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Old August 7th, 2016, 08:14 PM

IronDuke99 IronDuke99 is offline
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Default Re: Acceptable US Casualties Against 3rd World Armies

Speaking as a Pom who lives in Aussie, I agree with what Suhiir said.

Modern (ie, certainly 2000 onwards) western censors, firepower and body armour all tend to reduce casualties against 3rd world enemies. (although body armour sometimes prevents death rather than wounding).

These days in a modern Western military with body armour, and helo evacuation of casualties, excellent medical services, etc if you lose 10 men as casualties chances are only one or two will die.

Civilians, including the media, tend to take much more note of military deaths than they do of military wounded (which, maybe, is partly why we end up with so many homeless/in problems ex military, but I digress).

In game terms a casualty is a casualty, without regard to being more or less slightly wounded up to atomised.

No Commander likes casualties to his own men. Every Commander, worth his salt, strives to minimize his own sides casualties in his plan, while still carrying out his assigned job of work. Battalion Commanders and above tend, these days, to be very conscious of the media, while those below them are much less so.

My own view on modern, COIN/terrorist/guerilla, game scenario design would be that an objective would have to be very vital for it to give victory, in an offensive operation, to a Western military that suffered, at most, anything over 25% casualties. Defensive ops would have different rules, since being overrun, against a lot of these types, would almost certainly result in 100% unpleasant death and the spoiling of ones whole day.

Scenario designers need to make maximum use of assets like, night vision devices (ie, a Western military should be able to spot the enemy considerably better than the enemy spots them at night or in poor visibility) attack helos, spotter drones, close air support and artillery, etc.

Use Preferences and increase a Western forces Search (to help spotting) and also Infantry Toughness (to allow for body armour). I also tend to slightly raise Western and/or lower terrorist/guerilla Hitting as well since many of them -not all- seem to have poor shooting skills.

My view is that, in general, the game is pretty good at showing peer on peer warfare, such as a Russian or Chinese battle group v a US or British battle group (that is always going to be bloody) but you have to tweek it a bit to be more accurate for COIN ops and then give the western side fairly strict parameters to win the game.

Last edited by IronDuke99; August 7th, 2016 at 08:25 PM.. Reason: better wording.
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