Centurian52

Interesting. I wouldn't have thought that dust would be a problem for the Javelin.

I think most of that was outside the city itself though, on the northern and southern flanks.

I heard the same thing. Even if they have taken every building within the city limits though, it's still far too early for them to declare victory in Bakhmut. Generally speaking, battles for cities are rarely (if ever) confined to the limits of the contested city (as TIK has persistently reminded us, the Germans took most of their casualties in the Battle of Stalingrad outside the city itself). The battle of Bakhmut is still very much ongoing, and I think the Russians are going to lose this one.

She's right though. You don't really think that the Ukrainians should stop before driving the Russians out of all Ukrainian territory, do you? This war has to end with all Ukrainian territory being returned to Ukraine. Regardless of whether Putin is still in charge or not, we have to assume that Russian leadership will not honor any agreement that is made with them.

The best part is, since they aren't officially part of the MoD, hunting them isn't technically an act of war against the Russian government!

That was very interesting. I like that he reminded his men to keep a respectful distance from the M113 (a video I saw a little while ago with troops closely following a BMP-1 made me nervous about how closely bunched up they were around the vehicle (one RPG hit could have made for a very bad day)). The use of a smoke grenade on an enclosed space in an attempt to asphyxiate the Russian soldier in the dugout caught my attention. I specifically remember someone brought up that tactic in reference to the Cyclops position videos. I appreciate them shouting at the Russians to surrender at every opportunity. "Surrender and you will live" seems like good messaging to me. And "surrender or I'm throwing a grenade" is just a great carrot and stick. It's unfortunate it didn't work this time, and it would be nice to understand why. Perhaps there are ways to improve the messaging (honestly I'm not sure how much clearer you can get)? Or perhaps these particular Russians were just diehards. I suppose in the end it doesn't really matter whether they die or surrender, so long as they are no longer contributing to the enemy's numbers. The biggest reason that surrendering is preferable is the hope that the behavior will become contagious. In any case, the attempt to get the Russians to surrender reflects well on these soldiers. And it was validating to see him send some of his troops to clear the trenches to the left moments after my instincts started screaming that they needed to clear the trenches to the left. The one thing I didn't like seeing was the one guy in front pushing so far forward without anyone parallel to him. My impression is that on the occasions where he stops he's probably waiting on others to catch up, and then he gets egged on to go forward again before they do.

I've heard good arguments that Germany lost WW2 before they even started it. But I think November 1942 is when it is indisputable that they had lost the war. You have the triple hammer blows of the 2nd Battle of El Alamein, Operation Torch, and Operation Uranus in November 1942. There's just no coming back from those. Likewise it's possible that Russia lost this war before they even started it. I don't remember exactly when I realized that Russia would lose. I don't think I ever believed that Russia would win outright (actually the earliest assessment I remember giving to my friends and family back in January/early February 2022 was that it would probably take the Russians 2-6 weeks to reach the Dnipro with casualties in the low tens of thousands, but that they wouldn't be able to push past the Dnipro at an acceptable cost). I think I persisted for at least a couple weeks in believing that Russia would eventually defeat conventional Ukrainian forces, occupy the country, and eventually be defeated by unconventional Ukrainian forces. But I think the moment when I realized that no reasonable person could still believe that Russia could win was the end of March/beginning of April 2022, when Russia withdrew from Kiev and northern Ukraine. April 2022 was the November 1942 moment for me.

That's how I felt even when they were firing over 100 missiles a day. But then again when I think of a full scale, high intensity, post-industrial revolution war, I think WW2. And obviously nothing in this war has been on the scale of WW2. I think people who are used to Iraq and Afghanistan (2001-2021) have the opposite reaction, and think that the scale of the fighting and casualties are mind numbingly massive. I suppose the reality is that this war is utterly medium.

Ok, I just want to say one last thing (this has been bugging me all weekend), then I promise I won't say another word on this subject (and I'm holding myself to that, so you can retort with whatever you like and I'm not allowed to respond to it no matter what (and I know I'm right on the line here so I'm going to avoid using the g****ics word)). I think you are assigning a degree of significance to the word "population" that is not warranted. A population is any arbitrary grouping of people. It does not imply that anything significant distinguishes that grouping of people from any other grouping of people. A population could be "all students of San Diego State University", "all people who are north of 54 degrees N", "US citizens who voted in 2012", "people who did their taxes in April", or even "people currently living in Russia". It is just whatever group we are currently interested in. Think population as opposed to sample*. A sample is a (hopefully random) selection of a few members of the group, while a population is the whole group. The arbitrariness of the word is a feature, not a bug. It is absolutely essential that grouping people into two different populations does not imply that there is any significant difference between those two populations (other than the criteria that was used to group them), since if it did it would be impossible to study whether or not there were any significant differences between two populations. The word would be nearly useless. I hope that clears up that when I referred to multiple human populations I did not imply that humans weren't one single population (the word can be applied recursively after all). *Ex. The sample is the 100 students of San Diego State University who responded to the survey. The population (which we hope the sample will allow us to make generalizations about) is all students of San Diego State University.

Not really. At least not more than before. Keeping in mind that the Ukrainians have apparently already established some positions across the river. I don't think Russian aircraft were ever the problem for crossing the Dnipro. I think the main problem is that it's a big dang river. Even with light Russian resistance in the area, it's not really conducive to the kind of high speed breakthrough/maneuver operations I think the Ukrainians probably want to conduct. I think we will see Ukrainian river crossing operations as part of the main counteroffensive. But I think it will be an auxiliary/exploitation effort and the main point of effort will be somewhere else.

I will admit that, while I have been fully won over to WEGO for most titles, I still play CMA in real time. I only switched over to WEGO after the engine had been given more or less all of its current features. I just don't know how to WEGO without my 'target briefly' command. I like to make heavy use of speculative and suppressive fire, but I don't want to waste ammunition by area firing for a full turn. But I've got some ideas for fudging a target briefly command on my next playthrough, mostly involving chaining up pauses, moves, and target arcs (or maybe I'll learn to get by without area fire). So I'll be trying out CMA in WEGO after I'm done with my current CMBS playthrough (I've got all the 2022 mods loaded up to model current events). Then once I've finished up another run through all of my CMA scenarios, I'm going to do a full playthrough of every campaign and scenario I have for CMCW. And I'll be starting with the legendarily difficult Soviet campaign. I'll be hot off of playing Soviet/post-Soviet forces for a couple games straight at that point, so I figure that's my best chance (don't want to get used to US forces and then have to re-adapt to Soviet forces). That will be my first playthrough of the Soviet campaign. I've been saving it for when I'm ready, since I believe there are some bragging rights associated with doing well on the first run of that campaign. If my timing is perfect I'll finish up the last scenario I have for CMCW which pits US forces against the Soviets the day before we have British and Canadian forces to send against the Soviets. Then it will be back to where I left off in early WW2 with CMAK (which I temporarily put on hold to scratch my modern war itch).

Oh yeah, that's not an insignificant point. If there is anything that I feel is at the heart of what Combat Mission is all about, it's learning. There is no better way to learn about warfare than to experiment with it and see what works and what doesn't work (in an environment where doing what doesn't work doesn't get real people killed). In fact I believe the experimentation angle is one of the key selling points for Combat Mission: Professional for real world militaries.

WEGO is not a must. The game is well designed to work well in either WEGO or real time. Anyone who says that WEGO is the only "correct" way to play the game is much too elitist for my taste. I played pretty much only real time all the time for years, and that worked very well for me. I think there are trade-offs between the two game modes though. You have more precise control over your troops in real time. You can cancel orders that you've realized are suicidal, whereas in WEGO you just have to sit there and watch your troops mindlessly carry them out. Bounding is easier to manage (requires more use of pause orders and guestimating travel times in WEGO). It's easier to coordinate actions a little more tightly (you can order troops to charge a position the instant that a barrage lifts in real time, where that requires some more estimation in WEGO). The drawbacks are that it gets harder and harder to manage your forces in real time as the battles get larger, and it gets easier and easier to miss stuff. In WEGO you need not miss any of the action happening anywhere on the battlefield, since you can rewind as many times as you want and watch each action from as many angles as you want. I find it is a lot easier to coordinate very large forces in WEGO (in large part because it is so much easier to pay equal attention to every part of the battlefield). And for that reason I find that I play far more consistently between small battles and large battles in WEGO. And game performance can be a lot better in WEGO. The main thing that finally won be over to WEGO though, is that it is so much more cinematic. In real time you mostly need to stay zoomed out so that you can keep an eye on the big picture. In WEGO you can watch the turn once zoomed out, so that you get the big picture details of what happened, and then watch it again and again zoomed in on each individual action and catch all of the interesting little stories that play out for your soldiers. It's like making your own war movie (only better than most war movies).

You continue to demonstrate that you have absolutely no understanding of what I said. Do you even realize that you are attempting to counter me with arguments that are in complete agreement with everything I said?

If you had fully read my comment you would have seen the following sentence: You might try rereading it, and keep an eye on the nuance this time. The nuance is pretty important.

That's not how genes work. It is very rare for a gene to be "for" something specific like that. Most traits are an emergent property of many many genes. I feel like most of your comment is directed at Steve, not me. In fact I get the distinct impression that you didn't even read the rest of my comment, let alone any of my other comments in this discussion. As a reminder, I am firmly in that camp that is saying that biology can't account for how Russian behavior differs from the behavior of people from other countries.

They don't. That essay is laser focused on genetics, and doesn't address behavior. But Steven Pinker's book How the Mind Works does address it. The TLDR is that genetic variation does affect variation in human behavior. Other human traits are influenced by genes, and it makes all the sense in the world that behavior would be among those traits. The studies he references come up with something like 50% of the variation in human behavior being accounted for by genes, with the other 50% being accounted for by the environment. Again though, that is variation within human populations, not between human populations. Differences in behavior between populations is almost entirely environmental. The reason is, as the essay I linked points out, that there is very little genetic variation between human populations. So environmental factors are the only thing that can account for behavioral differences between populations.

I found this essay which gives some numbers for how much genetic variation there is within human populations vs between human populations. One caveat is that they are grouping human populations by continent, not by country. https://www.ashg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/genetic-variation-essay.pdf

About 80 thousand years ago. Some unknown event (the Toba volcano eruption happened around the right time, and has been proposed as a likely cause) whittled the human population down to an absurdly small number (10,000ish sounds about right), resulting in a massive genetic bottleneck that has left its mark on the human gene pool to this very day. We are one of the least genetically diverse species on the planet. This is part of why we are so susceptible to plagues.

I tried War in the East. There was a lot I really liked about it. But I didn't like the alternating turn-based style of gameplay (as if we were still limited by a tabletop). It would have benefitted a lot from WEGO. I just don't understand why so many computer wargames are still trying to emulate tabletop wargames (surely the goal is to emulate war!). Edit: It's just impossible to get a sense of simultaneity (or any sort of accurate time flow) with alternating turns, particularly when you're moving one piece at a time (again, like it's a tabletop game). I get that it's impossible to have simultaneously executed turns on a tabletop, but there's just no reason not to have simultaneous turns on a computer. If someone could make WEGO mods for all of Gary Grigsby's games I really think I would give them a second look.

Damn. This sort of thing is a real concern in the DoD. We all want to trust our colleagues. No one wants to think that someone you've worked with for a long time actually intends to do something nefarious, and certainly no one likes getting their friends in trouble. But we don't do annual insider threat training just for show. Whether you're uniformed (me 5 years ago), GS, or a contractor (me right now) you need to make sure the rules are being followed!

At that point we're talking about biological differences between individuals, which I do not dispute. There clearly is biological variation between individual humans. It is well documented that a significant portion of the difference in intelligence between individuals is genetic (not 100% of the difference in intelligence, but a significant chunk). But we're talking about populations, not individuals. The full range of biological variation is present in all human populations. There is far more variation within a given human population than there is between any two human populations.

Hundreds of years in nothing on evolutionary timescales, and evolutionary biology has come a long way since Darwin's time (Richard Dawkins is a far more recent pioneer who has dramatically transformed the field). The fact is that human populations have not been isolated enough for long enough to have any significant genetic differences between each other. Which is not to say that there are no genetic differences at all. I think the most significant genetic difference between human populations that I've ever heard of is that European populations are more likely to have lactase persistence (a mutation which makes it possible to digest lactose past infancy), while lactose intolerance is more common in most of the rest of the world. And of course there is the obvious differences in skin tone as an adaptation to differences in the amount of UV light in different parts of the world. And apparently some people in the world are tetrachromatic, giving them four different types of cones in the eyes, though I haven't heard anything to the effect that this condition is more common in one region of the world than any other. While these are interesting examples of recent human evolution, they still happened on the scale of thousands of years, not hundreds. There are clearly differences in how Russians consume and react to information. But I am confident that those differences are 100% cultural and 0% biological. Things like state-controlled media, poor education standards, and compulsive lying as a survival skill in corrupt systems are likely contributing factors.

I've been playing since 2009. CMSF was my introduction to Combat Mission. I've played every single CM game since then as they were released, from CMBN, CMA, all the way to CMCW. And more recently I've started playing some of the legacy games, CMAK and CMBB. I think some people have a strong preference for either the WW2 or modern titles. But I play both (plus CMA and CMCW, which are neither really WW2 or modern, but right in the middle), and I really like getting a practical feel for the differences between WW2 and modern combat. Combat Mission is far from the only game I play (I'm excited to get home and try out Rule the Waves 3, which should have just released today). Basically anything with a strong claim to realistically model some domain of warfare will catch my interest. But Combat Mission is by far my favorite game. Nothing really comes close.

Sure, but I never said anything about tourism (maybe Steve implied something about tourism?). If figure that Ukraine becoming a nice place to visit will be a result, not a cause, of their economic growth.