For what it's worth, I approve of the somewhat misleading briefing. In the real world, Intelligence sometimes gets it badly wrong, your plan goes for the proverbial ball of chalk and you have to improvise. I also approve of the difficult terrain when played as Russian. However, the issue that I have with this scenario is that your units start exploding on the start line before they have had a chance to move. There is absolutely no advance to contact, nor is there anywhere where you can deploy your vehicles out of harm's way while sending your infantry forward to recce and identify the enemy (US) positions. Why? Because the setup zone/start line, which is on the eastern edge of the map, is in plain view.
In the real world, once your lead units (probably recce elements) had started exploding, someone would have sent out the Soviet equivalent of 'Contact, wait-out.' Any survivors would have reversed out of danger and a sitrep would have been sent immediately after. Even if there were no survivors, no contact report and no sitrep, the columns of smoke and the exploding vehicles would have told even the most unobservant Soviet commander that there was something pretty nasty up ahead. This would result in flanking manoeuvres if the terrain permitted, or the adopting of a defensive posture until sufficient forces had arrived to deal with the situation and the Soviets had SOPs for both. What they wouldn't do is to blindly move reinforcements into the killing zone, which is what is currently happening the way the scenario is set up. However, once the enemy was spotted and once they were satisfied that there were sufficient reinforcements to win the firefight, they would go in mob-handed, and being Soviet, they would happily accept heavy casualties in order to do so.
Were the map extended 150 - 200 yards to the East, and the setup zone/start line changed to an area that was unobserved by the US forces, the scenario would be world class.
SLR
