ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Here's the skewed power of artillery from another perspective: In my PBEM game, my opponent is besieging Chengtah, a key city on the Chinese main line of resistance. The base has six forts, it's a wooded hex, and the Chinese have about 4500 AV. The Japanese have some 23 units and an AV well in excess of 3,000. Here's the combat results:
Ground combat at Changteh (81,50)
Japanese Deliberate attack
Attacking force 102321 troops, 957 guns, 532 vehicles, Assault Value = 3535
Defending force 121842 troops, 521 guns, 0 vehicles, Assault Value = 4603
Japanese engineers reduce fortifications to 5
Japanese adjusted assault: 1704
Allied adjusted defense: 14135
Japanese assault odds: 1 to 8 (fort level 5)
Combat modifiers
Defender: terrain(+), forts(+), leaders(+), experience(-)
Attacker:
Japanese ground losses:
14413 casualties reported
Squads: 35 destroyed, 953 disabled
Non Combat: 64 destroyed, 646 disabled
Engineers: 65 destroyed, 164 disabled
Vehicles lost 138 (13 destroyed, 125 disabled)
Allied ground losses:
2440 casualties reported
Squads: 14 destroyed, 138 disabled
Non Combat: 11 destroyed, 213 disabled
Engineers: 1 destroyed, 9 disabled
Guns lost 1 (0 destroyed, 1 disabled)
Usually, you would expect casualties to be higher in a deliberate attack than in a bombardment. This attack - which was a major battle involving two large armies - resulted in less casualties to the Allies than did the Japanese bombardments in the jungles around Akyab, even though those bombardments involved considerably less troops.
There was another Japanese deliberate attack the same day at Ankang involving two smaller armies. The results:
Ground combat at Ankang (82,42)
Japanese Deliberate attack
Attacking force 41072 troops, 352 guns, 132 vehicles, Assault Value = 1482
Defending force 37284 troops, 215 guns, 0 vehicles, Assault Value = 1301
Japanese adjusted assault: 707
Allied adjusted defense: 664
Japanese assault odds: 1 to 1 (fort level 1)
Japanese Assault reduces fortifications to 0
Combat modifiers
Defender: terrain(+), leaders(+), disruption(-), experience(-)
supply(-)
Attacker:
Japanese ground losses:
2026 casualties reported
Squads: 4 destroyed, 145 disabled
Non Combat: 9 destroyed, 121 disabled
Engineers: 0 destroyed, 13 disabled
Vehicles lost 45 (7 destroyed, 38 disabled)
Allied ground losses:
2343 casualties reported
Squads: 15 destroyed, 162 disabled
Non Combat: 7 destroyed, 167 disabled
Engineers: 0 destroyed, 4 disabled
Another deliberate attack and again considerably less casualties in this "pitched battle" than we saw during the Akyab bombardments.
You can pick through this and try to find reasons the Chinese suffered less casualties than did the Allies at Akyab, but the bottom line is that it shows how bloody artillery bombardments are in this game [not against fortified hexes, because the developers have fixed that]. Battles should be more bloody than artillery bombardments.
Looking at the data you listed in post #121 of this thread, the Allies suffered a total of 2001 casualties in TWO days of artillery bombardment. In the combat results above, the Allies took 2440 casualties in ONE deliberate attack, plus 2343 casualties in another deliberate attack.
2440 one-day battle vs. 2001 two-day bombardment. How, exactly, are bombardments
more bloody than battles?
Furthermore, what about the other factors involved?
What was the units' morale, fatigue, leadership, support,supply?
Without knowing those factors, how can you claim something is wrong with the combat model?
And have you duplicated the results of the Akyab bombardment?
Maybe it was just a one-time bad 'die rolls' event.
Bottom line, there is nothing wrong with artillery in AE.
