Latest on the 1.04 in test now

[Q-Ball]

The Axis 1941 campaign will not replicate history with evenly matched players right now, but I think that's primarily because good Soviet players won't allow massive numbers of units to be encircled. That's the biggest change to me. And that's OK, because why should they have to repeat the dumb mistakes of history?

The Axis will not get as far in 1941, and probably 1942 as well, though there will be some payback, because the Axis player probably isn't going to allow a Stalingrad to happen either. Or even a Korsun pocket for that matter.

Hard to say how it all pans out, but safe to say you won't see as many pockets in-game as IRL.

[kirkgregerson]

I think 1.04 changes have been long overdue, but reasonable so as they had to be flushed out with data and exp by players.  Having played a pre-1.03 game and getting my ass handed to me by the blizzard and single NKVD units in swamp (old terrain mod bug) in summer 41, I'm happy blizzard weather is finally brought back to something more historical.  Except for a very few AARs where an inexperienced soviet player was facing an expert axis play (obvious from AAR play), I've yet to see a 1942 for an axis player that had any chances of limited offensives with success (like Blau).  I know plenty of 'Soviet only' players won't like the changes, but IMO you 'lived large' for months after the initial release and now you need to accept that the changes coming in 1.04 are for the betterment of WitE.  Given equal caliber players the axis should have it mostly their way in 41-42 (except for winter).  Soviet production and an almost endless manpower will start to tell in 43 onward and attrition will be the axis's worse nightmare.  Very much looking forward to the upcoming changes!!

[&o]

[GBS]

Well said kirk.... makes a lot of sense.

[*Lava*]

ORIGINAL: Q-Ball

The Axis 1941 campaign will not replicate history with evenly matched players right now, but I think that's primarily because good Soviet players won't allow massive numbers of units to be encircled.

I think it is because good Soviet players rail their folks out of range of the "plodding" (in comparison) German offensive. Totally inaccurate portrayal of the war.

Most of the Soviet front line should shatter on turn 1. That is what happens when you are taken by surprise. No need for a "Lvov Pocket" which never happened in history.

Then the race is on.

The Soviets should have to struggle to construct a defensible line, as they did in the war. As it is, Soviet players can bog down AGS well before they reach Kiev... and that also is totally inaccurate.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game. But it's modeling of the operational aspects of the war seem to be way off, especially in the South.

[Q-Ball]

You can get off the mark in AGS, but I think only by forming a giant pocket around Lvov. Failing to do that will get you bogged down, because the Reds have alot of units down there.

If you do that, Southwest Front will be short for a few turns, so I can't see getting bogged down in front of the Dnepr.

Railing units away from the Germans isn't as easy with the new Factory move rules; you have to use that selectively. Plus routed units can't be railed, which used to be standard practice. These are positive changes.

[*Lava*]

ORIGINAL: Q-Ball

You can get off the mark in AGS, but I think only by forming a giant pocket around Lvov.

The Germans didn't have to do it... why should we?

In fact, the Lvov pocket, even well executed, results in a scattering of your mobile forces and lost momentum in the direction of Kiev. The Axis should be in Kiev by turn 3... the turn when the Soviets start getting lots of reinforcements.

The Soviet south should shatter and fall apart on initial contact. The Axis should be in Kiev by turn 3 and then the real operational decisions starting becoming available to both sides in how they want to change history.

But without that start... with all the dilly dallying around Lvov, there is no "Southern strategy" because you have lost the initiative and are already well behind the time line.

Thus, the game has generated into whether you can take Stalingrad or not. As I have said before... not very interesting from an operational POV. And disappointing for a game of this caliber.

[Q-Ball]

Historically, though, the Germans didn't take Kiev until September. They didn't even attempt it until the 2nd week of August, after the Uman Pocket was cleared, or approx. Turn 8-9. Turn 3 would have the Germans in Kiev the first week of July!

Southwest Front historically didn't shatter, and gave the Germans alot of trouble. The leadership down there was generally more on the ball, and the Soviets put most of their T-34s and top units down there, to support what they thought would be the primary theater.

In game, I think this works pretty well; the best at-start units for the Reds are in the South, as they should be. Some of the Mech Corps are pretty nasty.

There's alot you can do beside gunning for Stalingrad....

[hfarrish]

I think it is because good Soviet players rail their folks out of range of the "plodding" (in comparison) German offensive. Totally inaccurate portrayal of the war.

As a mostly Soviet player, I actually think you do better by using the units in the South to bog down the Germans (and hopefully get in an isolated counterattack or two) rather than railing them out to form a line somewhere else. This is probably even more true now if fortification build is being slowed. Seems like some of the better/experienced Sov players on the forum also follow this approach.

[Angelo]

ORIGINAL: Lava

ORIGINAL: Q-Ball

You can get off the mark in AGS, but I think only by forming a giant pocket around Lvov.

The Germans didn't have to do it... why should we?

In fact, the Lvov pocket, even well executed, results in a scattering of your mobile forces and lost momentum in the direction of Kiev. The Axis should be in Kiev by turn 3... the turn when the Soviets start getting lots of reinforcements.

The Soviet south should shatter and fall apart on initial contact. The Axis should be in Kiev by turn 3 and then the real operational decisions starting becoming available to both sides in how they want to change history.

But without that start... with all the dilly dallying around Lvov, there is no "Southern strategy" because you have lost the initiative and are already well behind the time line.

Thus, the game has generated into whether you can take Stalingrad or not. As I have said before... not very interesting from an operational POV. And disappointing for a game of this caliber.

Yea a bit of a disappointment...but really 'it's the only game in town' as nothing else out there comes close.

I've found that the GC's are all about how many units and men the germans can destroy. If the soviet can keep these numbers down they will have a chance at a decisive win. The axis need really large numbers, way above historical to win decisively. I'm looking at 10 to 1 in all casualties rates, which is unlikely against an experienced soviet player.

Taking out production and recruiting centers helps but holding victory locations means very little, except near the end game.

So, like many games min/max is the name of the game and large number of surrenders, as captured troops don't filter back to the enemies army.

[Klydon]

The Germans didn't do an early Lvov pocket in part because it was not the operational plan to do so. The original campaign called for a strong thrust from the 6th Army left short of Dnepr and to follow the river bend, netting the Russian units to the west of the river. Essentially, the Uman pocket is the end of the first phase of the operational plan. The Germans did not count on the Russian ability to have substancial additional reserves east of the river nor on the Russians to give such a spirited defense in the area. As Q-Ball mentions, the better troops in the Russian army were down there and there were far more T34/KV1 tanks there than in center and up north.

As far as the rest of the Russian frontier army not going away, anyone that thinks there are any good amounts of troops left after a good open by the Axis in the North and Center, need to start up a game with humans as both players, do an Axis turn and then look at what the Russians have to work with north of the swamps. This is generally a few units that are trashed, some frozen corps, and not much else. This has caused some German players to claim "Sir Robinov" especially in the north when the fact is there just isn't much left to work with up there.

From what I have seen, it is tough for the Axis to duplicate the 1941 campaign simply because the Russian player will play better than his historical counter part and also the Axis players generally try to get ready for the blizzard instead of trying to continue to advance, even in mud and snow. Not saying this is smart or not, but in the short term, it does explain why the Axis rarely achieve historical gains. They certainly usually do not achieve historical casualties, but this is again due to better Russian play.

[Encircled]

I think my opponent and I are going to reach the start of the blizzard, then hold to the patch comes through. We are probably going to be there in about two weeks (roughly)

Do you want the data after every turn, as I'm sure both of us are more than willing to supply it?

[carnifex]

ORIGINAL: Lava
I would think after having annihilated the Soviet Air Force, on turn one, any trains which tried to operate under Axis controlled skies would be easy pickings.

No one controls the skies at night, but the train kept a-rollin' all night long.

[randallw]

The air war is constructed like the ground forces, using the constraints of back and forth weekly turns.
 
Even with the first week of clobbering the Red Air Force the Germans may have been on the short end of the numbers, since the Reds had maybe 10k or 12k planes to begin with, and the Germans began with under 4k.
It is not as if the Germans had enough planes to blot out the sun.

[NinetyNine]

If the blizzard changes force the Reds to move troops around and have offensives in local areas of the map(as opposed to the back to Poland roll they can currently perform across the entire map), I'll be happy.

[Joel Billings]

ORIGINAL: color

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

(c) (Section 22.3.2) The percent of damaged elements has been reduced in December 41 so instead of roughly 5-20% the losses are now roughly 1-7% (the damage losses are still reduced by 50% in Jan/Feb 1942).

Thanks a lot for sharing these details [:)]

There's one thing that jumped to my eye, so I'm curious about knowing a little about the changing interactions in the game engine.

Above statement says blizzard attrition is going from 5-20% damaged to 1-7%, is that correct?

At first sight seems like a big change that will considerably lower german blizzard attrition losses.
Upon reading some other details in your list I get the impression you are tweaking other parts of the engine.
Does that in effect mean some parts of the losses previous suffered from blizzard, are now suffered in general ?
Trying to rephrase the above statement: even though that drop in blizzard damaged % is large, it's deceiving in an isolated context as losses are generally going to be higher due to other attrition factors?

I'm especifically thinking about:
- 10) More damaged units returned to pool are disabled resulting in less % damaged units recovered.
- 12) increased front line attrition & KIA % with net change resulting in more damaged elements

I do not intend to critize, I'm merely analyzing the changes trying to understand what impact the changes will generate.

Good questions. Let me start by saying a few things about how I view the state of the game in 1.03.

I feel the game is fun to play and that many/most of the smaller scenarios are balanced fairly well. As for the Grand Campaign I believe there is truth in both the German supermen and the Soviet supermen in blizzard. The German supermen has truth in that an expert German player can defeat a weaker Soviet player by keeping them off balance and destroying lots of Soviet units and taking key locations. This leads to either a break in the Soviet morale, or a very bad situation for the Soviets even after the blizzard (it doesn't usually get that far as the Soviet player morale breaks). There is truth to the Soviet supermen in blizzard because the average Soviet player is able to take back too much territory and the Germans are hurt too badly during blizzard. There is also truth to the fact that the Germans are too strong going into the blizzard. One reason why the blizzard is so bad is because the Germans were found to be too strong after the blizzard if the blizzard wasn't strong enough. What I don't know for sure is what an expert German would do against an expert Soviet player, because expert German players can do so well in 41 to be able to endure the winter, but against and expert Soviet they might find themselves right where average German players usually find themselves (beaten badly in the blizzard).

After studying things further, we found that the Germans were in fact too strong going into the blizzard and the Soviets were also usually too strong (even when they took "historical" casualties). So we had a goal of fixing this as well as trying to improve the blizzard so it would not be harsh as it has been because it clearly was too harsh. This is where we were as we were moving into 1.04 work. Around this time we discovered several anomalies with manpower that we had never noticed before. It was clear in order to get a handle on what should change we needed to make sure everything was working as expected. Pavel made a thorough review of how manpower was flowing and found and fixed several major bugs with manpower. These are on the 1.04 bug fix list. Many of these bugs were impacting both players, but several impacted only one, or one player more than the other. The net effect of these manpower bugs was that both sides were not losing manpower that should have been lost (due to withdrawals, various kinds of losses not being accounted for correctly, etc.). It was clear that we needed to fix these first so we could feel confident that we were working with a stable system before making changes. Ideally these would have been found and fixed pre release, but once we knew about them we had to get them fixed. This part is done now, and the system seems to be working well. The net impact of all of these fixes is very hard to figure out. We can run AI vs AI tests but human vs human tests can take weeks.

So with the bugs fixed we now looked to try to find out what was wrong with the model. What we concluded was that we were not accounting for enough time for casualties to be out of action. We have two ways to deal with non-destroyed manpower. First, the damage system which makes them unavailable for combat and over time fixes some and sends others back to the pool (with some becoming disabled). Second was the disabled system that takes a percentage of these damaged elements going to the pool and puts them in the category of more seriously wounded and thus out of action for a much longer time period. During normal times, the damaged system was repairing many of the elements quickly, and those returning to the pool were immediately available to return to the front (with only a small portion disabled). We think this system was not taking enough men out of action for long enough periods of time. There was a catch though in blizzard. During the first winter the German supply situation is so bad (as it should be) that the damaged elements were often being destroyed outright, or creating a huge churn of men from the front back to the pool, both causing larger disabled numbers. The large frostbite damaging of squads was a major cause of damaged churn as well. Now there should be more disabled during the winter due to sickness/frostbite, and the compounding effect of combat and life in weather the Germans were not used to. However, it was too much and combined with the CV reductions and the larger Soviet armies facing them, the Germans were being forced back too much.

We could have tried to alter one or two formulas, but since there were some systemic problems, it seemed better to try to make changes in many places. In addition we had already wanted to make changes to fort levels based on what we had been seeing, so that and several other changes and bug fixes were thrown into the mix as well. In the end we hope to have a better system that is more consistent and fitting reality. For example we were finding later on that manpower totals for both sides, especially the Soviets were higher than we thought they should be. In looking at casualty numbers it became clear that large numbers of soldiers that were not killed or captured were eventually discharged or sent to duties that would not show up in the game. Given our current mechanism, the disabled pool has to account for this.

As for your specific questions, the frostbite percentage didn’t make sense anymore (if it ever did) given that we increased the percent disabled for damaged troops returning to the pool. While we brought this number down, we found that the number of disabled was still very large, and we think this is because of the terrible supply situation the Germans are usually in during the blizzard. We looked at our supply modifier during blizzard and thought it was too harsh, so we adjusted this. We needed to increase the percent of damaged troops returning to the pool that are disabled given the casualty out of action time I talked about above. We also created the concept of a “transit pool” to deal with manpower that recovers fairly quickly but still needs a some time off to account for the time the individual is away from the front. Given all the changes, we also took the time to better rationalize the attrition split between killed and disabled men.

Now, did we get it all right? Of course not. It would be foolish of me to think that we’ve got everything working just right. There are many posts in the tester forum regarding concerns one way or the other about some of the changes (some by me). AI vs AI tests which can be done quickly only tell us so much. Human vs AI and Human vs Human tests take much longer. We do think things are moving in the right direction, but realistically getting things to balance out right is going to take time, and this will need to include public beta time. For all its faults, we still think that 1.03 is a good game and can be enjoyed as is. Games started with 1.03 can be continued with 1.04 if players want to do this, but the effects of all the changes on balance in these games are impossible to determine. For those of you playing tournaments or serious matches where you are playing both sides and combining scores, I suggest you not switch versions during your two-game matches. We appreciate the support of the community in helping to make this a better product, especially those willing to play and comment on beta versions knowing that their beta games may experience some turbulence.

[*Lava*]

Well, I'm certainly looking forward to 1.04 and would like to thank all the folks working so hard to make this, already outrageous game, even better.

It's been a long time since a wargame has gotten the amount of attention that I have given to this one. It is an awesome "just one more turn" game that has taken me into the wee hours of the night on (too) many occasions.

Super game and I know it's going to get better! THANKS!

[Schmart]

Joel, we all really appreciate the work you guys are doing to support and fine tune the game.

Just curious if it is in the cards to add some form of a manual AFV upgrade option at some point like we already have for air units?

[randallw]

The patches are released as betas, then become official later on; should we ever worry about using a beta too soon because of a crash risk?

[Joel Billings]

Crash bugs are one of the main reasons we have the test team check out versions before we send them out as a beta. We want to minimize the risk of a crash bug getting out to the public (also other major game killing bugs). There haven't been too many of these, but occasionally they'll slip in and the testers usually find them. Clearly the more changes we make, the greater the chance of a major bug slipping through.

[Joel Billings]

ORIGINAL: Schmart

Joel, we all really appreciate the work you guys are doing to support and fine tune the game.

Just curious if it is in the cards to add some form of a manual AFV upgrade option at some point like we already have for air units?

Having a manual AFV upgrade is not on my radar screen at the moment. I'm not even sure what it would take to make this happen, or how feasible it is. I haven't even spoken to the programmers about it as I've had bigger missiles incoming.