IdontknowhowtodoX

Brendan McBreen, a retired USMC Lieutenant Colonel, ran 300 squad assaults in CMSF and drew insights from them. McBreen, who has 25 years of service as an infantry officer, found that the service's manuals and training materials give only vague and inadequate guidance about how to conduct a squad assault. He used CMSF to run a series of tests, matching a rifle squad against different defenders, and tallied up the results. 
Then he wrote up his findings. The whole series of seven articles appears over on the Tactical Notebook, a Substack run by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, a historian in Quantico. 
Abstract Part I Part II Part III (test setup within CMSF) Part IV Part V (tactical insights) Part VI (recommendations) Among McBreen's recommendations: "train with simulations" and "use simulations to improve our manuals." 
Fight Club US and Fight Club UK merit acknowledgements.
 

The British Army's approach for essentially all of the Cold War was defence in depth and counter-attack, with the emphasis on "depth" at all levels. This is in contrast to the German approach, which had the emphasis on the counter-attack. One of the fascinating things about Cold War doctrine is that everyone was trying to solve the same problems, but going about it differently.

Active Defence wasn't about deploying in depth, but in creating depth through manoeuvre. AD had an up-front defence, with elements peeling back and rotating, creating successive kill-sacks. Counter-attack wasn't a formal part of this, and it's not clear where that element would have come from.

The issue with AD is that it's very complex, and ambitious to the point of implausibility. It's also that it lacks a real theory of victory - the best an Active Defender can do is not lose, there's no real ability to win.

☝️
To give a rl example of an incident that happened early this year in a simulator exercise.
a company of l2a6 is defending. the far left platoon starts getting targets at 3500m and engages. suddenly one tank turns its turret and puts five rounds into a tank of the center platoon only barely being stopped before also shooting the company commanders tank.
The tc had seen a thermal signature and immediately brought the gun over without checking what he was looking at and the gunner didnt realize he was looking at a leo2 and fired even though he knew there were friendlies there, the tank was pointing and engaging in the wrong direction, only 1000m away and was in the open easily identifiable.
If this happened to anyone in cm theyd riot yet it happened irl.
So while cm has issues with the spotting model rl can be much weirder.

The other area of improvement is the effect of artillery on armoured vehicles.  The current CM engine is not reflecting realities we are seeing in the war in Ukraine, I do believe a revisit is in order on just how vulnerable tanks are to heavy indirect fires.  This will have a big impact on CW as the Soviets were an artillery heavy force.

I just ran a better test than the one I did a few years back, since that one was at 150 meters. This one is a more typical 800 meters. T-72A vs M60A1 RISE+. It unsurprisingly shows a larger difference in spotting, although  not massively. The biggest difference was in the number and magnitude of outliers produced. A quirk of the CM spotting system is that it can produce huge outliers from time to time, which probably account for most of the "my tank is totally blind!" anecdotes. For example, the median spotting time for T-72 was 36.5 seconds but the single longest time recorded was 270 seconds. Because of that the average changes a lot depending on if you include outliers or exclude them, although the median doesn't change much.
n=50
Outliers excluded median
M60: 27.5 seconds T-72: 34 seconds Outliers excluded average
M60: 26.9 seconds T-72: 39 seconds Outliers included median
M60: 29 seconds T-72: 36.5 seconds Outliers included average
M60: 29.8 seconds T-72: 53.7 seconds  
What does this tell us? Nothing we didn't already know, frankly. But #1, and perhaps most importantly, CM spotting is highly variable and the result of any given encounter is usually a function of the situation combined with sheer dumb luck rather than the vehicle characteristics. For example, the fastest spot time for the T-72 was 8 seconds and the longest spot time for the M60 was 101 seconds. Second, while the difference in spotting ability in identical situations is around 21-23% most of the time the M60 is more consistent and therefore less likely to throw out an extreme result.

The Relationship between Soft Factors, Morale & Fatigue 
 
Preface
Hi all, I'm pretty new to the BFC forums but I've been milling about over at the FGM for a little over a year. I recently created the below post and it received a lot of positive feedback to the point that it has now become one of the sitcky threads over there.
I have been prompted to post the thread here and after a conversation I had in another thread on this forum, I thought that by placing it here, then non-FGM members can have a read through without me having to copy and paste snippets from the original post at the FGM.

Introduction

Whether selecting unit attributes in a quick battle or whether in game wondering if you should use your +1 Leadership squad or +2 Motivation squad to assault a farmhouse. it can be difficult to make an informed decision due to the fact that there is not a lot of information in the manual which explains how the attributes of Experience, Leadership, Motivation and Fitness (hereby collectively known as the 'Soft Factors') affect certain game concepts such as Morale, Suppression, Firepower and Fatigue.

The forums can be slightly misleading as some posts describe exactly how something works whilst others are more how people feel something is working and it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The information below is based on a painstaking process using the editor to separate out the impact of different factors by isolating them and testing them under different conditions. By isolating and testing these factors, the mechanics behind the concepts of Morale, Suppression, Accuracy, C2 and Fatigue start to reveal themselves and after several red herrings, dead ends and lots of repetition the information below has been teased out from the game.
2 videos accompany this post to explain some of the findings, however all of the findings can be backed up by video evidence.

The editor used was the one for Fortress Italy v2.00 Engine 4.0.

SPOILER ALERT - if you prefer the murkiness of not knowing how the Soft Factors affect gameplay then please stop reading.

Having said that the following information does not quantify the game concepts affected by the soft factors but instead generalises as what is likely to happen within a certain concept under certain conditions to units with high and low values for the soft factors.


Morale

Before being able to explain the characteristics of the 'Soft Factors', it is imperative to understand how Morale works in the game.

Morale reflects the psychological state of a unit and determines its ability to respond to orders and fight.

Morale states from highest to lowest are;
 
Ok > Cautious > Nervous > Rattled > (Shaken) > (Panic) > Broken
States shown in brackets () are temporary states.

The states Ok through to Nervous are simple gradations and a Nervous unit will not behave differently from an Ok one.

Rattled troops which become Pinned (or highly suppressed) will dash for safety, even if they are stationary when they become Pinned (or highly suppressed).

Shaken troops will cower in their current position in the hope that the pressure will ease. They will not respond to orders or fire their weapons.

Note: Shaken troops observed running for cover have been Pinned (or highly suppressed) in the Rattled state prior to becoming Shaken.

Panicked troops will try and run away from the perceived threat to save their own hides. They will not respond to orders or fire their weapons.

Shaken and Panicked states are temporary and will eventually revert back to one of the other persistent states depending on the situation and the Experience, Leadership and Motivation of the unit.

Broken troops will respond to orders but are 'Brittle' and will quickly become Shaken or Panicked if fired upon. Broken troops will remain Brittle for the remainder of the battle irrespective of their Experience, Leadership, Motivation and Fitness.

Morale is affected by 2 conditions of the battlefield and each of these conditions impact on Morale in different ways.
 
1. Combat Stress

Combat Stress has a persistent impact on Morale and is caused by casualty build up.

Casualties sustained reduce the Morale of the unit for the remainder of the game and is therefore known as a persistent effect.

Morale affected in this way cannot be regained (except under one specific condition - see Leadership). The impact of Combat Stress depends on the number of casualties sustained over time and the Experience, Leadership and Motivation of the unit.

Not only does taking casualties effect the Morale of the unit directly impacted, other units organisationally closely connected are also affected in the same way but to a lesser extent. The persistent Morale effect of casualty build up only effects other units via organisational connection regardless of geographical proximity.

Example 1 - 1st and 2nd Sqd of 1st Plt are separated by 500m. As 1st squad sustains casualties and suffers a persistent Morale impact, 2nd Sqd will also suffer a persistent Morale impact even though it is 500m away and has no LOS to 1st Sqd.

Example 2 - 1st Sqd of 1st Plt is within 10m of 3rdSqd of 2nd Plt. 3rd Sqd of 2nd Plt receives incoming fire and half of the unit is wiped out and the Sqd is instantly Shaken. 1st Sqd of 1st Plt receives no impact to their persistent Morale state due to the fact that they are in a different Platoon. 2nd Plt would have to take far more casualties before any of 1st Plt become affected.

The way that Combat Stress is distributed to other units is vertical between different platoons and companies although it is horizontal between units of the same platoon.


2. Combat Shock

Combat Shock has a temporary impact on Morale and is caused by suppression.          Suppression has a temporary impact on Morale and the affect is removed once the suppression is lifted.

         The duration the unit remains suppressed for depends on the amount of incoming Firepower, the immediate casualties sustained, Experience & Leadership of the unit.

         The temporary impact on Morale of being suppressed depends on the amount of incoming Firepower, the immediate casualties sustained and the Experience, Leadership & Motivation of the unit.


Suppression Indicator

The Suppression Indicator is not merely a measure of incoming fire, more accurately it represents the units perception as to how much danger it is in based on the incoming Firepower, the immediate casualties sustained, and the Experience, Leadership & Motivation of the unit.

Inexperienced, poorly led and unmotivated units suffer the greatest Morale impact from being suppressed whilst inexperienced and poorly led units can remain suppressed for sometime after the last shot was fired in their direction.
 
Pinned

If the Suppression Indicator becomes full the unit becomes Pinned. Stationary Pinned (or highly suppressed) troops will return fire but will not respond to movement orders until the suppression has reduced.

Troops which become Pinned (or highly suppressed) whilst moving to a waypoint will attempt to dash for cover. If no cover is nearby, they will hit the deck.

Rattled troops which become Pinned (or highly suppressed) will dash for safety, even if they are stationary when they become Pinned.

Experienced and well led troops recover from being Pinned quicker than inexperienced or poorly led troops.
  C2 - Command & Control

C2, or Command and Control, reflects the effect of having a unit being able to receive orders from and deliver information to its HQ team.

Being within a C2 link does not provide resistance to the persistent impact on Morale caused by Combat Stress.

Being within a close C2 link (Close Visual/Voice) does provide resistance to the impact on Morale caused by Combat Shock - troops within C2 range of their HQ unit are less affected by the temporary impact of suppression upon Morale as they are less stressed by being shot at and the immediate impact of seeing team/squadmates killed & wounded is reduced.

More experienced units pass on information to their buddies and superiors quicker than less experienced units. This includes verbal, visual and radio communications.

The range of visual and audio C2 is fixed for all Soft Factors, Morale and Fatigue states but will vary by terrain. In open ground;
: Voice range < 50m (unless the HQ is hiding in which case voice range drops to <25m)
: Close visual range <100m

  Experience

Experience reflects the amount of training and combat experience the unit has.

Experience levels from least experience/training to most experience are;
 
Conscript > Green > Regular > Veteran > Crack > Elite
Experience has 6 characteristics which impact on the unit;
 
1. Spotting - troops with higher experience are able to spot enemy contacts sooner than less experienced troops.

2. Firepower - higher experienced troops will engage at longer ranges and have greater accuracy than less experienced troops. They therefore tend to cause more casualties to the enemy than their less experienced counterparts during a firefight.

3. Resistance to Combat Stress - more experienced troops are less affected by the psychological impact of losing team/squadmates.

This characteristic is cumulative with Leadership and Motivation. 

4. Resistance to Combat Shock - experienced troops are less affected by the temporary impact of suppression upon Morale. They are more used to being shot at and better desensitised to the immediate impact of seeing team/squadmates killed & wounded than less experienced troops.

This characteristic is cumulative with Leadership and Motivation. 

5. Suppression Recovery - experienced troops recover quicker from being suppressed (including being Pinned), they realise when the incoming fire has shifted away from them sooner than less experienced troops do.

This characteristic is cumulative with Leadership.

6. More experienced units pass on information to their buddies and superiors quicker than less experienced units. This includes verbal, visual and radio communications.

Leadership

Leadership reflects the quality of NCO's or other team leaders in the team or squad to organise and support the troops. Leaders can be of varying quality.

Leadership is shown as a simple modifier ranging from;
 
-2 > -1 > 0 > +1 > +2 Note: A Leadership modifier only applies to the unit with the Modifier (like all other modifiers). In other words it does not filter down to sub-ordinate units (see HQ Leadership Modifier Example).

Leadership has 3 characteristics which effect unit behaviour under duress;
 
1. Resistance to Combat Stress - better led troops are less affected by the psychological impact of losing team/squadmates.

This characteristic is cumulative with Experience and Motivation.

2. Resistance to Combat Shock - well led troops are less affected by the temporary impact of suppression upon Morale. The NCO's are better at encouraging the troops under fire and getting them to remember their training when faced with the immediate impact of seeing team/squadmates killed & wounded.

This characteristic is cumulative with Experience and Motivation.

3. Suppression Recovery - well led troops recover quicker from being suppressed (including being Pinned), they realise when the incoming fire has shifted away from them sooner than poorly led troops do.

This characteristic is cumulative with Experience.  Unlike the characteristics denoted by Experience, if the Leader of a team or squad is incapacitated, the Leadership value of the unit will change to that of the next most senior member who steps up as the Leader. This value can go up as well as down, for example, a unit with a +1 Leader incapacitated and replaced by a -1 Leader will suffer a hit on Morale which may be enough to cause a persistent drop in the unit's Morale state. Similarly however, if a -2 Leader is incapacitated and replaced with a 0 Leader, the unit will receive a boost in Morale which may be enough to cause a persistent increase in the unit's Morale state.

Note: In Engine v4.0 manual page 68 it states that a Leadership bonus will help "direct fire to be more effective". However, this has not been possible to reproduce using various tests. Whereas the difference in accuracy between Crack units and Green units is repeatable and obvious, the effect of Leadership on accuracy is not apparent.

  HQ Leadership Modifier Example

Reading some posts, there is a lot of confusion over how this Modifier works with HQ units. So I will clarify it here.

The Leadership (Ldrshp) modifier for all units (from Btn Hqs through to Plt Hqs down to squads and teams) only effects the unit that the modifier is for, in the same way that a -2 Fitness modifier only effects the fitness of the unit that the modifier is for.

In fact, it helps to think of the Leadership modifier in the same was as the Fitness modifier. An unfit Plt HQ does not make all of the squads in that platoon unfit aswell.

So a squad with a -1 Ldrshp modifier is not offset by the +1 Ldrshp modifier of its Plt HQ. The squad will still suffer the penalties of having -1 Ldrshp.

So how does having a Plt HQ with a poor leader affect the performance of the Platoon?

This is best illustrated with an example;
  Lt Bike is the Plt Leader of 1st Plt. He has a Leadership modifier of -2. All 3 of the squads in 1st Plt are Regulars with average ability NCO's so no Ldrshp modifiers for the squads. For reference 1st Plt HQ is also Regular.

1st Plt are on a patrol and 1st Squad makes contact with an enemy force. After a couple of minutes, the casualties from 1st Sqd begin to mount. Not only does this have a persistent Morale affect on 1st Sqd, it also has a persistent Morale affect on the other 2 Squads and the Plt HQ because of their close organisational link.

However, because the Plt HQ has Lt Bike with his -2 Ldrshp modifier, it suffers a greater impact on Morale than 2nd or 3rd Sqd does from the build up of 1st Sqds casualties.

After another minute of combat, the persistent morale states of the Platoon are;
  Plt HQ - Rattled
1st Squad - Rattled
2nd Squad - Nervous
3rd Squad - Nervous As the combatants manoeuvre for position, the Plt HQ comes under fire. As the HQ team is already Rattled, it doesn't take much suppression to drop their Morale state temporarily into Shaken.

Now that the HQ unit is Shaken, the C2 link between the HQ and the 3 squads is cut. This makes the squads more vulnerable to the Morale effects of suppression (see C2 - Command & Control).

As 1st Squad is already under suppressive fire, its Morale state instanteously drops from Rattled to Shaken because of the loss of the C2 link (see C2 - Command & Control).

The HQ will take longer to recover from the supression than it normally would for a Regular unit because of its -2 Ldrshp modifier, meaning that as a consequence, the C2 link is broken for longer.

So we now have the following situation after 5 minutes;
  Plt HQ - Shaken
1st Squad - Shaken
2nd Squad - Nervous
3rd Squad - Nervous If we rewind the clock and give Lt Bike +2 Ldrshp modifier, then re-run under exactly the same circumstances the situation would have been after 5 minutes;
  Plt HQ - Nervous
1st Squad - Rattled
2nd Squad - Nervous
3rd Squad - Nervous This is because the Plt HQ would not have been so affected by the casualty build up of 1st Sqd so that when the HQ came under some suppressive fire, it was still in a high enough Morale state not to become Shaken by it and therefore the C2 link between the HQ and the Squads and the benefits it brings (see C2 - Command & Control) would still be intact.



Motivation

Motivation reflects the units dedication to the cause and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their squad mates and commanders.

Motivation from best to worst ranges as;
 
Poor > Low > Normal > High > Extreme > Fanatic Motivation has 3 characteristics which effect unit behaviour under duress;
 
1. Resistance to Combat Stress - better motivated troops are less affected by the psychological impact of losing team/squadmates.

This characteristic is cumulative with Experience and Leadership.

2. Resistance to Combat Shock - highly motivated troops are less affected by the temporary impact of suppression upon Morale. They are less psychologically affected by being shot at and better desensitised to the immediate impact of seeing team/squadmates killed & wounded than their less motivated counterparts.

This characteristic is cumulative with Experience and Leadership.

3. Resistance to Panic and Breaking - highly motivated troops can be Shaken but are less likely to Panic and try to run from the fight to save themselves. They are also more likely to recover to a positive morale state after being Shaken than less motivated troops and are less likely to become Broken and Brittle.

Fanatic units will not surrender.
Fatigue

Fatigue is the physical effect of running around and using up energy.

Fatigue states best to worst are;
 
Rested > Ready > Tiring > Tired > Fatigued > Exhausted
Tired troops cannot Fast Move.

Fatigued troops cannot Fast, Assault or Hunt Move.

Exhausted troops cannot Fast, Assault, Hunt or Quick Move.

More tired troops do not move slower than less tired troops moving at the same movement command, ie Unfit troops moving at Fast Move, cover distance at the same rate as Fit troops moving at Fast Move, they just won't be able to keep up that pace for as long.

Keeping troops stationary recovers their fatigue relatively quickly. Hiding troops has no additional benefit.

Troops will recover fatigue whilst at the Move but it is at a slower rate.

Experience, Leadership and Motivation do not effect Fatigue states or recovery times.

Fatigue has no effect on Morale either from Combat Stress or Combat Shock.

Fatigue has no effect on accuracy nor the range at which targets are engaged at.


Fitness

Fitness represents a units physical resistance to Fatigue.

Fitness states from best to worst are;
 
Fit > Weakened > Unfit  
Fitness has 3 characteristics which effect unit behaviour under physical exertion;

1. Fitter troops tire less quickly from Fast Move (sprinting), Slow Move (crawling) and Quick Move (jogging).

2. Fitter troops recover from tired states sooner than less fit troops.

3. Weakened and Unfit troops recover fatigue on the Move extremely slowly.  
Closing

All of the conclusions made above have been arrived at through thorough isolation and testing procedures which can be backed up by video evidence.

There is more stuff in the CMx2 engine to dig up than what has been uncovered here but for now I'm unable to go further into this rabbit hole.

Hopefully the information presented here clears up some of the historical confusions that have been around on the various forums. It may also affect the way in which unit purchases are thought about, and hopefully it allows players to make better informed tactical decisions and enhance the way their game is played.

Josey Wales updated 24/09/17

Buttoned up.
Why do you think this is odd? It's really more like a too small sample size. I'm not claiming that what I say is exactly true - in fact, back at university I'd have been flogged for making such bold statements with so little data. I did a "simulation", meaning, "made a dice roll", i.e. I generated a random number, repeatedly, until it was < 0.01 or 0.02, respectively. That is about the order of magnitude (very roughly! I don't know the exact values!) for the spotting probability in the scenario I described (0.02, or 2% for the "simulated" M60). I repeated this 50 times for each "tank". The result looked like this:

Different histogram but same phenomenon. Long tail for orange and seemingly no tail for blue. Now, exactly same parameters and setup but 5000 "experiments" for each tank.

Here you see that both have long tails, and if I were to repeat the experiment a million times each, you would probably see that both get events out to 700. Only that orange gets way, way, way more of them. Just by having 1% instead of 2% probability for each dice roll.
Wish I was the statistics expert, I'm a particle physicist and some statistical data analysis was part of my PhD and later in my job. But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, I guess. 😉 What you describe may be unlikely (though that depends on what the actual parameters governing this situation are) but remember this: There are thousands of players out there making thousand upon thousands of dice rolls each day. The probability that someone observes such a situation (and then makes a frustrated post on the forums) is actually not that small.

No dude don't do that. We already have Wargame Red dragon. Don't need another one. RNG spotting is what makes CM different. Even though it does frustrate players at times.

ATGM team is not necessarily. Only BTR formation have them. It means you have to give up BMP formation. It's more than it's worth. BMP is better suited to running an attack. BTR is just car. My view is that instead of putting effort into sending ATGM teams to destroy American tanks, more effort should be put into reconnaissance and planning. Choose a manoeuvre route that will expose as few of your troops as possible. Approach US forces quickly. Get within 1,000 metres before the Americans launch enough ATGMs and rounds. This is more valuable than ATGM.

I understand OP, as I used to have this problem too. But since I gave up micromanagement I've solved that problem. Also I found the charisma of Soviet. In my personal experience, Soviet tanks were perfectly fine, if not overwhelmingly superior, in tank battles within 800 metres. NATO spotting magic only beats the Soviet at a distance. Once the Soviet tanks got close(within 1000 metres), the m60's pathetic gun and armour could not save them. 
Focusing on whether a particular tank can see enemy tanks is a form of micromanagement. For the Soviet player, micromanagement means nothing. You just need to get enough tanks moving in the general direction of the enemy position. Mass will solve the problem of blindness for you. 
And don't forget artillery bombard. Soviet can't live without battery.

The TC had to piss, and no it could not wait.

Tank Crews can be unionized. 4PM and it is time for a Devonshire Tea with scones cream and homemade jam. 

Let's calm down a little, shall we?
This unpleasant "discussion" made me dig out a test I did some time ago. I've been doing data analysis for basically all my professional life, so I always suffer a bit when reading these threads. So, as we've been discussing on page one or so, anecdotal evidence ("here look at this battle, spotting is broken!!!!") is meaningless. But also doing "experiments" is only as good as the experiment itself plus the evaluation afterwards. First of all, if you do experiments, control the variables! Eliminate everything you are not directly interested in. If you want to look at spotting, do it on a flat surface and make both opponents hold fire. Because, as I often see, if you measure time until first shot, or kill, you are skewing the spotting process. Next, don't look at averages or medians alone. Look at distributions. And don't eliminate outliers. My text book about statistical data analysis said that, eliminating outliers, although done often, should really only be done if you know what you are doing, e.g. when you know that your outlier is actually some measurement error and not some rare event.
So, here's what I did:
I put an M60 TTS and a bog standard T72 (the exact models aren't relevant for the method) on a flat map with paved ground, roughly 2 km apart. I set both vehicles to hold fire. I then measured the time it took for each tank to first get a partial contact and then a full contact.
Here is the raw data:
t72 = [84, 17, 78, 4, 174, 65, 77, 321, 289, 444, 31, 3, 290, 2, 40, 120, 40, 159, 57, 69, 15, 54, 80, 95, 19, 58,
       23, 672, 154, 154, 17, 14, 342, 12, 386, 43, 84, 12, 378, 123, 30, 44, 240, 311, 110, 2, 68, 181, 137]
t72_id = [7, 21, 7,28, 7, 35, 14, 0, 56, 0, 35, 0, 7, 70, 42, 7, 35, 35, 0, 49, 0, 7, 0, 0, 0, 63, 28, 7, 14, 0,
          7, 7, 7, 49, 7, 21, 14, 21, 14, 0, 7, 14, 28, 0, 14, 7, 28, 56, 77]
m60 = [89, 68, 41, 38, 71, 10, 73, 0, 20, 9, 4, 55, 91, 34, 31, 8, 14, 116, 64, 4, 18, 63, 116, 38, 3, 18, 71, 132,
       39, 73, 43, 73, 116, 210, 207, 36, 180, 27, 88, 48, 102, 3, 52, 77, 176, 22, 18, 80, 24]
m60_id = [7, 7, 7, 0, 14, 14, 0, 14, 14, 7, 14, 0, 7, 14, 35, 14, 7, 0, 7, 14, 7, 0, 14, 7, 7, 7, 14, 35, 7, 0, 7, 0,
          0, 7, 0, 7, 14, 14, 7, 7, 7, 0, 7, 0, 0, 7, 21, 7, 7]
Times are in seconds, the entry t72 is time until partial contact for the T72 trying to spot the M60, the one with  "_id" is the difference between partial and full contact. The same for m60. And in order to get the distributions I made histograms with 30s bins for plots 1 and 3 and 7s for plot 2.



So, what do we see here? Well, first of all, I should have taken at least ten times the data or make make larger bins. I didn't have the patience for the former and doing the latter would mean that we don't see much of a distribution. 😉 Anyway, from the raw data we see: time until partial contact can be any number, time to ID (which is what I call time to go from partial to full contact) is always a multiple of 7.
The histograms tell us the following: Although it is not possible to get the exact distribution, this is definitely not something symmetrical where average or media are easy to interpret. If you look at the bins with the highest counts, those are at low times. That means, players will usually see that their T72 or M60 are often quick to spot their target. Nothing to complain about or make a forum "rant". But for both (!) tanks it is quite possible that it takes several minutes - more likely for the T72 but also the M60 TTS had an event with over 3.5 minutes. The time until partial contact is consistent (no more, no less) with an exponential decay which you would expect when counting the number of dice rolls necessary to roll a specific number - only that the M60 TTS rolls with a D6, while the T72 rolls a D20, so to speak.
Now, is spotting "broken" or not? For me, this is really not a meaningful thing to say. Because by "broken" people usually mean "takes too long" without saying what "too long" is and why. With the above distributions, it is possible to never spot the target. Right? Wrong? Broken? This is a game/simulation and as any such thing, at least if you want it to run in reasonable time on a consumer machine, it is simpler than real life and abstracted. A meaningful discussion would be "Is this spotting model adequate? Could CM do better by applying model XYZ, instead?". I'm not sure if the long tails (what some call "outliers") are working as intended (although I find @The_Capt analogy with the barrel quite convincing) or if it is a model that is just designed to get the "center", the common situations, right, accepting that every now and then it produces something odd. But getting the tails of an exponentially decaying distribution right is brutally difficult - in fact, come to think of it, my whole PhD thesis was about modelling the tails of a similar distribution correctly.
 

Crazy. I thought Soviet's lovely tiny ATV were completely blind. This is truly surprising. 

No dude don't do that. We already have Wargame Red dragon. Don't need another one. RNG spotting is what makes CM different. Even though it does frustrate players at times.

I have explained why that is a contrived number. I'm done talking about it.
Sturm-S vs M60 RISE+ @800 meters. Outliers not excluded.
Median M60: 29 seconds Sturm: 17.5 seconds Average M60: 29.8 seconds Sturm: 25.5 seconds Since you attach so much meaning to the single largest time, for the Sturm it was 88 seconds.
That's a 49.4% advantage in median spot time for the Sturm-S. WTF @The_Capt, how do you sleep at night? 😡😡  😡

I had included T72s in my Fahrbahns scenario because I imagined they might never show up in a scenario otherwise. Because why would anyone pick T72 when you can play with T64s and T80s? I guess i underestimated the nostalgic appeal of T72.

So I have been toying with the map editor in Combat Mission ever since I got Black Sea a couple of years ago and I have half a dozen maps that I am fairly happy with, pretty much all of them 90% complete. Most of them are maps of the Donbas region where fighting actually took place but there are also a couple that I simply picked because the topography looked interesting. I have downloaded tons of stuff over the years from other people, scenarios, campaigns, maps and loads of mods so I thought I'd post what I have here. Is not purely unselfish because I also hope it might encourage other people like me to share their work with the community.
All these maps are based on real terrain and topography, using google earth, tons of photos and a bit of creative license from time to time. But I tried to stick as much as possible to the real terrain. I am going to provide a couple of satellite pictures for each one because some people might find it interesting to know where they are located. But obviously you're free to use them for whatever purpose you like and pretend it is a place in Greenland or Kentucky if you feel like it.
I decided to post them all in a single thread and plan on releasing them in the next weeks as I put the finishing touches to them. I got one of Nikishyno and Logvynovo in the Debaltseve area in particular that people might like.
Again feel free to use these for whatever you want. All I ask is that you link to this thread if you end up using them to create a scenario with one of them for instance. Also if you are some sort of genius or mastermind who knows how to create an AI plan for quick battles and make one for one of these maps, please post it here.
 
 

Put your favorite units in a battle, or your Wittmans or whatever you got with the story...  This doesnt have to be just bodycount, it could be one tank but it saved the day or whatever. Give me what you got, I know some old timers got some good ones
In a day or two when my battle finishes with Probus I shall tell you guys a tale of a battle where a horde of commies came storming through, preplanned artillery causing massive casualties and rumors that we had a spy in our ranks.  Almost all our ITOWs got killed by ATGM fire..  things looked bad.
Then the tank charge came.  On my left flank.  Looked like the whole red army was coming at my men.  I had 3 M60s TTS (vet and one crack crew) and one ITOW left.
I rushed my M60 over... and right when I was about to make contact.. the plan loosely being to fire retreat fire retreat etc, I remembered the smoke trick.   Crack M60A3TTS totally alone.  I dont have the names now but Ill have screens..  Long story short, using smoke, they literally stopped the soviet drive COLD. the Soviets tried rushing them, didnt work. Lotsa bounced projectiles, but they legit KO'd at least 12-15 T64s, 2-3 BMPs,1-2 trucks, and IDK how many infantry. It was INSANE. 
Finally my opp got ANOTHER damned 64, my crack crew long out of smoke, smoke rounds, the infantry around outta smoke, and its within 500m.  still 2 shots before they even got on my tank. this crew was so pimp. But the shots bounced.. The 125mm.. didnt.  Catastrophic explosion everyone KIA.  Im personally going to recommend the cmdr for the CMOH and the gunner, the crew Army Cross.
The T64? My other M60 schwacked him. Whew.  scary but stopped... right? then I hear the whine of a turbine engine.  'WTF *checks date* uh oh'

OP goto youtube search free whiskey domfluff combat mission soviets
there should be a few vids that are excellent. also u can dm me for specific tips. 
You have to accept YOU WILL TAKE CASUALTIES
You HAVE TO USE COMBINED ARMS
The tank sensors WILL NOT SEE THE WESTERN TANKS FIRST, UNLESS YOU ARE SITTING STILL LOOKING AT WHERE THEYLL COME FROM
Learn to use your ATGM inf teams to take out western tanks that are exposed.  If you can tactically at all always try to have the western tank advance or move or enter your tanks LOS, your tanks on the move will never spot the western tank first.   If you cant do this, you need to have infantry with the tanks, and mass your tanks.
I almost always let the tac ai target on its own, but in this case if you are doing massed tank attacks consider things like t62s or maybe not the best sov tanks.  Franjly I think T64Bs are always a better choice than a T80B, perhaps except defense where the reverse speed is like a lousy 4 km/h better.   But in case of massed tank attacks with infantry, use weight of fire.  So lets say you got 12 T62s and see 3 m1s.  First remember western platoons are in 4s with tanks and pact is 3s.  so always look for an extra tank, tho it may not be there. second, weight of fire, tell your tanks like if its m1s you want 3-5 tanks shooting at each m1.  This by weight of fire will kill or mess the tank up so bad it can at least stop a disaster. 
DO NOT TRY POPPING SMOKE if its DEFINITELY A THERMAL EQUIPPED WESTERN WEAPON - THEY WILL BE ABLE TO KEEP FIRING AND NOW U CANT EVEN TRY TO SHOOT BACK
Soviets have a fckton of IFVs, apcs, and tanks.  almost all have coax and a few thousand rounds.  literally shoot eveerything potentially  that could have enemy troops in it with target light for mg fire, multiple vehicles, for a min or two per spot, longer on buildings.   This often also gets a repsonse or makes a human think you know where their men are
Soviet arty respone times suck,. Get TRPs and preplan your arty otherwise
everyones different. the way I play them works great or disastrously-  I like high tempo attacks.  IE Im on you and th ebattles gonna be decided fairly quickly...  If you do this right, or learn to do this right lots of people are terrible at handling this, some ppl play really cautiously or slow.  The entire sov doctrine actually encourages what I do somwhat, you need to basically sorta probe or designate a couple attack lanes and send some BTRS or BMPs, and have some infantry near running wit hthem
Where you fin dthe enemy weakest you want to RUSH your men into that hole, and try to blow into their rear where they hopefully arent even sure where u are exactly.   Then You should also on the move be able (time is key, dont stop and mass) pick the avenue you want to strike from now and either roll up th esides, or maybe you wanna rush your tanks over into keyholed spots spots with only a small LOS window as it were ) and have your infantry take up good cover and now the western defender has to come dig u out
thats off the top of my head sorry g2g booty call

Exactly.  Take any battlemap and put a Soviet tank platoon in a position about 1000-1500m out.  Then blindly drive US forces right through their field of view.  You are going to wind up with a bell curve of how quickly the US force get spotted - some early, some late.  Now unbutton the Soviet tank platoon.  Now move it closer.  Move it farther.  Change the crew experience.  Change the tank.  You are going to wind up with a bunch of bell curves.  So the actual question for the developer is “where is the middle of the curve?”  If the curve is indeed “They never see them, not once 10 time out of 10!” in a context where they should be closer to 50-50.  Well then we do have problem.  But having actually run a lot of tests like these, I know it is not the case.
We constantly tweak and provide feedback on where that bell curve should be.  So when a player comes on the forum frustrated with an experience the next question has to be “well what was the context and where would it fit on all those curves?”  Big problem in this case is we are not given any in game ranges or data - how far, what conditions, which Soviet vehicles and how many, what crew experience?  For example if this was a  single buttoned T-62s with green crew at 2000ms, we’ll just forget it.  That tank was not designed to engage at those distances and is basically looking through a straw at those ranges buttoned.
In the end a lot of the frustration about CM centres on the fact that the game models tactical friction too well.  Humans in combat do incredibly dumb and counterintuitive things - it is the stress.  So when your stupid tank goes the wrong way around trees, that is not a bug it is a feature.  It is brutally realistic.  The trick is learning to succeed even in the face of all that unscripted chaos.  And for some it is a major draw, others well maybe not so much.

This.  And in Valley of Ashes I had a moving Soviet T64 spot and engage a static M60a3 in a wood line at 2+ kms.  This does not prove or disprove anything beyond the fact that stuff on the end of either spectrum can (and will) happen.  The problem the developers have is that these wild situations are what players remember.  They do not remember the other 80% of the time when engagements happened pretty much as one would expect.  And then once a bias sets in it becomes all one sees.
So in beta we have run a lot of spotting tests and the US spotting abilities are superior in the main, pretty much as they were in RL.  Always room for improvement, but no, “Spotting is not broken”…this is a conversation we have had many times.

Also, of course there's an RNG aspect to spotting - that's how spotting has been modelled since there have been models for spotting.

As the basic example, Koopman in Search and Screening (1946), who theorised that the detection rate is proportional to the solid angle subtended at the point of observation of the target.
Since your chances of finding something is going to be harder the larger an area you're looking at, that's a base-e relationship of some kind. The Koopman probability of a detection in time t is P(t) = 1 - e^(-yt), with your y in Koopman theory being y=kh/r^3, h and r describing the height and distance to the target, and k being a value for how complex the search operation is.

Call that a "dice roll" if you like, but that's how modelling this kind of thing usually goes.

 

The fact is that depsite how good this game is, and that its spotting system does many things better than other games, it is the weakest link in these games and quite frankly needs a serious look over. 
I posted a while back about some issues I had in the NTC Missions where M60s without thermals could not see several plattoons of soviet tanks in a open featurless desert. I replayed the mission dozens of times trying to find out some workaround. Unbuttoning, target arcs etc. No matter what, those M60s could not see anything. One thing I discovered from that discussion is that CMCW units cannot remember what they have spotted, so once the find something, they can lose it again and then have to start the entire spotting process all over. That is a HUGE problem. 
The other big issue is the way thermals have been modeled. Make no mistake, thermal optics are a huge advantage in the real world. But the way they work in CMCW I think needs quite a bit of adjustment. I could be wrong, but I suspect that thermals have some kind of blanket spotting buff because it seems to boost aquisition even when it shouldnt. Tanks with thermals seem to alway get the first shot even at close range, etc. One extermely frustrating example is having a bunch of soviet tanks that are lying in wait with faceing or arc commands and the thermal armed tanks get the first shots off almost every time even in that situation when ranges are less than 1500. Often even at much closer ranges. 
And stuff like this is not an uncommon thing. Units routinely fail to see things that are right in front of their face. 
One last thing. This issue has been the subject of complaint pretty much since CMX2 came into existence. What I find rather depressing is that many in this community just assume the people complaining are bad at the game or go on lengthy explanations of how sophisticated this games spotting system is compared to other games. In the latter example, it simply doesnt matter. The fact that this game is trying to do things that other games dont do doesnt mean its problems should be a free pass. This aspect of this game needs a serious adjustment. 
The problem is sufficiently frustrating that if the only thing CM 3.0 or patch 5.0 did was fix this, I would be totally happy with it. 

From my notes on fighting like the Soviets:
1) Time spent on recon is never wasted.
2) Time and resources spent killing enemy recon is never wasted. 
3) Have a plan and execute it. 
4) The artillery fire plan dictates the maneuver plan. The maneuver plan dictates the fire plan. These must be mutually supportive. 
5) A company of Sov tanks spots better than any single German/American tank. 
6) Take away the better spotting offered by the NATO habit of fighting unbuttoned. Get them heads down to decrease their situational awareness. 
7) When you attack, attack! Don't poke him with one finger at a time. Make a fist and crush the enemy with overwhelming force. 
10) Use a platoon to crush a squad > use a company to crush a platoon >> use a battalion to crush a squad. Fair fights are for suckers.
9) Keep pressing attacks until they aren't feasible anymore, but don't reinforce failure. The Germans/Americans never have enough troops/tanks. 
10) Just because you have mass doesn't mean the only way forwards is a frontal assault. There are other ways to win that don't involve sticking your dick into the meat grinder until it jams. Recon routes that bypass the enemy, the Germans/Americans never have enough troops/tanks to cover every avenue of approach. Infantry infiltration is a thing.
11) Take you time, don't be in a rush to die. You'll probably run out of people, tanks, and/or ammo before you run out of time. 
H