Quick173

Not that I’ve seen. Though I made this wee short film 
 

Ah thank you! This is I think is one of these scenarios I enjoyed making the most. Getting the Soviet AI plan to provide soemthing that resembled a Soviet echeloned attack took some fettling. Though I think the scenario is harder for the Soviets than it was in real life!
Yeah the noise of battle when i took this for its first tests was impressive! But artillery was a feature in this action and was remarked upon by all the eye witness accounts i referenced. Yeah the aircraft add another sound dimension and again were soemthing remarked upon by witnesses.
The Soviets were really understrength at this point especially the armoured units - so you pretty much have the whole of 8th Guards Tank Corps on the map by the end. Sounds impressive but they'd not many tanks left by then. I only had the first infantry from 76th Guard Rifle div from the first few echelons mainly cos the game would have choked and I ran out of AI slots! I am pleased that the sense of being attacked by waves works though as again that's how it felt to the German defenders.
In the actual action Fluegal's group ended up being pinned in the woods on the German right flank whilst Soviet infantry advanced past them. They ended up sitting doggo fending off some Soviet infantry close assaults till they could pull out during the night (this is covered in the Panzergruppe Flugel scenario - though the map used in that one is representative).
Anyways thanks for taking this for spin its a large scenario but good to hear it delivers the experience I was after!
Many thanks.
Tioraidh!

Just finished @George MC 's Heart of the Dying Sun scenario and it's one of the wildest I've ever played, it auto ended with 43 minutes to go. For one look at the Soviet Casualties! Some parts of the battlefield you'd have a hard time not stepping on any bodies. The amount of Soviet artillery was amazing, there were very few turns where artillery wasn't falling. The Soviets must have literally fired over 5,000 shells, a lot of times the noise was just incredible, massive artillery, tanks, AA guns, machine guns firing, and Soviet planes flying around at the same time. The planes may not be too effective but after seeing them in here it adds a lot to the battlefield noise. 
At times it seemed like things were winding down but it was just a pause as the next human wave of infantry was coming through the smoke and dust. It's not that easy but a very fun scenario.

This video covers the translation of one section (Section IV) from a larger pocket-sized booklet, printed by the German military during the later stages of the Second World War titled 'Panzer Hilft Dur!' translates as 'Panzer Helps You!' 
Section IV in ‘Panzer Helps You!’ covers the mittlerer Schützenpanzerwagon (Sd.Kfz.251), known as the m.S.P.W. or just S.P.W. To provide context I have included a couple of primers regarding the Sd.Kfz. 251 and German SPW advice on correct use and deployment of SPW.
 

All good points.
But just to clarify - this series of wee vids is firmly fixed on the tactical level - platoon/company I might stretch to battalion... So I'm only covering the sort of stuff that might be relevant or useful within a Combat Mission setting. Once you move to the operational many other factors (operational and strategic) start to impact on the effectiveness of the German armed forces, especially the panzerwaffe.
Its useful to put this into that wider picture so thanks for adding the background. I'll chuck in my own view re the wider picture. With the wider industrial, societal and geographic factors the German war effort was doomed to failure in the long term. Very little in the amount of 'superior' training/tactics was going to fundamentally change that, though a few limited tactical 'successes' might slow that bloody process. 
 

Ah so onto REDDIT tactic #2, treat the other poster like your personal information waiter.  I spent nearly a half a page answering your post but this is the “soup you do not like.”  This is exactly what I mean by obtuse flanking - I do all the work and you sit back and nit pick from the high ground of ignorance.  “Prove to me that the earth is indeed round!”
You need a few more years on that learning journey because you do not even know what you are looking at.  
All of this research is by-design trying to figure out how to overcome the attacker-defender problem.  It has been central to warfare, pretty much from the beginning.  The problem is pretty simple, attacking is more costly and dangerous than defending but it is the only way to get things done.  So how do we overcome that?  Force ratios is one way, but there was a lot of research on speed, tempo etc because we were all up in manoeuvre warfare back in the 90s.  All those force ratio studies were reinforcing the western myth that attrition was dead.  It was all the rage right up until this war where clearly attrition is back on the menu.  Of course there are other factors in the force ratio equations, now you can go look up what force multipliers really mean.
The bottom line is that if you look at highly attritional battles against prepared defences losses ratios at the tactical level can get very high - the the opening of the Somme.  However, over time those ratios tend to settle into around 2-1.5 to 1 losses agains attacker…until/if the attacker achieves break out, then the ratio will flip pretty fast. The major weakness of defence is that it is more rigid system, more tied to owning terrain in land battle. Once that system is cracked it can fall apart pretty quickly.  However clearly the UA has not suffered this yet.
But hey if you want to cling to the idea that at Bakhmut the RA - throwing literally waves of untrained convicts and poorly trained and supported conscripts at prepared UA defences, should be seeing 1:1 loss ratios because you haven’t seen a curve on a graph…well I cannot help you.
I can tell you that if you dial in a solution that does not take into account the fact that attacking is more costly and dangerous in the short term in any professional military school, from junior leadership to joint staff college, you will fail.
 

Sorry, but I think this will be appreciated here...

https://news.sky.com/story/as-boris-johnson-heads-to-finland-what-will-it-mean-if-the-finns-join-nato-12610045
Finland's prime minister and president have said the historically neutral country, which fought the Soviets in WWII and lost, must seek membership of the defensive pact. 
 
Let me be the first to congratulate Vlad Putin on rescuing NATO from the dustbin of history.  Actions, meet consequences.  I expect Sweden to follow soon.

Now Bofors L40/60 in service %)

Let me say, this is also good discussion because it has led to dilemma, and in my experience that is a sure sign we are onto something.
So let me paint things out a bit (begs for patience):  So back in 1945, infantry could basically effect about 200m versus tanks, and maybe 1000m vs other infantry.  They had ISR in the form of intel feeds, which were often daily, and what they and those in radio range could see.  Now in 2022, those same infantry, in modern militaries, are able to effect armor of all types out to 80kms (Switchblade 600, NLOS ATGMs such as Spike) and employ UAVs and other sensors to see at least as far.  They also can do the same to other dismounted infantry; however, those are harder to find than armor, and infantry still need armor in the modern battlefield in order to attack (maybe?)
So what?  Well this means that, as we have seen in this war, that infantry - light infantry in particular - have far more range, lethality and accuracy than at any other time in human history.  They are also just as hard to see.  What has appeared to have happened in this war, at least as far as I can tell, is Ukrainian defence has relied on light infantry to do most of the heavy lifting.  I have no doubt Ukrainian conventional mech has been engaged, particularly at key points; however, Ukraine did not, and does not have anywhere near enough conventional mass to defend the frontages it has - enter hybrid warfare.  This is a game changer, as light infantry can essentially deny swaths of the land domain battlespace.  Further, they now have ranges that inflict attrition and friction well past the formation level.  When combined with integrated ISR, and their own through UAVs along with effective comms, and UA artillery, they have hammered Russian logistics to the point I suspect it broke - leading to the collapse of an entire front in the North.  This demonstrates a much higher level of both tactical and operational levels of precision than the Russians have been able to muster.
So What?  Russian mass, in all its forms is not working.  And based on this entire discussion, I am coming to a hypothesis as to why and it jumps from your statement up there: that is exactly how Russia fought and won in 2014, and likely thought it could fight and win in 2022.  In 2014 they demonstrated repeatedly that they could bring their assets to bear faster and with more accuracy than UA forces.  They believed they could suppress and then kill in detail with superiority like they did in 2014...so what changed?  Well Ukraine developed an C4ISR system apparently, and one that can do one helluva better job at bringing assets to bear.  I also suspect an organic C4ISR system emerged within local Ukrainian defence; Haiduk has already described how everything from sensing to logistics to killing has been crowdsourced in this war.  This created a major dilemma for the Russians, and it would be for us too - how can we bring our assets to bear to achieve effects when they were designed for another opponent?  You noted that we use mass fires to hit moving armor - what happens when your opponent offers you no moving armor?  What happens when an opponent can hit your operational LOCs from that treeline?  They can take out  your lead F ech armor at a nearly 1-1 munition kill ratio?  And because you are carrying so much mass, for miles behind you, they can see you coming for days...and you can't see them at all?
The dilemma is that, and you are correct here, all-precision is not practical.  Your slide example demonstrates that. However, mass as we understand it is not working and it is likely because how we have designed it was for a centralized mass-v-mass war...and people don't need mass to stop mass anymore, or at least that is what I suspect we are seeing here. In order to combat what we are seeing, yes we would need to blast every treeline OR we really up our ISR game to the point we can see a person in every treeline 40 kms out, which as far as I know is also not an option.  In your case up above, those infantry died in their vehicles before we could even figure out which treeline to hit.  I suspect that is why, as we have seen in other post the Russians are employing WW2 style approaches of "recce by death" to try and suss out Ukrainian defence.  All this adds up to a really slow and grinding advance, while ones logistical trains are being destroyed.
Ok, so I am not a Logistician either, but I do have a fair amount of experience in this field - I went through an Operational Support phase for about 5 years. Your example is perfect.  Since WW1 Army's have been firing "unfathomably large amounts"...it is also exactly how Germany lost that war. 
It is trite to go with "professionals talk logistics" (I think Bradley was really saying professionals see the entire system); however, logistics is the critical path for warfare, and has been for a long time.  Why?  Because it is how one can sustain all that mass.  Without it military mass breaks down and fragments, so many historical examples of this, a the Russians have re-affirmed this truth.
Back in the day, I had the same sentiment - "they always winge about that but someone will figure it out."  I suspect some Russian commanders had the same idea.  Problem is that based on all that stuff I pointed out before re: light infantry -and frankly we should know this from 20 years of small crappy wars- there is no such thing as a rear area anymore.  Russia has lost nearly 1000 logistical vehicles (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html) and it shows.  I strongly suspect they keep stalling out because their logistics system strains and then fails, which directly effects the Russian A-game of mass.  This makes mass unaffordable, mainly because it is not working anywhere near quickly enough - it is in an upside down battlefield calculus.
So what is our dilemma?  We do not have an answer to what we are seeing in Ukraine right now.  We have excellent C4ISR but it has limits and finding light infantry in bushes is one of them - we learned that one the hard way.  We have mass but it won't help if we cannot find the thing to hit with it, and it creates weight we need to support.  We have excellent logistics to support it; however, it is highly visible and vulnerable at the ranges we are talking about.  We have airpower, but we even saw in Iraq that we can lose air superiority below 2000 feet.  This lead me back to something that has been nagging me for about 20 years...what does superiority even mean anymore?  We had all of it and it did not seem to matter.
We do not have the precision to combat this type of fight, and our mass will not work either.  We would no doubt do better than the Russians for all the reason we have explored here but I am more and more convinced that warfare has been shifting for some time and has shifted here again.  This shift has pushed us into a dilemma space we need to figure out.  Maybe it is not that bad, and we can mitigate with what we already have.  Maybe it is worse than we think.  All I know is that we need to figure that one out because the Chinese are watching this as closely as we are and if I wanted to really mess up a western proxy nation intervention in 5 years I already know what I would do.

Some nice captured T-80s under new management.
 
 

More interesting, our General Staff to this time didn't confirm this. Some people from there hint Russian counter attacks and shelled with artillery, but we hold taken positions. Also maybe operatoin is more longer and have more deep goals, than reaching Siverskiy Donets bank, so official information will be later.
The chief of miliatry-civil administration said only that evacuatin of civilians from Staryi Saltiv is impossible, but he will not comment antthing about either this village liberated or not.  

No, helicopters hit oil depot after this strike. Theese are different episodes. 

@The_Capt
Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba on the meeting of NATO countries ministers of defenses:
"I regret to say this, but this is true: the battle for Donbas will remind you WWII with large-scale operations, maneuvers, participation of thousands tanks, armored vehicles, planes, artillery. This will not be local operation, based on what we see from preparations of Russia to this. Russian has own plan, we have own. And outcome of this battle will be decided on the battlefield"
So, as I said recently, "light infanty" tactic on Donbas will be less useful. Here is more dense troops deployment, clear frontline, minefields, trenches, strongpoints, Russians will have more short and defended routes of supply. Here will be completely other war. 

Because it (almost inevitably) appeared elsewhere:

Justified for whom?
In the beginning of 2014 only 18% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO and about 3/4 (undeservedly) considered russians ok guys.
Everybody was more than happy to stay neutral and there were no issues apart from russian soldiers looting something and killing ukrainians in Crimea once a year just for fun - but our government always tried to sweep that under the rug and pretend it never happened.
The war began in 2014, the justification was that Ukrainians are subhuman and don't deserve to have a country. And it flew perfectly well with the russian population.
Pretending that NATO is somehow a reason for the war that started 8 years ago when Ukraine was extremely anti-NATO is your typical russian BS designed to give "russian-friendly" politicians in the West a reason to keep letting Russia do its crimes.

Unicycle troops - in any situations Ukrainians never lose their sense of humor )
Baсkground song is "Koleso" ("a wheel") 
 

Brigade general SBU Andriy Naumov, the chief of SBU internal security directorate have lost own post as far as in July 2021 due to corruption scandal and dirty intermal withstanding inside SBU. He left Ukraine on 23th of Feb, one day before war began.
Brigade general SBU, chief of SBU in Kherson oblast, Serhiy Kryvoruchko also left territory of Ukraine before invasion. Reportedly he gave to Russians all defense plans of Kherson oblast, which allowed Russians to seize it so quickly. 
So, for now Zelensky can only dismiss them. Prosecution will be after the war. The irony, both were appointed and later promoted to brigade general ranks personally by Zelenskyi. And looks like he did it by advice of Andriy Yermak, the chief of Persident's Ofiice, which many in our contry consider as Kremlin agent of influence. And after the war his political opponents will remind him on this.
  

Commander of Azov speaks on behalf of all defenders of Mariupol
Translation:
... It is quite difficult, taking into account that the balance of forces and means is just disheartening. We understand that in the next couple of days it will be even more difficult for us. But our soldiers do not give up and will fight to the last. We are military, we are ready to die for this country, we are ready to fight for it, and this is our duty and our obligation. We have people sometimes fainting from hunger. We eat once a day, our provisions are also running out, just like ammunition. We try to save its, even our seriously wounded have to boil technical water so that they can drink it. I managed to wash myself since 35 days maybe three times before a full blocade. We are ready to kill and rampage without sparing ourselves. When people, after the third or fourth wound, pick up a rifle, grit their teeth in pain and go further into battle, I don’t think these people are afraid of something.

I still think the WSJ commentator is getting it right:
"The Ukraine incursion will end with a whimper:
Hostilities will end after Putin has secured the land bridge in eastern Ukraine. NATO countries will breath a sigh of relief, but holler about how Russia will have to 'pay' for the incursion. Biden will boast that his leadership was successful. Russia will pay lip service to reparations, but cease after the sanctions are removed. Germany, Italy, Turkey and other countries will revert back to energy reliance on Russia. NOTHING will change, save Putin getting more valuable land, ala Crimea. Putin will begin planning for 'annexing' the rest of Ukraine." Also adding that Russia and China will continue to chip away at the US dollar's dominance and nations like SA, UAE, India and others will support the "new world order".

This story is a bit sentimental but it does appear to indicate a fairly static situation east of Kharkiv.  Also the first time I've seen an automatic grenade launcher
 

I'm actually Chinese, and my observation of Chinese netizens' reaction is actually very much the opposite.  The great majority of ordinary Chinese citizens seem to buy into Russia's propaganda (b/c that's what they are fed on Chinese media) and many are very pro-Putin.  They lay the blame at Ukraine and the West's doorstep, and feel that Russia is helping China by checking the West's expansionism and disrupting their containment of China's own rise.  The strong nationalist sentiment that Xi Jinping has been cultivating through propaganda and autocratic leadership is very worrying...

@The_Capt
I think, you judge mostly of territorial defense footage, so you might get the impression that we are fighting only with light infantry, heavy armed with modern toys. But this is because there is too few footage from our "line" units. But they fight hard with all own equipment from the tanks to BMP and artillery, though in conditions of cities defense, even these units often use "light infantry raids" tactic.
Yes, territorial defense actions are making outstanding controbution and their shoot and scoot actions release our "big army" for more hard tasks, TD work is winning a time for Reserve corps brigades and "second waves" of existing brigades deployment.