SHVAKS

Thanks for the context behind your design philosophy. I have experience, although limited, designing games myself and I work in the game industry too so I always appreciate these kind of inside perspective. Now onto some of my responses: The core audience for CMCW is pretty obvious and I agree on your reasoning on why the campaign is made this way. However I don't think some extra hand-holding is going to dissuade the "obsessively detail orientated grognard" from enjoying the game in their own way. The whole idea of "hand-holding" to me is a bit biased to be honest, because it implies that it is dumbing down the experience and a lot of people here would have issues with that. There is always a way you can provide an enjoyable experience for both the hardcore and casual audiences. And in the case of CMCW where you don't want to sacrifice realism, that is by providing bits and pieces of info in game to serve as hints, or if you feel that is too much, providing some extra background info and "behind the design of..." in the user manual would still be an improvement for the casual bunch. I am not suggesting that 100% of the game should be comfortably beatable by your average casual gamer, that would be absurd. What I am suggesting is that there could other forms of gain for your average gamer when they can't beat some of these scenarios. As an example, people like me may repeatedly bash their heads on things like mission 3 and never beat it, hit the surrender button, then either walk away because there is nothing more the mission can offer, or be presented with an informative excerpt that tells them why this mission is so hard (hint: it is the real life) and some background on Soviet doctrine and the idea that this brutal encounter happened exactly because of such doctrines. I guarantee you if this is in the game, there will less people like me posting threads like "mission 3 bad" and more casual players will have a better appreciation of your efforts in crafting these scenarios even if the difficulty is not for them, and they may even start learning things themselves and eventually convert to your core audience. Again I'm sorry if my previous thread has some confusing wording, but "no skill can win this fight" is just not something I said or intended to say. What I am saying is that regardless of whether skill is applied in mission 3, the player will not feel he won by skill. In my experience, I chose to go immediately to the left and hug the covers as soon as wave 1 showed up because I recognized it is Czechmate 2.0 and I am in a kill zone. After bashing my head on this mission 2-3 times, I watched M.Herm's video to get a rough idea on what I should be doing, then I did some more terrain analysis and found all the good locations for my ATGMs before M.Herm posted his illustration above (we ended up finding the same positions) however it doesn't really make the fight against the Bradleys on the left flank that much easier just become of random chances. I think it would be reasonable for me to argue that there is at least some application of skill on my end, but it got canceled by the very "swingey" random chances that is part of CM. Lets arbitrarily assume that one needs to score 100 points to beat a mission, and getting lucky gives you points while getting unlucky takes points away. In Soviet mission 1 and 2, Skill and the correct application of tactics will give you more than 100 points, so you have a comfortable margin to absorb hiccups caused by random chances on the battlefield. In mission 3 I feel like the application of skill and tactics will give you at most 80 points, the rest 20 points need to come from getting lucky by chance (Bradley does not hit your FO, your cluster/arty hits the target, your ATGM actually does their jobs .etc). In the end if someone wins in this situation, no matter how many skill and tactic points he scores out of 80, the deciding factor will be the player gets the rest 20 points because of luck. The player could have applied a lot of skill, but in the end he will feel he won because of luck. In the end I think this is a problem of designing for "what it is" versus designing for the feeling it evokes. And I think while designing for what it is is important for a combat sim, designing for feeling is equally important as this is the most important pillar in all other types of games. Finally onto your final words. I understand you have a strong vision as a designer on what the Soviet campaign in CM is going to be and I appreciate your effort in sticking to that so this has nothing to do with QA anymore. What I think of this is that there may be a case for another way CM missions can be designed. Looping back to your argument of catering to your core audience: Focusing on your core audience is good in this niche market, but I think there is an argument for an alternative approach: I think designing for the hardcore veterans would be the least efficient solution if you want this series to stay alive and grow: Often times the hardcore veterans would have specific tastes and likings that they want from a game, and you can't really cater to them all because everyone is different. This is simply down to experience: the more one gets into CM, the more one would find the part of CM that he enjoys and stick to that. Meanwhile the casual and new players are the ones you have most control of, because they have more similarities: They don't know a lot about CM, and they may lack historical context and other stuff that veterans of the series may take for granted. By focusing on them and solving their pain points you would be achieving more for a lot less effort, while converting some of the uninitiated to your core audience in the process. To be clear, I do not want any of the hardcore oriented stuff to be removed or dumbed down. You have the soviet campaign which is probably the hardest campaign in CM history and that's no small feat to design and to make it realistic and playable. However it is just a huge missed opportunity if you only dedicate it to a small batch of people in this niche franchise in this niche market. There are ways you could make it enjoyable for people outside of your core audience group without sacrificing the hardcore experience you want to achieve, and I hope those are worth considering by you and others in the design team.

I fully get that the soviet campaign is designed to be brutally difficult. My frustration is not about the difficulty itself and I think you missed my point. Plenty of games/simulators/interactive experiences were made brutally difficult and people still enjoy them one way or another. Difficulty itself does not prevent enjoyment and fun, it is what follows, or the lack thereof, that affects enjoyment of the player. The problem with soviet mission 3 specifically is that I feel it does not provide anything when you beat this difficult scenario: There is so much based on chance and luck in this scenario that executing the same strategy can lead to extremely varied results to the point that singular engagements start to greatly affect the result of the mission. The first two missions averted this pitfall well. In the first two missions you are not supposed to be stopped by a platoon of M60s or TOWs on a hill because you have the tools to solve the problem, and when you execute the soviet doctrine well, it will pay off in those missions. However in this one it doesn't seem to be the case. Your cluster didn't hit that Bradley which sees your FO in the first turn he showed up? Better reload the mission! You snuck into the best firing positions for your ATGMs? Better save now so you can savescum and not see them all gets taken out before their missile hits! It is a poor design choice because it doesn't mentally reward the player when the scenario is beaten. It reinforces the notion that "you win because you are lucky" or "you win because you have the power of hindsight and knows where the Bradleys are". On your notion that the mission is unfair but is realistic: Being realistic doesn't magically make a good scenario in a wargame. Again this goes back to my previous point: You can have a US scenario where a single cut-off platoon with zero support defends against a Soviet company or more. Is it realistic? Probably, as this is exactly what Soviet doctrine is trying to achieve. Will is be a good scenario? Probably not. And I think both you and I understand why. If you are going the full realistic route to showcase what would likely happen in "the real deal", what the soviet doctrine is about and especially its limitations, which I assume you are as you have posted this in various threads on Soviet campaign/doctrine, would it be better if the player gets a bit more context on what exactly you are expressing with these scenarios? As you provided the context that when Div or Regt Recce failed, the 2nd echelon will very likely drive into fights like this, it at least helped me make sense on why this scenario is here. So why isn't this info in game somewhere? All the player knows from the briefing is that the recon elements "found" the enemy and we must push through. No mention of forward recon elements being pinned down/destroyed or anything that indicates they are not doing their job. You can certainly use the realism argument on this as in real life the Soviet commander won't have perfect information either but the point is the lack of information like this prevents it from being the learning experience you intended it to be. Letting the player know about what happened, even after the campaign is done, would be a great way to provide context and make people appreciate this experience more.

Thank you M.Herm, after much trying and save scumming on my end I managed to get a total victory with some casualties. I saw your graphical depiction afterwards and it is basically the same plan I took. I saw the reworked campaign post long before this post, however I am playing on the steam version so I assume it is auto updated into the game. I got the bombers, mortars and artys, but the arty FO does not show up, presumely because I am winning too hard in the last mission (which never made any sense to me), So I am forced to play the opening with the two bombers and mortars. Is the reworked campaign a standalone update that one must download even if they are playing the steam version? The graphical depiction of the battleplan you showed is basically the same plan I worked out with the help of your playthroughs on youtube. However I think it is affected too much by RNG (random number generator, commonly used to describe randomness in games) that it has a very high chance to fail even if one executes it well and knows enemy positions beforehand. Let's go through the problems of this plan: 1. Because the tanks come in piecemeal as platoons and not as a full company, you cannot use them to effectively engage the bradleys at any time, except for the final push through the left flank. In each wave of the attack, the only effective weapon to fight the bradleys are one tank platoon and one AT platoon (sustained loss in last mission), so you either goes against the soviet doctrine of "using a company to crush a platoon" and engage the bradleys, or you do nothing at all and lose momentum. 2. Wait a minute, you say, there are additional ATGM dismounts that you can use! Speaking of them, I find them very ineffective except for the 2500m range ones that comes after wave #3. I even worked out all three 1000m ATGM positions on your battleplan myself without looking at your video, and I find those positions as underwhelming as the ATGMs themselves. Location 1 (botton yellow dot in your image): I snuck ATGMs into that position starting from my first playthrough, they never spot anything throughout several tries and I eventually gave up on that building. Location 2 (middle yellow dot in your image): I found this position after several tries. Getting there is very hard unless all bradleys on the left ridge is destroyed which makes this position unnecessary. In cases where my ATGM teams actually gets into this positions, they are engaging hull down bradleys from buildings, which is the least ideal location for them to be. Bradleys on left ridge are hull down to this position making them very hard to spot and be hit, and are in ideal positions to spot my launch and fire back. When my ATGM units fire, the backblast blind them causing a high chance to lose control of the missile. Out of 3-4 tries where I took this position, I managed to kill exactly one Bradley so I ended up not bothering taking them. Location 3 (top yellow dot): This position is somewhat useful as they have better chance to engage the Bradleys on the left ridge and in the forested areas along the road. However it has the same problems as location 2: Bradleys are highly likely to spot the launch and take out the ATGM team, sometimes even when the missile is still in flight. I ended up only taking this position in my winning playthrough, took out around 3 Bradleys and sustained heavy losses while doing so. Location 4 (red dot): the only good position in my opinion. Somehow the M60s are very reluctant to fire on this position even if they have very good view on it. Putting the long range ATGMs here will solve all the problems coming from M60s. 3. Regarding my heavy arty, I was only able to get the FO as part of first wave and that's already very late. Given CM's modeling of the negligible effect arty has on heavy vehicles, it is very hard to use them to take out the bradleys. In my winning playthrough, I have expended all heavy arty assets on the Bradley platoon on left ridge and only took out two of them. 4. Lastly, the enemy clusters come in very early into the mission and they don't stop. I don't know how many cluster bombing missions the AI player has in this mission but it feels like too many to the point of making me think it is bugged. After finishing this mission I really think this is the worst CM mission I have seen so far. You can win but there is no fun to it, nor does it teach you anything besides the obvious"don't use BTR formations to attack Bradleys". Everything needs to go perfect in order for the plan to work and that's what you want to avoid in a scenario because it tells the player he wins because he is lucky. I am confused because there are missions like this for the soviets in the game while everyone seem to get that if there is a US mission where every Tow and Dragon missile needs to hit perfectly or otherwise you get steamrolled, it won't be a fun one. I really hope more QV gets applied to campaigns in future CM contents and QVs should actually be paid to test these missions. Seems like a very severe oversight that resulted in this abysmal experience.

Already watched this video several times. My general strategy is the same as this video, going through the left side to get more cover and fight in close range. However a lot of the things shown in this video seems to work because of RNG. It also rarely shows the top down view on the map, so I don't entirely know if I am doing something different than the video says. By "one of the playthroughs", are there any more video playthroughs on YT? To my knowledge this is the only video playthrough available on the internet. Searching "combat mission cold war soviet mission3", "combat mission cold war soviet campaign" or "combat mission cold war nuke and bypass" will give you several playlists but they are all the same.

Soviet campaign, normal version

How do you beat this one? This is a significant difficulty bump from mission 1 and 2. In this mission I have neither advantage in fire power nor space to manuver. The forward observer which is supposed to be on the field from the start does not appear, so the opening 10 minutes I only have two mortar batteries plus 8 extremely unrealiable cluster bombs which are very ineffective on bradleys. I'm playing on elite so I can only get the real fire missions going after 10(1 company arrives) + 5(time to get the observers into place, when they are not deleted by bradleys) + 12-16 minutes to actually call down the fire missions. My fire plan simply do not exist so my other plans have no chance of succeeding I can clear some enemy positions after much casualty and fighting with RNG but any bradley position in a wooded area will block me enough to kill momentum and get the btrs clustered. Not mentioning the surprise that comes into play at 25 min mark which I can't counter nor hide from if I am forcing myself to play blind. When the infantry ATGMs arrive it is already too late. I am wondering if the design here is to just force the player to surrender and take the losses and move onto the next mission. The attack was shattered and the russians chose somewhere else to attack. Makes perfect sense to me but on the other hand I have no skills at CM. Could anyone please provide some tips on how to reliably beat this without savescumming or using hindsight?

And that kinda correspondes with my point: I couldn't win it as is in my previous runs because I assumed the AI is going to do the smart thing with its tanks, which is sit back and snipe anything that attempts to approach the town (which is preciously what I am going to do if I am the blue commander as I know the initial red force in the town is quite few in number so preventing red reinforcement should be a huge priority for blue side). As a result I thought the only way to handle this as red is to force an engagement at all angles with all my tanks BMPs, and AT carriers at once when blue force is still out in the open (which never worked for me). The only reason I won is because the blue AI actually failed to cover the road approach (isn't obvious because the tree cover shouldn't be blocking the thermals from the looks of it, but it actually can)so my BMPs can just drive into the town and unload all the infantry. This results in me having more infantry AT in the town which hard counters the tanks and M113s. In addition,driving two of the M60s through the north side of town without any infantry support is without doubt an actual blunder in my book. Blue is attacking a red position with the knowledge of red scout squads in the town and more red infantry reinforcement on the way, which should automatically warant infantry leading the way for ALL tank movements. In my last playthrough blue AI lost two M60s to RPGs in the north side of the town which gives me massive breathing room to manuver around and flank the rest of the blue force, something that isn't possible if the blue commander decides to leave the two M60s around the northern outskirts in overwatching positions. In fact, blue lost all five M60s to RPGs in the town, which should say something about how the blue AI is handling this engagement.

Strangely, after I made this post yesterday I tried this scenario again and got a total victory as red. Massed push never works for me against 5* thermal M60s so I tried blindly rushing down the road with whatever BMPs I have and commiting to the infantry fight in the town and it worked like a charm. Turns out none of the five M60s can get a full sightline on the road to the town so it is mostly safe to travel what looks like the most dangerous road in the world, though I am still confused by why the single file of trees on the side of the road can mask my movement while thermals seem to penetrate thicker treelines and nail my scouts with ease. Once all my infantry forces are in the town there are a few dubious tactical decisions the AI made that become easily exploitable, namely rushing two of the M60s into the north side of the town with no infantry support whatsoever and shuffling the rest of the tank platoon to a worse overwatching position to the south of the town where they can be ambushed by infantry AT weapons. The blue forces will be bogged down in the town fight and end up losing. The BMPs and T-64s are only useful for taking out the two M901s in the beginning of the scenario then the rest is mostly infantry. In the end I end up not committing my AT and tank platoon at all but still achieved total victory with relative ease. Feels like the AI is throwing its advantage away since I reckon if the AI spreads out its tanks in proper overwatching positions and never rush them into the town I would have no chance at all. Is the AI blunder here intentional in order for the red vs blue ai experience playable?

I have tried the red side of the "Skirmish at Sichenhausen" scenario 10+ times and every time my forces get obliterated so I think I am definitely missing something. I have played Black Sea and Shock Force 2 before so I have some experience although I am nowhere near as good as the pros so here I am asking for some pointers. Coming into this scenario my plan is to get rid of all the enemy tanks first and use my infantry+BMP combo to clean up the rest. My main source of frustration comes from all the enemy tanks preventing me from utilizing my forces in any effectively manner. The red side is supposed to be numerically superior in this scenario but my tank force consists of only a single platoon of T-64A (2 green, 1 regular) while the enemy tank platoon consists of 5 M60A3s (all veteran I believe). After a few tries I quickly dicarded the option of trading blows with enemy tanks at 1500-2000m. If I am staying hull down at range then my tanks have trouble spotting anything (they can't spot a M60 parked in the middle of the road even if the commander is unbuttoned, a target arc is set on the enemy tank, and scouts nearby feeding them spot information). If I got lucky that my tanks do spot a enemy tank, then they struggle to deal any damage: the only competent crew is the platoon HQ which comes at regular, while the other two can't hit a broadside of a barn due to their green stats. The armor on T-64s also feels weaker (only my gut feeling), and from my observation a M60A3 can reliably take out a T-64A in 3-5 shots at 1500m-2000m while the T-64s either can't make the spot, struggle to hit, or start reversing and pop smoke as soon as they are taking fire, which is of course no use when all the M60s have thermals. The second option I tried is to hit the enemy from all angles with everything I have to utilize my numerical advantage. Sadly this seems impossible without taking out the thermal equipped M60s. My BMPs and AT vehicles are just as blind as my tanks and are easily taken out when they drive over the crest to engage the tanks in the vally, and an all out attack usually results in about one M60 and several M113s taken out before the rest of the tanks get to react and kill everything I have. I even tried to degrade the enemy's command structure first after identifying some movements on the other hill and slaps it with lots of mortar fire. Turns out I took out the A Troop HQ but the enemy's ability to coordinate doesn't seem to be affected at all. I heard this is a balanced scenario but here I am feeling the red side is severely handicapped. What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions are appreciated!