Matrix Games Forums

There are few things better to increase the immersion of games like FCRS and FCSS than U.S. Army Field Manuals, equipment encyclopedias, ARCO illustrated books, fictional works, etc.

My guess is the developers, scenario creators, beta testers and dedicated players of these games have both digital and printed libraries of such materials on hand.

Any links to free sources, as well as printed materials from Amazon.com and other book sellers would be greatly appreciated.

I have a decent collection of books mainly, but it's difficult to find reference materials that cover equipment from the late 1980s.

Thanks in advance for increasing our enjoyment of these excellent products!

- Mike

There's a lot of stuff in varying quality and usefulness, and equipment/hardware is only one small part of a bigger picture--so it'll depend on specifying what you're looking for

double post

This is a little bit newer than the game time period (1996 vs 1989) but I used it to brush up a bit for beta testing (both here and for Combat Mission). Being a former US Army artillery officer, this is always my prime interest and I LOVE gunnery - I was both a battery and battalion fire direction officer while in the Army, best two jobs ever.

FM 6-40 for field artillery gunnery
FM 6-50 for the cannon battery (operations and roles, etc)

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military ... index.html
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military ... index.html

Global security gives you 4 looks a month before paying, but these are the right time period being from 1996 - close enough for the time period of the game to be useful. And the game of course is at a higher level than the minutia of battery operations, so it makes for some good background reading if you want to know how things work or what's going on to cause something. In game terms there wouldn't be much that had changed. The manual (non-computerized or GPS aided) gunnery has not changed significantly since WW2, nor has the the high level organization and roles of personnel.

Pretty much all US Army organization for many years has been on combined arms teams, whether cross attached (for this period), or by TOE (more recently sometimes). So these two on the mechanized company team, and battalion task force will be very useful. FM 71-1 (company team) and FM 71-2 (tank and mech inf bn task force).

These as well are hard to find without paying for them, unfortunately.

For free though, I'm linking pdfs of my Fire Support Handbook from when I was a FIST Chief back in 1980-ish. For big picture, things didn't change much by 1989. Everyone may find it useful because it distills a lot of info from both maneuver and artillery manuals and some good info on Soviet tactics as well. It was pocket sized for reference in the field, with small print, so please excuse the poor quality - best I could do. There are some good tables of what to fire for a variety of targets, and good info on fire support planning in attach and defense. Hope that's useful.

Dropbox links (files are too big to attach)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k836gm9qiyj7w ... 1.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bixp3da5h6tfa ... 2.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4bngy9sz5dju6 ... 3.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/apml7ifq4mqfd ... 4.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdcgfvqjnhxh4 ... 5.pdf?dl=0

Let me know if those don't work. They look odd but I think they do. The whole manual is there, broken up into 5 parts.


Dave

Thanks for the links, and thanks much more for serving our country!

I read in another post that the game is intentionally opaque in certain areas, and I personally like that design decision.

You "learn" by taking an experiential approach, and not just from studying a huge rule book. Others may certainly disagree, but for me it increases the shelf-life of the game.