Help with Bogging

[ropey]

Hi

I'm designing an historical scenario where historically most (about 15/30) of the tank force was lost to bogging/thrown tracks over the course of about 3 (realtime) hrs of battle. Can anyone help me with a, the ground conditions (ie, damp,wet,mud) that would come close to simulating this attrition rate and b, the affect terrain type has on that figure?

Much of the real landscape was either flat but soft going (leading to bogging) or raised and rocky (leading to thrown tracks).

Thanks in advance

[Sergei]

I would estimate wet or mud conditions are needed. You could test it yourself though, maybe have an empty muddy playfield with 30 tanks of the sort you're using and see how many immobilize in ten minutes (have an enemy bunker behind a building so the AI doesn't autosurrender). Then calculate from that.

Note that in actual battle they might not be moving around all that time. And is this a battle or an operation that you're doing? In operations, tanks immobilized by bogging return back to 'bogged' status for the next battle.

[Redwolf]

This will probably be difficult to tune as vehicles have drastically different bog changes in CM. For example, T-34 are very good (realistic) but then there are effects like the StuG III being much more (about twice) as prone to bog than the StuG IV for which there is no historical evidence. 8-wheel vehicles are also much better than tracked vehicles.

If you use damp ground you will probably have 1/3rd of normal tanks (not very good ones) bog. But it is hard to estimate as you don't know how much the tanks in reality actually moves. 3 hours of speeding or 3 hours of ambushing and only doing small position changes?

I think it would be a bad idea to have people play a scenario where realistic bogging would be essential for the scenario's playability.

[ropey]

Thanks for the help. I will playtest with wet conditions. It's currently a battle, but the same map can be used for an operation involving Poles and Paras. However the same conditions were a factor in that attack too, so I need to get it roughly right.

The playability doesn't hinge on bogging - just the realism. There are other factors that I can tweak such as the available infantry support/ opposition.