Casualty Madness

[raizer]

unless you like playing the AI, you need the axis fanboys and "complainers" to participate here in the forum and in pbem, dont dismiss "us" so causally [:)].

And you have had to have read the thousands of accounts in the Ukraine, prior to the Einsatzgruppen arriving, of german soldiers being treated as liberators, by the descendants of the Ukrainian kulaks and, accordingly, there were huge hauls of prisoners in the South who knew not what was in store for them.

And again, the casualty figures are fine by me-its just comparing russians in summer of 41 to the soldiers of Nippon that gave me a serious itch

[Oleg Mastruko]

ORIGINAL: raizer
unless you like playing the AI, you need the axis fanboys and "complainers" to participate here in the forum and in pbem, dont dismiss "us" so causally [:)].

I actually like fanboys, I like "fanboy clubs", and I like people who clearly say they belong to some fanboy club - I personally claimed membership in some fanboi clubs for some Matrix games or particular sides in some games. It's OK when people clearly advertise their colors, instead of claiming "objectivity" while posting blatantly one sided posts.

However some people are very sensitive to that term and think it's an insult. (I never mean it that way.)

Also, no other army in history had as many fanboys as WW2 Wehrmacht, which becomes quite obvious on WITE boards lately [;)]

I look forward to playing the Axis in PBEM one day, but I will start with Sovs. Axis are clearly the harder side to play, but hey that's historic. My friends among beta testers say that in the hands of the true expert Axis is almost unstoppable. I am looking forward to becoming that expert, not crrying "madness!" when I lose 100 men more than I wanted in the first week of the war....

[bwheatley]

ORIGINAL: Oleg Mastruko

ORIGINAL: raizer
unless you like playing the AI, you need the axis fanboys and "complainers" to participate here in the forum and in pbem, dont dismiss "us" so causally [:)].

I actually like fanboys, I like "fanboy clubs", and I like people who clearly say they belong to some fanboy club - I personally claimed membership in some fanboi clubs for some Matrix games or particular sides in some games. It's OK when people clearly advertise their colors, instead of claiming "objectivity" while posting blatantly one sided posts.

However some people are very sensitive to that term and think it's an insult. (I never mean it that way.)

Also, no other army in history had as many fanboys as WW2 Wehrmacht, which becomes quite obvious on WITE boards lately [;)]

I look forward to playing the Axis in PBEM one day, but I will start with Sovs. Axis are clearly the harder side to play, but hey that's historic. My friends among beta testers say that in the hands of the true expert Axis is almost unstoppable. I am looking forward to becoming that expert, not crrying "madness!" when I lose 100 men more than I wanted in the first week of the war....

Think you'll find quite a lot of confederate states of america fanboys. Myself among one of them.

[notenome]

And the thread goes way off track. Now as everything in WitE, the casualty mechanics are fairly complex and obscure, so its hard to put a finger on what exactly the figures should be. Now one thing that appears to be well modeled is that most losses in the beginning of the war were NCL; frostbite, illness etc. Unfortunately, though the number of casualties is roughly right (roughly a million men lost) the type of casualties is wrong. Axis casualties tend to shakedown to 50/50 killed/wounded (even for attrition) when combat casualties should be about 3.5:1 disabled/killed and NCL losses should be something on the order of 9:1 or 10:1 disabled/killed. The second problem is that disabled losses return much, much to slowly. NCL losses returned on average in a month (25% a turn) and combat losses returned on average in 3 months (7% a turn). Change these two things and the Axis become much, much more resilient, which I believe they should be.
 
What this creates is a large amount of flux for the Axis. Their units will be constantly understrength as men are constantly being rehabilitated, but pauses (such as in mud or when a unit is refited) should allow a unit to get its strength back quickly.

[Joel Billings]

If you think that losses are averaging 1 to 1 in killed to wounded, then you don't understand what I've been trying to tell you. Disabled are only the most seriously wounded. There are many more wounded that don't get tracked by the system as permanent losses as they are in elements that get damaged but not destroyed.

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

If you think that losses are averaging 1 to 1 in killed to wounded, then you don't understand what I've been trying to tell you. Disabled are only the most seriously wounded. There are many more wounded that don't get tracked by the system as permanent losses as they are in elements that get damaged but not destroyed.

As a long time AE player, I’m aware of what you mean here Joel, and personally I had no trouble discerning this in game. But I think it needs to be displayed better in game during the casualty breakdowns for combat resolutions.

Damaged elements are a new concept to a lot of players and not intuitive since you also have disabled elements in game. Very easy to confuse the two, especially since damaged elements are not tracked in any kind of global tally record the way killed and disabled are. So they need to be highlighted somehow when they do occur.

Jim

[PMCN]

Let me quote myself from my AAR. Here is the real "casaulty madness"

"The 286th Security division of all things advances to secure the ground. General-Mayor L. Govorov rallies his troops and launches a counterattack on the security division. The 286th Security division musters only 5000 men, and 90 guns while the 9th, 11th Rifle divisons supported by the 25th Cavalry division and 45th Tank Bde outnumber them with 24,000 men, 248 guns and 31 tanks. The battle is distressing in the extreme as it seems the enemy is equipping his security troops with captured weapons, 1 tank, 909 men and 7 guns are lost in the attack even though we outnumber the enemy nearly 5 to 1. Our troops advance through a hail of machine gun, rifle and mortar fire to finaly drive off the invaders forces. The estimates place their losses on par with ours at 833 men and 28 guns."

This is not an isolated incident as it happened several time in the turn the most extreme odds I had about 9:1 and had again fairly even casaulties. If you watch the fight at detail lvl 4 you will see where the damage is coming from. Most of it is "device_x is damage by attack_y" things. Rarely are you getting hard kills. A damaged unit has about half its size in casaulties listed in the loss report. Also you see that pre-retreat the casaulties were actually lower...in the above fight it was only about 500 men killed in the attack the remaining 300 came in the retreat, as did a lot of the artillery losses. Pre-retreat the casaulties stood at 900 to 500...even though I had crushing superiority. When I attacked Rumanian infantry divisions my losses in the attack before my men started shooting were on the order of 4000 men to a few hundred.

I stronly recommend watching at least the occasional fight at a message setting of 4 to see what the combat really is like. Otherwise you are flying blind for the most part. To me the madness is thinking you can attack a division that has just been cut off and get out of the fight with a couple of skined knees or something.

[Zovs]

"...with 24,000 men, 248 guns and 31 tanks. The battle is distressing in the extreme ... 1 tank, 909 men and 7 guns are lost in the attack even though we outnumber the enemy nearly 5 to 1."

I see no problem what-so-ever here at all. You're attacking troops only lost 909 men out of 24,000, you must be joking or are being sarcastic that you find this distressing.

[Jim D Burns]

You need to be specific here with your numbers, since damaged is not disabled, so you have to break it all down to help us truly understand what really happened. Damaged equipment is still part of the units TO&E and gets repaired on map inside the unit rather quickly. And it does not get tallied in the casualty reports, but it does show up as casualties in the combat reports.

I guess a better way to explain it is this; assume a damaged squad has 1-3 walking wounded guys, so they get back into action pretty quickly and never leave their units TO&E. Assume disabled squads have 4-7 severely injured guys, so they’re out of action for quite some time and leave their units TO&E to enter the replacement pools later as replacement equipment. And killed is killed of course.

So even though your casualties are roughly 900 and theirs are 800, it could be that you suffered 90 damaged squads (would show as 900 casualties) and they suffered 10 killed squads, 30 disabled squads and 40 damaged squads. So as you can see the numbers reported can be very different outcomes.

So it is very possible your 90 squads or a good portion of them are not really permanent casualties at all, they just need a little time to get repaired. So without a breakdown of real casualties (killed/disabled) vs. temporary casualties (damaged), getting upset about the numbers may be a bit premature.

Jim

[saintsup]

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns

You need to be specific here with your numbers, since damaged is not disabled, so you have to break it all down to help us truly understand what really happened. Damaged equipment is still part of the units TO&E and gets repaired on map inside the unit rather quickly. And it does not get tallied in the casualty reports, but it does show up as casualties in the combat reports.

I guess a better way to explain it is this; assume a damaged squad has 1-3 walking wounded guys, so they get back into action pretty quickly and never leave their units TO&E. Assume disabled squads have 4-7 severely injured guys, so they’re out of action for quite some time and leave their units TO&E to enter the replacement pools later as replacement equipment. And killed is killed of course.

So even though your casualties are roughly 900 and theirs are 800, it could be that you suffered 90 damaged squads (would show as 900 casualties) and they suffered 10 killed squads, 30 disabled squads and 40 damaged squads. So as you can see the numbers reported can be very different outcomes.

So it is very possible your 90 squads or a good portion of them are not really permanent casualties at all, they just need a little time to get repaired. So without a breakdown of real casualties (killed/disabled) vs. temporary casualties (damaged), getting upset about the numbers may be a bit premature.

Jim

Thank you !! I finally understood the point.
IMHO, combat report information regarding "casualties" is very misleading then.

[PMCN]

ORIGINAL: dlazov66

"...with 24,000 men, 248 guns and 31 tanks. The battle is distressing in the extreme ... 1 tank, 909 men and 7 guns are lost in the attack even though we outnumber the enemy nearly 5 to 1."

I see no problem what-so-ever here at all. You're attacking troops only lost 909 men out of 24,000, you must be joking or are being sarcastic that you find this distressing.

What is distressing is that I inflected less casaulties even though I outnumbered him 5:1 and forced a retreat. And pre the retreat damage I had only inflicted 500 or so. And this was not against dug in troops, they had just moved in. Also the "distressing" since it is from an AAR also had to do with the fact my own weapons were being used against me.

[Zovs]

If you had them completely surrounded (with no hex to retreat to) and in a pocket then they could not retreat and would have surrendered instead. If you leave open an escape route or hexes that the unit can rout to in the pocket they will (if they have the MP) retreat instead. Still not distressing in the least.

What is more distressing is if you put the AI on Hard and have it rip open a 40 to 60 mile gap in your lines and you have no troops or reserves to put into the gap.

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Paul McNeely
What is distressing is that I inflected less casaulties even though I outnumbered him 5:1 and forced a retreat.

Attackers almost always took more dead and wounded casualties in WWII than the defenders did when attacking an enemy determined to hold its ground. That's why it was said you generally needed at least a 3-1 odds ratio for any real chance at success and higher odds ratios were preferred. Had you routed him I'd have expected the defenders casualties to rise, but I see nothing wrong with your results.

Jim

[PMCN]

I see a lot wrong with the results Jim simply because I had him cold. That is a second line combat formation hit with 3 Rifle divisions to do the "pin", and a cavalry division and tank brigade to do an encirclement. It should have evaporated and been rendered combat incapable from that attack, as it was it barely got a scratch.

The actual combat losses on my side are trivial, I loose more than that for those units in attrition per turn (25,000 men a week attrition losses according to my latest turn results when no combat occured). I am not complaining about my losses, it is just annoying that their losses were so low. I lost 900 men in the attack, inflicted around 500 casaulties before they pulled back and another 300 in the retreat. For those odds and given I had a massive artillery superiourity I would have expected much better than this. It is "distrubing" to do so poorly against a second line unit because "what does that mean when you take on the big boys?", this is from an AAR as well so it was "in character" for the STAVKA officer writing the diary. He was also disturbed by reports that "our own weapons" were being used against "us."

I am pointing out that the people complaining about taking losses against "cut off" russian units should take a deep breath and realize the losses are much much worse for the russians. I just lost 9000 men on two failed attacks in the blizzard, mind you I knew I was unlikely to succeed but it was a critical point, in those two attacks I lost nearly 1800 of those casualties to the Luftwaffe. Even when I threw an entire army (3 infantry divisions, 5 cavarly divisions and infantry brigade) at a single division and won I lost more on the attack then they did around 4000 soviet to 3500 german casualties with the retreat losses in that case around 2000 so only 1500 inflicted by combat.

Also statements like you made Jim over combat losses being higher for the attacker are not true in this game in all cases. I've had AI attacks fail against me and the losses on my side are higher more often then not. In general the german's loose very little when they attack, it adds up over time though. Soviet losses are usually higher attack or defence, win or loose. Excluding 41 blizzard turns I can think of a hand full of cases where the German's lost more than I did, though in fairness that is because the AI often achieved fairly substantial local superiourity.

Watching the failed ones I mentioned it was: Squad damaged/destroyed by 81 mm mortar/50 mm mortar/MG 34/Kar 98/Sig X for a good 20-30 min. They got cut down in waves. It was pretty much WW1 redux. The CV value of the german position dropped from 21 to 15 even though I think in total they had only 500 casaulties. Most of those from Flamethrowers and my mortars which seem to fire only after my troop hit his front line.

From what I can see the battle logic is well done. It looks like what you expect: long range artillery bombardment, medium range artillery bombardment, mortar&machine gun fire, rifle&light mortars followed by more heavy mortars&anti-tank gun&infantry gun fire. Then the attacker fires, though I see my troops firing back sometimes in between depending on ranges and such.

[Jim D Burns]

I don’t know the engine well enough to defend or criticize this particular battle result, so my comments concern generalities of WWII combat. A retreat is not a route and I don’t expect the losses to be very high for the defense if the commander executes a well planned retreat in good order. This is a classic military operational maneuver and is designed to preserve a forces fighting strength at the expense of giving up ground.

Assuming the unit retreated early in the combat resolution, who knows, perhaps only a third of your stuff ever even got to shoot at it. I don’t know since the inner workings of the combat engine mechanics are a mystery to me. But it’s not beyond belief that the defender stood his ground initially, then because he was outnumbered, the defense decided to retreat before being overwhelmed. In such a case if the defense manages to execute the maneuver without routing I would expect the attacker to have taken more casualties and the defender to have gotten away in relatively good order.

But to expect a 5-1 odds attack to simply obliterate your opponents unit every single time purely based on the odds shows a clear lack of understanding on your part when it comes to WWII combats and casualties.

I recently (within past 6 – 8 months perhaps) did a casualty breakdown for the German Panzer Lehr Division a few days after the massive Cobra bombardment and breakthrough. German records show the unit actually only lost about 1,000 men in the 3-5 days the sources covered. That’s for the period covering the bombardment and all the fighting that then occurred as the allies poured through the breach into the German rear area.

Popular myth has people believing the division was wiped out, that simply is not true. It was shocked into a state where it was unable to stop the allied breakthrough, but it still recovered enough to allow it to fight a delaying retreat and was only short about 1,000 men 3-5 days later after the fighting it was involved in was over.

In game terms the allies had far more than a 5-1 advantage vs. the Panzer Lehr that day, it was probably closer to a 10-1 or 12-1 or more, with about 3,500 dedicated aircraft and artillery from three different Corps bombing the daylights out of the division.

I posted the exact numbers in a discussion in the WitP AE forums about artillery effects. Unfortunately the search function does not work on the forums right now so I can’t find the thread to link to it, but it’s in there somewhere.

Jim

[Rasputitsa]

I am not into the detailed description of the way the WiTE casualty models work, but it would be wrong just to look at the body count. The military objective is to render you enemy militarily ineffective, that can be achieved with, or without, killing people in enemy units. What would be more worrying is if, after high odds attacks, enemy units maintained high levels of efficiency, I would be more interested in the CV remaining.

Retreats can be managed in good order, but I would have thought that it was the exception rather than the standard in WW2. Once a unit has left it's positions, communications become very difficult, yes they had radio, sometimes, but without modern communications nets, command and control breaks down. In fixed positions you know which sector each sub-unit is holding and can send messengers and you have fixed comms lines, but once into a forced move, where do you send the messengers and under fire where have the elements of your force gone ?

I agree that casualty rates were not necessarily as high as you might expect (each man will have a high sense of self preservation), as long as a unit cannot act efficiently, it is militarily ineffective and that's all you need. If you can keep them on the run, then you're winning. [:)]

[Walloc]

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns

I recently (within past 6 – 8 months perhaps) did a casualty breakdown for the German Panzer Lehr Division a few days after the massive Cobra bombardment and breakthrough. German records show the unit actually only lost about 1,000 men in the 3-5 days the sources covered. That’s for the period covering the bombardment and all the fighting that then occurred as the allies poured through the breach into the German rear area.

Popular myth has people believing the division was wiped out, that simply is not true. It was shocked into a state where it was unable to stop the allied breakthrough, but it still recovered enough to allow it to fight a delaying retreat and was only short about 1,000 men 3-5 days later after the fighting it was involved in was over.

If u have futher interested in the subject and doesnt alrdy have read it, i would suggest reading:

Zetterling, Niklas: Normandy 1944: German military organization, combat power and organizational effectiveness, J. J. Fedorowicz, Winnipeg, Man. 2000. ISBN 0-921991-56-8.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

[PMCN]

3 infantry regiments under attack by 3 Rifle divisions will be able to retreat, and with luck in good order yes. Add in the cavalry and the tanks and the situation changes. Add in a crushing heavy artillery superiority and there would normally be even more of an issue. Russian artillery probably is not much of a factor after the initial attack since they can't displace rapidly to follow the advancing infantry. But the trouble is the tanks, their carried infantry and the cavalry would be able to cut off the retreating troops without signficant issue. They move faster than the security forces on foot and once a gap is made they would pour through it. THAT is why I think the results are off. Also the sort of retreat while under pressure we are discussing here would be hard for top line troops to pull off, 2nd line security forces are unlikely to be that sucessful.

The artillery in WitPAE was a WW1 artillery generals wet dream till they toned it down. It was wholy and completely absurd and had no relationship to reality.

The reason the casaulties are the way they are is that the attacker gets subjected to the full fire power of the defender, so you advance through waves of artillery, motar fire, machine gun fire, rifle fire, more mortar fire, infantry gun fire, AT gun fire, FLAK gun fire etc. Then you start to shoot back and when you reach a magic number the enemy pulls out. Regardless of how much fire power you had left to fire. In watching the blizzard fights I saw one combat end after a single attack on my side. In that case it was 395 german and 129 soviet losses (German Rgt attacked by single Soviet division), probably 200 or so of those losses are from the retreat if not more.

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Walloc
If u have futher interested in the subject and doesnt alrdy have read it, i would suggest reading:

Zetterling, Niklas: Normandy 1944: German military organization, combat power and organizational effectiveness, J. J. Fedorowicz, Winnipeg, Man. 2000. ISBN 0-921991-56-8.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

Thanks Rasmus, I too have this book and it is a facinating resource. Lots of good info contained inside.

Jim

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Paul McNeely
Also the sort of retreat while under pressure we are discussing here would be hard for top line troops to pull off, 2nd line security forces are unlikely to be that sucessful.

But they retreated in game and didn't route, so in your example they pulled it off. Whether or not they should have pulled it off is its own argument, and probably should have been your point all along, but having pulled it off they should enjoy the benefits of a successful maneuver just like any other unit.

Jim