One Month On...

[ComradeP]

Good to hear it's a successful release, success it certainly deserves.

Its easy to build an opinion after a couple of play-throughs but as Bayes has shown with his analysis the results after multiple engagements are in the realms of possibility.

I guess it's inevitable that we disagree here. Bayes has mostly ran fairly balanced tests, with fairly equal forces. However, the Germans could hold when outnumbered 3 to 1 or more in tanks, a situation which is unlikely to happen in the game. A full strength regular Tank brigade engaging a full strength elite Panzer company would be less likely to result in a Soviet victory than in the current game.

The lack of a mechanic for armour penetration dropping with range also means armour penetration values can be ahistorical, and that small units can inflict disproportionate casualties (or the other way around: that larger units don't necessarily inflict more casualties than smaller units during a turn).

The only time Dog Soldier's casualties went up to what I would call a more historical level was when I closed to 1 hex range, which nullified my range advantage as the range advantage doesn't work as well as it would historically. Overwatch operations with the distances suggested by Dog Soldier are also not historical in terms of distance between units and the maximum range for a likely successful penetration of a T-34's frontal armour by a Panzer IV. In essence, both of us were working around the limitations of the system by using strategies that we shouldn't be using.

This is a quickly escalating problem that can remove part of the fun from playing a scenario and it's similar to the Soviets using huge artillery concentrations in Moscow '42 to counter high German replacement rates, large units and overall resilience.

If anything is changed, a semi-hard cap with limited variability for when a unit with a certain hard attack value can still harm an enemy unit with a certain defence value would be appreciated. It would remove most of the freak results of single HQ units or Disrupted units inflicting more casualties than tank platoons, just because they got good rolls.

Maybe playing with the optional fire rule would improve results as well, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure if it was or wasn't changed, but if the AA effectiveness formula is still the same as in PzC (which is what the manual suggests), than it is now 4 times less effective than before (because 1 hex is now 250 meters instead of 1 kilometre). That might also be worth looking at.

Artillery casualties can be spectacular, but it depends on the type and the number of available tubes or launchers. There are situations where the hex artillery fire limit won't prevent you from badly mauling a unit or stack in a turn. On the other hand, casualties from Katyusha's are very variable for some reason so that can counter the effects, but it can also mean a stack takes 100 casualties or more in a single turn.

As to the balance: as I've mentioned elsewhere, the benefits from defensive positions don't scale well so there's a big difference between a Soviet unit in a bunker (difficult to remove) and a Soviet unit in another type of cover (it's going to die, fast). That means that the Germans can plow through the Soviet lines in the later scenarios, but have significant difficulty with getting through bunker lines, also because that often depends on getting good Disruption die rolls.

A good example is State Farm: the D quality units are going to fold in a couple of turns and there's not much you can do about that. I'm guessing that for the moment a draw is the best I can do as the final objectives are difficult to capture for the Germans. On the other hand, visibility can have a big impact. Visibility in my game with Pijus Magnificus is 4. In another game, it was 12 so I couldn't place my units in good positions without exposing them to artillery fire.

In terms of scenario balance, bringing scenarios with and without bunkers for the defenders closer together in terms of the capabilities of the defender to resist the attacker might be a challenge, but would in my opinion improve the game further.