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CW fire support teams vs FO - QB point question


dkchapuis

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For Regular/Normal/Fit/0 troops, the difference in cost is 197 vs 100, so twice as much.

The FO team is two men, has an Observer and a Radio man.

The Fire control team is four men, has a radio man and two Observers.

The cost is going to be twice as much because there are four dudes. Is that useful? Well, they'll be able to take a hit, potentially, but the main thing is where they are in the formation, and what their job is.

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Sure, so points-buy systems are always terrible and always wrong in any implementation ever, they're just often the least-worst option available for wargame design.

The major issue typically is that there's no concept of context in those values. As an extreme example, a dedicated anti-air missile system might be given a value of 100 points. That same system will be useless if the enemy have zero air assets, but it'll still cost you 100 points. Equally, if they're heavy on rotary wing support, then that 100 point vehicle might counter several thousand points of the enemy, and in each case the vehicle will have an arbitrary number attached to it.

In the specific case of CM, the points will be decided by a formula (which we don't know). That's important for CM because it's going to be a priority for the system to be as hands-off as possible. Battlefront can't afford the time and manpower to do continuous "balance patches" or the like, so it's going to be important to have a system where you can set up the initial constraints and then everything else falls out automatically.

The downside to that is that, since points-buy is always wrong, is that you'll always have outliers, and things which are "overcosted". In CMx1, the costs for a turreted vehicle were very high, so turretless vehicles were the most efficient option. In CMx2, that's been corrected, which leaves vehicles like the Stug III looking a lot worse, and perhaps overcosted.

The main reason for this unit in context is that they exist in the TO&E. There are C2 advantages to having an FO asset at this level, and this FO asset comes with four men, who you have to pay for. Is it worth double the cost? No, probably not. If you only have a limited number of artillery assets available, then the platoon FO is probably as good or better in many situations.

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Interesting. That's another example of why a points-buy system like this has hard limits on how well it can reflect anything real - there's no limits on what you can attach, so even if you had an "Artillery (Berlin)" option with high rarity, then there wouldn't be anything stopping you taking a different equivalent formation.

I don't know much about the Berlin Brigade (or Berlin Infantry Brigade) - I assume they weren't expected to last terribly long?

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2 minutes ago, domfluff said:

Interesting. That's another example of why a points-buy system like this has hard limits on how well it can reflect anything real - there's no limits on what you can attach, so even if you had an "Artillery (Berlin)" option with high rarity, then there wouldn't be anything stopping you taking a different equivalent formation.

I don't know much about the Berlin Brigade (or Berlin Infantry Brigade) - I assume they weren't expected to last terribly long?

That is a reasonable working assumption - there were three brigades of which the French one was slightly 'light' on numbers so a division minus was there (albeit- a lot of the combat support and combat service support was light on compared to that expected of a division across the piece).  As an example, the Brits had no gunners and its engineer element was a TA Engineer Squadron.  The combat element of the UK's Berlin Brigade was formed by three infantry battalions on a unique establishment roughly equating to the light role Type B establishment and an armoured squadron.

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14 hours ago, dkchapuis said:

So just from the point of view of calling in arty missions, no advantage.
 

Having 4 people vs 2 is a small advantage, but seems not worth double…

 

thanks again!!

Doesn't make any difference in the game as far as I can tell. In real life the fire support team has more radio nets it can simultaneously monitor, as opposed to the FO team that just has the one radio. But that isn't reflected as far as any use in game. It's in TO&E so it shows up 🙂

Dave

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