Speculation on game style, plus will teams become unbalanced towards the end

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Peterk:

What does ASL have to do with a realistic simulation of tactical military combat? It's like checkers with firepower ratings.

[Hunter]

Originally posted by General Bolt:

Hunter,

Will fuel be an issue for a cut off ME? How will that play out in the CMBB battle?

It will certainly be an issue. Generally fuel is used up after about 4 hrs of moving. This could be a hundred Kilometres or 1, depending on whether you are using a road and travelling, or advancing on the enemy through a muddy bog.

Vehicles without fuel cannot move, and are at high risk of being abandoned.

Hunter

[Peterk]

What does ASL have to do with a realistic simulation of tactical military combat?

ASL is a game. CMC is a game. Both games can have similar style victory conditions. A CMC campaign designer can force time issues to be important.

[General Bolt]

Originally posted by Hunter:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by General Bolt:

Hunter,

Will fuel be an issue for a cut off ME? How will that play out in the CMBB battle?

It will certainly be an issue. Generally fuel is used up after about 4 hrs of moving. This could be a hundred Kilometres or 1, depending on whether you are using a road and travelling, or advancing on the enemy through a muddy bog.

Vehicles without fuel cannot move, and are at high risk of being abandoned.

Hunter </font>

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Peterk:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />What does ASL have to do with a realistic simulation of tactical military combat?

ASL is a game. CMC is a game. Both games can have similar style victory conditions. A CMC campaign designer can force time issues to be important. </font>

[Andreas]

In any case, quite apart from it being a problem, I think we should welcome our stacked overlords.

Stacking worked in Real Life. It should work in CMC. How well it works (assuming we are talking about skilled players on both sides) should depend on victory conditions. E.g. if you manage to delay your opponent for long enough for the cavalry to arrive behind you, yet die a horrible death, you have won the campaign.

If you manage to destroy some of your opponents most important assets (by e.g. forcing him to committ, and then destroying his maneuver tank force), while dieing a horrible death, you have won the campaign.

Etc. pp.

I think it is time again to promote this discussion I started a long long time ago: How to attack like a Soviet Rifle Corps

Main effort of 37th Army is 66th Rifle Corps and 6th Guards Rifle Corps. The 37th Army has a 4km wide breakthrough frontage assigned to it. It is divided in two groupings, two corps up, one corps reserve. According to plan, it is supposed to break through the depth of the German/Romanian defense in 7 days, to a distance of 110-120km, with the distance to be covered in the first four days 15km each.

66th Rifle Corps (GOC Major General Kuprijanow) consisting of two groupings (61st Guards RD, 333rd RD up, 244th RD reserve). Attached are 46th Gun Artillery Brigade, 152nd Howitzer Artillery Regiment, 184th and 1245th Tank Destroyer Regiment, 10th Mortar Regiment, 26th Light Artillery Brigade, 87th Recoilless Mortar Regiment, 92nd and 52nd Tank Regiment, 398th Assault Gun Regiment, two Pioneer Assault Battalions, and two Light Flamethrower Companies.

Corps frontage 4km

Corps breakthrough frontage 3.5km (61st RD 1.5km, 333rd RD 2km)

Densities per kilometer of frontage:

Rifle battalions 7.7

Guns/mortars 248

Tanks and assault guns 18

Superiority

Infantry 1:3

Artillery 1:7

Tanks and assault guns 1:11.2

There is no man-power information for the divisions, but expect them to have between 7,000 - 7,500 men each, 61st GRD maybe 8,000-9,000. The soldiers were prepared over the course of August by exercising in areas similar to those they had to attack, and being brought up to speed on special tactics needed to overcome the enemy in their sector.

Density in 61st GRD sector per kilometer of frontage:

Rifle battalions 6.0

Guns/mortars 234

Tanks and assault guns 18

Density in 333rd RD sector per kilometer of frontage:

Rifle battalions 4.5

Guns/mortars 231

Tanks and assault guns 18

The initial attack

333rd RD did not bother with niceties like reserves and put three regiments up. 61st GRD attacked in classic two regiment up, one reserve formation. This proved to be lucky, since its right wing of 188th Guards(?) Rifle Regiment got stuck in front of the strongpoint Ploptuschbej. 189th Rifle Regiment on the left wing made good progress though, as did 333rd RD on its left. The GOC 61st GRD therefore inserted his reserve (187th GRR) behind 189th RR and off they went. When darkness came, 244th RD was inserted to break through the second line of defense. It lost its way though, and only arrived at 2300, by which time elements of 13th Panzer were counterattacking.

The German/Romanian opposition was XXX. and XXIX. AK, with 15th, 306th German ID, 4th Romanian Mountain Division, and 21st Romanian ID. 13th PD was in reserve. At the end of day one, 4th Romanian Mountain, and 21st Romanian Divisions were almost completely destroyed, while 15th and 306th ID were heavily damaged (according to a German source: 306th lost 50% in the barrage, and was destroyed apart from local strongpoints by evening). Almost no artillery survived the fire preparation.

13th Panzer counter-attacked 66th Rifle Corps on day one, and tried to stop it on day two but to no avail. A study on the divisions history says 'The Russian dictated the course of events.' 13th Panzer at the time was a materially understrength, but high manpower unit, with a high proportion of recent reinforcements. It only had Panzer IV, Stugs and SP AT guns. The division was at the end of the second day in a condition that it was incapable to attack or of meaningful resistance.

At the end of day two, the Red Army stood deep in the rear of German 6th Army. No more organised re-supply of forces would be forthcoming, and 6th Army was doomed to be encircled and chopped up.

The comment on the result of 66th Rifle Corps operations in Mazulenko is: 'Because of the reinforcement of the Corps and the deep battle arrangements of troops and units the enemy defenses were broken through at high speed.'

This is what well-done stacking can, and should be able to do. Needless to say, it would be a challenging, yet probably frustrating experience, to play against this in CMC, even with victory conditions that allow you to win, if you do your best, even if you die.

All the best

Andreas

[JasonC]

No, just stacking did not work in real life. Arty and the area fire effect of MGs cut up overstacked infantry. The Russians tried in too often but easily 2/3rds of the time it was their own losses it drove up. (Already in WW I, 210mm howitzers and entrench MGs readily smashed mere stacking). AT mines and other stationary obstacles gummed up overstacked vehicles - though truth be told, sliding reserves in front of them was also important in that case.

But on a 2 km by 2 km map, nothing anybody can actually command in CM is going to be overstacked in those terms.

As for objectives, people are still unclear on the concept. Campaigns kill entire side forces. Dead men hold no ground. In the real deal, forces were integrated bits of much larger ones, and could and did receive massive reinforcement on short time scales (a day), so winners had to fight wave after wave in succession. But in anything like a somewhat balanced CM campaign, the side forces will be finite and proportioned to each other. One side may have an edge, sure, but more likely the attacker. And when he kills half the defenders, the other half are going to become roadkill.

As for 4 hour fuel stuff, it is wrong for the era. Maybe M-1s that get 2 gallons per mile and trail fleets of tanker trucks get away with that. In WW II, tanks refueled in a laager at night and not before.

And they weren't out of gas, either. Ranges were 100 to 200 miles on a tank of gas, and none of them drove that much in a day. Record advances were on the order of 50 miles - which is enough to cross France in a week or so. Wheeled recon elements might go farther against no opposition, but don't guzzle fuel like armor does. Basic loads of ammo, carried by a unit or its organic transport, lasted a day or two for artillery and up to a week for small arms and such.

Nobody will run out of supplies before having all the opportunities they might want to kill the enemy maneuver elements in the op squares around them. Rommel went clear into Egypt during Crusader. It didn't work but he got back. Typical Russian penetrations that got overextended in 1942-3 did so by driving not 2 km past enemies but more like 50 to 100 miles. And had problems just from follow on and supply elements not even knowing where the spearheads were, not because 100 riflemen slide in behind them in 2 km squares. In situations of a limited road net, all roads cut might be more dangerous, but over a time scale of days afterward, not hours.

Of course you leave flank guards, but they can be scratch and they do not need to press. The other guy doesn't know which op square is the one that is about to be hit by the real fist. He doesn't know it during the tactical fight either, until the second or third wave hits him. Nor does he know whether the screen he hits on a flank is a screen alone, or just the recon element of a battalion already in the same op-square but hanging back.

[C'Rogers]

I think there are two main problems with this topic. One we are unclear on how objectives will be worked out (which pretty much everybody states). Secondly though I don't think looking too past campaigns is necessarily going to reflect how this game will function. No offense to the excellent runners of campaigns, but no person can track as many details as a program can. Whether the program will do everything it needs too is an obvious wait and see I guess.

I think there are four things that can prevent the use of the "big stack". One is the ability to have supporting artillery. If recon is at all existent big stacks should be obviously pretty quickly, and where it is going could very quickly be met by limited troops and a ton of shells (and again, and again, and again if necessary). Secondly, as has been mentioned, is the ease of cutting communications and supplies (and even if supplies aren't an issue cutting communications could slow a big stack to a standstill as they wait for orders where to go). Third is just the limitation of what the Big Stack can do. It can punch through a line anywhere of course (though how often and how many casulties could be a big issue) but it can only be in one place at one time. If that end objective requires it holding more than one square the whole idea doesn't get far.

Fourth is just the campaign designer. He can start the units spread out across the map and the attacker would have to waste valuable time he may not have assembling the big stack.

Now I'm not without worry over the potential for gameyness. CM is trying to be brought into an engine that it never orignally planned for and subsequently it would be easy for cheap tactics to exist. But Hunter has been more than aware of all the proposed flaws and we will just have to wait to see how he handles them (as he has stated he is).

As for 4 hour fuel stuff, it is wrong for the era. Maybe M-1s that get 2 gallons per mile and trail fleets of tanker trucks get away with that. In WW II, tanks refueled in a laager at night and not before.

Maybe I misread but isn't Hunter saying tanks lose fuel every 4 hours after they move, not they necessarily always lose the same amount? Even if the program updated how much fuel was lost for every 30 seconds of game time that doesn't mean there wouldn't be plenty of fuel for the whole day. It is just a statement of how often the calculation is made (at least I hope the way I am reading it is correct).

Basic loads of ammo, carried by a unit or its organic transport, lasted a day or two for artillery and up to a week for small arms and such.

Under normal circumstances, or during one of the major battles of the war? Much like CM represents a fairly rare occurence (two equal side meeting in battle) so CMC is represting something rare, a major continuous battle. Units may enter tired and low on supplies already (represting a game start in a battle already underway) and may fight more than they would in 99% of the rest of the war.

[Andreas]

Originally posted by JasonC:

No, just stacking did not work in real life. Arty and the area fire effect of MGs cut up overstacked infantry. The Russians tried in too often but easily 2/3rds of the time it was their own losses it drove up. (Already in WW I, 210mm howitzers and entrench MGs readily smashed mere stacking). AT mines and other stationary obstacles gummed up overstacked vehicles - though truth be told, sliding reserves in front of them was also important in that case.

But on a 2 km by 2 km map, nothing anybody can actually command in CM is going to be overstacked in those terms.

So what the Soviets did at Iassy was not overloading? What was it then?

All the best

Andreas

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Andreas:

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

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />What does ASL have to do with a realistic simulation of tactical military combat?

ASL is a game. CMC is a game. Both games can have similar style victory conditions. A CMC campaign designer can force time issues to be important. </font>

[Andreas]

Shrug. Who cares? The logic still is not obvious to me. Tombraider II is also a game.

All the best

Andreas

[JasonC]

Andreas - they overloaded lots of times, and some of them failed spectacularly, and some of them succeeded. The explanation of the variation from stacked case to stacked case can't be stacking, which is constant across them. Instead you will find it turns on terrain, defender alertness, counter-concentration efforts, tactical skill of the break-in, etc. Just packing them in, when that was all they had going for them, regularly resulted in bloody fiascos. Add good intel directing effective counterbattery and prep, tactical surprise, effective use of terrain to mask parts of the approach, etc, and you can get a success. But stacking alone does not produce it.

Want an example? East face of Operation Kutuzov. They have 9 rifle divisions supported by multiple tank regiments for a 14 km attack sector - 6 in the first wave and 3 behind them. They lost 60 KVs on the opening day and took the first defensive line, were halted at the second. Infantry losses were appalling.

The Germans that stopped them had only 6 infantry battalions and 24 heavy PAK - backed by 18 batteries of field artillery. Even that amount reflected alert concentration by the defenders. One German ID arrived as reserve late in the day and PDs came the next day, to meet tank forces (on top of the RDs, above) thrown in by the Russians. They got a bloody brawl but no breakthrough.

Or Mars. Or Kharkov in 42. Or any number in later 42 before Uranus. It was still happening a fair fraction of the time even much later.

The reason is simple and was already fully understood by the Germans in WW I and incorporated into their defense schemes. Getting more combat power by packing in infantry increases exposed area to area fire weapons in direct proportion to any increase in outgoing combat ability. It therefore multiplies damage taken by the same factor as damage inflicted.

Worse, there are high area firepower defense means that have very low target signature to attacking infantry. Howitzers over the horizon, dug in and well hidden MGs, minefields and obstacle belts - none of them give a hoot about how many riflemen there are on the other side of the field. They are not suppressed by the increased outgoing. So their impact multiples up in direct proportion to attacker density.

If they are dense enough, they inflict losses on any attacking force sufficient to radically disorganize it and to crack its morale. The attack may then occupy ground - nearly undefended, taking out a few MG nests and LPs and seizing the first obstacle belts and trenches - but it will sustain losses in the process out of all proportion to anything it inflicts back.

The lesson was therefore learned that concentration by infantry fails against adequate technical means. In WW I, there were two tactical solutions to the defense dominance that resulted - relying on massive arty fires, and tactical surprise. The former could work but was ridiculously expensive in material terms if the defensive positions were well prepared, and could still fail outright if the defenders did simple things like evacuate their forward positions on warning of an attack. The second had a better track record but was hard to achieve reliably, once the scale grew beyond the trench raid level.

In WW II, armor could concentrate with less exposure to area fire effects, and that more than anything else is what led to mobile warfare and a restoration of offense dominance. It still faced problems from obstacles - AT mines in particular, and terrain channeling. Gun fronts could stop it on narrow fronts, particularly if the attacker muffed his all arms coordination. Most of the time, though, the initial break in by armor was successful, and the fight shifted to a battle with arriving reserves in the depths of the defended zone. The same area fire stuff could strip the tanks by then, though, if the defenders were good.

[Ardem]

I don't mind the stacking sense, I find the majority of stackers cannot wield there force in a CM game with teh effectiveness of half the size, why. just like Real life you don't have the time to plot a regimental move in CM when you have a 2 week dealine for the CMC campaign person threatening to auto resolve if you don't finish it.

So what happens you use the heavy resources in your units and make the rest of them wait behind the front line or follow up.

The smaller enemy uses it resources well get more opportunity to kill units and bug out before it gets to heated, eventaully the fist is slowly chewed up due to mismanagement more so then actually idealogy behind it.

plus attack on the flanks of a fist allow those side shots you can't get in games at the moment with quick battles.

I say please someone bring on a fist towards me, watch me nip at you heels until I rip your achilles out.

[JasonC]

The things that pass for thought...

[Andreas]

Jason - I don't think that we disagree. I am just confused I guess because it appears to me that you use 'stacking' and 'overloading' describing different actions, maybe one unsuccessful, while the other is successful. I had brought the same examples you brought in your post-before-last above.

What I am saying is that the game should not artifically punish stacking/overloading (to me that is the same thing), because historically it worked sometimes, and whether it worked or not was to some degree depending on the skills of the commanders on both sides, and to some degree on the local situation. So in CMC I would expect a good commander/team to get away with it if he/they play a bad commander/team, and if the local situation allows. And in the converse case the game should allow the defender to spank the attacker very very badly.

But ideally, CMC would allow me to set up a battle like the Iassy one, in which the defenders are going to get beaten no matter what, but where the victory conditions can be specified in such a way that they can win despite being wiped out, because of the victory conditions.

All the best

Andreas

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by Andreas:

But ideally, CMC would allow me to set up a battle like the Iassy one, in which the defenders are going to get beaten no matter what, but where the victory conditions can be specified in such a way that they can win despite being wiped out, because of the victory conditions.

I've toyed with that idea in CMBB, but thing is, people hate those scenarios. No matter how many times you tell the defender 'You win by causing casualties, you will get wiped out', the player gives up halfway through the battle, and asks why you put out such a crappy 'unbalanced' scenario in the first place.... At least, that's been my experience.

[JasonC]

Andreas - stacking alone did not work in the real deal. It will work far too well - alone - in CM campaigns, if the designers stick with the cookie cutter 2 km by 2 km map sizes they've said they will always use, and the rest of it. It is precisely an excess of effectiveness to stacking alone that I am trying to warn people about, in time for something to actually be done to address it.

There are significant modeling weaknesses in CM. Stress them hard enough and they will break. Relevant ones here include weak area fire effects, lack of modeling of grazing fire and penetrating fire for infantry, expensiveness of artillery and limitations on shell number, rapidity of rally after causalties, lack of serious disorganization effects (units stay units and respond to orders until routed etc).

On a small enough map you might still get some of the realistic problems from overstacking, even with CMs modeling limitations. On 2 km by 2 km maps, you can put 2 battalions in the first wave and not encounter a single issue, other than micromanagement workload. And people will. With tanks it will be even more effective to stack.

The designers and many players seem to be expecting parallel fighting by balanced teams. Only dumb operational commanders will fight that way. It will not just be a tactic or a realistic ability to mass, it will be a gamey single optimum beyond what history justifies. That's the problem. And most just say "I'll go around" or "I'll set VCs that need people to go fast", and it is mindless - they are not facing the problem.

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

They will put 80-90% of their force, especially the most powerful armor units and large caliber artillery, on a single map, and then move that "stack" around vigorously, trying to keep some initiative. Only tiny bits on neighboring maps.

The great thing about CMC is we will see what works and what doesn't tactically, and for the first time, really, players are going to have to figure it out for themselves. They won't be handed an OOB and told to 'capture the flag', as in a normal CM scenario. Now, they will have to decide which flag to capture, and then put together a force to get the job done. I'm sure we'll see some spectacularly bad decisions and short campaigns before players learn how to handle battalions or regiments over time and space. Sometimes putting three battalions on a 2x2 map will make sense. Other times, it might be a disaster. It depends on a lot of things.

In any case, I feel pretty confidant saying that any campaign in which it makes sense for the attacker to put 80-90% of his total forces on one 2x2 map is poorly designed, and Broken with a capital 'B'.

You can't allow the concentrating player to simply abandon the rest of the map to the enemy. A good campaign will provide opportunity for attack and counterattack on both sides, thereby punishing the attacker for putting 80% of his units in one place.

[Steiner14]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Andreas - stacking alone did not work in the real deal. It will work far too well - alone - in CM campaigns, if the designers stick with the cookie cutter 2 km by 2 km map sizes they've said they will always use, and the rest of it. It is precisely an excess of effectiveness to stacking alone that I am trying to warn people about, in time for something to actually be done to address it.

There are significant modeling weaknesses in CM. Stress them hard enough and they will break. Relevant ones here include weak area fire effects, lack of modeling of grazing fire and penetrating fire for infantry, expensiveness of artillery and limitations on shell number, rapidity of rally after causalties, lack of serious disorganization effects (units stay units and respond to orders until routed etc).

On a small enough map you might still get some of the realistic problems from overstacking, even with CMs modeling limitations. On 2 km by 2 km maps, you can put 2 battalions in the first wave and not encounter a single issue, other than micromanagement workload. And people will. With tanks it will be even more effective to stack.

This are good arguments, but there exists a correct answer for that in the game:

give me artillery support and a platoon of decent PAKs, and i will first disable 75%-90% of your stacked force by blinding them, while i will knock out one tank after the other.

The answer to stacking would be, to increase artillery load in the game and as i understand it, the amount of ammo will be handeled by CMC completely. So the aspect of too expensive arty doesn't hold with CMC.

[John Kettler]

All this talk of fisting seems outrageous on a family board! On a more serious note, I think it might be interesting to see, maybe in Beta, how the outcome of Autoresolve does or does not track with the results of applying Dupuy's Quantified Judgment Method of Analysis.

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

You won't blind jack and you won't pick off tanks one by one. You may button some tanks, but they have friends with binocs in too many places. And those friends have mortars. And time is not a serious issue. You might kill a tank with a heavy PAK, then you will lose that heavy PAK. You might do it 4 times, and the stack won't even notice, while your AT net will be busted.

One fellow early one said he'd beat fist tactics with a "wide PAK front". A wide PAK front is a round square and a misunderstanding. A PAK front has as many guns to a yard as the attacker has tanks to a yard, or at a minimum half that many and all of them killers through any aspect at any range. And no defender will have that in every op square, when the threat that must be met is 30 tanks on one map.

Yes, Virginia, I said 30 tanks on one map. Plus 2 battalions of infantry - in the first wave. And heck, they are mostly hitting the left side of even that one map, not the whole thing (feint on the other half). With support weapons and mortars and FOs, all the trimmings. You won't stop it with 2 FOs and 4 PAK 40s. You won't stop it, period, unless you are just as massed.

[Bluefish]

Originally posted by JasonC:

You won't stop it, period, unless you are just as massed.

Chuck Norris could stop it.

[Ardem]

See your using the PAK wrong if you getting mortar fire on them, you should be expecting to lose the map.

Keyhole your pak so it out of sight from mortars, there will be enough tanks that they will come across your keyhole eventually, have a truck stand by, kill a tank or two and bug out.

Repeat the same process 8 (PAK) and back off to the next map.

Hopefully you have taken out 5 tanks to the loss of maybe one or two guns.

Use HMGs in cover to slow the infantry, use FO on the infantry to keep them supressed.

Two or three maps zones like this and you should have enough of a defensive zone to defend a good spot with enough forces.

Also use other forces to sweep his flanks and hinder his supply.

I can't see how this is so hard to strategicly see.

Now if you take two fists, then its a different story, but two fists is not like stacking all your troops in one pile.

This aint like CM where you bug out you lose, sometimes it is more advantageous to hit and run.

If your PAK can take out two tanks to its own loss, then as far as I am concern it is a good trade.

[Andreas]

If it had been that easy, the Germans would still be in Romania.

All the best

Andreas

[Steiner14]

JasonC, i know what i can, and cannot in CM, believe me.

Agree with Ardem. No one says, that it's easy, but a good player is able to harm stacked forces quite well.

For the defender it's easy to get a 3:1 superiority in a keyhole.

The "problem" in normal CM-battles is, that the stacked force is mostly concentrated in an area, while the "defender" in that area has not enough firepower to stop it, because he has to defend his flags and not enough time to move the mobile forces around.

But in CMC the defender doesn't need to care about flags at all! He can even concentrate all his firpower on a small keyhole, concentrate his whole arty on one area, he believes, the attacker will come across.

As being myself a player favouring highest possible local superiority and compensating that with higer speed, i know very well, where weak moments, even for the strongest force in CM are. And if the defender is prepared for that moment, then good night. Luckily in normal CM-battles, the defender has to defend his flags and therefore prediction is easy for the attacker. But in CMC this is all different.

[ July 16, 2006, 02:19 AM: Message edited by: Steiner14 ]