Tuesday, September 13, 2016

How to Ruin a Tank Battle Position - Combat Mission Shock Force

Do you remember Combat Mission Shock Force?



In a rare example of early victory, I attacked with two platoons of Abrams tanks. My objective was in an area that was being used as a withdrawal route by Syrian Republican Guard armored units.



Moving forward and firing from the hip ( :) ), the US armor moves forward into their battle positions.

Complete and utter destruction. Those T-55s didn't have a chance against my Abrams.


This battle position (1st Platoon) had the 1st Platoon cleaning up Syrian armor like there was no tomorrow. Formation was a tad tight, but it was working.

Until I did this ...

The tiniest fold in the terrain left this tank fighting its own firefight. You will see the outcome later.

On the other side of the sand pile, just a few meters away the other 3 tanks in the platoon are having fun.

Without a wingman, the odds of being killed increase.


Should have done this before.

It was like walking into an ambush.

And it was a very close call.

A quick victory at the "basic training" level of difficulty may explain the quick Syrian collapse and surrender.

I have this narrative compiled in a video, which you can check in YouTube:

https://youtu.be/5PKoAbIT8oA

The tank loss took some victory points away from my score. I made a serious mistake by leaving that tank alone and unsupported. It was just a few meters away from the rest of the platoon, but the terrain avoided the latter from providing fire support.

Cheers,









5 comments:

Marco said...

Nice, you get back on the old CM, no the oldest, the controversial war on the terror one, man when you read about it sounds so 2000's. I like it but for modern the BS is the best.

The little meters that you move are a big difference perhaps because the actual CM are not exact point kind of movement but area movement, which got his pros and cons.

Dimitris said...

Very nice.

Just how big a battle (in terms of number of units and battle area) does the engine support?

Also, are the scenario files raw text (like in M1TP2) or binary?

JC said...

Hi Marco,
Yep. I keep going back to CMSF because the enormous amount of virtual hardware to play around. You are right, the resolution of the positions of the units has increased. Maybe I should have used Black Sea ...

Hi Dimitris,
The battle areas are tiny for typical tank engagements. a 2x2 km map with some trees and built up areas will start to show some lag. The amount of units is not so problematic as far as I know. But yes, the virtual body counts will add up to the performance impairment.

Cheers,

Anonymous said...

It's almost been a month and no posts! Hoping all is well.

Marco said...

Yeah man, you concern us after that encounter with the syrian republican Guard, hopefully you made it to the extraction point.