USASOCRanger
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Posts posted by USASOCRanger
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Okay.
Somewhat back on topic, I suppose.
What were the overall roles of light infantry type troops? Paratroopers, Special Forces, Commandos, SAS, etc. I mean, once one side or the other decided to cross the line of departure.
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10 hours ago, Ultradave said:
Yes, that's pretty much it, and we were under no illusions at the time how difficult and how costly that was going to be. For example, as a Field Artillery officer, one of the important things we were taught about the nuclear artillery shells of the day was how to completely destroy them to keep them from falling into Soviet hands as we were overrun. I don't think anyone really had any confidence that REFORGER would actually have time to work, should it happen for real.
Dave
As for this comment, the Army back then was good. We were well trained, and we would have been fighting on "home ground". We knew every detail of the terrain and had prepared fighting positions and detailed tactics on how to use them and how to fall back and make an invader pay a price. Every inch of West Germany was well surveyed and mapped, and we trained over and over again on the course of a potential invasion. The issue is more that the Soviet Army would have been larger, and their equipment was equivalent or slightly better, with the huge advantage of a head start in passing out ATGMs like Halloween candy. They were everywhere.
Dave
Sorry, I didn't mean it the way it came out. It looks like a nightmare solution to me. Like you said: inferior numbers and either peer or inferior equipment. I suppose that the Bradley and the Abrams were huge game changers then. The advantages that your force would have had are things I do not have: knowledge of the terrain and prepared plan and all that.
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57 minutes ago, Bozowans said:
My go-to strategy as the US is to hide units behind buildings or some other hard cover like a hill, wait for the Soviets to pass, then shoot them in the side as they go by. This way you can eliminate their numerical advantage by shooting them one by one as they turn the corner, and at the same time avoid their tough frontal armor. Your biggest advantage as the US is that you're almost always defending, so you can set up ambushes like that frequently.
For the first mission of the NTC campaign for example, I picked the "spoiling attack" option instead of the hasty one, allowing me to deploy behind those mountain passes. I figured it would be a bad idea to just deploy all the tanks in a line and slug it out face to face. The Soviets had to advance through those passes to win, so I put almost my entire force hidden behind the reverse slope, hugging the sides of the mountain, then shot them in the side as they went through. I ended up taking almost no losses.
I still haven't played that much of CMCW, but it's been very interesting. I had no idea just how bad the US Army was back then. I played one scenario where I was defending on good ground and still won, but took heavy losses and lost even more tanks than the Soviets did, even though I was defending. I was not expecting that.
That was essentially how I managed, or attempted to manage, it. I lost my TOW platoon pretty earlier on because they weren't hull down enough and I let them sit still for too long and basically sat back and hid until the rest of the company came onto line. I was able to blunt the attack but it wasn't pretty.
I understand that the basic overall plan of the day was for the forces in Europe to hold and defend long enough for reinforcements and resupply to make it to the US and that the hope was that NATO Airpower would defeat Warsaw Pact armored superiority. I guess it didn't hit me as to how difficult that would have been in those years until I fired this up.
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On 5/28/2021 at 9:38 PM, Redwolf said:
Post them in this thread. Go slow, one by one, have savegames and wait for reactions before moving on. Don't "dump" large lists without interaction:
Probably just a by product of the Soviet Telekinesis experiments. Nina Kulagina was here!
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Alright everyone, thank you very much for the information.
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What are the equipment differences in the '79 and '82 campaign?
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Yes, I noticed the vulnerability of the M60 almost immediately. I set up my tank platoon into a firing line on a short ridge in the NTC map and thought to myself "Awwww yeah, here we go. Time to bring hell to those commie bast-oh ****!" So, I should essentially protect them the same way I'm protecting the Tank Hunter platoon. Ensure they're hull down or have relatively useful cover and concealment and just totally forget they are tanks.
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4 minutes ago, domfluff said:
The NTC campaign has a few unusual quirks - one of which is that the soft factors for Opfor are very high (since it's simulating the actual NTC).
The main thing with spotting is that it's a percentage game, and if you're exposing yourself to a large number of eyeballs, you're going to be seen by at least one of them. BMPs feel exactly as blind in CW as they do in the other titles, but there tend to be a lot more of them, at much higher concentrations.
As a quick example of the maths:
Imagine you have a US M60, which we will arbitrarily give a 60% chance of spotting the enemy first, and getting the first shot off. Facing this are some Soviet armour with terrible optics - we'll give them a 30% chance of spotting the US tank first. Getting the first shot off is usually enough to win a fight like this, so this is a reasonable enough fudge for a "kill".
Clearly 1 vs 1, the US armour will usually spot and kill the Soviet armour before they can do the same. The issue is that there won't be a 1vs1 - the Soviets outnumbered the US 6:1 in some cases, so you're going to be fighting outnumbered.
If there were three of those Soviet, 30% tanks coming into view doctrinally in line, the chance of any one of them getting the spot and the first shot off is 66%. Mass is absolutely the name of the game, and how you manage your resources to concentrate force in a way that benefits you (and only you) is a huge part of the deal.That is very useful, thank you.
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13 minutes ago, domfluff said:
With difficulty.
The US Mech inf company is:
1x Tank platoon
2x M113 platoons
1x M150/M901 TOW platoon
1x 60mm mortar platoon
Since the US in this period (especially 1979) are behind both in quality and quantity, you're forced into using tactics which are most similar to the Syrians in CMSF- getting the most of of this combined arms unit is the goal, and relying on a defence in depth, supported by artillery fire and close air support.
With the highly mechanised environment, the anti-tank weapons are the most obvious component of this firepower.
These come in three distinct bands. Your long ranged firepower consist of the TOWs and the M60s, which have an effective range of approximately 2km. Your medium range firepower are the Dragons, which have a 1km range, and finally the LAWs, which are sub-300m. There are (typically) enough Dragons for one per squad, and enough LAWs for one per man.
Your tank platoon is the most powerful and mobile of the company, and is really the core of your firepower - the infantry are there to define space and protect the armour, but the deployment of your tanks, supported by your TOWs are the central problem.
Shock Force teaches bad habits. In that game, an Abrams platoon can sit on a ridgeline and dominate - you really have to do something wrong to take serious Abrams losses. This isn't the case for any version of the M60, especially the earlier ones.
Cold War in particular is often about relative mass - you're talking about US tanks that don't even have laser rangefinders - you're fully on WW2 gunnery here - so getting maximum guns on target at one time is the key, but you also need to make sure that you're engaging the smallest proportion of the enemy that you can. This usually means using terrain effectively to control the enemy's position - having them advance into prepared killzones, etc.
On a broader level, Active Defence was the doctrine. This was an elastic defence, a fighting withdrawal. Typically each company team would act as an independent unit, and would withdraw to a secondary prepared position as the enemy got into medium AT range. A second company would then take up the long-range fight as the first is repositioning, and then this would repeat.
In terms of supporting fires - the company has an FO for a reason. The 60mm mortars don't have many good targets for themselves. They're good at keeping BMPs and BTRs with exposed gunners buttoned, and smoke missions can be useful to shape the terrain. When the Soviets are forced to dismount they can be useful, but they're a bit difficult to justify in general. Air-launched cluster rounds are stronger than artillery, since the shells are larger. 155mm clusters are best used as point targets with maximum duration, and with the FO adjusting their fire over the period of the mission. The best targets are forming-up points - areas where the BMPs are going to concertina before building up for an actual attack.
Okay,
So I need to be a lot more careful with movement and pay more attention to microterrain, attack or defend slices of the opfor formation, and have consideration for fallback positions after firing.
I have also noticed some strange LOS issues. During the NTC campaign, I placed a FO at the top of the ride on the US Left. I did not have the team skyline themselves, I gave a Move command to a couple of tiles below the plane and then a Sneak + Hide and short fire arc to the top. The team was able to observe enemy movement as normal, but they were also instantly seen by the opposing force and obliterated in short order. Fine, there's no cover or anything on the ridge and that's fine; I can make a semi-reasonable argument for how a buttoned BMP was able to see a couple of dudes on a hill from it's flank. But I've also seen this in other examples: infantry teams who sneak into wooded areas and observe enemy troops or vehicles who then immediately get spotted. I haven't played since Black Sea first came out and there have been some Engine updates since then; could that be part of it? Did troops suddenly become more observant over the last few years?
[quote]
For a more detailed look, this is the field manual:
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=My8-u2rYNVoC&hlTHE TANK AND MECHANIZED INFANTRY COMPANY TEAM (FM71-1, 1977)
Edited 6 minutes ago by domfluff[/quote]
That's great! Thank you.
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Looks really cool. Team Yankee was the first thing I thought it when I saw the Cold War page.
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Hello everyone. I am a long time Combat Mission player going all the way back to Beyond Overlord. I am more or less comfortable with gameplay mechanics and everything, but I ran into a huge speed bump with Cold War. I am a GWOT veteran and grew up in an age of Javelins, TOWs, Bradleys, and all that ****. My question is this:
How in the hell does a mechanized infantry company with M113s and a couple of Dragons fend off, or attack, a motor rifle company with BMPs? I mean, the 113 is about useless in that fight so I realize it's about correct positioning of the dismounted element but how on earth is my couple of Dragon dudes supposed to carry the day in that fight?
I honestly think Cold War is my favorite version yet...
in Combat Mission Cold War
Posted
I love it. I'm not great at it; still trying to get used to a totally tech-inferior US Army, but I love it. I've started using some Quick Maps to play around with different scenarios and force compositions and such.
I do miss my Javelins, though. The Dragon just isn't enough.