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...but, this is exactly my point. In SC2 the opposite happens. The Army Unit has more firepower (higher Soft Attack Value) but the same manpower (10 strength points). An Army Unit should be able to attack an enemy unit, absorb a fair amount of loss during the attack, and then survive a counter attack. A Corps Unit should be able to make the same attack with similar fire power, but remain too weak to survive an effective counter attack. You also bring up the point that a higher concentration of units should take more losses under combat. That is not always so. In practice, a large Army Unit would mount several defensive lines a few miles appart from each other. (Remember each tile represents a depth of 30-40 miles.) By spreading units in depth, most of the Army would be out of sight and fairly "safe" from an initial artillery bombardment. There are many accounts of such practice. One example is the Soviet defense of Kursk. But, an even better example is the German defense of the Oder crossing. Defense in depth within the area represented by one single tile in SC2 was the best infantry defense against armor as well. This practice slowed down the supporting armor and exposed the armor to anti tank weapons. Again, a standard practice in WW II. Carpet bombing performed by high altitude heavy bombers maybe the only exception. This is the one case where high concentration of troops would be disastrous. But such attacks were the exception rather than the norm during WWII. The truly large ground encounters in WWII were in the eastern front where the Russians and Germans had few strategic bombers. Meanwhile, the truly large air battles were in the western front, where there were far fewer ground troops. Maybe Hubert could make heavy bombers more effecitve against armies: say damaged caused by heaavy bombers calculated as a percentage of the total strength of the defender. If that is not possible, I would still like the freedom to mod Armies with higher strength values.

I see your point. However, if the Tank Group stands for only an armored corps of 3 to four divisions, then it should not be so much more powerfull and so much more expensive than an entire Army Unit. One or the other seems out of whack. There other things that bother me about the so called Army Unit. First, the cost difference between an Army Unit and an Infantry Corps is too small. Second, the Army Unit should be able to take more losses than a Corps unit - have more strength points. I would like to elaborate on this last point, becaus I feel it is quite important. In SC2 strength points are mainly a measure of how many hits a unit can take. As you lose stength point your morale drops and this indirectly affects performance. But, by and far, strength is a measure of a units ability to take more punishment. If you pack more men into a smaller area, this may increase your ability to inflict damage on the other foe (combat values as represented in SC2). However, the main advantage of packing more men into a small area is that you have more depth. You can keep a reserve out of the front line, using them to plug holes if you are defending, or to defend against a counter attack if you have succesfully occupied new territory. If the above reasoning is correct, the main difference between an Army Unit and a Corps unit is that Armies should have more strength points (instead of higher combat values). Of course, less combat strength would make an Corps a poor unit for attack, since it would loose a lot of strength in the initial attack, and thus be veary weak to defend against a counter attack. Meanwhile, an army with a lot of combat strength would be much better suited for an attack since it would have a decent chance of holding the newly obtained terrain. I would make an Army Unit much more expensive (say 200 MPP's. But I would give it 20 strength points. Of course it would be al but impossible to frontally assault such an army. But that would be historically accurate. ...and result in a more intesting game. Since Armiy Units would be very expensive there would be fuw of them. However, since they have more strength points, players would concentrate on attacking the corps units in order to surround the Army Units (remember Stalingrad...and so many other battles in the eastern front). This same scheme I would apply to Tanks: I would have Tank Corps and Tank Groups. Tank Corps would have 10 strength points while Tank Armies would have 20 strength points. Army size units should be slower than Corps units, and maybe have slightly higher combat values. But the main difference between one and the other should be strength points - the ability to take more hits before breaking down. I realize this may not be possible to accomodate for WaW, but maybe at least, we can have an editor that will allow us to assign larger combat strength points to Army size units. ...by the way, cutting down the combat strength of Corps Units may not be the best way to go because existing combat formulas are too leathal. And the only way to keep lethality down is to forgoe on research. So I must beg Hubert again, at least give us the option to edit upwards the maximum strength point for an Army size unit.

Can we have small armored corps in addition to large armored groups? Sort of like the difference between small infantry corps and large infantry armies? Why? I think of the Tank Group as the equivalent of the German Panzr Groups during the Russian Campaign. The Germans had four panzer groups at the outset of Barbarosa. At least two of these panzer groups were army size. Panzer Group's 1 and 4 were smaller at the outset of Barbarosa - more like a large corps. Yet, by 1942 Hoth's Panzer Group 4 had been augmente to army size (and not just on paper - Panzer Group 4 lost one Corps inside the Stalingrad pocket and stiill had substantially over half of its total strength outside of the pocket). On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of cases where a corps, instead of an army size unit would be most appropriate: The French never had a full armored group. The British armored elements in North Africa did not amount to an Army size unit. Rommel only had one german armored corps in North Afrika - not a panzer group. The armored units stationed in France '44 were split into independent headquarters for the Normandy and Calaise areas. A small armored corps would have a good soft attack punch but substantially weaker in other areas. In SC 2 the armored group had strength values of (4,4,5,5) for (SA,SD,HA,HD). For my new armored corps I would propose something like (3,2,2,2). Most player would agree with Guderian that they should concentrate their armored force into large Tank Groups. But, what if the resources are not there, as was so often the case in WWII? What if you can only spare a small corps size armored force for a possible counter attack in Normandy?

Must of the purges took place before the game starts (September 1939). When Stalin saw Hitler take Poland in a few days, he realized he needed the army. A couple of months later Stalin lost half a million men to the small Finish Army (16 ;ight infantry divisions) in 1940. After this fiasco, not only the purges were over, but he started taking officers out of prison and sending them back to their units. ...but it was too late. If the purges had not taken place, Hitler would not have had a chance in Russia. However, if the purges had not taken place, the Finns would not have slaughtered half a million Russians. And, this in turn must have been an important element in Hitler's decission to accept a two front war. See Glantz's When Titans Clashed. Think about it, if you see the Russians lose half a million men to a tiny and lightly equipped Finnish Army. And, meanwhile, the Wermacht destroys Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium France and the British Expeditionary Force in no time, with small casualties... Hitler probably was superbly confident. In his book, Lost Victories, Manstein tells us that Hitler had a very good grasp of the tactical but failed to realize the time and the number of men needed to achieve large strategic objective. Manstein speaks of Hitler as an intelligent person who lacked the "staff trainning" necessary to comprehend the resources needed to achieve the objective he set out for himself. If you add these two elements together: a superb confidence on the tactical superiority of the Wermacht with a limitation the appreciate the time and resources needed to cover the vast Russian country and subdue the large though ineffective Russian Army, it is easy to understand Hitler's mistake.

The armies of Italy, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria performed pretty badly during WW II. The Poles and the French did not fare much better. Nor did the Russians during 41 -42. One common denominator was that these armies were not adequately equiped. One way to dramatize the poor equipment of these armies is to have the German, British, Finish and U.S. unit start 1939 at a higher research level (say 1 for infantry weapons, anti tank and armor), while Russian and all other minors start at 0. Any comments?

Yes, at first glance it seems contradictory. But let us look closer at both the game and the historical track. First, in SC2 the main difference between an ARMY and a CORPS is that the ARMY has more attack strength (see combat value table). The ARMY is your attack unit - sort of like the Russian Shock units. Meanwhile the CORPS is your defending unit. In the historical front line the Russians were unable to coordinate large scale attacks. All attacks were shallow and lacked concentration. The consequenes first in the Ukraine (where the first serious counter attack was mounted), later in front of Moscow, and finally all along the front during the winter of 1941-42 these counter attacks failed misserably because of dissipation of effort. Eventually Stavka passed a directive requiring Front Commanders to use Shock Troops in an attack (my recollection is that this happened in late '42). Shock armies were organized to operate in a 30 mile wide front, instead of dispersing over much wider front like regular troops. These shock armies were the equivalent to SC2 Armies and SC2 Tank Groups. Coincidentally, only at this stage was the Russian Army able to mount successfull attacks against the Germans.

As of 1941 the Russian Army had over 3 million enlisted men. By most account, the Russian Army also had the best and the most tanks. And, it also had 5 million partially trained men ready to be called to arms. (In preparation for an impending war with Hitler's Germany they had made provision to give partiall training to all abled bodied men. On the date of the invasion they had over 5 million men with one month worth of miliatry training in addition to the 3.3 million enlisted men.) But the Russian Army also faced some daunting limitations which almost cost them the war: Limmitation #1: Because of Stalin's Purges, the Russian Army was desperately short of officers. The shortage was so accute that they did not have officers to staff Corps headquarters and at one point were forced to temporarily elminate them. The lack of qualified officers limited large scale maneuvers. Even at Stalingrad, the Russian had serius lmitations executing large scale maneuvers. In fact, they did not even have enough qualified artillery spotters. These was one major reason for stripping infantry divisions of their artillery and concentrating them in artillery corps. The shortage of officers was of greatest importance in the development of mechanized forces where the tempo of the battle was much faster and where there was a need to coordinate a more diverse group of weapons. There is a great book on this subject: When Titans Clashed. #2 The T 34 is over rated. The T 34's slopping armor and large gun were important improvements. But in other important aspects the T 34 was inferior to the Panzer III and IV: One of this limitation is obvious: one out of four T 34's did not have radios. ...perhaps another casualty of Stalin's purges. The purges were not limited to army officers, but included a wide range of people through out the govenment and the general economy... In any event, the Russians could not produce enough radios. Other limitations of the T-34 were less obvious. The crew was over loaded - it needed a fourth crew member. The tank could not cary enough ammo and gas for deep penetrations. The optics were not nearly as good as the Germans. ...and, my guess from anecdotal references, loading, turning the turret, aiming and shooting was too slow. Limmitation #3: The Russians did not have enough trucks. Infantry attached to mechanized forces walked on foot during 1941 and 1942. The Russians never had enough trucks to carry the infantry of their mechanized forces. The challenge is to find ways to represent this limmitations in a game such as SC2. To the extent we manage to do this, we will be able to allow the Russian more units, thus better representing the war in the eastern front: Here is my shot at it: #1 Lack of Qualified Officers: First, do not allow the formation of Army Units during 1941 and 1942. Allow the Russians only to build Corps during this period. Second, make Corps units cheaper, but Army units more expensive. Third, create Mechanized Corps as well as Mechanized Armies. Allow the Russians to make only the smaller Mechanized Corps during 1941-42. Allow the formation of full blown Mechanized Armies only past January 1943. #2 T 34 over rated: Do not give the Russian a head start on armor over the Germans. #3 Not enough trucks: Make it more expensive for the Russians to "motorize" their units.

This is an interesting idea. Imagine a German Player building new roads or rail lines to supply a defensive line deep in Russian territory...

Attachments did occur in WWII. For example, the British designed and used specific armor to support the Normandy Invasion. The Russian's stripped some units of artillery, while others had their fair share. etc. Germany's Fifth Column were likewise moved around. But more important, each country organized their "standard" units in a different manner. The Finns had more skii troops. Certainly Rommel and Monty did not have ski troops in North Africa. Resources as I conceive them would be a means to give your units a make your units different from the units of other countries. As a German Player I may add mountain attachments to the units that will defend Italy, the Alps and the Carpatian Mountains. Once attached, I would keep them there. The Finns may add skii troops to all their Corps. ...and so forth. I would not want a player to constantly attach and re attach resources. Instead, I would like the players to use resources as a means to design the compostion of his army to best fit the way he intends to use it.

There is a third way to handle specialized units. ...of course, this is SC3 stuff already, but this is the idea: We could retain the existing Unit structure, but each country could build a non-unit pool of specialized resources. This pool of specialized resource would not be placed in the map. But they could be "attached" to a Unit boosting a given capability of that Unit. To elaborate further. a given country could build a Mountain Resource, and attach it to an Infantry Corps. This would make the Infantry Corps better in Moutain Combat. Some examples of resources and their effects could be: Anti Tank - boost anti tank defense and anti tank attack. Anti Air - boost anti air defense and anti tank defense. Armor - additional tanks boost armor strength. Artillery - increased soft target offense and dense, increased anti tank Bridge - speeds up river corssing (should be different from combat engineers or pioneer). Pioneer - on defense speeds entrenchement, on attack causes more de-entrenchemnt of the enemy unit. Infiltrator - Lowers morale and disrupts opposing unit. Mountain - faciliates mountain crossing and combat Recon - increases movement capability Ski - Better in Winter Warfare. Supply - Extends supply range. When constructed, resources should be assigned to an abstract pool. When a player decides to assign a resources to a Unit, the Unit should have a minimum supply level of 8. It should be possible, but cumbersome to remove resources from a Unit. Resources would be removed from a Unit to the Pool - they cannot be transfered directly to another Unit. (Thus, it takes 2 turns to transfer the resource to the new Unit). The unit surrendering a resource must not be in an enemy zone of control. And, may be, it should cost 1 MPP to remove the resource to represent operating costs. Or course, there should be a limit to how many resources could be attached to any given unit. I suggest a maximum of three resources per unit where each of the resources is of a different kind. Perhapps, Elite Units could receive more than 3 resources, say up to five.

I remember reading somenthing about this, but cannot recall the details. On the other hand, the order of battle in the Russian Army was pretty screwed. ...and not just because of combat losses, but also because of lack of officers (courtesy of Stalin's purges)... In any event, because the Russian Order of Battle was so screwed up, it would be good to know the actual compossition of any unit before taking for granted it was actually "corps size". ...though I would imagine that, in this particular case, a corps was a corps.

I welcome the idea of having Artillery Corps level units provided they recreate the advantages and disadvantages of having very large Artillery "Corps" units in real life. ...well I know this sounds odd, but allow me to elaborate. The Russians did try very large artillery concentrations during WWII. Whether they actually reached corps level is besides the point. They did strip artillery out of front line units while making huge concentrations of artillery which "front" commanders would move around as needed. The Germans, Americans, and every one else could have done so as well, but, decided not to. Of course, the Russians were facing very different circumstances. The Russians were very short on radios, and very very short on qualified spotters and officers capable of coordinating fire support. Clearly, there were important advantages to fully integrating your artillery within each Corps. The challenge is to accurately represent the pluses and minuses of independent vs. integrated artillery within a simulation. ...and, that may be SC3 stuff...

Excellent. ...some of the stuff I really like: "...several types of units have two offensive strikes per turn. Tanks are one of them." "the Destroyer. It is inexpensive, fast to build, excellent against subs, can shore bombard and is okay in surface naval combat." "...Cruisers and Battleships have little offensive capabilities against Subs. Subs do well against everything except Destroyers. It is normally a waste of good resources to go Sub hunting with Cruisers and Battleships." "If a Sub is not next to a Destroyer...[and] the sub makes a successful Dive, the Sub escapes all future combat that turn." Plus roads and railways, plus a better AI. I am really looking forward to it.

This looks great! I dare ask for one more thing. By and far most world maps are flatten around the equator (or some line rather close to the equator. This flattening effect has some nasty distortions on northern latitudes, such as northern Europe. East-West distances are "stretched" while north-south tiles are not. The result is that you end up having more tiles than necessary when you measure say the distance from Lodon to Oslo - because the map was stretched in order to flatten it. This creates some important game play anomalies. The most obvious one regards aircraft ranges in the northern seas. But there are some less obvious, yet more important effects regarding supply lines in northern Russia. This problem can be greatly reduced easily using a map that was flattenned at lattitude closer to the bulk of the strategic action in Europe (somewhare around Paris-Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow axis). If Hubert provides me an e-mail address will gladly e mail a sample source map.

This has potential. WWII bombers and artillery was very good at pinning down and suppressing enemy fire, thus allowing infantry and armor to attack. Bombers and Artillery were not enough to destroy an enemy corps. Their true value lay in their suppression of the enemy. If I understand this new feature correctly we could edit bombers and rockets/artillery so they would have increased suppression but decreased damage capability. ...so it would be impossible to destroy an enemy unit solely by bombardment, and still allow for heavy suppression which would greatly enhanced a direct infantry or armored attack. ...that seems the right way to go.

I second that...

My proposal would take care of this... at least with regards to armor. I propose that increases in heavy armor will increase the Survivability Value of a unit. So a high tech armored unit would take lower losses in combat than their low tech counter parts. As per my revised combat formulas the "Attack Value" would be diminished by the opposing unit's "Survivability Value". A unit with high "Survivability Value" would take lower losses. Clearly, heavy armor tech should increase the survivability of armored units (and this units would take lower losses). Arguably, advanced aircraft tech should also increase the survivabilty of airfleets. ...samething for subs and heavy bombers. The case is not clear at all for other units and technologies. Going back to my proposed revision for the formulas, my "Survivability Value" would be and item to be substracted off the Attacker's or Counter-Attacker's value. If "Survivability Value" of all units is set to 0, you would get the current combat formulas. So you could set to 0 this value and leave all existing scenarios as they currently are. ...but if this new field is created, a Modder could set this "Survivability Value" to some value higher than 0... so this type of unit would take lower losses during combat.

I have not played TacOps in a long long time, but my recollection is that TacOPs units were platoons and companies, as oppossed to SC2's divisions, corps, and armies.

I have two suggestions regarding SC2 Combat Formulas: First Proposal: Accounting for Combat Strength as a contributor to Readiness Combat Strength currently plays no role whatsover on Combat Resolution. Combat Values depend on tech level, experience and, intrinsic unit type values. Unit size is never a part of the combat formulas. Unfortunately, this leads to David and Goliath effect that some times looks unrealistic. For some time now I have been looking for a way to factor in Combat Strength into the combat formulas while preserving the existing turn mechanincs. This is my shot at it: A unit facing much larger enemy units all around its front will have to divide resources to cover its flanks and rear, unless that unit is backed up by equally large supporting units which can cover its flanks and rear. Accordingly, we should compute an Adjacent Odds factor that looks at the Combat Strength of all units in the vicinity. This ratio is supposed to represent how much of the units capabilities have to be diverted to covering the flanks and the rear. When the Adjacent Odds falls beyond the critical value of 1, Readiness should be reduced. The mechanics for implementing this idea would be as follows: Inmediately before resolving an attack, the program would calculate for both the defender and the attacker the total adjacent enemy combat strengths. This will include the combined total strength of all units adjacent to the attacking and defending units. And, based on this count, the program would calculate for each attacker and defender an "Adjacent Odds" factor as follows: Adjacent Odds Factor = Sum of all adjacent friendly combat strength (including the unit involved in combat) / Sum of all enemy combat strength (including the unit involved in combat). If the Adjacent Odds Factor is less than one, readiness should be reduced as follows: Readiness = Prior Readiness * Adjacent Odds Factor. Notice that Readiness would be reduced but never increased by the Adjacent Odds Factor. Once all your flanks and rear are duly covered a unit its free to fully engage the enemy... no need to further adjustment. And also, notice that if you have a greater than one Adjacent Odds Factor, that probably means your opponent has a less than one Adjacent Odds Factor... and the opponnent's readiness is reduced accordingly. Some questions do arise regarding the computation of the Adjacent Odds Factor: Should it take into account solely Combat Strength, or (Combat Strength * Combat Value)? ...my inclination is to say no, but, I suggest playtesting. What do we do with Artillery Bombardments, Naval Combat and Air Combat? My feeling is that the Adjacent Odds Factor should not apply here. What about Amph. Landings and Paradrops? Again, my feelings is that the Adjacent Odds Factor should not apply here. How do we define what adjacent means? I would only include units adjacent to the defending unit. I would not include units to the rear of the attacking unit. But, I would include units to the rear of the defending unit. Again, playtesting may be in order. Second Proposal: Introducing a "Survivability Value" in Combat Formulas The current "Defense" Combat Value is actually a counter attack value. "Defense" strength determines how much damage the defending unit will cause on the attacking unit. As SC2 stands, you cannot Mod a unit that will have high survivability, but low lethality. Consider the case of an infantry unit subjected to an air bombardment: An infantry unit may or may not be able to inflict damage on an attacking airplane depending on how good are its anti air guns... but that is a different issue all together from an infantry units ability so survive a bombardment. However, during WWII infantry units were pretty good at surviving bombardments (whether from air or from artillery)... even if they were lacking adequate anti aircraft guns. When creating a MOD, I would like to increase infantry's ability to survive bombardments (from airflleets and from artillery) without making it more lethal on counter attack. I think SC2 is missing a "Survivability Value" which should be different from the "Counter Attack Value". This survivability value should be substracted from the opposing combat value to calculate losses. But the surviability value would not be used as the counter attacking value to calculate attackers losses. For that purpose we would use the existing "Defense Value" which could be renamed as "Counterattacking Value". One advantage to this scheme is that it allows to decrease the level of lethality of the game as whole. As the game currently stands an increase in Defense Combat Value increases the lethality of the counter attack... if you want to decrease the lethality, this is not the way to go about it. But, more important, my scheme allows a modder to increase the survivability of a particular unit without making it more lethal its attackers. ...and vice versa, a modder could make a particular unit quite lethal while making it less survivable. WWII infantry units were pretty resilent. They were not as lethal as their armored counterparts, but they could survive quite intensive bombardments. Infantry should have a fairly good survivability value even if they have low Attack and Counter Attack Values. On the other hand low tech armored units had pretty low survivability values (Panzer I's were known as tin coffins). Only heavy armored units should have good survivability values. Armored survivability should increase with tech. However, I infantry's survivability should not increase with tech. ...unless you introduce a new tech for personal body armor. (Among land units, only armor's survivability should increase with tech. Artillery and Infantry's survivability value should not increase as tech increases. Not sure about air and naval units.) I would really appreciate comments on these ideas...

I have TacOps... Of course, that is a different scale all together. I mentioned Patton vs. Rommel because the game scale there was more like SC2's...

Chavez is still selling oil to the U.S. and to other western countries. The Iraq oil embargo created a unique set of circumstances. In Iraq, Bush had three altenative choices: lift the oil embargo, keep the oil embargo, or attack. Bush did not want to lift the embargo as long as Husein was in power, but, he did not want to keep the embargo in place until Husein died of old age (a la Fidel Castro). The Bush administration probably felt there was only choice left: regime change.

I like very much the idea of point build limits. I would have a point build limit for all infantry units: Infantry Corps, Infantry Army, Engineers, Paratroops, and HQs. And a separate point build limit for all highly industrialized units: Armor, Air Fleet, Air Bomber, Subs, Cruisers, Battleships, and Aircraft Carriers.

I liked both of those games very much. One thing I liked very much about Patton vs. Rommel was that it had truly simultaneous turns. It would be really neat if SC3 could have something like that. As far as V for Victory, I liked very much the way it resolved combat...

Aside from its huge size, War in Europe had some great features which could easily be incorporated into SC2; for example: Armor could move before and after an attack, while infantry moves only before an attack. In SC2 terms... armor could be allowed to spend any remaining action points after an attack, but not infantry.

I the Iranian army does not have a chance, but, that would not be the end of it. As you say. the occupation and the international landscape would become hellish. Nothing would be gained but an endless accumulation of problems, death and suffering for everybody. As far as your next point: Pentagon Intel... well quite frankly, we should question how good that is. Finally, I agree that the invasion of Iran has no merit. In a wargame, the game ends when you defeat the enemy chips in the board, or when time runs out. In real life, it is not quite that simple.