Wunderwaffles: Quality is a Quality on its own!

[Wiedrock]

@M60, complaining about few Artillery pieces scoring more hits than whole Armies of guns, brought the idea looking at combat in a whole new way to me.

While testing Fort reduction with Artillery Divisions I created this beauty of a battle.
It's an Edited Scenario in 1942, Soviet ASSAULT Front and everything is at "100%"(Supplies and so on).
All are at Detection Level 5, for MOREX and CPP see pic.

See the 34x LeIG18 scoring more hits than 270 Tanks, 2555 Guns and overall ~137k Soviets (all 88CPP) combined.
....and it's not even Artillery/indirect firing.

The Battle was won by a combination of Reducing the Fort (CV "/3x2"), German Leader failing rolls and Soviet Leader not failing every roll.

[M60A3TTS]

TBH, I did this more times than I can say against jubjub in our game. But it begs the question, did you really win when it cost you 7-8 times the casualties? It just isn't the losses shown, but has yet to include those that are subsequently written off in death or long time injury recovery from the damaged ground elements. Losing 5k+ at a pop is not a small loss, and those rifle corps are now stripped of much of their CPP.

Now I know the other side of the argument. You only do this to a few hexes, take the losses and no more level 2-3 forts for a while. But a very defensive Axis player is swapping weakened units for stronger ones in the line, counterattacking with care, and just piling up more Soviet losses. You aren't replacing tons of leaders or building stuff like the Soviets so no lack of APs to build forts. You don't think you'll get to 10 million Soviet casualties so fast, but it can happen.

[Wiedrock]

But it begs the question, did you really win when it cost you 7-8 times the casualties?

I don't think so.

I recently did a comparison bewteen 50 MOREX normal Corps and 60 MOREX "Guards" to quantify the difference for application to the larger stratregic number games. I am wondering the same.

In this test I simply did 3 German attacks each and averaged out the numbers (and only looked at DES/KIA - ignoring retreat and DAM).
Ofc. I should also do it with Soviet attacks, ...maybe one day. And probably 10 attacks each,....maybe the day after.

In this short setup, the loss ratio went from 1:6.8 to 1:4.1, so:
4.1/6.8=60% → 0.6-1=-0.4 → -40% losses
or
1-6.8/4.1=+65% losses
...so depending what you use as the "base" you either lose 40% less men per German KIA or 65% more per German KIA (tha's what I hate at percentages - this does not make any sense at all!!! ).

The retreat losses (while not accounted for in the math) did logically show the same behaviour one can observe in 1941 already, when the "special" Divisions with +5NM get retreated and lose less men than regular Divisions.

50MOREX.png (532.17 KiB) Viewed 348 times

60MOREX.png (542.66 KiB) Viewed 348 times

I did similar stuff with keeping Soviets at 50 MOREX but reducing German MOREX by -5 each, that also made a large difference already, that's why I looked into using Air Interdiction to reduce MOR but did not find it work (with how I set it up at least, in the end it may only work when Germans are already in a bad situation, or so...).

An idea would also be to use the Biplane TacB to do Night Harassement missions (like both sides did on the eastern front), but the Night Mission modifiers must be so ridiculously large that missions feels like only having 1% effects (if any effects at all). With that you either could (if it would work) put down interdiction or maybe add some fatigue to Ground Elements (not killing/damaging, just by DISrupting - but the planes in this game during night do fly silent like bats and drop bombs that make pillow-sounds - so noone is prevented from sleeping! .

Speaking of Night Missions....look at this beauty from an average Summernight in 1941.
0 Ground targets hit in 5k Sorties, but the German planes hit the ground at least.

Night.png (267.72 KiB) Viewed 348 times

[HardLuckYetAgain]

having planes on night missions is suicidal, unless it is a very small mission

[Q-Ball]

I think the German player will lose alot of planes on Night Ops....once. Just switch everything to "Day Only", and it solves that problem. It's not sustainable.

Without a bunch of German planes crashing into the woods, night bombing is a waste of time and resources.....even if you have a billion U2 biplanes, you still need grounds crew and supplies

As far as the LOSS RATIOS.....I've had alot of attacks just like those first two, "Successful", but with 6-1 casualty ratio. I can live with it for now because it farms Guards, but that pace is not sustainable over the long-term