Butschi

You realize nuclear blackmail cuts both ways. What has kept Russia from deploying tac nukes and lethal chemical in this current war? The famous Russian morale restraint? If Russia had deployed those WMDs in ‘22 the conventional war would be just as over.  One cannot point fingers at the West for being “weak kneed” on the nuclear equation, while at the same time forgetting that Russia is in the same box.

Yep...it was always going to go nuclear and that's pretty much why it didn't happen. Ironic, really.

Haha and you aren't worried about the way the Orange one has infringed the rights of others and the constitution and the working of Congress and absolutely doesn't support Ukraine.
I suggest folk get some balance and perspective...
 

Tutorial Part 2: Elevation
 

I decided to create a new topic for this because "tool to set elevation in the editor" is no longer really a good description. Finally (from my perspective 😉) I managed to release version 2.0.0 of CMAutoEditor.

https://github.com/DerButschi/CMAutoEditor
Woah, Butschi, wait a minute CMAutoWhat? What the hell are you talking about? CMAutoEditor is a tool that takes "external" data, like elevation, and automates clicking in the CM scenario editor. This way it kind of works around "missing features" in the editor. Wouldn't it be nice to import something like a heat map instead of clicking elevations in the editor? Of course I can't change the editor but by letting CMAutoEditor do the clicking it does something similar.

 
Version 2 is really a major update as it now includes importing data from OpenStreetMap. This way you can basically use CMAutoEditor to create a whole map for you.
Still, feature creep and being overly ambitious is certain to kill such a small project so I had to triage what makes it into this release and what (maybe, provided there is enough interest on your side and enough time on my side) gets postponed to a later update.

The cut affecting most of you is that for this release only CMCW is really supported. The reason is that there are differences in what is in the scenario editor for each CM title. That means not only are there buttons at different positions but there are also different buildings, roads, flavour objects etc. which need to be programmed as a "profile". I intend to modify CMAutoEditor in a way that the community can help with that but I am not yet sure how best to do it. So, for now CMCW only. CMBS should work for everything but flavour objects.

Another thing I had to cut is support for Windows version older than Windows 10. I know, there are quite a few of you around who still field Windows 7. However, python is only supported up to version 3.7 on Windows 7 and a few of the libraries CMAutoEditor depends on require python 3.10. In addition, I don't have a farm of PCs idling at home where I can test different Windows version so I can really only develop for Windows 10. Sorry for that but maybe this doubles as a friendly reminder that nowadays Windows 7 is a security liability and you should upgrade to Windows 10 or 11. 😉
There is of course a long list of things I'd like to improve eventually and given that this is a rather complex piece of code the chances that it is free of bugs is close to zero. So, feel free to contact me here or on github if you find something!

Now, with all the caveats out of the way let's move on to the more pleasant stuff. 🙂 What's new in version 2? Well, of course OpenStreetMap data. You can import forests, rivers, roads, streams, railways, farmland, grassland, bushes, buildings and even bus stops, wayside crosses and much more. I improved the tools to import DGM data so that now arbitrary rectangles can be extracted. The information from this can be loaded into the OSM data converter so that you don't have to manually enter bounding boxes. (The geotiff tool is unfortunately among the things that didn't make it for this release so you are left with the previous capabilites). CMAutoEditor itself is now also much faster. Please note, that it may be too fast for what your PC can handle. If you experience "holes", e.g. when setting the elevation, that means the CM Editor is not responsive enough. I will make the parameters that determines the rate of clicking selectable from the GUI in a later update. Last but certainly not least there is a GUI for all the tools, so no more going to that evil shell, typing commands - kudos to @Dawntaker for supporting me with GUI making!

One more thing. I won't repeat the mistake and not have a manual or tutorial video ready at release: Since my previous tutorial video is now totally deprecated I am doing a new one. This time, instead of just telling you what the different features do, I'll do a step-by-step tutorial in four parts where I will create an actual map. This way I will certainly miss a few features but you should get a better feeling of how to actually use the tools in reality. Part 1 is finished already and it covers "installing" (i.e. downloading the .exe files) CMAutoEditor, installing other necessary tools, selecting a location for the map in map.army, finding and downloading elevation data, downloading OpenStreetMap data and getting historical aerial imagery and working with it. So, basically the boring stuff, some of you might say, but possibly the most important part. 😉
In the future I'd like to adapt CMAutoEditor to one of the WW2 titles, I think CMFB or CMRT would be best. Obviously present-day OpenStreetMap won't do for that. So, instead I'd like to make another tutorial showing how to use and old map or aerial image to make "OpenStreetMap data" from scratch and feed it into the CM scenario editor. Drawing polygons and tagging them is still - in my view - much more comfortable than clicking in the editor with some semi transparent overlay. So, if you have good material, go ahead and make a suggestion here. 😉
I hope you enjoy this new version of CMAutoEditor and the tutorial video(s)!

I am less than certain about that. Western focus has always been on stability because stability is important for our investments. Russia poses a problem because it meddles in our affairs and destabilizes regions including our direct neighborhood. So, reducing Russian military capabilities to a point where they can no longer do that is fine. What we don't want is Russia being too weak that it either descends into chaos itself or creates a vacuum of power that is filled by other, maybe even less savory parties. I guess you are right with Africa and the Middle East but the Stans? If the alternative is that either China takes over or Taliban/IS?

FWIW, I loosely follow global (I mean also non-Western) tankie media on both left and right. I don't go out of my way to listen to their bilge, but there's other issues I do like to follow their on and I just happen to get their pro-Russia stuff while I'm there.
So, their 'alternative facts' on the war are as follows:
1. The nationalists controlling the so-called Ukrainian state are fanatic Russophobes with a Nazi-fascist era ideology (Banderism), actively practising ethnic cleansing of Russians, including from oblasts (e.g. Crimea, Donbas, Luhansk, Kherson, Odesa, Kharkov) where they (allegedly) form demographic majorities.
2. NATO is an alliance of inveterate old imperialist powers, dominated by the Anglo-Americans, whose wasteful, decadent economic systems demand hegemony over global resources, including those of Russia, both to prop themselves up and to keep their rivals (the BRICS) from surpassing them. Ever since the (tragic) collapse of the USSR, they have cynically backed anti-Russian movements in the republics (especially the above-mentioned Ukronazis) as another step in neutering, dismantling and plundering the great Russian state. So 'expansion of NATO' may be understood as serving this larger project.
3. The failed offensive of summer 2023 is the clearest example of Ukraine being a puppet or at least a client, being forced against its own instincts to abandon its Cossack tactics and fight Russia head to head in a Western way, with Western kit. While the severe manpower shortages it faces today are a result of Ukrainian men seeing the game and no longer wanting to be cannon fodder for perfidious Albion, et al.
....Like it or not, this lens has a great deal of traction outside the West, even among some patriotic Ukrainians.
Zelenskyy knows all this; and so he needs to assert boldly that Ukraine is fully in charge of its own strategy and policy, even if it means offending delicate sensibilities in the West now and then.
... Note I am NOT claiming that this is why Ukraine has crossed the border in force. But perhaps it helps explain some of their seemingly (in our own lens) 'unhelpful' public statements.

Until they are not.  Wanna try NATO airstrikes into Russia?  NATO control of the Black Sea? How about direct NATO strikes on Moscow?  Hell, lets send in US and Western troops...Russia has no red lines apparently.
In fact this report is not good news at all.  It means there is daylight in the risk calculus between the US and Ukraine...not good.  The main reason is that the US likely knows what is going on inside Russia better than Ukraine.  This is not the first time the UA has played a bit fast and loose.  The fact they did so without US buy in is not a good thing, it is dangerous.

I very much doubt there will be a widening of the conflict.  Lukashenko will not commit to anything more than posturing.  And stop with the Polish mechanized forces driving on anything, that's pure boneheaded fantasy.
Re not telling western partners - well, they wanted to retain opsec not read all about it in the WSJ from unnamed sources in the Pentagon.
 

We all understand perfectly well that NATO troops will not invade Belarus as long as Putin's nuclear weapons are there. Otherwise, the US will go crazy over the risk of a nuclear war. So just forget about Polish mechanized columns driving through Belarus

I don't know exactly how much leverage Putin has over Lukashenko, but as far as I understand it, his power (and life probably) depends on Putin staying in power.
As for how much military threat he could pose, if he deploys 20,000 men in an offensive posture on the border, Ukraine will at least have to redeploy some kind of units to fight them off if they invade. And they probably don't have that much to spare these days.

Good summary at ISW:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/assessing-significance-current-russian-and-ukrainian-operations-course-war
Of course it all boils down to “Russia does positional warfare, Ukraine should do manoeuvre”…how the UA are supposed to pull off manoeuvre on anything besides a largely undefended border sector is still not clear.
My working theory based on Fall ‘22 was - erode, corrode, collapse. But the RA has adopted a very low energy state defence so this does not appear to work offensively. Operational collapses appear to require more precision firepower than Ukraine has in order to engineer.
What is left is - suppress, sanitize, breach, breakout - but we really have not seen this work in a defended sector.  The “sanitize” part is the bitch of the bunch as the attacking force has to pretty much create a box of ISR darkness for the opponent and neutralize everything for kms.  Again the firepower requirements are very high and will likely take an intense offensive swarm no one has been able to generate.
Or we are living in a Defensive primacy age and whatever it will take to reestablish the offensive simply has not been created yet.

I wonder if the Russian response is simply going to be to ignore Kursk and keep grinding in Ukraine.
Ukraine will eventually run out of how far can they get with their supply lines and stop. No need to commit actual sizable forces.

State of war does not automatically mean mobilization; it's still an option. Even if announced, it can be limited to most basic needs at the front while keeping potentiall pool of fast-replenishable "Meatforce" at hand. Again, it depends how they would play it. I would see potentiall for destabilization not in sole fact of mobilizing, but if they would somehow run out of money to pay for it.
Btw. Syrsky before Kursk himself admitted that Russia will increase her contingent in Ukraine to 690 000 by end of the year in normal way, without mobilization additional troops. That is why Kursk is such a gamble; it depends on Kremlin taking the bait and acting in panic mode, pulling away substantial reinforcements from other fronts. Until now, if we pass on social media histeria, they do not seem to overreact. It's open question if it's cold-hearted strategy or innative passivity and nachuism of current Russian population (and its military forces), but for now effect of Kursk offensive is likely smaller than we would like it here.

I decided to create a new topic for this because "tool to set elevation in the editor" is no longer really a good description. Finally (from my perspective 😉) I managed to release version 2.0.0 of CMAutoEditor.

https://github.com/DerButschi/CMAutoEditor
Woah, Butschi, wait a minute CMAutoWhat? What the hell are you talking about? CMAutoEditor is a tool that takes "external" data, like elevation, and automates clicking in the CM scenario editor. This way it kind of works around "missing features" in the editor. Wouldn't it be nice to import something like a heat map instead of clicking elevations in the editor? Of course I can't change the editor but by letting CMAutoEditor do the clicking it does something similar.

 
Version 2 is really a major update as it now includes importing data from OpenStreetMap. This way you can basically use CMAutoEditor to create a whole map for you.
Still, feature creep and being overly ambitious is certain to kill such a small project so I had to triage what makes it into this release and what (maybe, provided there is enough interest on your side and enough time on my side) gets postponed to a later update.

The cut affecting most of you is that for this release only CMCW is really supported. The reason is that there are differences in what is in the scenario editor for each CM title. That means not only are there buttons at different positions but there are also different buildings, roads, flavour objects etc. which need to be programmed as a "profile". I intend to modify CMAutoEditor in a way that the community can help with that but I am not yet sure how best to do it. So, for now CMCW only. CMBS should work for everything but flavour objects.

Another thing I had to cut is support for Windows version older than Windows 10. I know, there are quite a few of you around who still field Windows 7. However, python is only supported up to version 3.7 on Windows 7 and a few of the libraries CMAutoEditor depends on require python 3.10. In addition, I don't have a farm of PCs idling at home where I can test different Windows version so I can really only develop for Windows 10. Sorry for that but maybe this doubles as a friendly reminder that nowadays Windows 7 is a security liability and you should upgrade to Windows 10 or 11. 😉
There is of course a long list of things I'd like to improve eventually and given that this is a rather complex piece of code the chances that it is free of bugs is close to zero. So, feel free to contact me here or on github if you find something!

Now, with all the caveats out of the way let's move on to the more pleasant stuff. 🙂 What's new in version 2? Well, of course OpenStreetMap data. You can import forests, rivers, roads, streams, railways, farmland, grassland, bushes, buildings and even bus stops, wayside crosses and much more. I improved the tools to import DGM data so that now arbitrary rectangles can be extracted. The information from this can be loaded into the OSM data converter so that you don't have to manually enter bounding boxes. (The geotiff tool is unfortunately among the things that didn't make it for this release so you are left with the previous capabilites). CMAutoEditor itself is now also much faster. Please note, that it may be too fast for what your PC can handle. If you experience "holes", e.g. when setting the elevation, that means the CM Editor is not responsive enough. I will make the parameters that determines the rate of clicking selectable from the GUI in a later update. Last but certainly not least there is a GUI for all the tools, so no more going to that evil shell, typing commands - kudos to @Dawntaker for supporting me with GUI making!

One more thing. I won't repeat the mistake and not have a manual or tutorial video ready at release: Since my previous tutorial video is now totally deprecated I am doing a new one. This time, instead of just telling you what the different features do, I'll do a step-by-step tutorial in four parts where I will create an actual map. This way I will certainly miss a few features but you should get a better feeling of how to actually use the tools in reality. Part 1 is finished already and it covers "installing" (i.e. downloading the .exe files) CMAutoEditor, installing other necessary tools, selecting a location for the map in map.army, finding and downloading elevation data, downloading OpenStreetMap data and getting historical aerial imagery and working with it. So, basically the boring stuff, some of you might say, but possibly the most important part. 😉
In the future I'd like to adapt CMAutoEditor to one of the WW2 titles, I think CMFB or CMRT would be best. Obviously present-day OpenStreetMap won't do for that. So, instead I'd like to make another tutorial showing how to use and old map or aerial image to make "OpenStreetMap data" from scratch and feed it into the CM scenario editor. Drawing polygons and tagging them is still - in my view - much more comfortable than clicking in the editor with some semi transparent overlay. So, if you have good material, go ahead and make a suggestion here. 😉
I hope you enjoy this new version of CMAutoEditor and the tutorial video(s)!

The difference between Dresden and Tokyo and other Japanese cities was that after Dresden was destroyed, the decision was made to never again do that to a European city because of the public outcry in Europe and the U.S. In Japan however, with the people being “Japs, Nips, Slopes, Slants, Non-White, and Asians,” the fire bombing was not only continued, but improved. Gen. LeMay actually had scientists working to determine the “best ratio of high explosives to incendiaries and napalm to do the maximum damage to the wood and paper houses of the civilian population.”
I do not excuse or condemn what the U.S. Army Air Corps did because I wasn’t born until five years after the war ended, BUT, IT WAS UNDOUBTEDLY REVENGE AND RACISM BASED! Hopefully, we have moved beyond those emotions, however Russia hasn’t, and therein lies the issue.

I can’t seem to shake the feeling that you somehow want to defend/rationalise the actions of the “good” guys though. Am I right, or wrong?
 
I my professional experience it is generally the criminally minded minority in any society, whether it in itself is “bad” or “good”, that commit the excesses/crimes in any event. And there is no reason for the pro social majority of any society to condone that, no matter if the flag on the perpetrators shoulder is your own or a foreign one.
 

The difference is surely that humanity, or much of it, it trying to evolve.  Your view seems to be that we stay in an unchanging state.  Five hundred years ago it was normal to burn witches and people who painted their church the wrong colour, two hundred years ago it was normal to keep slaves, one hundred years ago women did not vote.  Russia is behaving barbarically as a norm of behaviour.  War crimes are part of the russian operating manual: supposedly the enemy is intimidated and their own soldiers too.  Thankfully western societies reject russian behaviour whole heartedly.  Western armies make a big effort to behave differently, civilised, and avoid civilian casualties.  There is no equivalence.

Before this gets out of hand here is a translated excerpt from Zeit about German aid for Ukraine: (the original report by FAZ is behind a paywall)
So, this is not stopping support for Ukraine but telling our MoD that if they want to send additional stuff, the money has to come from somewhere, they are not getting anything on top.

The indiscriminate bombings are a particularly bad example to make your point. They were probably the number one obstacle for us to come to terms with Nazi crimes. Contrary to popular allied believe, the major part of that happened decades after the Nuremberg trials, when the next generation demanded to know what there parents did.
The indiscriminate bombings were something many Germans had experienced themselves and everyone could see the bombed out cities. On the other hand, the Eastern front had been far away and concentration camps easy to ignore if one didn't want to see them. The soldiers themselves didn't talk about what they had seen and done but everyone could see the effects of the bombing campaign.
And to this day they make for great whataboutism when talking about the Holocaust and German warcrimes: "But but but the Allies weren't any better, remember Dresden? And did anyone of them end up in Nuremberg?"

The indiscriminate bombings are a particularly bad example to make your point. They were probably the number one obstacle for us to come to terms with Nazi crimes. Contrary to popular allied believe, the major part of that happened decades after the Nuremberg trials, when the next generation demanded to know what there parents did.
The indiscriminate bombings were something many Germans had experienced themselves and everyone could see the bombed out cities. On the other hand, the Eastern front had been far away and concentration camps easy to ignore if one didn't want to see them. The soldiers themselves didn't talk about what they had seen and done but everyone could see the effects of the bombing campaign.
And to this day they make for great whataboutism when talking about the Holocaust and German warcrimes: "But but but the Allies weren't any better, remember Dresden? And did anyone of them end up in Nuremberg?"

I do not dispute the RAs behaviour in this war has been abhorrent.  It is a stain on them as a military that will not wash off on our lifetimes.  
But…illegality in warfare is not a scoreboard or balance sheet.  Any UA alleged warcrime should be investigated and prosecuted by the Government of Ukrainian. If they are smart (and I think they are very smart), these will be transparent and public fair trials within their legal system.  It does not matter that “Russia has done worse”.  Reprisals have no place in determining the righteousness of any action.
As to Russia, a major reason we will be unable to renormalize with that country is the outstanding war criminality on display.  Without full prosecution…and it goes pretty high up the chain, we should not lift sanctions and put out warrants for known RA perpetrators.  Russia’s continual disregard for the law of armed conflict will be why they likely will remain boxed up as a nation and never allowed to rejoin Europe…or at least one would hope.

So MAD is justification for such legal frameworks of “they did it first, so we can too”?  MAD is outside of the laws of armed conflict.  In fact MAD is outside warfare itself.  It is an action of species suicide - taking you with me over the cliff.  You are conflating prosecution of conventional warfare with an activity outside of the legal frameworks we have constructed…to avoid freakin MAD.
If Ukraine starts committing the same level and intensity of warcrimes, what do you suppose will happen to support from the West? It is in fact intellectually lazy to simply dismiss the whole “warcrimes thing” as “boys will be boys”.  There is never justification or legal normalization of war criminal behaviour.  To throw the LOAC out the window is to pretty much toss the international rules based order out with it.  At that point what are we fighting for?  If we destroy the rules based order we built, because we are angry or pissy with Russia - we basically erode or destroy why we are supporting Ukraine in the first place.
Trust me I get the impulse and the realities of warfare, but a major difference between a professional military and the RA is adherence to laws of warfare…even when it gets hard. Actually, especially when it gets hard.  Any military that starts to slip, forgiving or looking the other way on unrighteous shoots, is on a slippery slope.  Let it get too far and we won’t be able to tell the difference and that has serious strategic repercussions.

Easy now.  What we did not see was Allies rounding up civilians and executing them in retribution.  Further, and this is for everyone - just because you like CMBN and Band of Brothers, WW2 is the last historical citation anyone wants to use in the modern prosecution of warfare. In many ways it was as bad or worse than medieval warfare when it came to any laws of armed conflict.  WW2 is the reason we passed the modern laws of armed conflict and stood up an entire international legal mechanism to investigate and prosecute warcrimes.
Illegal "revenge" or "retribution" is not sanctioned under international law.  By this logic, Ukraine could have a few Buchas to "even the score".  This would be 1) illegal, 2) morally wrong and 3) harming to the larger Ukrainian cause.
Does this "tit-tat" stuff happen on the battlefield...definitely. Is it still illegal, yep. What civilians do not understand is that the hard part is not to get the guys to kill people, it is getting them to stop. (And before anyone pulls out Grossman and Marshall their conclusions are highly disputed, and from personal experience, simply do not add up to observations in the modern era.)  

Who here is ignoring this? I have been very outspoken about my opposition to ALL nazi following actors in this war, from Vladimir Putin and his government, to his far right supporters in the west, and yes too NATO/ukrainian opponents both appropriating nazi imagery for "trolling purposes only" and the outright fascists. Fascism bad, their symbols bad, anyone endorsing them even ironically or for humor or aesthetic reasons is worthy of criticism and shame, period.