"If we can clarify in an email, I'll set up a meeting. If we need to set up a meeting, I send an email. One must not be predictable" 
without GPS then they're just useless
Something similar seems to have happened in Ukraine with various GPS-guided artillery shells and bombs. Turns out, it's not such a good idea to make your military heavily reliant on fancy precision-guided munitions, and just assume that no one's ever going to figure out a counter-measure to the guidance systems. After all, you're the best-funded military in the world, how could anyone else innovate anything?
I guess we're heading for the CoD Black Ops 2 timeline of the entire US arsenal being disabled by electronic warfare. Game was set it 2025 too 
Deus Ex has a few great ones, Nihilum, 2027 & The Nameless Mod are all pretty good if you're looking for more imsim content
Half-Life of course has a pretty massive modding community, and they've made a lot of good stuff over the years - Echoes and Field Intensity for the 1st game and Entropy Zero 2 for the 2nd are basically on the level of proper expansion packs. Minerva, Mission Improbable, Uncertainty Principle and Downfall (all for HL2) are somewhat shorter, but still really good. There's also new campaigns for the Portal games, but I haven't gotten around to playing those yet.
Mount & Blade has a ton of total conversions, for various historical periods and fantasy settings
Medieval 2 was already mentioned, so some other cool mods for it are The Italian Wars and 1648, for the pike-and-shot fans among you
The Blizzard RTS games have a ton of custom campaigns, although I haven't played many yet. StarCraft 2 in particular has recently been having a ton of new campaigns made (although mostly in the format of overhauls of the existing campaigns, rather than being entirely new missions, but they can still be pretty extensive with the new units and mechanics)
MGS V has had a decent amount of modding done to it too - nothing too massive, since the modding tools are very limited, but Infinite Heaven allows you to tweak a whole bunch of stuff (and, in combination with some other mods, significantly lighten the grinding, which I probably wouldn't have been able to stomach the game without), and allows people to add new custom side-ops
The Bundeswehr is running out of assault rifles (in German, machine-translated quotes below) archived
According to information from WirtschaftsWoche, the force only has 50,000 to 60,000 rifles. “Too few and too broken for almost 200,000 soldiers,” is what military officials say.
The G36 has been in use since 1996. After a dispute over the accuracy of the target in 2014, the federal government at the time stopped the procurement. At the same time, a successor model was a long time coming - partly because of a patent dispute between the applicants for the delivery of a new rifle. Even after the decision for the G95, also from Heckler & Koch, there were delays in the Ministry of Defense until recently, according to industry circles.
One of the problems that caused problems was an additional visor purchased from an external manufacturer whose plastic holder broke off too easily from the G95. In addition, testing is ongoing - even though the French army has been using the weapon for years. Now the government apparently wants to order 119,000 rifles in September and use them for the first time next May.
Turns out, the anti-Soviet propaganda about only every 2nd soldier having a rifle... is now true, but for a NATO country (extra irony from it being Germany specifically). In fact, it's even worse, since 60k rifles to 200k personnel is closer to a 1:3 ratio
Also, the best part is - given how much equipment they inherited from East Germany, they would have probably been just fine if they'd just kept it instead of selling it off and destroying it. Yeah, NATO countries are supposed to use 5.56, but the former Warsaw Pact countries other than Poland either took until the 2010s to start the process of adopting new rifles chambered in it, or haven't even gotten around to it like 20 years after joining (outside of select special forces units).
in authoritarian North Korea, the children's cartoons channel blasts propaganda every day
Smallswords were an evolution of rapiers optimized for ease-of-carry, so kind of. They're definitely more associated with the aristocracy though, a regular guy at this point in time would probably be carrying something more like a hanger/cutlass:
I haven't played Elden Ring, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think there's anything other than maybe showing a few bosses. It's mostly a humorous video poking fun at a certain segment of the Souls games' fanbase
I've heard good things about Dread Delusion, but haven't gotten around to playing it yet
https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1805450204541284734
I've pointed out on many occasions that the Russians have the capability to launch a strategic offensive in Ukraine basically any time they want to.
But what I have not addressed is conditions. What would they want it to look like? How would they know when to "roll tanks?"⬇️
Critical to this analysis is just how successful the Russian decision to adopt a "ground and pound" approach to destroying the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been. Despite the full and enthusiastic backing of NATO and a Ukrainian numerical advantage for much of the war, the Russians have maintained a lopsidedly positive loss-exchange ratio against their enemies throughout. Ukraine is going into demographic collapse while Russian society at large has barely noticed the war.
@MNormanDavies pointed out some time ago that the Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to "change the game" and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The "game" heavily favors the Russians and they're not in a rush to change it!
The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center - at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I'm sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher's bill of North Vietnam's war-ending 1975 operation - and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.
So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses "in depth," and then all hell is going to break loose. That could actually be quite soon - for instance, the recent Russian maneuver in Kharkov was likely intended to accelerate this timeline - but regardless, the State Department will be warming up their helicopters shortly afterwards.
As an addendum, it's just occurred to me that the Ukrainian Hundred Days Offensive of summer 2023 could be likened to Lam Son 719 as a poorly conceived and executed offensive maneuver by an army that had no real idea what it was actually getting itself into... perhaps a topic for examination later.
I think the video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8YVh0O1aFA, he linked the channel but not the specific video. There does seem to be some actual testing there
these maces were ceremonial because he assumed they'd make poor weapons
I think the point was that they're poor weapons against plate armor. Fortunately for mace-lovers, most people on the battlefield aren't fancylad aristocrats who can afford a full suit of quality plate so they can get bonked just fine (especially outside of late-medieval Europe, which he brings attention to toward the end - maces were extensively used in other parts of the world, and even for Europe he points out that a lot of the surviving historical maces and artistic depictions from them are actually from the 16th century, at which point armor coverage of the average soldier has decreased somewhat).
It's kind of a clickbaity title, but I guess "flanged maces in the very specific and limited period of 14th-16th century Western & Central Europe" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely
Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan
The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ... Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.
more
In addition to Israel, the Biden administration has sent an enormous quantity of materiel to Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Meanwhile, the U.S. is gearing up to rush an influx of arms to Taiwan in hopes of deterring a possible Chinese attack on the island, which Beijing considers a rogue province. The U.S. Defense Department already struggled to maintain robust munitions levels in the decades before the recent wars in the Middle East and Europe. But the shipment of arms to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan has placed intense pressure on the Pentagon’s inventory, forcing it to make challenging risk management assessments as it tries to move the defense industry from peacetime production to a wartime footing.
...
The shortages are in part symptoms of a chronic issue, said a senior defense official, granted anonymity to discuss the closely held process. The Pentagon has long used munitions as a “bill payer,” neglecting their purchase in favor of platforms like ships or planes in the annual budgets, the official added. Over time, the low orders led to some companies exiting the market, which in turn reduces the number of businesses that will build those munitions and the speed at which they come off the line.
see, this is why you're supposed to have a state-owned arms industry, since when you leave things to the whims of the free market, obviously a ton of companies are going to go out of business during peacetime, like what do you expect to happen 
... the U.S. could use Javelin anti-tank missiles or Tomahawk cruise missiles against at least four major competitors: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But the military doesn’t necessarily expect to fight all four adversaries at once and may calculate requirements based on fighting two enemies at a time.
well damn, I sure hope we don't end up facing a couple crises at once! now, that'd be a real bad situation for us
... The U.S. often serves as a “backstop” for European allies, Clark noted, pointing to NATO’s heavy reliance on American munitions in its 2011 Libya campaign. “It’s not so much, are we going to have enough weapons to sustain our own capacity for a ground war, because we probably do,” Clark said. “It’s, do we have enough to sustain our own capacity to fight and also support our European allies who may need augmentation because clearly they don’t maintain the magazines to sustain themselves.” Others interviewed about the munitions requirements process also noted it lags behind real-world events and is closely tied to the Pentagon’s war plans, which usually project short conflicts instead of the reality of longer, protracted wars.
well, good thing protracted wars never happen!
But the U.S. could still quickly run through certain munitions even in a short conflict with a major adversary like China. A wargame conducted by the Center for a New American Security think tank and the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party last year found the U.S. would run out of long-range, precision-guided munitions in less than a week in a fight with China over Taiwan. Outgoing committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., subsequently told Defense News that America’s inventory of long-range anti-ship missiles stood at 250 last spring, noting a conflict with China would require at least 1,000.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, the U.S. has also used weapons that could be relevant to an Indo-Pacific battle, like the Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawks, to respond to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes off Yemen’s coast. “Is it a sustainable, long-term strategy to use million-dollar munitions to shoot down drones and loitering munitions that are $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a piece?” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., asked Gen. Michael Kurilla, the U.S. Central Command leader overseeing forces in the Middle East, during a House hearing in March.
...
The Pentagon hopes the foreign aid legislation will allow it to continue large-scale arms transfers to friendly countries. And as the department replenishes systems to those three partners, it hopes the additional munitions demand will pump resources into lagging munitions production lines. A significant chunk of that will go toward increasing domestic munitions capacity in the U.S. ... But even with the foreign aid legislation, expanding industrial base capacity is no simple task. ... Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress in October that some contractors have required employees to work additional shifts to keep up munitions production rates, highlighting labor shortages in the industrial base.
...
A former senior Pentagon official who now works in the defense industry, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to talk to the press, told Defense News the Pentagon is generally willing to take more risks on munitions inventory levels than in other areas, expecting that Congress will quickly fund replenishment efforts. “The mentality in the Pentagon is if I do get in a fight, Congress is going to be real responsive to give me as much money as I need,” the former senior defense official said. “Right now, we’re having a problem replenishing artillery for a war in Europe that we’re not even in.”
impressive, very nice... let's see the Hohenstaufens' HRE
the best kind of medieval border-gore is when the same guy owns territories that aren't contiguous, just everything being exclaves within exclaves on top of other exclaves 
Yeah, I don't care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I'll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I'll make a hard mode, you don't know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don't really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of "give the enemies more HP and damage", and "I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10" isn't a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that's obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can't demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!
I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we're still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it's going slow, people got mad about "ludonarrative dissonance" which wasn't even that fancy of a term, like "ludo"'s Latin but "narrative" and "dissonance" are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about "artistic vision", but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.
If you're looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your "vision"... then games just aren't the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what's the "right" and "wrong" way to experience a game - it's significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.
And besides - your game probably isn't some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it's some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you're a AA developer and if you don't release this one on time you're going bankrupt) is going to be. You're going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn't really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you're not Valve and you don't have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going "damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I'm just not having a good time here" and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn't necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn't in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.