Trying To Like The Game But...

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

All of you fraidy cat Soviets need to sit down and play the Kiev scenario. You will not be allowed to do this runaway in that scenario. Nor can the Axis player do a Lvov pocket since he is limited to historical AGS forces. Learn how to make do with what you have and defend in the south. Then try this for real in a campaign game with both sides making concessions so the south plays out reasonably.

This is completely correct. The best PBEM I had in the 'Road Tos' was Dnepropetrovsk. The German can't do a Lvov and the Soviets can't run (first is lack of units, second is the victory conditions). The result was a brilliant tussle that came down to just holding Kharkov at the last.

It unfolds very realistic with the Germans struggling with SW Front, swinging into the gap between SW and S Front and then back north.

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

Well, nobody is very experienced at this point in playing with the mild blizzard as it is brand new. But I very much doubt that this new blizzard means that no offensive whatsoever is the optimum strategy. I can imagine wanting to stop early with it or limiting the scope of the offensive, but simply sitting in place everywhere for the duration?

At a minimum I'd want to grab as much real estate west of Moscow as possible in order to provide a bigger buffer to it come summer of 42. There's some good defensive terrain in this area. And attacking is the best way to generate morale and guards which helps you get past 42 where the morale cap is very low.

I've an AI game that I keep on going back a few turns on purely to try and get a handle on what works with the new changes. Since in my game the AI has vastly overloaded the Volkhov Front, I've made no useful counterattacks up there, managed to regain some key river lines and that is that. Around Moscow I only got Rzhev back because at the end of the day the AI is ... an AI. In Feb on the Moscow sector its down to 2 punch drunk boxers trading blows. In the south, I've regained a lot of ground but am thinking about where I need to call a halt as my gains are pretty fragile.

[morvael]

ORIGINAL: GamesaurusRex

[:(] I believe the isolation effects are too extreme (the pocketed troops should be able to fight to some extent and the mopping up should cost the Germans more than it does).

[:(]I believe the combat system is not calculating the CV correctly (when the modified CVs are registering less than the raw CVs in fortified battles where there are no command, supply, morale, or other penalties... you have a problem).

[:(]I believe there is no real incentive for the Russian to fight west of Moskow, and given the low replacement rate of men and material available to the Russian, there is no practical way a Russian player can engage in combat in 41-42 and survive and recover to fight in 43. (If you greatly increased available replacements, maybe they could.)

[:)]I believe all these things can eventually get fixed if the Patching Gods keep up the good work, at least I'm hoping so.

Isolation - I would like to see one turn of little to no penalty for isolation, because those units would usually act at the same time as their opponent, trying to break out (unless they were ordered to stay). IGoYouGo systems, especially with a supply check between player turns create this problem, in a WeGo game with a single supply check that would never be an issue. But such is this design. I try not to (even if I would like to) change things in the original design if they are documented fully / clearly in the manual. When something is missing I can interpret things and this gives me some space for maneuver

CV in combat is a problem. As I have proven using math, that what you see on counters is not what you will see in combat. Expected value of combat CV is not scaling linearily with those you see on counters (simple case: unit with morale 100 has double CV in combat, with 0 it has half CV - thus morale 100 is four times better than morale 0; formula used for on-counter CV introduces completely different relation: normal CV for morale 100, half for 50, zero for 0). Modified CV in combat is divided by 10, to bring it closer to on counter values, but it has different spread. I could have put expected values on counters but it was decided players will be confused by completely new values and those values would have trouble to fit on the counters - a panzer division could have a CV of 60 for example. At least I have made the AI know of those values (which the players learns to "feel" by experience).

The best incentives to fight when it's not optimum choice from pure battlefield result perspecitve is making victory conditions that reward "suicidal" tactics, which cannot be otherwise expected to be used by any sane player. Twilight in the East or Napoleon's Triumph boardgames have been my inspiration in this matter. Unfortunately WitE campaign conditions are not giving any incentives for that. Good VC are the base on which any wargame must be built. Here, they look like they were added half-baked, without real thought behind them ( this is not a sandbox game to which such VCs belong).

All can't be patched without touching core foundations of the design. Effort & time questions aside, this can't be done by me, I have no authority, and the original team is busy with new games (they do it for living so I understand them). I try to patch the biggest problems I face as the player, without removing or redoing core design features, also trying to do it in a way that allows to do it in relatively short time, as I don't have the luxury of having no need for a day job or a family to care for.

[SigUp]

If you get rid of some or most of isolation CV reduction you must also get rid of the 1:1 = 2:1 rule. Otherwise the Germans will have it very hard to keep pockets closed. Furthermore, some isolation is necessary. A pocket always causes breakdowns in communications and chaos etc. It's tough to mount an organized counterattack out of a pocket with full strength in such a situation.

[GamesaurusRex]

Flaviusx:
Are we playing the same game ? Do your Russian troops come into the game (with a few exceptions) at a morale level of 35 to 38 like mine do ? Does your game have the rule requiring those units to remain 10 hexes away from the front for 5 to 10 turns in order to gain morale to 45 like mine do ? (This represents more than half the Russian force, you can leave them out of any proposed attack.) Can the German Army in your game routinely penetrate 150 miles through any front you assemble and suffer little to no attrition while doing so and then remain impervious to attack because their CV values are beyond anything you have in your entire arsenal ? Can you not assign your good leaders to your troops because to do so will only saddle them with multiple "lost battle" penalties during 41-42 ? Does your game calculate your modified CVs at levels that are lower than the raw CVs in places where you should be getting at least some fortification bonus and you are not suffering supply, command, morale, or other extraneous penalties ? (like mine does).

If not, we are not talking about the same game and I need to know where I can get a copy of yours.

[hfarrish]

I don't really see the isolation rules as being as terrible as others do. Certainly not a problem of the scope that logistics were prior to the fuel bird fix, or the fort spam of years ago, or the four month all front blizzard offensive. Could they use some minor tweaks? Possibly...but I've never really found them to be the thing that made me pound the table that the game was broken.

For all the pockets that lasted for months, there were many that were mopped up relatively quickly. Game is not going to handle every nuance perfectly.

[SigUp]

ORIGINAL: GamesaurusRex

Does your game calculate your modified CVs at levels that are lower than the raw CVs in places where you should be getting at least some fortification bonus and you are not suffering supply, command, morale, or other extraneous penalties ? (like mine does).

loki broke a pocket from the inside against me by getting a CV roll from 39 to 142 and another from the outside from 67 to 277. Oh, and ask terje about the dice rolls he routinely gets.

[Flaviusx]

I don't wait until they reach 50. I consider 45 morale or better to be adequate for front line duty. This is a case of the best being the enemy of the good.

And you might consider banking exceptional troops clocking in at 50 or better until the winter. They can occupy reserve positions, garrison cities, etc. Use them as immediate reserves but don't expose them directly to the front line. Since they don't need to be trained (indeed cannot be trained) they can be placed in reserve mode.

[GamesaurusRex]

morvael:

I salute you and your heroic effort, Sir, for the cause of tweaking this game. If you are doing this "Pro Bono" for the good of the cause, Sir, then I applaud your efforts all the more !

[Bozo_the_Clown]

What it lacks is a combat system that allows the two sides to actually engage in combat in 41-42.

That is just not the case. You can counter-attack with ease. The problem is the price you pay as the Russians because if you stick around to long your troops get encircled.

I just had one of those counter-attacks in my game with Pelton. 150 tanks destroyed on T2. In many cases the combat system favors the Soviets. It's the logistics that favors the Germans. As the Russians you have to figure out how far you can go with this approach. Not much point in counter-attacking if you lose half your army in the process.

[GamesaurusRex]

Flavuisx:
I hear what you are saying and I do use troops before they reach 50 out of necessity... but I am still confused... don't your troops that are in the range of 45 just rout and disappear like mine do routinely ? Then when you are down to the 43 morale and lower troops, doesn't your army just fold like a cheap camp chair ? At least, this has been my experience. How do you manage to attack the German Army in the blizzard with such troops ? And after you have attacked, are your troops not spent in the pursuit and then out of supply for lack of rail coverage and not dug in fortified and just more weak in defense than they were before you made the mistake of thinking you could attack the German Army before you had assembled Russian Corps level units to do so effectively ?

(And then there is the real problem that I don't use illegitimate methods like those here that do who claim they make 10 to 20 1:1 counterattacks per turn that decimate the German Army in '41 and early '42. They achieve these results by rerolling each attack multiple times until they get the result they want. Otherwise, this sort of claim is impossible to achieve honestly.)

[GamesaurusRex]

@ Bozo:

I can't stop laughing at your Sig.[:D][:D][:D]


"Not much point in counter-attacking if you lose half your army in the process. "... and that explains why counterattacking in any big way is not practical under the current German logistics/combat/morale advantages during 6/41-6/42. You're just forced to stay out of their way to conserve forces.

[loki100]

I agree, its taken me some time to realise that the game is built to reward a counterattack approach with the Soviets.

Yes you have to watch out for over-commitment but you don't need to be passive. Morveal has done a great job (a sentence that really should end just there [&o]) and one is to drag out into the light the multiplier around mass in terms of generating the final CV.

As a test, to make sure it wasn't pure luck I've just rerun my attack from inside the pocket, pretty similar pre-attack bombing run and if anything a better result than in the AAR:

[morvael]

I'm just a player like all of you, it's just that I have some programming skills, have been interested in wargame mechanics for a long time, and was pestering 2by3 with bug reports found during my first and only PBEM game, so in the end they decided to give me access to the code to try fix them and keep me occupied instead of flooding the forums Really, I still can't believe they took that risk of opening the code to someone completely unknown from the other side of the Ocean, hats off to Joel and the rest of the team for that bold step. I will try to do my best to entertain you with even more fixes to WitE while they will finish WitW in the meantime. My "lone wolf" style doesn't make me a good team player, so I haven't been helping in the WitW creation process as much as I (or they) would like to, but they have so many talented beta testers there, that I hope the final product will be good.

[Flaviusx]

They will sometimes rout, yes. Not always. You will not be able to create a rout proof Red Army until very late in the game. If you try to do this before 1943 you will never be able to cover the front as a practical matter. You simply have to accept an element of risk here.

As far as defense goes I am a big believer in terrain, depth, and reserves. I am also a big believer in counterattacking exposed German spearheads. Panzers are a lot more fragile than you think. Don't take the displayed CVs too seriously here. 9 rifle divisions piling on an exposed and tired panzer division out in the open will likely get a retreat result, whatever the CV says. The combat system rewards raw numbers in calculating retreat results.

The German army suffers from all sorts of penalties during the first blizzard, even with the mild blizzard rules. My advice to you is to play some games solo that fall during the blizzard period and develop a sense of what they are capable of.

[GamesaurusRex]

Once Again to Morvael for his efforts !

[&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o]




To Flaviusx:

Thanks for your insight. I may be missing something in the way the combat system is working. Perhaps I need to just slog on for a bit in my current game with Wheat to see if I eventually inflict at least some attritional damage on the German Army and make it into 43. If I can, maybe I can just manage to drag him into a downward attritional spiral, but it sure seems unlikely at this stage despite the fact that I'm showing 9 million troops in the field at present in June 42. I could just as well have 10 million, but what good are they if the CV calculations keep coming up with zero ?

[morvael]

Please stop, I will soon explode like a baloon with too much air inside [:)] I'm simply doing what I love most - tinkering with instead of actually playing games. Also, none of you have taken into account a possiblity that my changes could have ruined the game instead of improving it...

[morvael]

loki100 is right, the game does not favour Germans in 41-42 and Soviets in 43-45 too much, it favours the attacking side too much (IMHO), but at the same time makes it hard to realize that even 1=1 ants have a chance in combat IF they attack. And winning battles is crucial as retreat casualties are the main source of losses.

To help you put things into perspective here are CV comparisons:
a 16.2/16.2 German Panzer Division has expected CV values of 441.1 when attacking and 233.9 when defending (with 88.3% chance for a successful morale roll, and 88.5% mech combat roll, 92 morale and experience).
a 9.8/10.1 German Infantry Division has expected CV values of 175.3 when attacking and 106.1 when defending (with 65% chance for a successful morale roll, and 70.2% infantry combat roll, 85 morale and 83 experience).
a 9.2/9.4 German Infantry Division has expected CV values of 217.9 when attacking and 124.6 when defending (with 78.4% chance for a successful morale roll, and 80.2% infantry combat roll, 75 morale and experience).
a 2.1/2.1 Soviet Rifle Division has expected CV values of 59.5 when attacking and 36.0 when defending (with 69.3% chance for a successful morale roll, and 65.4% infantry combat roll, 37 morale and 36 experience).

Expected CV values are those that are mean results from the random process (you see the sum of those values divided by 10 as final combat CV). Note how big difference leaders give, and what is the gap between attack and defense.

With the 1:1->2:1 rule active, two Soviet 2.1/2.1 divisions (case 4) should be enough to win against a German 9.8/10.1 division (case 2).
On the other hand, that division can also win with those two divisions. A 9.2/9.4 division (case 3) can even win with three such divisions, as it is better led.

Now you see how the on-counter CVs tell you really nothing about real chances in combat. 9.2 can win over 6.3, 9.8 over 4.2, while 4.2 can win over 10.1.

[carlkay58]

Gamesaurerex:

Soviet shell units will arrive with a morale of about 37 to 39, as you noted above. Every turn they spend refitting over 10 hexes away from the enemy they will gain roughly three morale points. The Soviet NM cap is 50 in June, 1941 and will reduce by one each month to 45 in January, 1942. It will stay at 45 until 1943 where it will add 1 each month until it reaches 60 in early 1944.

Once the unit reaches NM, it will be difficult for it to increase further. Overall, it will take three turns of refitting for the new Soviet unit to hit the NM level. Some units may be one or two points low but in general that is the only amount of time that the units need to be held in order to optimize their morale level. If you bring the units up slow from the Urals, it will be no problem to have them at a decent level by the time they hit the front lines.

[Tom Hunter]

Gamasaurus I think you should look at Morvael's posts closely. I played the game once against the AI and got 8 turns into my game with Saper222 and by then it was clear that the victory conditions were a fundamental problem with the game. Very few people comment on this, but I am certain Morvael is right.

Like you I've been wargaming for a long time, I started in the mid 1970s. I also spotted a huge problem (and documented it) with the original War in the Pacific, like Pelton, Morvael and a few others I tend to analyze the game as I play, in WitP I discovered the battleship guns would not fire unless you sailed them alone without task forces. (that would be like discovering mech infantry would not attack if stacked with other units in War in the East)

Matrix did fix War in the Pacific, and I think they will fix this game as well. They do seem to have some trouble because they focus on very complex models in some places (combat) and put very little effort into other models (victory conditions.)

I think if you play the game some you will re-order your concerns about the game. The leadership issue is not a big one. The fact that the winter rules are on rails when they could be on triggers is huge. The victory conditions are absurdly simple for a game this complex, much to the detriment of the game. Worst of all the design tends to be deterministic, if you do one thing, it causes another, and early decisions, successes and failure cannot be undone later.

What is most interesting to me is that War in the Pacific had some of the same teething problems, and it seems Admirals Edition fixed them, they certainly fixed the combat model. Matrix and 2x3 seem to have a recurring problem here.

Personally I'm not sure if I should start another War in the East game, go back to War in the Pacific, or move to World in Flames and give a different dev team a try. Your mileage will vary. This game is still interesting enough to temp me, and I am experimenting with tactics that might break the game again (or might not) if they work I am considering playing again. On the other hand, I spend 3 or 4 hours on a turn, and I might have a lot more fun with a different game that had fewer problems and exploits.

[Wheat]

Uh, I'm an average or slightly above avg German player, but have done it enough to be dangerous. Flaviusx would be in Berlin by 44 against me.

I still say Gamesaurus should have attacked during the blizzard. Yes, your Russians are still pretty crappy but you will get some wins against the depleted Germans, thus building morale and guards. You will also regain some ground.

Since you didn't Hitler is planning a personal tour of Vladivostok in 43.

I think Gamesaurus is suffering psychological results from 55+ turns of running. He is far from dead. Huffing and puffing, but still chugging.

Also, since he has not played the Germans, he is not aware of the many difficulties they face.

The game is worthwhile, fun and with the continued patching, just gets better. Obviously, some of the things discussed can't be fixed, or won't be addressed till WITE 2.0.