Announcing CMBB Quickbattle Armor Limit Ruleset

[Redwolf]

I was working on a ruleset along the lines of the old Fionn-75 rules for some time now. Am a pretty satisfied with the result, so I think it's time to go public. I expect that I will make some adjustments after feedback, so if you play with these rules be sure to note verson number (now it's at 1.0).

The tables are at:

http://schlepper.hanse.de/redwolf/armorrules/

or as one zipfile with all months with one download:

http://schlepper.hanse.de/redwolf/armorrules.zip

Here is a copy if the design documentation. For the actual monthly tables please see the site above. As always, feedback is welcome.

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Combat Mission quickbattles where people choose their own forces have an "arms race" problem. While people would usually like to try new things and like fast gameflow from swift vehicles, they are often forced to purchase at least some of the heaviest available tanks and SP guns available. Failing to do so will often result in a game where one side got the heaviest AVFs available and the other player has to concentrate all efforts on dealing with them. This is not desired as a game like Combat Mission is about rich tactical choices and exploring combined arms tactics. More often than not, the "offender" did choose the heavy armor not to damage gameplay, but just to be safe from his dopponent doing the same.

For CMBO we had the Fionn rules, limiting heavy armor in several categories. People would agree to one of the categories and then restrict themself to purchasing only vehicles allowed on that list. In CMBB the situation is more difficult because the game spans a much wider timeframe. Any practical voluntary armor limit must be heavily timeline-oriented. As with any ruleset for any game, complexity must be kept at a minimum.

The ruleset presented here is only limiting vehicles with too thick armor. Unlike the old Fionn CMBO rules it does not exclude vehicles for having too big guns. If you want to buy a Nashorn to shoot up Stuarts, then by all means go for it and have fun (while it lasts, hehe).

As mentioned, the exclusion tables are time-oriented. For each month there is a definition of what the strongest common gun for each side is. Enemy vehicles which cannot be knocked out by this strongest common gun are excluded.

The precise definition is: there must be one towed gun and and one vehicle which gets a kill chance of "Low" or better at 550m head-to-head, shooting AP. The rarity of this gun and this vehicle must be 50% or less. Lots of exceptions to this rule apply.

Here are the events that change availability:

# Phase 1, 1941: everything not killable by the 37mm Pak36 gun or the Soviet 45mm AT gun is excluded. The early war fanboy club is invited.

# Phase 2, 194201 - 1942004: in January of 1942 the 50mm L/60 PaK38 becomes commonly available and hence the T-34 is allowed. And in turn, since the T-34 76mm L/42 gun is now in the game, all Axis vehicles vulnerable to this gun are now allowed.

# Phase 3, 194205 - 194309: in May of 1942 the Axis 75mm L/43-48 becomes available. This allows the KV tanks for the Soviets. Note that German vehicles with complete 80mm front are still not allowed, since the 76mm L/42 on the T-34 is still the Soviet reference gun.

# Phase 4, 194310 - 194401: from October 1943 on the Allied player is expected to deal with complete 80mm front Axis vehicles using SP guns and lent-lease tanks and stop whining about the T-34 gun.

# Phase 5, 194402 - 194412: the T-34/85 becomes available in February 1944. This has few immediate effect, since the both ammo types given to it in CMBB 1.03 cannot touch Panther and Tiger at the reference distance. The only vehicles that become newly available are the Jagdpanzer IV (early) and the Panzer IV/70(A). Hetzer, Brummbaer and friends are still not in.

# Phase 6, 1945: In Januar 1945 the SU-100 and hence the Panther, Tiger 1 and the medium tank hunters become available. The superheavies stay restricted: Jagdpanther, Jagdtiger, Sturmtiger, King Tiger and IS-3.

[ June 22, 2003, 09:04 AM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[Joachim]

My favourite:

07/43: Capt. Panther A allowed for Soviets.

Until 12/44: Panther A not allowed for Germans.

Gruß

Joachim

[Redwolf]

You can thank the mighty Pak40 which kills a Panther just fine at the reference distance. Too bad friendly anti-armor fire is not modeled

I had to stick to the rules, so to speak. The Germans can kill a Panther with low-rarity stuff in that timeframe, the Soviets cannot. I don't think many Russian players will actually buy captured Panthers under these rules. Complete waste of points given that the Germans have only stuff they can kill with their normal equipment.

There are more freak cases like that, for example, a T-34 model 1943 cannot kill itself, so the Germans are not allowed to have the captured ones.

[ June 20, 2003, 11:12 AM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[Nippy]

Couple of Questions:

1. What about Soviet 57mm guns? Both towed and tank mounted (T-34/57). When you turn rareity off they become somewhat affordable. And the 57mm toed is ready to go in June of 41'

2. And what of support weapons? I ask this because a good number of early war german tanks are vunerable to the Soviet 12.7mm DsHK HMG. Side shots at 200m or less do not bode well for the crew. Yet German MG-34 HMGs can't do anything to a T-26 or BT-7. Then again, Germans get a readily avaiable AT rifle in the 41' and early 42's years.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Nippy:

1. What about Soviet 57mm guns? Both towed and tank mounted (T-34/57). When you turn rareity off they become somewhat affordable. And the 57mm toed is ready to go in June of 41'

The ruleset as such always takes rarity into account, even if players decide to play without rarity. The goal is to have people use wide varieties of historically common equipment. Even if you do the actual battle with no or variable rarity, you should not be "forced" to buy historically rare equipment as an "insurance".

The towed 57mm gun never falls under 100% rarity. The T-34/57 would be available at acceptable rarity in November and December of 1941, but in these months the German equipment cannot kill T-34s, so they are out.

2. And what of support weapons? I ask this because a good number of early war german tanks are vulnerable to the Soviet 12.7mm DsHK HMG. Side shots at 200m or less do not bode well for the crew. Yet German MG-34 HMGs can't do anything to a T-26 or BT-7. Then again, Germans get a readily avaiable AT rifle in the 41' and early 42's years.

The 1941 phase with the very thin vehicles has a number of these problems, the biggest one is actually AA/FlaK guns because they are more accurate, deadly and harder to spot than the 12.7mm.

I think the problem is not really favoring one side, but there might certainly be a gameplay problem from excessive vehicle death rates. I guess we need some playtesting to see.

[ June 20, 2003, 11:56 AM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[Joachim]

As discussed in an earlier thread, the problem is "complex rules are not liked by many players" vs. "some odd equipment my unbalance the rules (FlaK, Dshk 12,7mm)"

If you want to take care of all these glitches, you'd need a table of allowed units for each month, mission type and rarity.

Let's see how this evolves... maybe playtesting some glitches with detailed AARs might do the trick and show that the rules are crap, need some improvement or perfect already.

[demoss]

Redwolf DOES have a table for each month. It's rather impressive, really. About the only thing I'd like to see is another color code to indicate that only towed guns can handle a given unit - that way, for certain types of battle (say, an attack on a relatively open map), one side or both could have towed guns not counted. That's probably better than trying to make a general rule for attacks, because on a heavily wooded map it may be quite reasonable to push up towed guns, while on a steppe map it probably won't.

I suspect it might also be worth trying to include an exception for equipment that is mutually incapable of a frontal kill but CAN penetrate the side - that would put back in some interesting matchups that really test the skill of both players. I'd be very interested to see a list of the numerous exceptions mentioned to the basic rule.

I'd also allow the T-34 M40 and maybe the M41 from the beginning - the turret is weak enough, IMO, to make them not terribly unbalancing, especially the M40 which can be killed from the front relatively easily in my experience by short 50s and longer Czech 37s. Check the kill chance vs a hull-down T-34 if you want to really see the difference.

Of course, I don't have a problem with the odd ubertank, so you may wish to take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

[SFJaykey]

Originally posted by Nippy:

.... the 57mm toed is ready to go in June of 41'....

Wow, the 57mm toed must have been extremely rare. I have only seen the ones with wheels... (Sorry, couldn't resist)

On the issue of stopping the QB arms race, this looks like an admirable effort, but I think you will still wind up with weirdly ahistorical force mixes. What I would like to see as an alternative solution is a set of historical force mixes that could be agreed upon by the players.

We have force mix options in the Unit Purchase screen already, but they seem to mostly affect rarity numbers. Force mix rules that forbade more unit types would take it to the next level, and be helpful to players (like me) who like to take historical forces, but still have a chance to actually win the game.

I have sometimes tried to "negotiate" force mixes with my opponents but it is hard to be specific enough to avoid bad feelings, while still preserving some element of surprise. For example I played a PBEM set in early '42 where we agreed on "no heavy tanks," and my opponent was miffed when I brought T-34s...

If someone could develop a few historically-based, game-balanced force mixes to shop from, it would enable players to combine the fun "shopping" element of QBs with some of the historical and game-balance advantages of playing scenarios. I'd do it myself, but in the time it would take me to research and balance one such force rule, some of the better read and more experienced folks here could probably rattle off 5 or 6 better ones.

[MikeyD]

Whew! And I thought I took this game seriously!

[86smopuim]

nice work redwolf dude.

[Lady Roxanne]

Nice work, Redwolf! I think you've killed the arms race. Players will find holes probably; but you can plug them as they appear.

[Lou2000]

Excellent effort Redwolf ......

On 'paper' it looks like it should work, maybe not perfectly, maybe not 100% but it should provide a much closer starting point for force balance.

I'll look forward to seeing what people think after playing with these rules.

[Monty]

Im going to try them out in my next pbem battles for shure !

Thank you Redwolf for your efforts.

Monty

[lcm1947]

Excellent idea. Just in time for me as I just got the game. Rules are good. Thanks for your hard work redwolf cause I know it takes time and energy to start and keep up with something like this. It will save a lot of new players like myself a lot of grief.

[Monty]

This deserves a BUMP i think

[markl]

Hi,

Could the whole lot be put in a zip file for download. It is too hard to go through the tables on the link.

Thanks

[Redwolf]

Sure, there is now a

http://schlepper.hanse.de/redwolf/armorrules.zip

size 53 KB. I'm make proper links tomorrow.

I could also make one html page with everything in it for printing, but I figure it is too big (50 pages).

[Jarmo]

Very, very nice. Just what was needed.

[Screaming Flea]

Great job. I'm gonna print these out for ease of reference!

[markl]

Thanks for the zip

[Joachim]

Originally posted by demoss:

Redwolf DOES have a table for each month

but but not a "table for each month, mission type and rarity" setting (standard, variable, off). That would amount to 21 tables per month, maybe cut to 9 tables per month. Easy to understand, pretty sure everybody always picks the right table. Neverteheless an absolute must for the true grog

Gruß

Joachim

[Caesar]

Bump 'cause it took me too long to find them

[Lou2000]

This is in need of another bump ..... BUMP

Anybody played (or playing) a game with these rules yet ?

[Ligur]

I haven't but I swear to God I'll be trying to stuff the rules down the throats of my next to PBEM opponents.

Also I was thinkin of a crazy scheme with rarity off but redwolf's rules on.

Huurrrrrrr...

[Lou2000]

I had wondered if Panzershrek's should be included into the list .... not an AFV, but it has the ability to hit like one !