badipaddress

GL and R2V continue to make FI great and so unlike any other CM.
He's welcome to his opinion, but it's hard to imagine anyone finding it meh.

I'm a big fan of CM:RT and play it more than the other titles I own. There's just something about it that made it my home base for CM. Here's an interesting, recent AAR showing a veteran Western Front CMer's first H2H battle in CM:RT:
 

Well, that's kinda hard to argue with innit? Stop now or I'll never buy another Combat Mission!

That's exactly my issue with CMBS - all probable additions to the Black Sea theatre have already been done in CMSF; and those not already in CMSF are even less plausible in CMBS.
Sure I get that, I enjoy CMBS a great deal as well - a well equipped OPFOR is a fun challenge; but that's exactly my point.
The way I see it, we can either have CMBS play catch-up to the tune of 3-4 modules ... or get a single new ("well equipped") OPFOR combatant for CMSF and make a solid title even better. Russia is where my vote is, but Iran would indeed make a solid addition as well.
Additionally, playing an interesting BLUFOR, like the Dutch or the Canadians, against a Russianesque and UNCON combatant seems a lot more interesting than commanding Yet Another Stryker Battalion(tm), even if it's against a "real" Russian force.
To be completely honest, I feel the issue of "geographic setting" to be of little consequence. At least to my mind, it is purely an aesthetic issue, one which can be easily solved with a texture pack. To illustrate that point - I have more play-time in CMSF(1) re-textured to look like CMBS, than I do in actual CMBS.
Perhaps that's just me, but I'd rather see a single modern title with a half-dozen modules, than a half-dozen titles with a single module each. 😉

I'm not sure audience you're targeting with this review. You start as if you're addressing those already invested into the Combat Mission franchise and familiar with Battlefront's past publication practices:
But then you carry on to explain Combat Mission as if to someone completely new to the series, while making a reference to something fairly obscure ... which "War on Terror" are we talking about here - the 15 year old PC game, the 14 year old board game, Labyrinth another 10 year old board game? 
I do agree with this wholeheartedly:
Without a doubt the biggest reason to own the game on Steam.
Every time I come back to Combat Mission after a year or two break, it seems my PCs hardware has changed enough to invalidate all of my activations. Can't find serial keys, login to web account, can't remember password, reset password, go to activate, out of activations, submit a ticket for a reset.
Granted, CM series is not for those lacking patience, but hardly something the mass market will accept when it takes a day or two to get a game running.
 
 

If you haven’t played any Combat Mission games then it may help to know that there are four types of battles you can have:
 
1. Premade battles (“scenarios”) that allow you to pick one or any side and have forces pre-selected. You read the conditions, forces available and objectives and attempt to fulfill the latter to win. They can range in size from a few squads to a regiment. 

2. Campaigns - these are an interconnected series of what is mentioned above in 1 with outcomes of each battle determining various things for the upcoming battle.
3. Battles you create using the scenario editor - these are like 1 above, but you are making it. 
 
4. Quick Battles - these are battles where you can choose the purchase points for each side and then either specifically set all the conditions or let them be random, including map choice. Here you can still set battle size (or let it be random) so once more you can have battles involving a platoon and a few tanks, to something much much bigger, wIth two battalions or more per side. There are a fair number of customization options so that you can decide the experience, morale, equipment supply for each side, etc. This is my favourite mode, I rarely play anything else. Thousands of hours of fun and still haven’t exhausted all the possibilities. 

Best to treat enemy held buildings like landmines:

If you can go round it, go round it.
If you can't go round it... blow it up before you go near it.
If you can't blow it up... shoot the crap out of it in the hope that you'll hit something important that stops it going off.

Clearing the building is the equivalent of stepping on the landmine- don't do it unless you literally have no other choice.

I can't talk about CMRT basegame because none of my scenarios are in it, but I've got four scenarios in the coming Fire and Rubble module they lean heavily on the AI staging large complex assaults.
I've joked on the Beta board that the hardest part of scenario design is doing the stuff nobody is likely to see, because players tend to choose the active side against relatively inactive defenders. If they played the defender instead they'd see the AI mounting a formidable offensive.

If I was showing off this game I would make it count. You gotta have great first impressions in this market.

@Wodin, don't take @Artkin's comments to heart.....Selling a review of CM to a bunch of ardent CM fans (& self-appointed experts) like us is never going to easy!
I reckon you did just fine.....More (& more exciting) pictures will always help though. 

Yeah, absolutely - it's enough to look at the state of their heavy and personal equipment during the 2008 conflict in Georgia. It was not much better than what they had back in the 90s - they won despite the equipment, not because of it.
Even CMBS is being very generous with equipment in some cases - T-90AM, which is featured so prominently in that version of 2017, has just started trickling in to the top tier units earlier this year.
I would, however, argue that fancy-schmancy-equipmenttm is not the predominant reason for adding a combatant to a CM title. After all, Italians do exits in both CMx1 and CMx2
 
Hesco barriers - sure, but that's just a fancy sandbag that a backhoe can fill.
However, I'm not sure adding Russians to CMSF inherently requires occupation duty units or equipment; not any more so than a late-WW2 title requires "occupied population logistics", shall we call it.
I imagine the initial thrust would focus on taking over airfields and ports - not civilian centers were NATO is conducting 'occupation duty'.
 
My feeling exactly - hearing that they're working on USMC for CMBS makes me cringe, if I'm honest.
I realize this is going to be a segue from the topic at hand, but as much as I like how the new CMx2 modules add depth, I equally dislike how the multiple titles shatter the breadth.
CMx1 worked out pretty well, once all of the titles were out - CMBO was the first one you'd only play if you really wanted the Tiger-II; CMBB was the East Front; and CMAK was 95% of WW2 west of Warsaw start-to-finish. 
Where as in CMx2 I struggle to understand why CMFB is a title and not a module for CMBN - the two share about 80~90% of TO&E and are separated by less than 200km of land and two months of time.
I suppose in the same vein I struggle to find a reason for CMBS to exist - especially if they already knew CMSF2 was going to be developed. I understand that it is not feasible for CMSF to span a decade and two continents worth of combatants; but considering the conflict is hypothetical, perhaps I just wish CMSF was a bit more of a sandbox (not a desert pun, I promise).

Purchased games should always download as the most current version.
When you fire it up, it should say v2.14 in the lower right corner.

I know that the concept of this game relates late 2000s. And I know it is about Western action against Syrian tyranic regime. But for the sake of the game it would good to add one more module. 

Adding Russia to this game would bring a new challenge - a new life to the game. 
 
It would give opportunity to simulate battles between NATO, US and Russia. It would be more up to date and I think that this would lead to more copies being sold. 

This game is already huge and at this point adding one module would not hurt (in my opinion). Just think about all those missions, and campaigns that will be created by the community. 

I don't think that the development team would need to work on anything - they could simply port some (not all) units from the CMBS. 

It would give us all a chance to simulate clashes of a different level. 
What do you thing @Bootie @Erwin @Battlefront.com? 

P.S. Do not get me wrong - I am NOT supporting russian involvement in Syria. All I'm saying is that it would add some spiciness for the OPFOR side and it would be a nice for the sake of battles. 
Again - I'm not supporting russian actions in Syria as well as I'm strongly against tyrannic regime of bashar assad (not going to waste a capital letters for his name). 
So I guess my question is - is this possible in theory to see another module for this game since it is one of the biggest games in CM history. Thank you. 
P.S. P.S. All the photos that I've provided here as visualization are provided for supporting the idea that I've described here. I'm not charmed or excited by any of those images. Those are visualizations and I'm NOT supporting actions of russia and its puppets in Syria. 
P.S. P.S. P.S. In case if Russia as an idea would not work - would the development team consider adding Iran (due to recent escalations) as an alternative? Why? To have more advanced and more challenging enemy to confront while fighting on blue side against red side. 
Thank you for your time, comments and thoughts gentlemen. 

Not going to lie, a Russian module for CMSF2 would be a tremendous addition - especially now that the title is released on Steam.
Sure we have CMBS, which can pretty well portray most hypothetical modern day US-v-Russia conflicts, but I think it's save to say that CMBS is now a shelved dead-end product. We are approaching six years since release without as much as even a hit at a single module.
CMBS saltiness aside, I do find CMSF to be more compelling - in both the setting and the variety of OPFOR available. Personally, I'd rather see a 4th module for CMSF than a 1st module for CMBS.
As far as the argument that the Russian appearance in CMSF would "conflict with the lore" - well, that's the beauty of an alternate-history setting - you get the write any narrative to fit your end-goal.
Seems like a fairly reasonable scenario for the Russo-Georgian war to escalate into a Russo-NATO conflict about a year after the events in CMSF. In turn that could bring Russia to Syria in an attempt to re-instate the original Syrian regime, in order to solidify their allies in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
No re-write of the existing CMSF lore, simply a continuation of the original time line past the initial NATO invasion and into NATO occupation. NATO would be portrayed mostly on the defensive and counter-attack; where as Russian forces would be portrayed as a force-multiplier of whatever is left of Syrian military. Perhaps not so much "Syrian military" as much as bands of UNCONS, but that's besides the point.
I would also like to echo some of the things OP is saying (about CMSF:Russia, not so much the extensive apologism of real-life Russian involvement in Syria 🤨):
 

Blocking water supply and/or electric power is not the way to win hearts and minds of the Crimean people though.