dbsapp

It is simple if it is not possible in RL don't do it. We play a game and as Soviet their tanks have the radios. Where do we stop? I use the artillery network as a communication channel. There is no other way we can access the field telephone network which must exist. Yes I can see what is going on from behind my screen. We can always use innovation. 

In Soviet training missions they show how to concentrate your forces and to use them en masse under heavy artillery support, you gather momentum and rush with all you have in one focused blow. 
In the campaign and many other single scenarios it simply doesn't work. To deploy this tactics means to lose your forces quickly and to do little or no damage to the opponent. The peculiar thing with the Soviet campaign is that it literally asks you to do the opposite things you had learnt from Soviet training missions. What is required from you in the first mission of Soviet campaign is to carefully scout enemy tanks and TOW vehicles and call pinpoint artillery strikes on them.
Cold War Red Army is described as heavily dependent on artillery assets and massive artillery support to pin down the enemy. But in CM world  artillery strikes on areas simply don't do anything to the vehicles, the only application they have is to bombard towns or infantry positions. At best areal artillery strikes can kill one or two lightly armored vehicles, which is far from being enough to suppress enemy defense. Many times I called pinpoint strikes on single M60 tank to find out 10 or 15 minutes later that bombardment didn't scratch the tank, it seats in full health in Moon landscape among craters with no trees around. 
In reality it should be completely destroyed or severally damaged. IRL photos from the tests:

 

 
That's one of the biggest drawbacks of CM engine and inconsistences of CMCW. In theory artillery plays major role in Soviet military planning, but in game practice it has little effect on the enemy. This virtually strips Soviet army of one of its most powerful forces. 
So does "Soviet tactics" work?
In my experience it does, but primary in Quick battles. To work it needs certain conditions. First of all, Soviet forces must have serious numerical advantage. In Quick battles this condition is met by assigning more points to the Red side than to the Blue. Second, the terrain conditions should be more or less equal. This is also true for the most of the Quick battle maps. Even artillery, which is relatively weakened under CM engine framewok, could be applied to block enemy infantry from reaching certain zones. 
But it definitely ineffective under conditions that differs from those of "equal" conditions of Quick battles.  
 

How about Scotland inviting Russians to help fight for freedom?

Nice job! Edited videos are much better than raw recording.

How about a variant background for late 2024.....After a series of unfortunate border incidents, the Mexican government purchases Iskander & S-400 systems from Russia and invites Russia to establish a series of military bases accross the country. 
Wonder how that one might play out? 

Not winning any Oscars, but it's fun to play around with video editing and CM
 
 

Who can forget Joan Jett and the Blackhearts? I think the jukebox in the old NCO club wore a hole in that track.
 

I’m playing this campaign right now and it’s great so far. Only a few battles in and my only criticism, and it’s a very minor one, is that there’s a few too many Shermans for my taste. I don’t play the Soviets to use Shermans for the most part. Nice to see lend lease represented and hopefully as the campaign progresses I’ll see more ISUs and IS tanks. 
MMM

As an aside, I found that you can assign UAVs to the highest HQ and subordinate units (including FOs) should be able to call artillery within observed areas while HQ gets up to the minute recon.

A good old fahioned pistol duell 😊...

 

Finally returned to the "Broken Shields" campaign after long period of oblivion since July. I stuck on the 10th mission "The Whirlwind" and left. Turned out it was the last scenario of the while campaign and I was several inches from the victory.
Well... not the victory actually. 

The last mission ended in bitter defeat for my German troops. It was close to impossible to win it and I guess it was meant to be lost. After all it resulted in complete failure for the Reich in real world. Anyway, the mission did well in conveying the apocalyptical feelings of retreating German troops seeking to save their lives and trying to find exit from the deadly trap among heavy snowfall and dozens of Russian tanks. 
To my surprise Reg Norge HQ himself was suddenly ambushed by the team of bailed out T-34!

I planned to send him to the extraction zone after all of his troops left, but it seems that the old fox decided to save his skin, ignore my orders and to flee first. Actually, he survived and escaped 😆 contrary to great number of troops under his command. 
I lost all of the remaining tanks in this mission.


Despite defeat at the end, the campaign was quite generous to me. 

 

You won Rumpenheim Rumpus - I say yes if the scenario designer sets the scene correctly and ensures the assets are there ...
Is artillery perfect in CMCW, I can't say because I haven't delved into it in minute detail.  There are enough threads out there that suggest it could be improved and I know that at least one indirect fire issue with the title is being seriously investigated.

Mark Felton is good at being entertaining but I hope you're not trying to imply that he's some sort of authoritative source, the dude cites David Irving in one of his videos for crying out loud.

In truth I don't think it would make for too interesting a scenario, but I'm happy to share. Find it here: https://mega.nz/file/SpwQRD6A#7kTU23eUzciUTyyARU76ZYAGXb1nNAiB9B7b6m0S-Wc

Blatantly borrowing from @Bil Hardenberger's blog to practice some scenario creation and pound the podium a bit...some screens:



Read it here: https://rinaldiaars.blogspot.com/2021/12/combat-mission-as-visual-aid-bringing.html

Soviets never planned an invasion they expected a Barbarossa type of invasion. To be met with massive nuclear retaliation. The West with the undertaking not to be the first to use nuclear weapons expected a Soviet invasion. This is an enjoyable game it is not even a hypothesis of WW3. It all came to an end when the Berlin wall came tumbling down.   

As you said, the density of fire doesnt match what would be normal in a PBEM. This is a lot more than a few tubes. 
Artillery can kill soft skinned vehicles, but not as easily as it should. And tanks are pretty much immune. Which was pretty much the point of the OP's post. 
There was a highly referenced post on these forums of an abrams taking numerous precision artillery rounds and surviving. 

The interactions shown here not only show the bug in question but also make me question exactly how fragments are being modeled. If you notice the BMPs that are knocked out have no system damage and are just destroyed. That makes me think that the game isn't model any sort of fragments as projectiles but instead use some sort of blast radius calculation. Since a fragment hitting the vehicle would cause some sort of system damage or possible crew casualties.

My guess is that modeling fragments explicitly in 2008 was seen as prohibitive so they are abstracted out.


@The_Capt

Yes, tracking down info on this is generally difficult and I don't really think vehicle destruction is that far off from what I've been able to find.

This is from the Dupuy Institute which puts armor losses during WW2 around 12% although I'm not sure how trustworthy they are as a source. One of the obvious questions (in relation to CM) is how concentrated are these losses are. 12% across a multi-day battle isn't huge but its possible that they could be concentrated in several CM scale engagements in which case they might be significant for our purposes.
Anyway... I generally think that too much focus gets put on kills in this discussion when I'm more interested in the effect of artillery during and immediately after a barrage. What sort of non-fatal damage might be caused^1, what sort of suppression might be caused^2, how does artillery impact target engagement^2.

^1  I think this is question is far more important in Shock Force and Black Sea but not without merit in Cold War. 40 artillery shells might not be concentrated enough to kill a tank within the barrage area, however, it might knock out the thermal sight which is not unimportant. Obviously in BS and SF you have modern tanks within even more equipment on them that could be knocked out. And CM is the sort of game where the destruction of a smoke launcher could be critical later.

^2 Suppression not only in the sense of the crew themselves being knocked around by blast effect and being worried by the shells falling/fragments clattering off the vehicle reducing their capabilities, but the crew making the decision to lower armored shutters over thermal sights and so on.

CM is often a game of minute details mattering which is why I don't think this is unimportant.

In Soviet training missions they show how to concentrate your forces and to use them en masse under heavy artillery support, you gather momentum and rush with all you have in one focused blow. 
In the campaign and many other single scenarios it simply doesn't work. To deploy this tactics means to lose your forces quickly and to do little or no damage to the opponent. The peculiar thing with the Soviet campaign is that it literally asks you to do the opposite things you had learnt from Soviet training missions. What is required from you in the first mission of Soviet campaign is to carefully scout enemy tanks and TOW vehicles and call pinpoint artillery strikes on them.
Cold War Red Army is described as heavily dependent on artillery assets and massive artillery support to pin down the enemy. But in CM world  artillery strikes on areas simply don't do anything to the vehicles, the only application they have is to bombard towns or infantry positions. At best areal artillery strikes can kill one or two lightly armored vehicles, which is far from being enough to suppress enemy defense. Many times I called pinpoint strikes on single M60 tank to find out 10 or 15 minutes later that bombardment didn't scratch the tank, it seats in full health in Moon landscape among craters with no trees around. 
In reality it should be completely destroyed or severally damaged. IRL photos from the tests:

 

 
That's one of the biggest drawbacks of CM engine and inconsistences of CMCW. In theory artillery plays major role in Soviet military planning, but in game practice it has little effect on the enemy. This virtually strips Soviet army of one of its most powerful forces. 
So does "Soviet tactics" work?
In my experience it does, but primary in Quick battles. To work it needs certain conditions. First of all, Soviet forces must have serious numerical advantage. In Quick battles this condition is met by assigning more points to the Red side than to the Blue. Second, the terrain conditions should be more or less equal. This is also true for the most of the Quick battle maps. Even artillery, which is relatively weakened under CM engine framewok, could be applied to block enemy infantry from reaching certain zones. 
But it definitely ineffective under conditions that differs from those of "equal" conditions of Quick battles.  
 

In Soviet training missions they show how to concentrate your forces and to use them en masse under heavy artillery support, you gather momentum and rush with all you have in one focused blow. 
In the campaign and many other single scenarios it simply doesn't work. To deploy this tactics means to lose your forces quickly and to do little or no damage to the opponent. The peculiar thing with the Soviet campaign is that it literally asks you to do the opposite things you had learnt from Soviet training missions. What is required from you in the first mission of Soviet campaign is to carefully scout enemy tanks and TOW vehicles and call pinpoint artillery strikes on them.
Cold War Red Army is described as heavily dependent on artillery assets and massive artillery support to pin down the enemy. But in CM world  artillery strikes on areas simply don't do anything to the vehicles, the only application they have is to bombard towns or infantry positions. At best areal artillery strikes can kill one or two lightly armored vehicles, which is far from being enough to suppress enemy defense. Many times I called pinpoint strikes on single M60 tank to find out 10 or 15 minutes later that bombardment didn't scratch the tank, it seats in full health in Moon landscape among craters with no trees around. 
In reality it should be completely destroyed or severally damaged. IRL photos from the tests:

 

 
That's one of the biggest drawbacks of CM engine and inconsistences of CMCW. In theory artillery plays major role in Soviet military planning, but in game practice it has little effect on the enemy. This virtually strips Soviet army of one of its most powerful forces. 
So does "Soviet tactics" work?
In my experience it does, but primary in Quick battles. To work it needs certain conditions. First of all, Soviet forces must have serious numerical advantage. In Quick battles this condition is met by assigning more points to the Red side than to the Blue. Second, the terrain conditions should be more or less equal. This is also true for the most of the Quick battle maps. Even artillery, which is relatively weakened under CM engine framewok, could be applied to block enemy infantry from reaching certain zones. 
But it definitely ineffective under conditions that differs from those of "equal" conditions of Quick battles.  
 

In Soviet training missions they show how to concentrate your forces and to use them en masse under heavy artillery support, you gather momentum and rush with all you have in one focused blow. 
In the campaign and many other single scenarios it simply doesn't work. To deploy this tactics means to lose your forces quickly and to do little or no damage to the opponent. The peculiar thing with the Soviet campaign is that it literally asks you to do the opposite things you had learnt from Soviet training missions. What is required from you in the first mission of Soviet campaign is to carefully scout enemy tanks and TOW vehicles and call pinpoint artillery strikes on them.
Cold War Red Army is described as heavily dependent on artillery assets and massive artillery support to pin down the enemy. But in CM world  artillery strikes on areas simply don't do anything to the vehicles, the only application they have is to bombard towns or infantry positions. At best areal artillery strikes can kill one or two lightly armored vehicles, which is far from being enough to suppress enemy defense. Many times I called pinpoint strikes on single M60 tank to find out 10 or 15 minutes later that bombardment didn't scratch the tank, it seats in full health in Moon landscape among craters with no trees around. 
In reality it should be completely destroyed or severally damaged. IRL photos from the tests:

 

 
That's one of the biggest drawbacks of CM engine and inconsistences of CMCW. In theory artillery plays major role in Soviet military planning, but in game practice it has little effect on the enemy. This virtually strips Soviet army of one of its most powerful forces. 
So does "Soviet tactics" work?
In my experience it does, but primary in Quick battles. To work it needs certain conditions. First of all, Soviet forces must have serious numerical advantage. In Quick battles this condition is met by assigning more points to the Red side than to the Blue. Second, the terrain conditions should be more or less equal. This is also true for the most of the Quick battle maps. Even artillery, which is relatively weakened under CM engine framewok, could be applied to block enemy infantry from reaching certain zones. 
But it definitely ineffective under conditions that differs from those of "equal" conditions of Quick battles.  
 

When I played this scenario about 10 of 12 AT-4 missiles hit the ground. 
I noticed that it's a common thing for AT-4 if they there is big elevation difference between firing team and the target. 

Don't rely on Pause & Reverse.....Pop out in the last 15 seconds of the turn, that way you should get to give orders as the situation develops, rather than hope the ones you already gave will hold up. 

Nothing to do with COVID but I am struggling to finish a small Soviet Campaign. I have 2 battles playing well, the 3rd is much bigger so it just takes time. I ask a couple guys for a playtest of the campaign so far...I think finally the core unit is working, so battle 1 losses are reflected in who shows up for the muster report on battle 2...