Counter techs are way too powerful.

[JerseyJohn]

Yeah, I'm sure they were smart enough to realize he was more useful to them in a plane than in an office. Although, as Germany developed a jet ground attack replacement for the Stuka it was designating Rudel to train the pilots and command the unit.

Do you play PBEM? I never have enough time for IP games. If you want to do it PBEM I'd recommend making your first move as the Axis and sending it to me, I'll reply as Allies and make my move as Axis in a second PBEM game. I've found it's a lot of fun doing it that way, playing one game for each side simultaneously. If you make your move remember to check the research area, every major power has unassigned research credits.

[SeaWolf_48]

I still believe that as good as anti-tank guns got, the german 75 and 88, and the british 6 pound and 12 pound, the US 57 and 75mm, no russian, german, british,or american infantry division could stand up to any Panzer/Armor division any time during the war(Italy, Romania excluded).

A level 5 panzer should destroy a level 5 infantry division every time, air power should be the only equalizer. From '42 on most panzer/armor divisions had armored infantry/panzer grenidiers to deal with anti-tank gunners, while the tanks would chew up the rest of the troops.

[Rabtherab]

Bottom Line: Don't put any chits on Heavy-Tanks. Anti-Tank (Armies/Corps) are much better in combat. Also (not significant), Armies are cheaper to reinforce, operand, buy, etc.

Agreed, as the game goes on, tanks can't stand up in the initial assults against fresh troops. But as anyone should know, it's a tanks MOVEMENT factor that makes it a powerfull unit. It's their ability to exploit gaps and encircle the enemy that matters most. Once units are cut off, even the advanced infsntry units collapse.

Infantry corps/armies simply don't have the movement allowance to be used in this role. If you do not build tanks or invest in research with them, how do you accomplish break throughs?

Without this important ability, It's little wonder that your games become static WW1 style games with one side or the other capitualating from sheer exhaustion, and weight of numbers.

[santabear]

Rabtherab: Exactly. Tanks will screw up the enemy's supply no matter how outclassed they are in firepower.

And when the enemy has to move units away from the main battle to eliminate a pesky tank unit it opens a hole for a friendly corps or army to gain a hex...or it creates an opportunity to 'stretch' the defenders. Then you can get there "first with the most (infantry)."

This does not work, of course, if the enemy has air superiority. Then the tank dies an aerial death, and his army continues to beat on you.

The tank units in the game seem to play pretty well. If you have Shermans or PkW III's and the other guy has Panthers or KV's (or good AT), you can't get through him. But using tanks as battering rams is contrary to what I've read about armored warfare in WWII. If you encircle an enemy infantry unit, it WILL die (though you might get scuffed up a bit) when it's supply runs out.

Thanks to all for the discussion about attack values! I continue to learn stuff every time I visit here...

SB

[Iron Ranger]

Infantry corps/armies simply don't have the movement allowance to be used in this role. If you do not build tanks or invest in research with them, how do you accomplish break throughs?

Without this important ability, It's little wonder that your games become static WW1 style games with one side or the other capitualating from sheer exhaustion, and weight of numbers

Yes your right, tanks should be used in the role of break throughs. But, two points. You need to doinate the air to create the break through (so everyones MPPs get spent on R&D and planes in the great air race that the game degenerats down to after the initial attack on Russia. And that the 5 points in movement is not enough to exploit the break through due to the +1 movement cost of going into a hex with two ZOC. If you want to improve Tank units and keep them in thier standard role of exploting a break through and not unbalance the combat role: lets add an aditional action point with each tech advance (plus all the other stuff). This would keep in line with the more powerfull tanks as the war developed (cut like butter through light garison troops - enemy controled hex's) but the need to stear around dug in consintrations of anti tank guns and infantry (the actual unit on the map).

[Shaka of Carthage]

Adding +1 action points for each tech advance, isn't that a little bit too much?

Thats' a potential +5 action points.

[KDG]

I think the tech advance should be different then what it is. The current advance only helps in tank to tank battles, and the way its set up now, these battles don't happen.

What might be nice is for tech one to add a soft attack, tech two add an additional movement, tech three add additional soft defense, etc.

Or make it even more interesting, and have the tech advance be random for improving tanks. Let it be equal chances for increasing either movement, soft attack, defense, etc., while always increasing the overall value of the tanks(10 > 11 > 12 etc.). Even have the cost be able to go down for a tank as one of the options (technology results in decreased costs all the time).

I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of variabilitiy on all tech advances. Think about how in history one thing is being research, and that research results in a breakthrough in something completely different.

So we get a jet tech increase, and randomly gain either improved ground attack or improved air to air attack, etc, decrease in costs, and so on.

I know many of the games of this genre have you invest in general research, and then it is applied to a random tech. To me this is too extreme, but some randomness in the improvements would be sweet. That way getting tech 5 in jets won't always mean the same thing (i.e. checkmate).

[arby]

Interesting discussion. I'll make some comments in this post, then some suggestions in the next.

1. There are some misconceptions about tank warfare here. First, infantry never caught up with tanks; in fact, the disparity between the two of them got wider. A 37mm AT gun could easily knock out a PzII; even a 75mm AT gun would have a problem with Panthers, and couldn't hope to kill a King Tiger unless it got a flank shot. An American advance in 1944 could be brought to a screeching halt on a mere rumor that there was a Tiger up ahead.

Second, while the "breakthrough" aspect of tanks was important, they were not used as light cavalry, i.e., with a primary mission of hitting HQ, supply, and rear areas. (That was indeed the mission of armored forces that the US planned on, which was one of the main reasons that US tanks were pieces of crap.) The tank was used as a battering ram; its proper analogue would be not to light cavalry, but heavy cavalry. In every single major offensive of the war, tanks were used to blow open and through the enemy's lines, with infantry to follow in a mop-up role. That is exactly the role of armor today.

2. WWII was the war of two machines: the plane and the tank. This game overvalues the first and almost completely neglects the second. In fact, it could be argued that the tank played a larger role in the war than the plane did; every major offensive, from the blitz on Poland through Barbarossa through the breakout from Calais was the primarily dependent on armor. That doesn't happen here.

3. Why it doesn't is a result of a number of factors, most of which have been previously discussed at length. The inability to stack and to have more than three, or usually two, ground units attack a defender, combined with the lack of retreat makes air power the god of battle.

4. There have been any number of suggestions as to how to remedy this: stacking, overruns, retreats, etc. The vast majority of them would require major changes to the combat engine. I think that's unlikely, because I think it's unlikely that Hubert is going to want to spend the countless hours necessary to do that, since the game isn't that terribly out of whack, plus there's no guarantee that it's going to work any better than the present system does, and may be worse. What happens if you spend all that time completely reworking the combat engine, and it turns that it completely screws things up -- the Germans can't conquer France at all, or wind up in Moscow five turns after they start Barbarossa?

Then what do you do?

So I'm going to offer a range of suggestions which will work within the confines of the current system. Some may be good, some may not be, but that's what we're all here for, right?

[zappsweden]

arby, very good post!

I find your information interesting.

I think that the changes we are proposing wont change the game too much. I mean, in France there are not any tech advances so that will surely be no problem.

A few minor changes that would only do good in the game.

1) halve the anti-tank bonus i.e L1 anti-tank means 0.5 extra soft defence, L2 means 1.0 points extra soft defence.

2) halve the anti-aircraft bonus the same way.

3) Air units cannot destroy GROUND forces i.e the ground force stays at strength=1

HUBERT, WHY NOT MAKE A SC 1.5 EXPANSION PACK INCLUDING SUCH NEW RULES AND SELL IT FOR DESCENT PRICE UNTIL SC2 COMES OUT?

it would be quick to make, since the map and graphics can be reused.

[Iron Ranger]

Exellent post Arby, you said just what I was thinking and better then I could.

I like your ideas KGB but I don't think that they would be easy to code into a patch. That was my idea with the extra movement rate - boost the combat value of armor and be easy to inculde into a patch.

All L5 combat techs are very powerfull, look at subs at L5. 50% chance to dive and a 10 factor in navel attack plus an increase in strenght for each level, and I won't even go into the jet tech.

Something is wrong when most of the experenced players agree that tanks after 1941 are useless and not worthy of investing in. Historical they were the most inportant unit in ground combat, but in this game you rarely see them due to the overpowering ability of long range air fleets.

[arby]

Okay, in no particular order:

1. Beef up tanks. Soft attack starts at 5, not 4; SA, SD, TA, and TD goes up 1 with each level of tech advance. (Also increases strength, of course.) This means that an L2 tank will inflict 2 to 3 points more damage than it does at present. Inflicting a 7-pt loss on a unit is going to open up some holes.

2. Change values of infantry versus tanks. Right now, armies have TA of 4, TD of 2. Should be the reverse. Infantry was virtually useless on the offensive against tanks. On the other hand, tank losses could be staggering; Germany started Barbarossa with 3200 tanks, and when the offensive closed down six months later only 160 were still operational.

3. Change the techs for infantry. Either have one "infantry tech," which raises soft and tank attack and defense ratings across the board, or (my favorite), split them into two techs: AT, which increases TA and TD values, but does not increase strength, and Artillery (fold that in with Rockets, maybe), which increases SA and SD values, and does increase strength.

Note that the effect of the above three changes will substantially increase losses from combat, especially as the war progresses. This has the added beneficial effect of forcing the player to use MPP's to reinforce units, rather than to create new ones, thus eliminating the Great Wall of Russian Corps and similar world wonders of SC.

4. Keep the air combat model as it is, but do a couple of things. First, reduce range. There's a big difference between range and combat range -- the latter of which takes into account the much greater fuel consumption involved in dogfighting -- and I think the former was used in this game. The Spitfire, for example, had a range of over 500 miles, but a combat range of less than 400. Air fleets should probably start out with a range of 4 and go up from there. Second, and I'm undecided on this one, have AA advances benefit ground units as well as resources. Remember, defense value only affects the losses that the attacker suffers. Inflicting additional casualties on air units is one way of dissuading a player from adopting the "20 air fleet" strategy. Making ground combat more decisive is another.

5. While we're on the subject of air and AA, reduce the base rate of AA for all resources to 0, and allow strat bombers to hit the resource instead of the unit on it. That means the strat bombers will take 0 losses until the opponent starts investing in AA. That should open up strategic bombing a bit more.

6. Corps are overvalued in the game, because they get the same benefit from tech advances that armies do. At the beginning of the game, a corps has half the TD that an army does. After 3 advances in AT, the corps has 80% of the TD that an army does, at half the cost. Corps should get half the benefit of tech advances, rounded down.

7. Also undecided on this one: a unit can either move and then engage in combat, or engage in combat and then move. (And if it can engage in combat, then move, can it engage in combat again at the end of the move?) There are some real interesting possibilities with this, but the problem is you don't have any idea of what it's going to do until you try it. Then again, my guess is that it wouldn't require too much of a code change, and if beta-testing shows it doesn't work, you can just take it out. Your confidence in my statement that this is so will probably not be enhanced by my confession that my experience in computer programming is virtually nil.

Anyway, I've run all that up the flagpole, let's see who salutes.

[zappsweden]

Originally posted by arby:

Okay, in no particular order:

3. Change the techs for infantry. Either have one "infantry tech," which raises soft and tank attack and defense ratings across the board, or (my favorite), split them into two techs: AT, which increases TA and TD values, but does not increase strength, and Artillery (fold that in with Rockets, maybe), which increases SA and SD values, and does increase strength.

How do u expect anyone to hold a city if soft attacks gets higher? It is very tough already due to the 4-5 air fleets supporting the attackers. If units increase their soft attack values they will inflict 5-6 damage points and cities can no longer be held. Having higher soft defence does not help because it seems only incresing the attacker losses.

[ April 07, 2003, 11:07 AM: Message edited by: zappsweden ]

[Desert Dave]

As originally posted by arby:

Anyway, I've run all that up the flagpole, let's see who salutes.

Well... doggone... I just CAN'T do that... never have been able to do it... no matter WHO the authority figure... whether the old man or swaggering cops on the curb-side beat or... a certain ROTC shave-tail from Ohio State U. who in 1968 thought he was an Avatar arrived on Earth with a special mission... ah, no matter The Top got 'im straighted away lickety-split quick... these high ranking sergeants are the back-bone of any Army, etc, or... well, you get the idea.

To the point, I am still NOT convinced that your premise is sufficient or justifying. I am no man's tank commander, and am approaching this quasi-intellectually, as you, but...

How many soldiers can a limited series of HE shells knock out of action on any given assault? 10? 20? Even if it is in the hundreds, how many men are in a corps? An Army? 60-100,000? What is the terrain? What kind of concealment? What sort of AT weapons?

***Perhaps the armor could REDUCE READINESS instead? Against every single unit that it contacts on a given turn.

Which suggests that I WOULD favor two movements for the armor unit... at 3 MPs per... AND, it could attack AT ANY TIME before or after either of its movements.

As for your other comments... and BTW, your commentary, earlier and later, is excellent and surely contributes to a valuable discussion... in general, I am inclined to mostly let Hubert's design decisions alone.

There are certain reasons for his choices, and I am satisfied that he did a great deal of research and careful application. However, deconstruction does have its purpose, as long as we all realize that changing one aspect will effect many many other parts of the game.

Beef up tanks...

Mostly disagree, since I am personally satisfied that tanks CANNOT perform the role of heavy artillery, nor "blow holes" in anything larger than a squad or company sized unit.

Change vaules of infantry...

Agree, but given my response to #1 on the list, I would go for: TA=2, TD=3.

Change the techs for infantry...

Excellent idea! :cool: I would rather see this an optional purchase, and not AUTOMATICALLY assigned.

Air Fleets should probably start out with a range of 4...

Sounds reasonable. You could also have... a base change of 8, without having to use the Operational move.

have AA advances benefit ground units...

OK. Also as optional purchase.

reduce the base rate of AA for all resources to 0, and allows Strategic Bombers to hit the resource...

Another good idea... has been proposed and championed since last Spring, I believe. I would also like to have separate tactical bombers. :cool:

corps are overvalued...

Maybe not. Special corps units that exceed average Army capabilites, such as the Marines or Commandos... were and are quite common in any era... often as various task-specific and detachable brigades.

Far better to simply provide separate "special" units.

a unit can either move and then engage in combat, or engage in combat and then move...

Yes indeed, but I would ONLY give this benefit to the Tanks, as indicated earlier, which would make it JUST powerful... enough.

[arby]

Originally posted by zappsweden:

How do u expect anyone to hold a city if soft attacks gets higher?

Simple. Increase the terrain bonuses for cities. Right now it's 1 for SD, 2 for TD. I'd give serious thought to boosting it to 4 and 6, respectively. (In fact, the terrain bonuses should all be boosted if the attack and defense values are.) A unit defending in a city will suffer about 2 points less damage against infantry, and more than 2 1/2 less against tanks.

[zappsweden]

Originally posted by arby:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by zappsweden:

How do u expect anyone to hold a city if soft attacks gets higher?

Simple. Increase the terrain bonuses for cities. Right now it's 1 for SD, 2 for TD. I'd give serious thought to boosting it to 4 and 6, respectively. (In fact, the terrain bonuses should all be boosted if the attack and defense values are.) A unit defending in a city will suffer about 2 points less damage against infantry, and more than 2 1/2 less against tanks. </font>

[SeaMonkey]

RB, in agreement with your concepts, especially the attack equating to a # of action points, perhaps 2 in clear terrain. But I do want to see a new unit, Mech./Mot. corps, to operate with the new and improved tank forces. And yes, the great devastator of combat forces, artillery, should somehow be actively researched(remember the proximity fuse) for improved application to attack/defence, maybe gunlaying radar is the medium in addition to rockets(need to be transportable).

[arby]

Okay, two things: tanks and corps. Tanks first.

I think the problem is you're using a reductionist fallacy -- one tank can't knock out more than a few soldiers, so several tanks can't knock out more than a platoon or so. But applying such a tactical analysis to a strategic situation runs into problems. In this game, a tank group doesn't just represent tanks, it represents the mechanized and motorized divisions that panzergruppes contained. You may not be concerned at seeing a tank or two rolling toward you, but if you saw a company of tanks rolling toward you along with halftracks and armored cars, my guess is that you'd be off to the races.

Which, historically, is exactly what happened. You may not believe that tanks could "blow holes" in anything more than a squad, but the German tank groups certainly blew holes in the Polish, French, and Russian (and American, at the Bulge) armies that they opposed. Not without cost, certainly; while German casualties in the blitz of France were minimal, it lost 30% of its tanks. But the tanks were what hammered the opening. In this game, you use infantry to open up the gaps and follow through with your tanks. In reality, the exact opposite occurred.

As for your suggestion about tanks affecting readiness, the big problem with that is that it really won't mean much: readiness only affects the losses you inflict, not the losses you receive. And given the present state of the game, in which damages to the defender greatly outweigh damages to the attackers, reducing the defender's readiness is of minimal value: in a standard Eastern front infantry v. corps combat scenario, reducing the defender's readiness by 90% has the effect of reducing the attacker's losses from .23 to -.4, and has no effect on the defender's losses.

Tank groups were the most powerful ground unit in the war, by a huge margin. I've read military historians who claim that the panzer division was the greatest single development in warfare since the invention of the bow and arrow. They aren't here; they're no more effective against infantry than other infantry, and actually become less effective than infantry, on the attack at least, as the game progresses. This desperately needs to be addressed.

As for corps, I don't think I made my point clear. I understand that special corps units were created in WWII that were superior to general army troops. But corps in the game don't represent those, they represent "half-armies." At the game's outset, you pay half the price for a corps that you would for an army, and get half the value: all of the corps values are exactly one-half of the army's values. What happens after that, though, is that while the price stays the same, the corps values go up at the same rate as the army's values. When I get to L3 anti-tank, my corps has a TD value of 4, while my army has a value of 5. Meaning I can buy two units with a TD of 4 for the same cost as one unit with a TD only 20% higher. That's one of the reasons you see so damned many corps: it's more cost-effective to produce them than armies.

One final note on tanks. As a hobby, I build armor models. About 90% of the hobby is devoted to WWII models, and about 90% of that to German tanks. Realism is the Holy Grail of modelers; it's not unusual for a modeler to spend $100 on books (especially those with a lot of pictures) before building a $30 model, just to make sure it comes out historically accurate.

One day I was at the hobby shop when an old guy came in. He looked at a model of a King Tiger -- the 60-ton behemoth that the Germans were producing at war's end -- and said, "Boy, that brings back memories." Turned out he was at the Battle of the Bulge, and had seen a King Tiger in combat. We all crowded around, breathless for the opportunity of getting some eyewitness accounts to bolster what we'd gleaned from books and pictures. "What did you see? What did it look like? What kind of camouflage pattern did it have?" And he said, "All I saw was that it was big, and it was coming straight for me, and that's when I decided the next glance I got at that thing would be over my shoulder."

[Shaka of Carthage]

Tanks versus Infantry

I'm confused on some of the SC concept issues. As was mentioned, I don't think any of the suggested tweaks should be considered until things are alot clearer. Probably best for me to think out loud in another topic.

Air Unit Range

Rule of thumb has always been for the combat radius of an aircraft to be 1/3rd of its total range. Maybe someone who has the numbers can post the WWII ranges of the aircraft we are discussing.

Corp vs Army

This one I think has become pretty clear. Corp is suppossed to be half an Army. Initial values reflect that. Hence any tech increase for a Corp should be half that of a Army to retain that relationship.

Ability to move and attack

Don't think anyone will disagree that the Armor unit should have that ability. After all, the manual refers to it as a "blitzkreig" attack. On the other hand, I don't think the Corp / Army unit should be able to move and attack also. That, along with a reduction in the action points, would properly reflect how the Infantry dominated units operated.

[SeaMonkey]

Move & Attack, Attack & Move..... thought that is a perfectly acceptable concept for the battlefield? How far can infantry march, tanks move, Mech/Mot. forces cover (clear terrain/light to no resistance, good weather) in a day, a week? SC scale = 50 miles per hex/turn = week. What are the numbers, if it applies to air (real life) then it should apply to ground forces. What are other limiting factors to movement assuming full supply? Adjust action points to apply to the real battlefield conditions,... simple?

[SeaWolf_48]

Arby

I have found a kindred spirit in you. Aleast we think alike when it come to Panzers and their ability to fight. If you have good air support there is no force on earth that can stop a tank attack, except another tank division. SC does not treat the tank with justice, especially in defense. Tanks should break thru infantry and be able to stand alone in enemy territory for atleast two turns.

Gurderian had Sh_t fits trying to get the German Highcommand to understand that the tank is the answer to offense and defense. Even Hitler did not believe in tanks until after France (fairyland). Hitler always wanted the tanks to stop because he was afraid that the tanks would be cut off. In SC tanks can get cut off because you can put new units in any owned hex. New units should only be able to come on the borad in a city or Army Base, and not next to enemy units. Break thru's are stopped because you can put new units next to a break thru armored unit. In HISTORY tanks would penetrate deep into enemy territory and cut off supplies and commands to the front line troops, they became demoralized and fell apart, new troops would have to try to break thru to them, but usually didn't. The WW1 stile of fighting in SC would be stopped with this simple fix. NO NEWLY CREATED UNITS WITHIN 5 HEXES OF ENEMY UNITS!

[Shaka of Carthage]

SeaMonkey

The ability to move and attack depends on the scale you are talking about. At the level that SC is representing, not being able to move and attack is a abstraction of other variables as well.

Later tonight I will post some of the movement rates I have once I get home.

SeaWolf_48

I agree that Armored units were powerful weapons. Tanks and airplanes (ie combustion engine) in WWII created a "revolution in military affairs" (ie RMA). But I don't think the fix you suggessted will solve the problem.

As you mentioned, breakthroughs are stopped because you can put units next to the ones that have broken thru, in effect, re-establishing your units lines of supply and cutting off the unit that broke thru. Its incidental that those new units are sometimes created that turn. Anyone who has played SC against a Human has experienced this.

[ April 08, 2003, 10:52 PM: Message edited by: Shaka of Carthage ]

[SeaMonkey]

Saw this interesting statistic..... in WWII, Allied fighter-bombers on averaged fired or dropped 800 bombs / 3500 rockets to kill one tank. Makes you rethink the relationship of air to armored ground force's combat.

[arby]

Originally posted by SeaMonkey:

Saw this interesting statistic..... in WWII, Allied fighter-bombers on averaged fired or dropped 800 bombs / 3500 rockets to kill one tank. Makes you rethink the relationship of air to armored ground force's combat.

I've read other stuff along those lines, that tank losses attributable to air were substantially inflated.

Makes sense: you're flying 300+ mph, trying to hit a target that's around 30 ft long and 10 feet wide, and very well may be moving, too, with weapons that weren't particularly accurate.

Air superiority was obviously helpful, but it wasn't nearly as determinative as this game makes it. The Germans had total air superiority on the Eastern Front until well into 1943 -- they virtually destroyed the Russian Air Force, on the ground, in the opening days of Barbarossa -- and it did not stop the Russians from mounting numerous counteroffensives.

[SeaWolf_48]

I respect both of you gentelmen but must disagree. Aircraft destroyed 10's of 1000's of tanks. Just one of Germany's Luftwaffe pilots Capt. Rudel destroyed 518 tanks, 800 trucks, 150 A/A and A/T guns and the cruiser Marat in Leningrad. I don't think he dropped 414,400 bombs to destroy 518 tanks.

During Normandy more of the german tanks where destroyed by planes than tanks. Capt. Michael Whittmann germany's highest tank ace was killed by a RAF Typhoon. No tank could kill him!

Planes set up to destroy tanks were many, British Typhoons, P-47 Thunderbolts, Russian Ilyushin IL-2M, Stuka Me-87g-1 tank buster. All carried cannons except the P-47 which carried 6-50cal mg's which are almost a cannon. A plane shooting from above hits the light armor on top of a tank and destroys it, mostly in the engine compartment.

I have never read of a A/T gunner killing 518 tanks, I don't think A/T gunners lasted to long on the battlefield. PanzerGrenidiers and tank MG killed them off before they could grow face hair. An A/T gun may get a tank, but the price it pays for it is deadly.

Infantry cannot and couldnot stand up to armor yesterday or today, even with the weapons that the common soldier can carry. I will give you this, city fighting can kill tanks, thus not to be used in cities unless in small numbers.

I have read that even in Viet Nam Commanders realizied that the tank was the best weapon he had to kill dinks.

[SeaMonkey]

I hear ya SW48, just posting someone else's research, that's kind of a problem about stats vs the "truth". Notice that I did refer to Allied and FBs using bombs and rockets, not cannon. And I wonder who it was that confirmed all of Rudel's reported "kills". One thing is for sure, airpower is devastating, just ask the Iraqis(excluding al-Sahhaf).

[ April 09, 2003, 06:43 PM: Message edited by: SeaMonkey ]