ORIGINAL: ComradeP
That air mission looks like a bug, it's as if the aircraft were damaged and the air base they were on was overrun. Pavel has stated that air losses are often incorrectly reported, but your result seems to be well beyond any small margin of reporting error.
I would suggest filing a bug report.
Okay, you're starting to hear the point I'm trying to get at. I'm reading what you're saying. Your pedantic posturing isn't helping me understand you and is making you look capriciously mean.
I'm trying to explain a point to you, and I'm losing my patience because you chose to interpret that point in your own way, instead of the way it actually works in the game. As this is the same thing that annoys me about Pelton from time to time, I don't have a lot of patience left to spare. If you think that makes me "pedantic" or "capriciously mean" then I can only say that you're entitled that your own opinion and that behaviour is generally related to the environment you're in and is as such often indirectly created by circumstances you face.
A few points:
-At no point in the game is German national morale 50.
-Part 1: Newly mobilized units primarily filled with conscripts and not with (men who were before the war) professional soldiers and/or reservists generally perform worse in battle than those filled with professional soldiers and/or reservists. Part 2: For both sides, the regular replacements are basically conscripts. Part 3: Based on point 1 and 2, the quality of units declines over time as the amount of professional soldiers and/or reservists declines and the overall amount of combat experience in/of a unit declines. Part 4: The German units that start the game with high morale have generally either been mobilized in one of the first mobilization waves and/or have combat experience and are thus on average more capable combat troops than those mobilized after the start of Barbarossa. Part 5: Considering point 4, it is as such logical that German replacement quality and overall unit quality declines if units are regularly defeated in battle and suffer high losses in the process.
-This is something of an assumption, but statistically speaking it's likely. Soviet national morale is likely to be lower than average unit morale in the final months of 1941, for the entirety of 1942 and the first half of 1943. It is likely to be higher than the average unit morale in the summer months of 1941 and from summer 1943 to 1945. I would like to add that I think 70-80 morale Guards units give the Soviets too much of an advantage and I'm thus not particularly happy with the national morale of 60 in 1944-1945 combined with the recently added national morale bonuses for certain unit types combined with the Guards bonus. However, the key point here is that there are extended periods in the game where Soviet national morale is likely to be lower than average unit morale.
We're in a lot of agreement in a lot of places. I also over-use 'pedantic' and 'capricious' too much.
This point is philosophical:
What's the difference between an 86 average morale unit right after it loses an attack on turn X and the same unit at the start of Turn X+1?
It's had a replacements phase through which to draw new conscripts.
Now, maybe I'm wrong in this part of my understanding:
But the loss on the attack is likely to see a reduction in the morale to 85 in 1941, and in any given year thereafter, it's going to be that much higher by virtue of the NM level being set lower.
Is that not accurate?
Independently, on the next turn, replacements are added. If my understanding is correct with replacements, they always come into a unit at a much lower experience level and somewhat lower morale level (?) than what would be considered the "average June 1941" levels for Germany. And their addition as elements to any given entry in the unit will correspondingly lower the levels of the unit (for experience at least).
That, to me, seems like a couple of things:
It seems like a failure of the 'experience' data being tracked (and it's being tracked per element!) to be meaningful to the combat engine. I presume that we really can't know if experience data is significant because it's inside the black box. I suspect this is an origination point of a lot of problems with WitE (and this is reinforced in learning that War in the West is already developing an improved combat engine based on WitE lessons learned).
It also seems like double-counting (however, if the above is true, then the double-counting may not be meaningful if experience isn't meaningful to the combat model in the first place).
It also seems like an artifice to make the German experience less fun, in this sense:
If one can delay the degradation of German unit morale, one can preserve the most entertaining part of playing Germany in the period after Soviets seize the initiative, which is counter-attacking. The morale of a unit has a tremendous bearing on how far it can move in the attack, and 86 is the threshold where a German unit is really a bada$$ on the offense, especially infantry.
(Remind me to tie this point back in to my banshee screaming about the cost of moving German divisions within armies and army groups, because the two are correlated to a gameplay option that Germany is unfairly, and in this case I'd argue unhistorically, missing for it in WitE).
The balance point German players should be rewarded for balancing correctly is 86 morale infantry, and national morale as a whole in the 80 to 85 range. If you can preserve 86 morale infantry through late summer of 42, you could actually be having very interesting 1943s. (It is the Soviet advantage in men and material that should beat Germany over time, not the artifice of national morale.)
But currently given the way the mechanics work and their formulas, the mechanic ensures not only that Germany can't practically achieve a meaningful body of 86-morale infantry through later 42, but that the Soviet doesn't have to focus any strategic decision making or assets in ensuring the German can't do this: The game mechanic handles it for him.
How many divisions could be argued to have "86-morale" type capabilities in the east through the late summer of 1942, particularly in the Fall-Blau area of operations? Hell, through to November 19, 1942...? this is where my casual understanding of history fails my ability to argue, but I would argue that it's more than can possibly be expected to under typical game circumstances. Regression to the mean will force 86 morale infantry down well before then.
The difference between German starting infantry morale and the starting national morale level creates the regression-to-the-mean issue that I keep point at saying that this is a primary problem in rewarding good German gameplay.
My success rate is about 80% in this game, but even with a 4:1 ratio of wins, German morale is going down, because there is a high probability of a lost point when attacks result in Held, and a much lower chance than 1:4 that a successful attack will result in a gain. This is highly problematic for gameplay, as I've mentioned throughout. This is to say nothing of the times in 41 when 1:1 ->2:1 shifts (and I'm not saying that mechanic should be re-examined), that result in retreats, that also result in an automatic loss of 1 morale point, possibly more.
Winter does what it does, and I won't complain about it, but Germany will also be required to lose morale for every Retreat it suffers, so that's double-the-problem. Is that double-counting again? I think so, and it wouldn't be as big a factor to me were it not for the fact that the die roll for a morale increase starts at 75 or if German National Morale were 80 or 85. I think the damn die roll should start at 100... That's the morale scale, and differences in national morale vs. unit morale are already factored into the rest of the formula). You could also set the movement penalty threshold for entering an enemy territory hex to 80 rather than 86, which would alleviate some of this problem.
Now, for all those units that start 1941 at 76 morale or above, the morale increase formula die roll start-point of 75 sets out from the start to punish them (it begs the question: how did they get to 85 morale in the first place?). If it was set to 80, it would be an improvement. If it could was 85 or 90 (the starting die roll number, I mean) then the chances for increased morale on attack would be meaningful for Germany. The same probability implications apply either instead of, or preferably in addition with German national morale. A system where the die roll formula start-point was higher, and national morale could be affected in some way would be a much more interesting game, and strategically complex. I don't think most of the Soviet-favorite players want a complex game...
Closing out the point:
It's one thing to be able to preserve some of your excellent infantry in the winter of 41 by pulling it back for rest and refit. I know some Soviet players who belabor this point as a-historic, but so is Soviet strategic defensive doctrine, and they can suq it...
When you take into account the capricious [;)] game mechanic
that ensures regression to the mean will take easily half your 86-morale infantry down to below the threshold, you could at least do what Germany often did historically: pull the elite units into a single body of command and use it as an offensive weapon when it could do significant good. But for the fact that it is the Soviet army that gets the freedom of command reassignment in this game.
So even when a player can know the importance and hindsight advantage of having 86-morale infantry under one command, the game mechanic punishes Germany and forces on them a strategic consequence for trying to overcome a bullshit game artifice.
So that's double-punishment again...
