CMSF2 Unscripted: Concrete Hell 34

My Syrian Army troops defend a town against Chap's probing US Army force in a Shock Force 2 multiplayer campaign.
Chap's Playlist: • CMSF2: A Concrete Hell
Campaign materials link: drive.google.c...
Mods:
Audigsil Modern Sounds: www.thefewgood...
Ramblers Night Vision Mode: www.thefewgood...
Syrian Army Realism Mod: community.batt...
Vein's Special Effects: cmmodsiii.gree...
Vin's Unit Icons for SF2: www.thefewgood...

[@ubersoldat00]

For future scoring purposes I think vehicle losses should also be worth a point. The destruction of half of Chap's armor should count for something.

[@tacomeru]

x2 The two outright kills on the M2s by that Saxhorn team should definitely put them up there with the sniper teams in terms of effectiveness for the match, plus the mission kill on that Stryker. Heck, with the kills from stonking the mortar team they didn't even come out too badly on outright casualties inflicted!

[@usuallyhapless9481]

So... yes in principle, but then all the Blue players stop taking vehicles and lose a whole array of options. The 'combat value' of KO'd vehicles is represented in the casualties score, it's just very difficult to nail down.

[@ironcat6047]

Excellent defense! I think keeping your infantry shifting to attack from different locations or withdrawing to safety was a great way to conserve your forces. It seemed to keep the enemy guessing as to where the next attack might come from which also prevented him from massing units and gaining fire superiority through out most of the match. The use of the AA Technical's to reduce buildings, cause casualties and provide suppression was a a excellent way to use all your resources. Wow, that BTR couldn't have come at a better time! It really shut down that avenue of approach and did a great job on disrupting and reducing the enemy units available to conduct a attack. Your mortars probably clinched it for you. While they didn't kill a large amount, the suppression was priceless. Great job on having the foresight to shift indirect fire. I think that shift, along with the increased volume of fire, might have caught him by surprise. I second Ramon Pineda's comment on vehicle loss as something that needs to be considered. Now it can be argued that it's basically the same as any crew served weapon so only the crew casualties count. However, that vehicles mobility, weapons, and protection provides advantages that surpass other crew served weapons. When you destroy a vehicle or disable its weapons system you are removing a major force multiplier.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Thanks very man!

[@kurthummitzsch9948]

Congratulations on your well deserved win. You did an excellent job preserving your forces. Your strategy of drawing Chap in and using your mortars paid off. I'm looking forward to seeing the results from other games, its an interesting concept you've come up with.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Thanks very much! There are certainly some interesting results in so far.

[@kersacoft]

I'm gonna miss this little series, it was something nice to look fowards to every day. Congrats on your victory.

[@Liangmidun]

And thus ends one of my favourite series this past month. Nice work on the win, and good luck to all of the cannon fodder in the next game. :)

[@Plumbersmack]

Man. What a roller coaster. Well done. Can’t wait for the next.

[@annoyedbipolar7424]

Great match exalted supreme leader. Next we must develop the Beard of Doom rocket with a pointy tip.

[@JamesWB100]

Great fun and well played both!

[@skinnybob6784]

Good stuff, can't wait for more content like this :) Good job Hapless.. Now I'm gonna play Steel Divison 2 and have a seizure when I let go off the pause button..

[@runswithbears3517]

What a great and close game!

[@mjkypta]

Congratulations on the win. I was screaming at the sacrifice of the one squad to the right of Charlie, which I think made it closer than it needed to be. However your strategy was masterful and very well executed. If this happened to the US army in real life it would be considered a disaster.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Thanks very much! I suspect the US Army in real life would have a lot more backup though.

[@acridproximal8848]

I think the technicals with the AA guns constitute for some of my favorite plays from this series. I'm not great at Combat Mission, so seeing the reverse command be used outside of a panic moment was interesting to see from my perspective.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

The old reverse shoot and scoot

[@chrisstarks5993]

Very enjoyable! I wonder what would have happened if chaps attacked on both the left and right at the same time. If obviously didn’t know your strategy. Your motor fire at a minimum would probably have been diluted. Will never know.

[@mzjalic324]

Very well played! I already can't wait for this year's Christmas bonanza game, and I really hope we get to see the mirror game of this one too!

[@Dreadhead02productions]

GG! Has been really enjoyable to follow this day by day and see how it all develops :) Now I've got Chap's turns to get through to see what his experience was like!

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Always worth seeing both sides. Plus, his videos are a lot shorter than mine.

[@davidjaros1117]

Congrats on your victory can not wait to see you more battles between you and Chaps . Well done finally you managed to win against Chaps haha

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Thanks! And yes, finally!

[@Wintertop2134]

GG WP! It has been fun to watch

[@CruelDwarf]

So quality of American infantry and their equipment is not enough to off-set one to one (reinforced company versus reinforced company) force ratio. At least in a 'slow and careful approach'. I think a determined mounted rush against one of the objectives would be probably more successful even if Chaps casualties would be more concentrated instead of being slowly grinded across half a hour.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Potentially. I think you're right that there's an argument that caution sometimes results in more casualties... but at the same time, the sooner Chap's main effort became apparent, the sooner I could start with the mortars so... swings and roundabouts.

[@CruelDwarf]

@@usuallyhapless9481 I think mortars were mostly effective as movement denial here. If you started the bombardment early, then Chap would have an option to sit the barrage out in the buildings, taking potshots at your guys through the dust and smoke. And Americans were winning firefights quite consistently during the match when your heavier assets weren't involved at least. So after mortrars stopped dropping he would have a several turns to clean the area out of your troops. But it is 20/20 hindsight of course. Do Americans have a formation in something cheap like up-armored Humvees in SF2? I think it would be ideal counter to what you did in this match.

[@Gunnery2]

Good battle. Fanatic infantry are so hard to dislodge especially when they are dug in like an Alabama tick…

[@tiredstars]

And here was I thinking the plan of luring the Americans to attack your weakest point seemed dubious. That's why I'm not a Syrian general.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

It would have looked dubious if it had gone wrong.

[@tiredstars]

Probably true of a great many successful plans. Seriously, though, Combat Mission games so often seem to come down to whether you can get your artillery on enough of the enemy's troops for long enough, so getting your opponent to concentrate their forces where you want them makes sense. To do that you have to offer them something of value, and you can't do a bait & switch with a ground objective. The other side of this is time: the earlier phases of the game, which drained Chap's time and manpower. It looked like he had a decent recon-pull strategy that just didn't have enough time or quite enough firepower in the right places to succeed. If Chap had time to hide in the buildings and weather the barrage, things might have been different. I do wonder what would have happened if Chap somehow had a couple of 155s in his back pocket to point target those buildings in Charlie. If they'd come down (or at least if that BTR had been hit by artillery), things would have been very different. Or if he'd been able to bring a bradley's guns to bear on them. In fact, Chap's vehicles were really underwhelming. I was half expecting your mortars and reserves to be wiped out by mk19 overshoots, but Chap didn't get lucky this time, and at range they lacked to accuracy or punch to do that much against infantry in buildings. The berm drills kept Chap's vehicles alive, but each one was a roll of the dice, and Chap's initial suppressive fire was necessarily but largely wasted, since the Syrians were well back from the first line of buildings. I wonder if it would have been an idea to move the vehicles forward off the berm to try and better firing positions for some key buildings, or if that just makes the risk worse. One downside of Chap's wide approach left the platoon on your left rather exposed, with nothing much to do other than to help Sir Kartoffel up the kill tally bit-by-bit. A well positioned vehicle could probably have stopped that. It's interesting to compare the high motivation Syrians with the mixed US force. The US troops looked like they were generally more effective in firefights (with better equipment), but the Syrians just wouldn't stay down, and with automatic weapons even a reduced team is a threat. I'm not sure how much of a difference it made, but it looks like by the end a fair amount of Chap's force was combat ineffective, while the Syrians were jittery, but mostly *trying* to do what they were told. (Even if some of them made rather dubious life choices... You can set your pixeltruppen to high motivation but not high intelligence...)

[@dv6000islame]

Good stuff. Nice job on your victory. Is there a place to see the overall campaign progress and how the different battles fit together on a campaign map or something?

[@nathangun2261]

Will building damage/bomb craters be in place for the next battle?

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Sort of. The idea is to kind of conglomerate battle damage per zone, by the results of each campaign turn. So the more fighting there is in a zone, the more I trash the place ready for the next turn. Plus any other... effects that might kick in before the next turn ;)

[@Cotton4kwarthunder]

What an amazing series! Even though I watched it 5 months later, it also introduced me to CMSF2. I would love to see another series like this later that i get to watch ontime😂

[@usuallyhapless9481]

I try and do one a year ;)

[@virtuallyreal5849]

If you ever do another series like this, you might base the Syrian points off actual kills. For example, every 10 kills rounded down is a victory point. (Which would give you a very much deserved pair of victory points for this action.) For whatever reason the media seems to focus on US death counts and not casualties, and I think that the US player should definitely be encouraged to keep deaths as low as absolutely possible. (30% casualties is absurdly catastrophic by peer standards.) This will also give some reason to recover casualties which is a good thing to practically encourage. The meta for this scoring would likely be a smaller crack infantry element and heavier armor, which I think is definitely better than encouraging huge swathes of sovietesque infantry.

[@davidjaros1117]

Chaps may bring Brits or Dutch next time . Can not wait haha

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Yeah, the other NATO options bring some interesting stuff to the table

[@jimmydesouza4375]

I am kind of worried that you need a calculator for 27+30.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Well, you know, when you've got one to hand...

[@Arvelium]

Really like ur videos thank u sir! I have just one kind of question, i'm kinda new, but how can i turn those grey icons on? I mean that ones that show possible placement of the enemy for spotters, thank you!

[@madeleineollerton5993]

you should have made some use of IEDs and VBIEDS, i think, since your confidence in the mortars during the fight was low.

[@GrumpyReaper2525]

Where can you see how much casualties a squad caused? UPD. Never mind, I jist can't use my Mk. I Eyeballs correctly.

[@sirfanatical8763]

You named them Speeedbump Battalion?

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Yeah. Pretty nasty speed bump though...

[@sirfanatical8763]

@@usuallyhapless9481 True. I've been experimenting with the Syrians for a while. I gave each platoon a fourth IFV and a FO like in the US platoons Also square tank platoons. Just westernizing them makes them soo much more effective. You might wanna try it too for the next scenario.

[@usuallyhapless9481]

@@sirfanatical8763 Going to be Blue in the next round I think ;)

[@sirfanatical8763]

@@usuallyhapless9481 ah okay. Would be nice if you'd try the Germans. BTW I'm a bet green if it comes to games like these. What am I supposed to do with Syrian special forces? How to use them and what kind operations should I do with these?

[@usuallyhapless9481]

Syrian Special Forces aren't 'Special Forces' in the western sense- they're broadly (very broadly) comparable to standard NATO infantry.