.
Suppression lets you move, movement gets you better positions to destroy the enemy. 
As far as the mortars go, the OPFOR call in times are glacial. Try to keep moving faster than the Syrian FOs can call or adjust fire. Move by routes where enemy FOs can't see into. Put artillery or airstrikes on those spots where you would put an FO. 
H

Some clearly love it but I'm not a fan to be honest so don't feel alone - give me armour and a lot of room to play around with and I'm as happy as a happy thing.

Tow/atgm vehicles are a difficult topic in Combat Mission if you want to shoot & scoot. 
In CM as long as you have a move order set, the Atgm will be deactivated. You can see it in the status panel of the vehicle too. The TOW launcher will be greyed out as long as you have some sort of movement order applied. Regardless if the unit is on Pause, it will not fire the atgm. Secondary/additional weapons will work though, if the vehicle has any (e.g. M2 Bradley). 
Realistically you can't fire most if not all tube launched Atgm on the move, so that's the way the game tries to portray this handicap,though it does it not perfectly. 
A work around would be that you give your vehicle a, for example, 30sec pause at the start of the turn, behind some cover and let it move to it's firing position. You should time it so that the crew has at least 10 seconds (or more) of spotting time in their new position at the end of the turn. 
In the next turn you can then decide if you want to move back/further or let the vehicle engage a spotted target. 
Usually the tac ai decides to back of and pop smoke (when available) on its own if they fired all their tubes and a threat is still present. 
Though that counts only for spotted threats of course. 
 
The only vehicles that can do a shoot and scoot with atgm are the ones that are able to barrel launch them, I believe. Bmp 3, T72, M60 A2 (Starship), to name a few. 

So installed Acrobat Pro, and now am able to get perfect OCR. There does seem to be a maximum size so the elevations grid needed to be broken into 4 pieces.
To get good results, it was also required to use the 2nd closest zoom in the editor to space out the elevation numbers more, to indicate the distinct 2 digit numbers for OCR, so as not to pick up just all single digits.
It only took a couple minutes to delete the buildings, then at that zoom and my resolution, was 12 screenshots to stitch. Then process to black and white, black on white background, then cut into 4. 
Each grid png, opened in Acrobat and running OCR, allowed direct output to excel and each number and grid placements was exactly correct. Then I combined the 4 pieced into one spreadsheet and ran the color formatting as originally.
As suggested, there may be a better process with some coding to make it easier to batch a bunch of the maps.
 

So installed Acrobat Pro, and now am able to get perfect OCR. There does seem to be a maximum size so the elevations grid needed to be broken into 4 pieces.
To get good results, it was also required to use the 2nd closest zoom in the editor to space out the elevation numbers more, to indicate the distinct 2 digit numbers for OCR, so as not to pick up just all single digits.
It only took a couple minutes to delete the buildings, then at that zoom and my resolution, was 12 screenshots to stitch. Then process to black and white, black on white background, then cut into 4. 
Each grid png, opened in Acrobat and running OCR, allowed direct output to excel and each number and grid placements was exactly correct. Then I combined the 4 pieced into one spreadsheet and ran the color formatting as originally.
As suggested, there may be a better process with some coding to make it easier to batch a bunch of the maps.
 

Yes, thanks, I did see that when searching about mapping. It's just that I'm looking for the reverse direction process. I haven't yet needed to code anything for this, and wasn't trying not getting into a project, but yes there maybe be some useful code around data to editor interface that could be used the other way. It promised to be working well with a simpler process, until I started with another map and the OCR fell apart for some reason, I haven't yet identified. 
 

I've always found it a bit annoying to have to probe with the Target tool in game and fly around near the ground to get an idea of the elevation topography. Working with topography is obviously a key aspect of tactical movement and positioning. Having access to good maps are an important capability and the whole NGA exists for mapping. One could argue that a proper topo is more realistic that being able to fly over the terrain at ground level as is normal in the game or use target tool from distant waypoints.
Anyway, I couldn't find any existing visualization tools for CM maps, so generated it myself. My PC is out of order right now with all my good mapping and graphics software tools but have been able to make a basic topo on my Mac. So am sharing the process for those who are interested.
The example here is from CMSF2 Semper Fi Syria, Marines campaign, from scenario 5 - Breakout. For my purposes this is enough to greatly improve situational awareness and planning. In standard green to brown topo colors of increasing elevation. Overlay on this are roads and buildings plus wooded and farmed (mud) areas for reference. You can see a few small rises in the eastern starting side which are enough for a hull down, or elevated viewing position, as well as better hidden areas. I missed noticing a couple of these useful features with just in game visual.
 
 
Workflow
This was more a proof of concept and some increased automation can make this process faster, and can be improved with better tools. Took most of the day, but much of the time for experimenting with different tools. Should be able to get a map done under 2 hours.
1. Open map in Scenario Editor and turn on cell elevation numbers display. Take screenshots of the elevation numbers. This map took 9 to cover area but higher resolution minimizes the number of files to stitch. A full screen screenshot, lets you crop these to the same size all at once for easier matching
2. Stitch these together. I experimented with automatic stitching tools, but just ended up using Gimp manually. It's a grid so easy to line up. Photoshop may be better and maybe could do auto stitch. Maybe 30 minutes to stitch and clean.
3. Color and contrast. Using Gimp (Photoshop) process the image to end up with just high contrast B&W numbers and nothing else. Select by color, invert, remove background, fill with black. This map was 8000x6400 image of a clean numbers grid.
4. OCR. I tried a few different tools, but Google Docs was by far the most accurate. Opening the image in Docs, creates a text file with all the numbers. Excel Data from Picture was unusable, which while similar number recognition, had no sense in how it assigned numbers to cells, without seeing the obvious pattern of spaces as suggestive of cells breaks. Some other online tools were worthless. I was surprised how with the cleanest possible black and white image with a grid of numbers so many OCR systems utterly failed. Yet Google Docs was so accurate.
5. Clean data. I loaded the data in a good text editor BBEdit (TextWrangler) to run Regex to find any errors and fix. You want to find anything that isn't 2 digits and a space. Looking at the image and data numbers, you can then determine the number of cells in a row. Then run a regex (grep) replace to break up into lines. End up with clean good data of the maps elevation at this point. This could be tedious if certain errors aren't anticipated. I found just a could small missing segments, but maybe hard to spot to correct.
6. Import into Excel. To create the graphic, I just set a conditional format Color Scale rule which colors from min to max values from Green->Yellow->Brown or any scale you like. Format the cell value numbers to not show. This map have 200x250 cell values.
7. Combine with features. Again took a screenshot of the resulting excel visualization, and back in Gimp (Photoshop), process the other terrain image to just extract roads and building. This was combined with the topo with pleasing and informative layer blending. This would be according to personal preference as to what map features to combine. I've used QGIS a bit which is a real mapping tool but would be overkill here, and again on my PC.
Some of the intermediate working files are too large (Gimp xcf) to upload but shared them here:  (Would have preferred PSDs)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12PESzndNEc76ZaF7Zhi58yKPsFE1YOOb?usp=share_link
 

I've always found it a bit annoying to have to probe with the Target tool in game and fly around near the ground to get an idea of the elevation topography. Working with topography is obviously a key aspect of tactical movement and positioning. Having access to good maps are an important capability and the whole NGA exists for mapping. One could argue that a proper topo is more realistic that being able to fly over the terrain at ground level as is normal in the game or use target tool from distant waypoints.
Anyway, I couldn't find any existing visualization tools for CM maps, so generated it myself. My PC is out of order right now with all my good mapping and graphics software tools but have been able to make a basic topo on my Mac. So am sharing the process for those who are interested.
The example here is from CMSF2 Semper Fi Syria, Marines campaign, from scenario 5 - Breakout. For my purposes this is enough to greatly improve situational awareness and planning. In standard green to brown topo colors of increasing elevation. Overlay on this are roads and buildings plus wooded and farmed (mud) areas for reference. You can see a few small rises in the eastern starting side which are enough for a hull down, or elevated viewing position, as well as better hidden areas. I missed noticing a couple of these useful features with just in game visual.
 
 
Workflow
This was more a proof of concept and some increased automation can make this process faster, and can be improved with better tools. Took most of the day, but much of the time for experimenting with different tools. Should be able to get a map done under 2 hours.
1. Open map in Scenario Editor and turn on cell elevation numbers display. Take screenshots of the elevation numbers. This map took 9 to cover area but higher resolution minimizes the number of files to stitch. A full screen screenshot, lets you crop these to the same size all at once for easier matching
2. Stitch these together. I experimented with automatic stitching tools, but just ended up using Gimp manually. It's a grid so easy to line up. Photoshop may be better and maybe could do auto stitch. Maybe 30 minutes to stitch and clean.
3. Color and contrast. Using Gimp (Photoshop) process the image to end up with just high contrast B&W numbers and nothing else. Select by color, invert, remove background, fill with black. This map was 8000x6400 image of a clean numbers grid.
4. OCR. I tried a few different tools, but Google Docs was by far the most accurate. Opening the image in Docs, creates a text file with all the numbers. Excel Data from Picture was unusable, which while similar number recognition, had no sense in how it assigned numbers to cells, without seeing the obvious pattern of spaces as suggestive of cells breaks. Some other online tools were worthless. I was surprised how with the cleanest possible black and white image with a grid of numbers so many OCR systems utterly failed. Yet Google Docs was so accurate.
5. Clean data. I loaded the data in a good text editor BBEdit (TextWrangler) to run Regex to find any errors and fix. You want to find anything that isn't 2 digits and a space. Looking at the image and data numbers, you can then determine the number of cells in a row. Then run a regex (grep) replace to break up into lines. End up with clean good data of the maps elevation at this point. This could be tedious if certain errors aren't anticipated. I found just a could small missing segments, but maybe hard to spot to correct.
6. Import into Excel. To create the graphic, I just set a conditional format Color Scale rule which colors from min to max values from Green->Yellow->Brown or any scale you like. Format the cell value numbers to not show. This map have 200x250 cell values.
7. Combine with features. Again took a screenshot of the resulting excel visualization, and back in Gimp (Photoshop), process the other terrain image to just extract roads and building. This was combined with the topo with pleasing and informative layer blending. This would be according to personal preference as to what map features to combine. I've used QGIS a bit which is a real mapping tool but would be overkill here, and again on my PC.
Some of the intermediate working files are too large (Gimp xcf) to upload but shared them here:  (Would have preferred PSDs)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12PESzndNEc76ZaF7Zhi58yKPsFE1YOOb?usp=share_link