Centurian52

I think it's going to be an operational level game set in the Pacific Theater featuring space lobsters armed with all of the Soviet Union's stolen DShKs.

Funny! I had this battle in my head, too since I recently saw the corresponding video from Operations Room on YouTube!

🙂

How is this really a problem, though? I mean, it's not like we paid money up front or something. Sure, we don't get our curiosity satisfied but that is all the hurt that is done, right?
Some do, some don't. Communication costs money, either because the devloper can't spend the time used for communication on finishing the product or because a dedicated communications guy is hired. You invest the money if you think it pays off. You keep potential customers up to date to get the hype train started, to get feedback early on or to find investors, for instance. But this is a double-edged sword. The hype train, once going, is hard to stop or to steer in another direction and customers, especially in gaming, get hyped about what they want to hear not what was actually said. Feedback is rarely representative because it is usually a loud minority that demands X and claims to speak for the whole community. And then there is always the danger that people form a negative opinion based on a product they've never actually seen and won't buy it later when it is released.
I just develop a stupid little tool in my free time and I am very cautious about when and what to tell you guys. 😉

That's my experience too. They stop when they trigger a mine on hunt, but not when they just see mines. I usually don't have time for slow though. So I use hunt with the aim of limiting casualties, rather than outright preventing casualties. I generally use slow to move troops out of an already detected minefield when I don't have engineers available to mark the mines.

I'd go with hunt. It'll wear them out, but I believe their situational awareness is a bit better with hunt, and they'll stop moving if they hit a mine. They'll tend to start running after hitting the first mine if you use move, so you'll be more likely to get mass casualties.

I move mine into a action square and wait a few turns. Engineers seem to be able to detect them within a few action squares.

100% or the endless bitch session that would result here if the decision was made to delay and issue a new date was made. 
There are really only three choices with regard to this: 
Pick a date and ship whatever you've got - obvious downside is bugs and issues with content Pick a date and delay to a new date if things are not as you want them - obvious downside here is complaints and erosion of "trust" Don't pick a date (or I should say don't say one publicly because all projects have dates) and just repeat the mantra "it will be done when it is ready" - is there a downside here - I don't know one. Marketing people will say they cannot build the sales collateral - BS just have it ready and book the interviews and reviews in the final weeks or after release but what do I know? I only have 30 years of software development experience and no marketing experience - other than watching them do it and not make sweet **** all of a difference if the campaign starts before release or after. Customers say they cannot plan or rely on you - BS: buy the products that are available that fits your needs. If non are available you have to wait. Wouldn't you rather have a working product in some future time than crap now? If you say you want working product now that's just stupid because that doesn't exist does it? Hence this question. You can end up in a combo of 1 and 2 that either turns into a death spiral: the product is not ready so we will delay it but that means you need to add feature X because the competition has changed which leads to more delays and feature Y needs to be added etc.; or you delay one or two times but piss off everyone and eventually you are forced to end up releasing early even though you tired to do the right thing and fix your problems.
I have worked in through all of these scenarios. The choices that BFC make are absolutely the best framework for managing projects I have lived with. I have worked for other places that get it right too BFC are not unique but doing this right is not the norm - sadly.

Absolutely!
Tentative contacts should both be clickable and "engage-able". Preferably there should be varying degrees of uncertainty about what side a tentative contact belongs to, so that your units might end up firing on friendlies thinking them to be enemies, and holding fire against enemies who they think may be friendlies.
Another feature which would be very fun and challengning (thought came to me when you mentioned that British airborne "linking up" mission") would be units or reinforcements which the player doesn't control or even knows about until his starting/"main" unit has spotted them. E.g. you start the mission commanding some paratroopers stumbling around Normandy during the night of June 5/6 and you know that there are other units out there, but you can neither control nor see them until your unit has found them, just as how you can't see or engage enemy units until they've been found.
I've seen people make missions where paratroopers are spread out and spawn as reinforcements all over the map (CMFI years ago I think), but there the player still has the God's eye view, knows where all different units are and can control them all from the start.
I don't suppose there's a reinforcement trigger in the mission editor, i.e. that all reinforcements are just triggered by the clock? Otherwise something akin to that could be achieved with hidden objectives which spawn reinforcements when found.

It's the best answer that's available. The people who are working on it genuinely don't know when it will be done either. But they're working on it.

I can highly recommend this approach to viewing battles. I play with the icons turned on with an overhead view while I'm seriously reviewing the action and giving out orders. But I save every turn specifically so that I can go back and view a whole battle for the spectacle (bit cumbersome doing it that way, so it sure would be nice if we got a full battle replay feature someday, but I'm pretty sure Steve has shot that idea down). And when I'm reviewing a finished battle for the spectacle the icons, landmarks, and objectives are off, the trees are on, and I stick to ground level. It really is a very different way to view the action. The one downside is that now most mainstream Hollywood war movies just can't hold my interest anymore.

Correct or not, the underlying phenomena touches on my idea of creating 100% reliable snipers through manipulating statistics: everyone will be sent to simply fire millions upon millions of rounds at empty desert on the firing range. That way, statistically, having fired all of the shots that would miss for loads of casualties inflicted, several hundreds or even thousands of the shots they might fire in combat will be just the ones which statistically would hit.
That's a correct employment of statistics, right?

I have never been inside an actual tank. So all of this is based on watching episodes of The Chieftain's Hatch, and playing Steel Beasts, Enlisted, and another game that I can't quite remember (games which restrict/can restrict the player's view to the internal optics of the tank). But, based on that admittedly limited and entirely virtual experience I believe the quality of the internal optics of most WW2 tanks was probably about on par with the M60A1. That requires some qualification. WW2 tank optics come in two flavors. There are the interwar designs that mostly relied on vision slits (mostly forward-facing, but sometimes there's a side or rear-facing vision slit). And there are the designs which came out either during the war or shortly before the war which used periscopes (often rotatable) and which gave the TC a cupola with full 360 degree periscopes/vision ports.
The prewar designs with mostly forward-facing vision slits have atrociously worse visibility than the M60A1. It is impossible to see anything that isn't inside a very narrow arc to your direct front without sticking your head out of the tank. These feel practically impossible to operate without being turned out most of the time. The designs with periscopes and a 360 degree cupola have pretty much identical visibility to the M60A1. My impression is that WW2 seems to have more or less perfected the periscope and cupola, and there really wasn't much more to be done to improve visibility until passive night sights and thermal optics came along in the 70s and 80s (and now apparently external cameras and large CCTV screens).
Visibility with periscopes and a cupola is still objectively bad, but it feels like amazing visibility compared to vision slits (visibility is much better if you turn out, but it's possible to operate while buttoned up). Unlocking the Panzer 3, after spending a while playing with the Panzer 2, in Enlisted was a huge eye opener. It felt like a massive upgrade, and not because the armor and gun were better. The armor and gun were better, but those felt like very minor improvements compared to the huge leap in situational awareness. The jump from vision slits to periscopes and cupolas felt almost as big as the jump from periscopes and cupolas to thermals and CCTV.

Ammo expenditure got so bad with the introduction of the assault rife that the Pentagon tried to limit the M4 carbine to either single shot or 3 round bursts. No full auto feature (M4 in CMSF2). They later backtracked and put full auto back (M4A1 in CMBS) more as a morale booster to the infantry than for any real utility.
Some years ago I tried a gameplay experiment. I played a scenario without 'eye of God' elevated view, no rewind, no flying over the map, no moving beyond my own forward line of contact, no floating icons, the camera only looking over the shoulder of one of the grunts on the ground. The game suddenly became very much more challenging. You find yourself cowering behind a wall as the earth shakes around you from incoming artillery. You hear tanks but see nothing unless you dare to look up and expose yourself. The enemy is seen in fleeting glimpses. Played as a FPS game instead of a tabletop game CM becomes brutal. I don't have the self restraint to play the game like that exclusively but I do try to avoid overlooking the map like an omniscient being as much as possible.

I've been in a M60 tank buttoned up and I can say spotting anything is hard. It helps when the other guy fires 🙂  Muzzle blasts and smoke puffs make things easier. But just seeing things tucked in a treeline? That's really difficult. Sights improve, for sure, with the development of thermals, but thinking more of the TC or driver being able to see and ID things out the ports? That was hard.
Never been in a WW2 era tank, even in a museum, but I can't believe it was better. It's probably STILL just as hard today. Just a lot easier to hit and kill something once you do locate it.
Dave

Over the years I've used the 2IC (XO team) most of the ways benpark described above and sometimes still do. 
After reading AARs on how units fight at the US NTC I have attempted to modify my use of the XO team somewhat.  I set up a Tactical Operations Center (TOC) staffed by the battalion XO.  Other XOs, especially from different battalions, and liaisons from attached units that are not in the vertical chain of command are also placed in this TOC.  In game mechanics this facilitates the horizontal sharing of information between units.  Also, If I have multiple FOs, I may place one at the TOC to handle fires on TRPs (artillery liaison).  The CO is generally with the Forward Command Post attempting to influence the battle at a decisive point and keeping subordinate units in C2. 
Various house rules can also be used to make game play more realistic.  So having a company and/or a battalion commander in voice C2 of a platoon fighting a decisive/critical action has a positive effect.  This also motivates the player to bring the Bn. CO forward, as in most real life circumstances, and not hide him in the setup zone. Of course this also risks the company and/or a battalion commander getting KIA which will negatively effect the actual game mechanics in addition to the house rules.
Lots of interesting tactical situations can be experimented with using the C2 system, scenario editor and house rules.           

I'm not quite sure on what factual basis that fear can actually rest itself upon.
One should appreciate the potentials of cyber warfare, but at the end of the day it's not as though we actually eat cyber food and drink cyber water. The "cyber warfare can destroy society as we know it" can sound reminiscent of pre WW2 "the bomber will always get through" fears of major population centres like London being razed to the ground overnight with millions upon millions of dead and seeing empires begging for peace within weeks of war being declared, or McNamara's technophilia in Vietnam.

I'll use them as makeshift medics, have them stay back to provide comms for the mortars, move up to be another FO, or (when I'm being very sloppy, and even then only in the most dire of emergencies) use them as an extra assault team.

I think there are a number of problems here.
1. The graphical representation of the terrain is far from perfect, so there is not a 1 to 1 relation between the battlefield you are seeing and the battlefield your pixeltruppen are seeing (though if you want to have a slightly better idea of what your pixeltruppen are seeing, it helps to turn off all of the icons). 
2. People tend to lack direct experience with trying to spot similar objects under similar conditions to our pixeltruppen. They generally don't live out in the countryside. Those that do live out in the countryside tend not to spend their time looking for people hundreds of meters away wearing dull clothing, or looking for vehicles hundreds of meters away with dull paint schemes. Even fewer people have any experience with scanning the countryside for dull colored people or vehicles hundreds of meters away through periscopes or vision slits. Hapless actually has a great video demonstrating this last point. At about the one minute mark he gives an excellent demonstration of how difficult it is to see out of a BMP-2 using Steel Beasts (playing any vehicle based game which limits you (or which gives you the option of limiting yourself) to viewing the world through the vehicle's internal optics, such as Steel Beasts or Enlisted, will instantly make you much more forgiving towards the spotting ability of your tank crewmen).
3. People routinely underestimate how much more difficult tasks, which are very simple out of combat, become under combat conditions. Not only spotting, but also marksmanship and basic decision-making all suffer severely under combat conditions. It's easier to provide numbers for marksmanship than it is for spotting, but hopefully this is enough to illustrate how strong of an effect combat can have on normally simple tasks. The book War Games: The Psychology of Combat, by Leo Murray, claimed that soldiers are about 1/6th as effective with their fire in real combat compared to realistic exercises* (I've lost my copy so I can't provide the exact quote and page number). Keeping in mind that accuracy in realistic exercises is already much less than accuracy on a shooting range, where soldiers are firing at fixed targets at known distances from stable positions. In the Napoleonic era (because I have access to better data than for more modern eras), an accuracy test of assorted smoothbore muskets resulted in one hit for every 4-5 rounds fired (21%-28% hits) at a target roughly the size of an infantry company placed 320 yards away from the shooter, while in real combat somewhere between 200 and 500 rounds tended to be fired for every 1 casualty inflicted (459 rounds for every French casualty at Vittoria according to R. Henegan, 224 rounds for every British casualty at Hougoumont according to Mark Adkin). That's a difference of 40-100:1 between a shooting range and combat. Again, I'm using marksmanship because it's easier to provide data for it than it is for spotting (and because I'm always happy for any excuse to pull out any data that I happen to be keeping in my back pocket), but it's still very relevant because many of the factors that make hitting targets more difficult in a realistic exercise compared to a shooting range, and in real combat compared to a realistic exercise, will also make spotting more difficult.
4. Last, and probably least, maybe the spotting system in Combat Mission isn't quite perfect.
*I should mention that the book never specified how much of the estimated sixfold reduction in fire effectiveness was a reduction in the accuracy of the fire, and how much of it was a reduction in the volume of fire (because soldiers were more suppressed by the cracking of real bullets).

Perhaps I'm an odd one out.  I do live in the countryside and do spend my time 'spotting' other people when I'm out.  No I'm not the phantom flasher, I have two crazy (well mostly barky, so not so bad) dogs and I like to be on top of the 'approaching dogs/people/horses/farm animals' intel.
I also spot (or sound contact) tractors, but in my mind I'm imagining they're T34s 🤪.  Of course I always carry a Panzerfaust just in case.

I'm surprised how long it took for Lindy's Bren vs MG42 video to be mentioned (I was sure that the OP would be about it when I first saw the title).
In CM it's clearly the MG42 though, the Bren is nowhere near. I don't think number 2s (hehe) assisting the loading process would make much difference. The Bren gunner still has to take aim again, and spread his fire, and that feature would also reduce the reload time for the MG42 by a significant margin.

I think there are a number of problems here.
1. The graphical representation of the terrain is far from perfect, so there is not a 1 to 1 relation between the battlefield you are seeing and the battlefield your pixeltruppen are seeing (though if you want to have a slightly better idea of what your pixeltruppen are seeing, it helps to turn off all of the icons). 
2. People tend to lack direct experience with trying to spot similar objects under similar conditions to our pixeltruppen. They generally don't live out in the countryside. Those that do live out in the countryside tend not to spend their time looking for people hundreds of meters away wearing dull clothing, or looking for vehicles hundreds of meters away with dull paint schemes. Even fewer people have any experience with scanning the countryside for dull colored people or vehicles hundreds of meters away through periscopes or vision slits. Hapless actually has a great video demonstrating this last point. At about the one minute mark he gives an excellent demonstration of how difficult it is to see out of a BMP-2 using Steel Beasts (playing any vehicle based game which limits you (or which gives you the option of limiting yourself) to viewing the world through the vehicle's internal optics, such as Steel Beasts or Enlisted, will instantly make you much more forgiving towards the spotting ability of your tank crewmen).
3. People routinely underestimate how much more difficult tasks, which are very simple out of combat, become under combat conditions. Not only spotting, but also marksmanship and basic decision-making all suffer severely under combat conditions. It's easier to provide numbers for marksmanship than it is for spotting, but hopefully this is enough to illustrate how strong of an effect combat can have on normally simple tasks. The book War Games: The Psychology of Combat, by Leo Murray, claimed that soldiers are about 1/6th as effective with their fire in real combat compared to realistic exercises* (I've lost my copy so I can't provide the exact quote and page number). Keeping in mind that accuracy in realistic exercises is already much less than accuracy on a shooting range, where soldiers are firing at fixed targets at known distances from stable positions. In the Napoleonic era (because I have access to better data than for more modern eras), an accuracy test of assorted smoothbore muskets resulted in one hit for every 4-5 rounds fired (21%-28% hits) at a target roughly the size of an infantry company placed 320 yards away from the shooter, while in real combat somewhere between 200 and 500 rounds tended to be fired for every 1 casualty inflicted (459 rounds for every French casualty at Vittoria according to R. Henegan, 224 rounds for every British casualty at Hougoumont according to Mark Adkin). That's a difference of 40-100:1 between a shooting range and combat. Again, I'm using marksmanship because it's easier to provide data for it than it is for spotting (and because I'm always happy for any excuse to pull out any data that I happen to be keeping in my back pocket), but it's still very relevant because many of the factors that make hitting targets more difficult in a realistic exercise compared to a shooting range, and in real combat compared to a realistic exercise, will also make spotting more difficult.
4. Last, and probably least, maybe the spotting system in Combat Mission isn't quite perfect.
*I should mention that the book never specified how much of the estimated sixfold reduction in fire effectiveness was a reduction in the accuracy of the fire, and how much of it was a reduction in the volume of fire (because soldiers were more suppressed by the cracking of real bullets).

@zastincahvsoz8689 Describe the tactical utility of space butter

Ah nice one  it’s a handy wee AI plan device for sure. I’ve also used it for having the turrets of advancing tanks swing about as though searching. Just plot the area fire point out of their LOF. They’ll swing the turrets to face the plotted area fire point but not fire. 

But otherwise I tend to use it is mainly for effect as you have to make an educated guess where the player might be defending. Latest etc can make this more educated and less guess though!
 
So in this case I’m glad it gave the impression of engaging a more sentient enemy! Immersion is what I’m shooting for!

Today's Perun has a good high-level overview of the Chinese military that is worth a listen for anyone interested in the China  / Taiwan / US situation.
Also has the wry observation that China is modernising its navy partly to be able to protect its international trade, which it is very dependent on economically. Particularly with the US, Japan and Korea. But the main geopolitcal threats it sees  to its international trade are from the US, Japan and Korea. So it is trying to build a navy to compete with those countries in order to be able to protect its trade with the same countries....
 

The M2A2 version of the Bradley was uparmored to resist 30mm autocannons in the mid eighties.