retrofitting?

Yogi Yohan · Post by **Yogi Yohan** » Sat Feb 24, 2001 2:49 pm

There's somethig fishy with the retrofitting routines. It seems to me that the PzIII and PzIV do not retrofit at all until the last type of the series is available, ie the PzIIIm and PzIVj. This seems very unrealistic since every time a significant improvement was introduced, it would be retrofitted to all tanks sent back to Germany or even in the field workshops.

Since there is a conversion routine, would it not be a good idea to have it constantly active so that you do not end up with my present ridiculous situation, with the front units starved for panzers and 450+ PzIIIg in the pool...

RickyB · Post by **RickyB** » Sat Feb 24, 2001 8:49 pm

Originally posted by Yogi Yohan:
There's somethig fishy with the retrofitting routines. It seems to me that the PzIII and PzIV do not retrofit at all until the last type of the series is available, ie the PzIIIm and PzIVj. This seems very unrealistic since every time a significant improvement was introduced, it would be retrofitted to all tanks sent back to Germany or even in the field workshops.

Since there is a conversion routine, would it not be a good idea to have it constantly active so that you do not end up with my present ridiculous situation, with the front units starved for panzers and 450+ PzIIIg in the pool...

Your ideas sound right on to me. However, the initial game hardcoded in the upgrade timeframe, and Arnaud did not touch that, although he did change other hardcoded things (if he adjusted every hardcoded item he probably would never finish). There should be a file called editwir.doc in the distribution that goes through a number of the hardcoded items, including production upgrades. I believe this is at least slightly out of date, as he did make it so you can change the upgrade paths for tanks and planes through the editwir program, adding in new types to the path. Most of it is still correct though.

------------------
Rick Bancroft
Semper Fi

PMCN · Post by **PMCN** » Tue Feb 27, 2001 4:05 pm

Hmmm, I thought there was a couple of upgrades for the germans. I believe that the IIIe-h are upgraded to IIIj in early 42 (or maybe that is the IIIe-g are upgraded to IIIh). The IVe-f are upgraded to IVh in 43 I think. All of your II's and 38T's are coverted to Marder III's when the Marder III becomes available. I think (but am not sure) that the StG IIIb convert to the IIIg and I think there is some convertion to the Hetzer but I am not sure as I have never played till that late in the game.

Trouble is rarely do my games go into much more than the summer of 43 so I am not sure completely. I know the IVd are upgraded but I can't recall if it is to the IVe or the IVh or the IVg. I know the IVg's are eventually upgraded to the IVh.

I don't know if this helps much.

Yogi Yohan · Post by **Yogi Yohan** » Tue Feb 27, 2001 5:30 pm

The editwir.doc tells the whole story. For the German side, from Jan 1943 on, older PzIIIs and PzIVs are converted to PzIIIm's and PzIVh's. There is no previous conversion and PzIVh's are not converted to PzIVj's. Other obsolete tanks get converted to Marders.

If Arnaud could tinker with this so that we have retrofitting going on from turn 1, and always to the latest model, it would make for one hell of an improvement, especially in conjunction with strongly reducing the experience drop when changing from an older variant to a newer of the same basic model (PzIIIg to PzIIIh etc).

PMCN · Post by **PMCN** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 1:22 pm

The odd thing is I remember there being an earlier conversion. I was sure that the early model III's convert to the IIIj in 42. I can remember seeing the numbers of them in the pool start to drop and the number of IIIjs to go up. If the blizzard issue can be resolved I can tell you shortly but my current german game is stalled awaiting a fix of the blizzard problem.

I agree that it would be nice if the tanks which were damaged were returned to the pool as the latest version. That was standard practice. Upgrading otherwise usually required that the unit be out of combat.

The germans tended to rotate their units, so only after withdrawl from the front line could a panzer division expect to obtain modern equipement (other than by field refits of damaged tanks).