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Hey all,

I've been doing some deep work on national orbats lately as I dive into what's happening elsewhere in the world, and had some questions about FL's approach to unit selection.

In the ref manual, it appears as though FL chose for Southern Poland the 1st Guards Tank Army, the 3rd Combined Arms Army, and and the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army for the Soviets. All of these units were a part of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) from before German reunification took place, with the exception of the 20th Tank Division which was from the "Northern Forces" Soviet command. In Sweden, elements seem to have been taken from a possible High Command of the Northwestern Direction TVD, with at least one division from the 6th Combined Arms Army, and one division from the 11th Guards Combined Arms Army, along with some naval brigades from units also in that region.

Anyhow, I recognize that FL probably doesn't have the resources or interest in mapping out every single unit in T2k, and neither do I. What I am interested in though, if someone can provide it, is FL's thought processes when it comes to unit selection for canon materials. Are there certain orbats that FL has been working off of for canon unit selection, and if so, can we be pointed toward them? And is there a cutoff date being used internally for when a unit would be no longer available due to having been disbanded in the real world (maybe the Gang of Eight coup?)? With answers to those questions, it would be a lot easier to write additional modules that involve units in alignment with FL's vision of the setting.

Even if the answer is, "we just looked in wiki for some units we thought would be around in the area in a hypothetical conflict and went with those," then that's totally okay - it would at least help content creators to understand the vision when it comes to unit selection. Any help in this area that FL or the mods can provide would be enormously helpful.

Thank you!

Hi!

The orbats in the core game were developed by our military consultants, who did solid research. I can't point you to their exact sources right now, but I'll ask and report back here if I find anything out.

Thank you - that would be a huge help! Clearly your contractors did great work when selecting units. I only noticed one error - from my understanding, the Soviet 3rd Shock Army was actually renamed to the 3rd Combined Arms Army back in the 50s. But that's a pretty minor issue - the rest looked awesome. And it's already lightyears ahead of the older versions when it came to which units they chose to include.

I only noticed one error - from my understanding, the Soviet 3rd Shock Army was actually renamed to the 3rd Combined Arms Army back in the 50s.

That appears to be true, but Western analysts called it 3d Shock Army pretty much throughout the Cold War, so if you called it 3d Combined Arms Army, you'd have a lot of people wondering what this formation was and why you'd left out 3d Shock Army.

As someone who's spent the last few weeks neck deep in national orbats and 80s/90s history, that's great to know. It does still leave me wondering what reference materials were being used by FLs military experts though, as that would help us to extrapolate how other areas in the theater may have looked.

For example, so far in Southern Poland, it looks to have largely been the Soviet GSFG. That leaves open the question of what may have happened to other GSFG forces such as the 2nd Guards Tank Army and the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army - were they already destroyed, or perhaps they were in northern Poland, or somewhere to the south or west? It also begs the question of what's going on with the 6GMRD, the Central Group of Forces (who presumably were part of the southern push through Austria and into southern Germany), and the forces of the Belorussian Military District.

To be clear, I'm not trying to figure out where all of these units were, as that seems like an exercise in frustration for everyone involved. Rather, I'm trying to nail down some of the thought processes being used by FL's experts and the orbats they were using, since that knowledge will help paint a broader picture of what was happening in Eastern/Central Europe beyond what was shared in the Ref's Manual. It will also help a great deal on a community project right now that's trying to help describe what's happening elsewhere in the world of Twilight 2000.

This may help:

NATO Order of Battle as at 1989
Warsaw Pact Order of Battle as at 1989

This may help:

NATO Order of Battle as at 1989
Warsaw Pact Order of Battle as at 1989

Thanks, Vihkr - I've seen those both as well. There's some really good info contained, but they're both a bit incomplete based upon what we're trying to achieve with this project.