Ssnake

When you find yourself surprised, usually that's your last moment in combat. But once in a while both sides are surprised, and then you can get away with some shit that might otherwise get you killed. The Bradleys in your example had the advantage of operational surprise - the Iraquis simply expected no enemy contact. The Bradleys were tactically surprised; they knew that eventually they might find the enemy, but didn't expect contact in that specific location.

I don't think so. You'd have to be very close to do this reliably, at which point the question must be asked what the hell you're doing. Or you push your luck and hope for the best, which kinda reminds me of the fish slapping dance:

...and here we go, the thread turns immediately political, and I have precious little time to wait and see how it develops, so here comes the padlock.

As usual, the topic is complex. In every war, there will be screw-ups. At the tactical level more or less on a daily basis, but arguably, if you have a learning culture you'll eventually master the tactics for any given theater. These make you lose engagements more often. Then there are operational decisions that are wrong - like, based on false assumptions about the nature and disposition of the enemy (e.g. the first battle for Fallujah during the Iraq war); these make you lose you battles. To name another example, the decision of President Johnson and his SecDef McNamara to preferentially draft low IQ soldiers to keep the public perception of the US involvement in Vietnam low. And then you have strategic mistakes that make you lose wars. Like, mistaking an anti-colonial struggle for national identity as a communist uprising (Vietnam), or believing that all people of Ukraine save for a few malcontents are basically Russians, led astray but a few misguided people, and that you have subverted your neighboring country so thoroughly and at so many levels that it's going to be a cakewalk. Or, to paraphrase an infamous Austrian with a questionable taste in moustaches, "one thorough kick at the door and the whole rotten edifice will collapse". Right now, there simply aren't enough Russian soldiers to take, and then hold occupied a fundamentally hostile country of the size of France and Germany combined. 200,000 simply aren't enough. 600,000 aren't enough when the defender is motivated and as 700,000 at his disposal. The Wehrmacht needed millions to conquer Ukraine, and to keep it occupied. So, this was an unrecoverable strategic blunder, based on flawed assumptions about the nature of the conflict. So the question is, how do we set up training. Do we prepare for the worst - a competent enemy that is highly motivated and also highly capable, or do we prepare for the optimistic scenario. It's much harder to successfully recover from going in too optimistically.

Didn't want to ruin your excitement over our great programming skillz...

Si tacuisses...

Yes, we're not giving you the tools because the classroom version is export-controlled, so there's limits what we're allowed to allow you to do.

Map data import and export functionality is limited to the Classroom version.

We used the existing Centurion as a basis and then Israelified it to give you one more variant to play with. I suppose we did not have information about different reticules at the time.

Could it be that the killed Centauro drove across the surviving Centauro's field of view as it pulled the trigger? That's the leading cause for Blue on Blue cases.

I have about 38 in my library, primarily Osprey/New Vanguard series. They may be out of print, but not hard to find.

Maybe you overestimate the power of your persuation.

Requires two or three additional parties, but it could be done.

Yes, but not with the Sho't Kal. That British sight is atrocious.

Not that again. It's a stupid urban legend.

Sure, "mission rehearsal" and "training" are entirely different application cases.

I don't want to promise too much about integrating some voice option in a future Steel Beasts version. It's certainly doable and desirable - whether the license conditions will be acceptable remains to be seen. In any case, my list of issues wasn't so much a cry for help to solve these problems for us, as an illustration why this hasn't been done already. It involves more than just dumping an autonomous recce drone into the Mission Editor and call it a day. Not, that anyone suggested that it was that easy, just that we need (and will) consider multiple aspects before implementing things.

The question is perfectly legitimate. The answer may, unfortunately, appear to be not quite straightforward. Up to this point, with the sole exception of the short-ranged and short-lived Sprite, all existing drones represent our military customers' desire to support certain procedures with drones that, effectively, require a man in the loop. You're asking for autonomous drones that feed intelligence into the OpFor situation map. At the same time, I presume, you do not want them to be unrealistically effective (like, identifying any possible unit to which it has line of sight). Striking a good balance is of supreme importance here so we don't upset the whole apple cart. Now, I also think that the position of our .mil customers with respect to autonomous reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions is about to change. You have to prepare the troops of today for the battlefield of today and of tomorrow, where drones will be a pervasive threat. However, the lessons from the current conflict in Ukraine are multifaceted. It involves, without attempting to be a comprehensive list, at least the following elements, all of which aren't yet adequately represented in Steel Beasts: - the use of dummies - the use of camouflage - the use of decoy troop positions - air defense against drones - electronic warfare - electronic warfare - more electronic warfare - electronic reconnaissance - electronic countermeasures - electronic counter-countermeasures The next question then is, even if we implemented all this (which we couldn't, at least not on short notice), should we push all these tasks onto the player? At which point will "more complexity is good for gameplay" flip to "too much complexity is bad for gameplay"? And if we automatize all that and the computer is largely busy fighting itself, then what's the point of it? So, we need a balanced solution that doesn't require every player to become proficient with every specialist job our modern armies can offer, that can be selectively automatized or handled by humans if the player so wishes. Oh, and ideally these new features will introduce no new bugs (good luck with that). I hope this explains why, at this stage, limiting drone usage to human players are the best option.

Yes, tactical outcomes can be incredibly granular. But even a casual glance at military history will tell you that - 400 malaria-ridden Spanish conqistadores with less than a handful of rather pathetic field guns win a battle against 30,000 Aztec warriors - how likely is that if you apply attrition logic? Or 100 Fallschirmjägers attack the Eben Emael fortress with 5,000 troops ... and the 5,000 defenders capitulate (and in this case, there was no major technological gap between the two forces). Psychology can play a huge role, different training levels, material advantages, they all compound on each other - and yet, sometimes they don't for the most bizarre reasons. That's why I don't think we'll ever have predictive quality from wargames, no matter how sophisticated. But we can hope to generate useful talking points for a post-exercise review.

Don't feed the trolls.

Alternatively, the wayback machine.

Eh, everybody has that one moment, once in a while.

Up to this point it was fun. If you continue trolling the rest of the forum with absurdities and lurid conspiracy theories, you won't last long as a member.

Loads for me. If in doubt, clear browser cache.

Yeah, either you use the "set path" command to add the Steel Beasts program release folder, or you have to change to the release folder before typing it; that's command line 101. We covered all that, and possible alternatives, in this video; you may occasionally want to pause the video to check what exactly was typed in. The narrator mentions everything, but apparently that's maybe a bit too fast.