STRANGE ROUT

[Phoenix100]

So, I'm playing through Manhay and I have a query about routing behaviour, all problems with which (namely it happened too soon and when a unit routed it fled towards the threat) were fixed in the patch, right?

So my problem here is the 1.2, which has been ordered to join the infantry up the road via a defend order, with ambush and attack ticked. It comes under fire from some allegedly sleeping shermans and they take out 1 panther. It routs. below is the screenshot and how its stats look. Now why on earth did it rout?

the infantry unit deployed further up the road also upped sticks (in a retreat) as soon as attacked by enemy infantry, but maybe that could be justified. Not the rout of these 11 panthers though.

[Phoenix100]

Here's the side bar for the 1.2



looks in good state to me. Why rout?

[Arjuna]

Was this fire from a previously unseen enemy?

Bear this in mind, that 1 tank lost out of 12 represents 8% casualties, which is fairly high for a single engagement. Also the unit is at close quarters and within effective range of the enemy tank company. The German company is doing amove to a defend - ie iot is not in an offensive posture. These are all likely factors but I would need to step through a saved game taken from just before the engagement to be sure.

[wodin]

Dave I can understand a retreat to reform to find an advantage to attack, but a rout to me says totally panicked troops running\driving hell for leather out of the way. Infact I expect in a rout they wouldn't even reverse keeping their front armour facing the enemy but turn around and speed off as fast as possible, which after losing one tank seems a little much.

Routing is what I've always associated with badly equipped and low moral troops like the Italians in Africa and the Rumanians in Russia, not the Germans, unless poorly equipped and inexperienced Volkstrum units. Germans I'd have thought like the Russians eventually became in '42 (well they improved alot anyway) to be experts at a tactical retreat even when under enormous pressure. If units routed as quickly as they sometimes do in BftB like that in Russia in real life then I'd imagine the Russian offensives in 43-44 would have brought the War to an end.

[Blond_Knight]

Personally Ive always thought even since RDOA that units retreated too quickly after taking (what I perceived as) minimal losses. Maybe a more detailed event log?

[RockinHarry]

Did you check "Threats" in tools for this particular unit? I oftenly find it surprising, what a single unit finds a threat and what not.[X(]

[Phoenix100]

Thanks for the response, Dave. I guess, as often happens with these behaviours, most of us are having an intuitive reaction to behaviour. It just looks wrong. These are Panthers, I mean - a tank most of us perceive as superior to the Shermans (even though I realise that at this kind of range that isn't true) and from an SS unit with decent stats. I didn't check threats and I don't have more detail, I'm afraid - mainly because the rout took me completely by surprise. I had seen the enemy unit and I expected the Panthers to deal with it easily. I think the unit had retreated from grandmenil and an engagement with these very Panthers which had ended in the US unit routing (this I expected a little more - big nasty Panthers stalk up on them in the night, after all...). It's possible my unit didn't see the Shermans - they're in light woodland in the middle of the night. But certainly I could see them, so I assume, given the distance and position of other units, that I got my info from the 1.2. Certainly when I look at it now the 1.2 can see them very clearly and they're further back down the road they came up (at least they didn't rout into the enemy and then surrender - well done on fixing that, fingers crossed).

I hadn't realise advancing them to defend with attack etc checked would mean they were less combat ready or aware than say using 'Move', if that's what you're saying. That's interesting.

I'll check if I have a save from before.

[Phoenix100]

I have no saves close enough. I played through again from an earlier save, but of course the AI did something else. Other units in that game did exactly the same though - routed or retreated when it seemed surprising. I doubt it's a bug, in the sense I suspect the game is set up to allow this, but I do think I agree with Wodin that - in the circs above - a retreat might be believable, but not a rout. A rout is chaos, fleeing full speed without order. I notice that the experience of the unit isn't super, but I had a look at the D-40 and was surprised to se its stats were like this;



these are the stats it starts the scenario with. Not so much better than the unit it routs, if at all.

plus, it's not Shermans at all!!!!! It's bloody Stuarts. So that makes me think it's even more bizarre. It's a wonder they took out a Panther at all, let alone got a company to rout.

I surrendered shortly after - to check the position - and found the D-40 was also, in fact, routing!!! They're both fleeing each other in total chaos. Does that make it better or worse, I wonder? Maybe more believable. But I have a problem with 6 stuarts routing 11 panthers. At the time the intel was they were shermans, i admit, but even so....Given the facings (my units offering no rear ends - at best offering a side shot) is it possible that a Stuart would take out a panther?

[Phoenix100]

Certainly they should get a medal, those Stuarts....

[RockinHarry]

Related rout question:

In my test games I have troubles with units in rout recovery. Beside that it appears to take 5-6 hours to recover, enemy routed units, particularly armored ones (Sherman or Churchill Tank Coy) rout oftenly into the mids of my infantry positions (entrenched, forest, track) and then stay there unmovable. My infantry then is busy for hours, expending loads of RPG to the rout recovery unit, with little (Shermans) to no (Churchill) aparent effects, although after hours the rout recovery AFVs get destroyed finally.

Another interesting observation is that the enemy armored unit (in rout recovery) info panel ALWAYS shows 1 AFV less in E&S, than in GEN tab. In the last stages of the AFV unit destruction, my infantry fires with small arms at it, indicating that the rout recovery AFV unit created "soft" factors (crewmen?), that were not there previously.[X(]

Edit: Might be the small arms infantry fire is generic close combat attacks? [&:]

[Phoenix100]

Units routing towards the enemy was meant to be a patch fix.

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: phoenix
I surrendered shortly after - to check the position - and found the D-40 was also, in fact, routing!!! They're both fleeing each other in total chaos. Does that make it better or worse, I wonder? Maybe more believable. But I have a problem with 6 stuarts routing 11 panthers. At the time the intel was they were shermans, i admit, but even so....Given the facings (my units offering no rear ends - at best offering a side shot) is it possible that a Stuart would take out a panther?

Depends a lot on the engagement range (I see those Stuarts were "resting" on a wooded area), but I would say it's far-fetched for the Stuart gun to defeat Panther frontal or sides armor unless it was a very short range, less than 100 meters perhaps.

Have you checked the stats of the Stuart gun and the Panther armor with the Estab Editor? I can't do it myself right now

[RockinHarry]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

Was this fire from a previously unseen enemy?

Bear this in mind, that 1 tank lost out of 12 represents 8% casualties, which is fairly high for a single engagement. Also the unit is at close quarters and within effective range of the enemy tank company. The German company is doing amove to a defend - ie iot is not in an offensive posture. These are all likely factors but I would need to step through a saved game taken from just before the engagement to be sure.

According to ESTAB, a full strength Panther Coy has 17 tanks. Since Phoenix started with an initially depleted unit of 12 Panthers as seen in

fb.asp?m=3004067

..beeing at 70% of full ESTAB,...now the question:

Is these initially depleted units equally brittle as units that took same losses during an actual battle? [&:]

Maybe the unit wouldn´t be that brittle if it would rather be an overstrength Plt initially. Scenario makers could add a (oversized) platoon type unit to ESTAB, but in the game name it Coy, reflecting the habit of germans to send units into combat that aren´t worth their name designations (Divisions in Regimental size, Btl in Coy size and so on). Just an idea, in case depleted units are more brittle than one would suspect.

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: RockinHarry

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

Was this fire from a previously unseen enemy?

Bear this in mind, that 1 tank lost out of 12 represents 8% casualties, which is fairly high for a single engagement. Also the unit is at close quarters and within effective range of the enemy tank company. The German company is doing amove to a defend - ie iot is not in an offensive posture. These are all likely factors but I would need to step through a saved game taken from just before the engagement to be sure.

According to ESTAB, a full strength Panther Coy has 17 tanks. Since Phoenix started with an initially depleted unit of 12 Panthers as seen in

fb.asp?m=3004067

..beeing at 70% of full ESTAB,...now the question:

Is these initially depleted units equally brittle as units that took same losses during an actual battle? [&:]

That's a very good question. Perhaps Arjuna can clarify. I think the game engine does indeed keep track of the difference between the strength a unit starts the scenario with and the state at any point in time: when it takes losses, the bar goes from bright blue to a dimmer hue of blue. I've always sort of assumed that was this difference the one taken into account in "morale" related computations. Note that less than 100% estab is denoted by the bright blue bar being shorter than the maximum length.

ORIGINAL: RockinHarry
Maybe the unit wouldn´t be that brittle if it would rather be an overstrength Plt initially. Scenario makers could add a (oversized) platoon type unit to ESTAB, but in the game name it Coy, reflecting the habit of germans to send units into combat that aren´t worth their name designations (Divisions in Regimental size, Btl in Coy size and so on). Just an idea, in case depleted units are more brittle than one would suspect.

If the above is part of the reason, a far more elegant solution would be to make a duplicate of the Pz Coy unit, name it something like Pz Coy (-) or Pz Coy (late 1944), and reduce its estab of men/machines/whatever to a lower # of elements, to reflect the fact that "100%" for 1944 German units actually means "70%". This of course means more work for the scenario designer (and introduces plenty of opportunities for fumbling when assigning estabs, since one can't check these as you can with other unit attributes).

[BletchleyGeek]

An addendum to the above: fiddling with unit sizes might not be a good idea, because of the rules regarding command capacity load and attachments across branches in the "prescribed" OOB and the hard-coded reassessment times (i.e. a Division HQ tasked with mission X reasseses the plain it is executing every Y hours).

[wodin]

I bet Dave is wishing RockinHarry never bought the game!!

[RockinHarry]

ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek

If the above is part of the reason, a far more elegant solution would be to make a duplicate of the Pz Coy unit, name it something like Pz Coy (-) or Pz Coy (late 1944), and reduce its estab of men/machines/whatever to a lower # of elements, to reflect the fact that "100%" for 1944 German units actually means "70%". This of course means more work for the scenario designer (and introduces plenty of opportunities for fumbling when assigning estabs, since one can't check these as you can with other unit attributes).

Had this idea in mind as well, but I´d figured it to be more simple in ESATB editing efforts, to add a Tank platoon type unit and make it overstrenght in the scenario editor. Just the opposite way, of depleting a full strength Coy, IN CASE depletion of full strength units causes any unit morale problems in the game. A quick answer by Dave would probably settle that matter.[8D]

Or based on the 70% Coy ESTAB idea...make a single 10% ESTAB variation of the Coy type unit and then overstrength it again (upto full theorethical TOE) to your needs in the scenario editor. No idea, if "reinforcing" units this way, causes side effects. At least with this variation, you could stick with Coy type units and it´s more flexible.

So far it´s just loud thinking. Didn´t make any practical tests yet.[:)]

[RockinHarry]

ORIGINAL: wodin

I bet Dave is wishing RockinHarry never bought the game!!

LOL [:D]

I can be a real plague if I´m really interested in a (good) game.[:)]

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: RockinHarry
I can be a real plague if I´m really interested in a (good) game.[:)]

A good kind of plague that one

[wodin]

Really do think you should be on the testing team my RH. You'd put the game through it's paces alright and I know it would end up an even better game for it.

Dave, hire this man!