Centurian52

I didn't get any bayonet training when I went through basic in the winter of 2012/2013. But I was also a POG (IT Specialist), so I still can't shed any light on what the combat arms guys were up to at that point in time.

Might as well start trying to assess their performance right now. The post-war information space is still going to be very muddy, just for different reasons. You still have well informed people disagreeing about how this or that platform performed in WW2. History is a complicated and difficult business, and it never gets easier. We get better informed about historical events as time passes because historians have been putting in the hard work of figuring out what happened for longer, not because the sources became more reliable. There's no harm in starting that hard work now.

Trenches have been used in every single war (that I can think of) since WW1, and many, many wars prior to WW1. Edit: And bayonets were still considered an important weapon at least as late as WW2, and were still retained in many armies until very recently (still a potential backup weapon, and some armies still maintain that bayonet training is a useful way of instilling aggressiveness). It's not so hard to see why bayonets were retained as late as WW2. Imagine you have assaulted an enemy trench or are storming a house and you find yourself in close contact with an enemy soldier. You have a bolt-action rifle, and have missed your first shot. Is it faster and less risky to work the bolt to chamber a fresh round or to thrust your rifle forward to stab the enemy with your bayonet? Stabbing is probably faster and safer in this situation. It's harder to imagine why bayonets were retained for so long after WW2. If you are in the same situation, but you have a semi-automatic or assault rifle, then the faster and safer option is probably to just squeeze the trigger again. So you would think that semi-automatic rifles would have been the final nail in the coffin for bayonets. But, as has been pointed out, bayonets don't run out of ammo.

I wouldn't worry about that. That is, at the earliest, still 17 months away (a new President would take office in January 2025). It's basically a given that the war will go into 2024, but I'm still hopeful that the Russians will be beaten by 2025 (at the very least, they will be in even worse shape than they are right now). And considering that this is mostly a bipartisan issue, there is a fair to decent chance that a new president would still support aiding Ukraine anyway.

Frankly most of what actually distinguishes ethnic groups these days has far more to do with culture than genes. There is certainly an implication that it has something to do with genes, but that's probably just residual 19th century and earlier racism (there was a time when "nation" and "race" were very closely linked concepts). Ethnic Russians are simply those Russians that the Russians consider to be the most Russian. I believe the highest concentrations of ethnic Russians are around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Non-ethnic Russians would be those Russians who have some lingering cultural memory of having been conquered or otherwise subdued by Russia.

A new episode of Anti-Tank Chats just dropped which probably belongs on this thread

I remember getting a whole bunch of 30s and 40s music from Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy, and using them as the music for CMBN (got the US and British music), CMFI (got the Italian music), CMRT (got the Soviet music), and CMFB (got the German music). I don't remember where I got it from. I'm sure it was one of the usual places to find Combat Mission mods. I think it was this one, but I don't want to download it to my work computer to check: https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/cm-mod-warehouse/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cmbn-sound/cm-fi_rt_bn-music-splash/

BMDs are less armored than BMPs. The armor is aluminum. It is tough enough to withstand small arms fire only, and will be easily penetrated by even an HMG. The BMD-1 has the same firepower as the BMP-1. The BMD-2 has the same firepower as the BMP-2. And the BMD-4 has about the same firepower as the BMP-3. The BMD-1 and BMD-4 each have room for 5 dismounts, while the BMD-2 can carry 6 dismounts. As the airborne equivalents of the BMP series, the design priority for the BMD series was to make it air droppable, not tougher or more "elite". They needed to be lighter, so they are smaller (less room for dismounts) and more lightly armored. Whenever any army in any time period gives armored vehicles to its airborne forces, those vehicles are always lighter than the equivalent armored vehicles given to the regular infantry, so there was never any chance of BMDs being given more armor than BMPs. The low number of dismounts that can fit into a BMD compared to a BMP is a serious problem for the VDV. Squad size does matter. Small squads can't absorb many casualties (everyone always seems to forget the importance of being able to absorb casualties). And having too many key weapon systems and too few riflemen can seriously hamper mobility and limit your offensive capabilities (who wants to assault a trench while lugging around an MMG? How many spare riflemen do you have to assault a trench if everyone is either manning or assisting a key weapon system?). And casualties can force you to abandon key weapon systems if you don't have enough riflemen in reserve to pick them up. VDV are not the only contract soldiers in the Russian army. The pre-war Russian army was a two tier army made up of contract soldiers and conscripts. Every Russian unit had both contract soldiers and conscripts (except the VDV, which had no conscripts). Russian law prohibited conscripts from being used outside Russian borders except during a time of war (which is why Russian units were generally understrength at the start of the war, since they had to leave their conscripts behind, though it's a curious feature of Russian law that mobiks don't count as conscripts). Since Russia never declared war, if VDV were the only contract soldiers in the Russian army then only VDV (and no other Russian soldiers) would have been in Ukraine. It would have been a very easy war. There is no internationally recognized set of standards that defines how much training is required to qualify a soldier as being "elite". But VDV troops are better trained than regular Russian soldiers (at least they were before the war (high attrition rates may have changed that)). So by the loose definition of "elite" as meaning "better than the typical formation", pre-war VDV formations were "elite" formations (don't think of "elite" as being equivalent to the "elite" experience level in Combat Mission), though I've read ISW assess that they are probably no longer elite formations.

I don't really have a precise formula. In general I think it's a good idea to start with the big picture. Set a camera angle that lets you see all of your unit icons at once, and note important events to zoom in on later, such as where casualties occur (so that I can investigate what caused the casualties). Once I've got the big picture I start zooming in on smaller events. If the scenario has developed into several distinct actions I like to get a close up view of each action. I definitely make a point of getting a close up view of anything particularly cool or cinematic that happens during the turn. And sometimes I like to view the turn once with all visual aids (unit icons, objectives, landmarks, hit text) turned off to get a better impression of what the battle actually looks like (it's amazing how invisible the battlefield can become when every unit doesn't have a brightly colored icon above them). But all of that is just when I'm being really meticulous. When I'm being a bit more fast and loose I tend to just follow whatever looks interesting and I may be more likely to miss stuff. So the most important thing I do is that I save each and every turn, so I can always go back and view it again if I realize that I missed something. I rarely skip through a turn unless things are exceptionally uneventful.

I don't think the Panther would make a very good T-34. Truth is there isn't a tank in the Western Front titles that makes a good T-34, but I would favor the 76mm Sherman. Even the Sherman doesn't really have the right armor profile, since it has tougher frontal armor and weaker side armor than the T-34. But the firepower of the 76mm Sherman is about right for the T-34-85, so it's probably the best candidate overall. The Panther is way off the mark for a T-34, though perhaps it might make a pretty good Centurion.

From what I recall of the research I did a few months back, it was a 105mm gun variant of the Centurion stationed in Germany in 1976/77 (don't remember the exact number, but 11 sounds about right). But there were a few older 84mm variants sitting back in Canada that might come to Europe as reinforcements.

I've frequently made the opposite complaint. Realistically the threshold for surrendering is way too high. No army fights to the last man (at least not usually, the Japanese in WW2 were the conspicuous exception to this). Usually a loss of 10% of your forces in a real battle is a pretty bad day, and the bloodiest battles in human history rarely go above 25% casualties (remember that real armies have to fight multiple battles, and if you are losing 10% of your forces a day then you are down to just 48% after only a week (also human psychology is a factor, and 1 in every 10 people you know becoming a casualty in a single day is going to severely shake your confidence)). The fact that the AI doesn't know how to retreat naturally pushes casualties above what they would be in real life (in fact I think this is the main reason why casualty rates in Combat Mission are so much higher than in real life (IRL losing armies retreat, while in Combat Mission losing armies keep taking and inflicting more casualties)). But even taking that into consideration, 70% seems way too high. Even cut off and surrounded units which, like the AI in Combat Mission, are unable to retreat don't normally take such heavy losses as that before surrendering. I do know the threshold for surrendering is not a fixed value. It seems to fall somewhere in the range of 70%-80% casualties (I think I've even seen it peek above 80% once or twice when facing really fanatical troops), and seems to be influenced by moral and remaining heavy assets such as tanks (more than once I've seen the AI surrender as soon as I destroy their last tank). edit: Thinking about it further, 70% may not be so absurdly high as a threshold for surrendering. Zooming in to historical engagements at battalion level or below (Combat Mission scale), it isn't so hard to find examples of units, once cut off from any hope of retreat, enduring more than 50% casualties before surrendering. It is definitely way higher than any normal casualty rate. But I think the principle problem remains that the AI has no idea how to retreat. And even if it did, most scenarios don't have exit zones to accommodate a retreat unless the scenario is explicitly a delaying action. There's probably some rather gamey thinking going on in the scenario design there, and I'd wager that most Combat Mission players probably have no more idea of how to conduct a retreat than the AI, since no scenario has ever asked them to try. So both AI and player alike keep taking and inflicting casualties long after any real force would have withdrawn, neatly explaining why casualties in Combat Mission are so high compared to real life.

There have been various upgrades to the CMx2 engine over the years (it's called engine 5, but really it's upgrade 5 to the CMx2 engine (or probably upgrade 4, since engine 1 was probably the base CMx2 engine)). The first few upgrades added lots of features, but it's been announced that engine 5 will focus on performance improvements instead of features. The CMx2 engine is a decade and a half old and it hasn't received any performance upgrades in that time. So it's starting to show its age, hence the focus on performance instead of features this time. Theoretically Combat Mission will run much more smoothly after engine 5 is released.

I'm finally getting back around to Balk's 1911 manual, and I'll follow that up with the British 1914 infantry manual. I had meant to just read FM 100-2-1, but that ballooned into reading the entire FM 100-2 series, so that took me away from the pre-WW1 era for longer than expected. I'm currently in the section where he is discussing how to employ infantry firepower. It seems he has a low opinion of volley fire. And he quotes Prince William of Germany saying the following Which rings true with my study of Napoleonic tactics a few years ago. I think a lot of people think of Napoleonic soldiers as perfectly drilled robots, but contemporary writers seemed to agree that volley fire would almost always devolve into independent fire after a while. So even in the Napoleonic era there may have been more independent firing than volley firing as a rule. It seems that most armies have dispensed with volley fire by 1911. The exception being the Russians, who retained volley by squad as a method of fire control, to prevent soldiers from expending ammunition too rapidly (as noted by Hapless on the previous page). Balk seems to be of the opinion that even this use of volley fire may not be entirely practical.

I seem to remember having an issue similar to this a few years ago. I was running Windows. My anti-virus was a bit too hyperactive and was quarantining the executable (it did this a few times before I finally just uninstalled the AV (I was using Trend Micro) and started just relying on Windows Defender). See if you can figure out how to check the scan history of whatever anti-virus you are using, and see if it has quarantined or removed any .exe files.

I would absolutely be on board with a Korean War CM game. Very hilly, very infantry heavy. I'm imagining infantry with mostly WW2 US equipment vs infantry with mostly WW2 Soviet equipment fighting over maps that look a lot like CMA or CMCW maps, but browner (about as hilly as Afghanistan or the Fulda Gap, but not as many trees back then as in modern day Korea). The Chinese have some of their own equipment, which we would be seeing for the first time in a CM game (I believe they have their own rifle at this point in time, which is not Soviet in origin, though I believe they mostly have Soviet machine guns). Relatively sparse force to space ratios in the early days of the war give way to very high force to space ratios in the later part of the war (even exceeding WW1 force to space ratios), which means lots of troops on even relatively small maps. I think most of the US tanks at this time are 76mm Shermans, but you've also got M26 Pershings and M46 Pattons in the mix in not insignificant numbers. If UN forces get included then you've also got British Centurions, although I don't think that non-US/SK UN forces ever made up a significant proportion the forces involved (UN forces were about 95% US and SK). Of course there isn't much opportunity for the heavier M26 and M46 to shine above the Sherman, since there just isn't very much tank vs tank combat in Korea. Though the NK and Chinese troops should have a harder time knocking out M26s and M46s, and I would expect those bigger 90mm guns to be able to lob a more powerful HE round a bit further and a bit more accurately. So perhaps they would shine a bit above the Sherman. And seeing 1st gen MBTs in action would nicely link the WW2 titles with CMCW, giving us an almost continuous equipment timeline. Of course I wouldn't expect to see a CM:Korea anytime soon. Battlefront still has plenty on its plate with engine 5 and modules for existing games. No doubt they'll find time to make new base games eventually, but I believe there are multiple competing suggestions for where to go next, and there may have been a reason why they didn't do Korea already. I know the stated reason they haven't done the Pacific front of WW2 is that they aren't confident that the engine could handle that much vegetation.

Both your vehicles and enemy vehicles can be both knocked out and destroyed. Enemy vehicles all appearing to be knocked out is like how all enemy soldiers appear as wounded. It is part of the fog of war. When you get the battle end screen their true status will resolve and you will likely see that some of them are destroyed. As far as I know there is no difference in terms of game mechanics.

What everyone else said, and I believe that the air controller is not the only unit that can call in air support. So it may have been another unit that called it in. It takes longer, since it isn't their specialty, but FO and HQ units can also call in air support. Of course it's been months since I've played the Russians in CMBS, so I may be misremembering. But I don't recall air assets being denied to HQ teams.

The Slitherine partnership does not prevent Battlefront from releasing products when they're ready. Nothing gets released on Matrix or Steam until Slitherine puts it into their release schedule, but Battlefront will still release it on their website. I think the main issue is that we lost a year to PBEM++. There is enough content out right now to keep me busy for a while, so while I'm eager to see British and Canadian forces in action against the Soviets, I'm content to wait as long as it takes for the module (I can backtrack to WW2 if I finish my current CMA/CMCW playthrough before BAOR is released (the main thing is that I don't want to move forward into the modern titles before BAOR is released, since I want to view Cold War equipment in its proper context of being better than WW2 equipment, rather than the skewed context of being worse than modern equipment)). But certainly a patch to fix the ongoing issue of TOW vehicles being counted as tanks on the end screen can't come soon enough.

I'm thinking of making a detailed study of this war. And I mean the entire war, from the very beginning, starting in 2014. I have a mountain of sources for everything that has happened since February 24, 2022 (most of them provided, at one point or another, by the How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get thread (I've dropped out of that thread for now since I can't keep up, but one day I'm going to read every single page and follow every single link on that thread)). But I'm not really sure where to start looking for sources on everything that happened from 2014-2021. At least I wasn't sure where to start looking, until I remembered the massive knowledge base that exists on this forum. The more detail the better, but anything is better than nothing. The entire period is of interest to me, even the low intensity years. If you find interesting information about the prelude to events in 2014 feel free to post that too.

Despite my earlier prodding, I believe they prefer to avoid answering that question until they are pretty close to being finished (customers can have an unfortunate habit of interpreting estimates as promises). My sense is that it's still going to be a while. It usually takes a few months after we get the first screenshots of the new forces, and we haven't got those yet (though we got a juicy pic of some of the new ground a page back (a bit flatter than the Fulda Gap, but still some rolling hills (I'm guessing the sightlines might be a bit shorter on average, since there will be fewer elevated positions, but fewer hills interrupting sightlines might also result in longer sightlines on average))). So I'm guessing the actual release is still a long way away (I'm starting to feel like we may be talking 2024, since we're already in the 3rd quarter of 2023, though perhaps a Christmas 2023 release is on the cards). But for something a little more near term, and probably a bit less risky if the estimate turns out to be off, @The_Capt are we getting close to seeing screenshots of forces?

The T-62 simulation had me thinking that we wouldn't see much improvement in survivability from the Chieftain. But this new simulation has me thinking that maybe the Chieftain will survive more threats that the M60 wouldn't have survived (at least from lower tier Soviet equipment). Does anyone happen to know which APFSDS rounds the T-55 is modeled with in-game?

My impression is that close order formations are not supposed to be used in contact with the enemy. They are used because command and control is far more difficult in extended order formations (remember they didn't have radios or the modern NCO corps back then). It requires giving up a lot of centralized control over the battlefield and placing a lot more trust in much more junior leaders (the devolution of command that Hapless refers to). But they recognized that close order formations were suicidal in a firefight. So you are supposed to keep your troops in close order as long as possible, but no longer. March them into position in close order, moving along covered routes as far as possible. The furthest you go in close order is either the effective range of the enemy's weapons, or the last covered position in front of the enemy. You then deploy into extended order to conduct the attack. When the attack has been completed or repulsed you gather everyone back up in close order to get them organized and off to wherever they need to go next. Ideally, every moment under fire is spent in extended order, while every moment not under fire is spent in close order. Of course people make mistakes, and this system lends itself to units getting caught in "inappropriate formations" (as Balk puts it). A unit may get ambushed, or a commander may keep his troops in close order a bit too long (what happened to the Highland Brigade at Magersfontein), or never stop to shake them out into extended order at all (what happened to the Naval Brigade at Graspan). And, because there isn't universal training everywhere, you will still have the occasional close order advocate who genuinely believe that combat should be conducted in close order. I get the feeling that the decision of when to deploy from close order into extended order is not unlike the dilemma we Combat Mission players are so familiar with of when to dismount mechanized infantry. Deploy/dismount too early and you lose control/mobility sooner than you needed to. Deploy/dismount too late and you could lose entire units to devastating enemy fire. I should note that I haven't finished Balk's 1911 manual, nor started the British infantry manual of 1914 yet. I'm still working my way through FM 100-2-2. So there is a lot I haven't covered yet, in particular how the defense is meant to be carried out in this period, and there may yet be other circumstances in which close order formations are considered useful.

I'm sure they have more than that. That must just be their active numbers. The Military Balance 2022 lists around 18,800 artillery pieces, of which around 2,000ish were supposedly active (I believe The Military Balance equipment counts are supposed to apply for the end of the given year). But, while most of the active guns are self-propelled, the overwhelming majority of the guns in storage (about 12,400) are towed. Russia has probably lost far more guns than is listed on Oryx, since destroyed guns are probably far less likely to be photographed than destroyed tanks, so who knows how far they have run down their stocks of serviceable SP guns. Towed guns are obviously much less survivable against counterbattery fire, so we can expect their artillery losses to increase if they start running out of serviceable SP guns in storage and start pulling out more towed guns. And there are the usual question marks around how much of their stored equipment is serviceable or can be restored (I'd guess less than half). And I believe there was some controversy around the methodology The Military Balance used to get their numbers (I know their estimated number of stored Russian tanks was much higher than what Covert Cabal was able to count up from satellite imagery, so they may have similarly overestimated Russian artillery stores). In any case, they have a lot of guns. So I don't think guns are the link that will break in their fire support chain. The weak links are ammunition supply, and barrel wear. They already seam to be seriously ammunition constrained.

If it's cheap enough that it could be used interchangeably as either a decoy or a strike asset (or both simultaneously) then being noisy to humans and visible to radar really would be a feature. Save the stealth for the expensive stuff. It puts the enemy air defenses in a real bind. If they ever stop shooting at these missiles then they become effective strike assets. If they do shoot at them then they are so cheap that it could be easy to saturate the enemy air defenses, or they become effective decoys to draw enemy fire away from more effective/expensive strike assets.