Matrix Games Forums

EwaldvonKleist - don't disagree about the quantity of air power on the Eastern front. But if the game engine for either WITW or WITE2 gets the right measure for the effect of a squadron of planes supporting a battle, that problem should take care of itself.
It may well be posts of yours that I was reacting to. I read some of the links of earlier posts. An apparently good case for low numbers of hard kills. Still the overall friction affect of air against armor on the western front seens clear, so I was speculating on how it may have manifested itself and how it could be modelled.

Longer reply:
Air combat: As already mentioned: Imo planes as tank busters are overestimated. Tanks have the protection to resist shrapnels and shockwaves, so you need very heavy bombs or direct hits to kill them. The effect of bombing against soft targets or the transports is a completely different thing. I have not digged deep enough into the air war to comment much on this. Just one more thing: Soldiers reporting that they were scared of planes is a bad indicator. A soldier is probably scared by everything which can kill him. What counts are numbers of destroyed manpower and ressources.

Pockets: IMO the % of personnel escaped should be calculated based on the situation at the time of surrender. If it is a result of a 6 side attack, almost no one will escape. If the pocket is loose and the unit is attacked from one side only, many should escape. But always most equipment should be lost, usually soldiers care more about their life than the artillery.

Fatigue: According to van Crefeld, the German army, also caused by the experience from WW1, was very good at managing fatigue and exhaustion among the troops (unlike for example the americans), especially if one considers they never had real reserves to shuffle around. Not sure about the Soviets. Of course no soldier likes to be on the front and will not be happy to fight. Many got psychologic problems caused by the intense fighting. But this is not of interest here. The only important question is: To what extent was the fighting capability reduced by exhaustion? A mentally ill soldier can still be a good fighter.
The thing is: You can run your car engine for a month with 4000-6000rmp all the time in the first gear and you will suffer a breakdown.
Or you drive in a high gear and you can drive for 10 years. If I got Crefeld right, its the same with soldiers.


Experience: Agree that it is a kind of Sqrt(time) function aka most is gained in the first time.

Officers:
What exactly do you mean with "they (the Germans) diluted their officercorps"?

Manpower: I agree, that the Germans ran dry on manpower. But the Soviets, as far as I know, had similar problems. If the soviets lost to much, they should too have problems to get enough first class recruits.

ORIGINAL: wpurdom

...

The comments on ground support by air are interesting. There seems a great deal of support for the idea that air power is too effective at kills on armored targets. You can't go too far in nerfing air power, though. It seems clear that the presence or absence of air power was huge, including immobilizing mobile divisions. Air power was enough to guard Patton's flanks the tanks don't run or fight without ammo and gas, and the change of weather seems to have been huge in the Ardennes campaign. Perhaps one needs fewer kills and more disablements of AFVs by air power as well as more attrition of the internal supplies and MPs of the fighting unit, particularly on interdiction assaults on moving units. I suspect that a lot of the breakdowns of German tanks were caused directly or indirectly by air power.

If you have WiTW you can test out the model quite well by using the Breakout scenario.

Just sticking to relatively direct intervention in ground combat, you have three options:

a) ground support ... much as in WiTE, your air units appear when a battle breaks out
b) interdiction - but your target is the unit
c) interdiction - but you hit anything that moves in a geographical area

With the allied airforces for a few turns you can generate eye watering levels of interdiction over specific targets. What tends to happen say for (c) is if a Pzr division moves (either as a reserve reaction or as a chosen move) it will run into that airpower. Most of the direct losses in the first instance are disruptions. However, if it either carries on moving under intense air attack or enters combat then the game engine has a routine to turn disrupted elements into damaged elements (or destroyed).

So it tends to be incremental, move a short distance under heavy interdiction and you have a fatigued, beaten up unit that will probably recover if given time. Enter combat in that shape and you will take heavier losses as the unit has already lost cohesion etc.

Plane type has an impact too. 2 engined level bombers bomb from a high altitude and will mostly disrupt. Ground attack aircraft (such as Typhoons in WiTW) come in lower and may get some outright kills as a result - even on armoured targets.

ORIGINAL: loki100
With the allied airforces for a few turns you can generate eye watering levels of interdiction over specific targets. What tends to happen say for (c) is if a Pzr division moves (either as a reserve reaction or as a chosen move) it will run into that airpower. Most of the direct losses in the first instance are disruptions. However, if it either carries on moving under intense air attack or enters combat then the game engine has a routine to turn disrupted elements into damaged elements (or destroyed).

So it tends to be incremental, move a short distance under heavy interdiction and you have a fatigued, beaten up unit that will probably recover if given time. Enter combat in that shape and you will take heavier losses as the unit has already lost cohesion etc.

Will night movement be an option?

We discussed this at length for WitW Dev and decided that with week long turns it was a level of detail too far. As WitE2 has lower air interdiction you can assume that it won't be an option (although I may be proved wrong again).

Any chance of having the impact of command and control simulated in WITE 2? I have recently read "the Viaz'ma catrastrophe" regarding the operations in late 1941, and it really does an excellent job at explaining the massive C&C failure on the Soviet side, that completely negated other factors.

I would love to see something like the asymmetrical turns in Flashpoint Campaigns or the activation rolls in some of the AGEOD games. I need not be so drastic as in the AGEOD game but could be handle like a movement/supply/attack modifier that make units with poor C&C stick to their current positions and difficult to use in a proactive manner.

I realise that it is very difficult to implement without it completely breaking the game.

Agreed, I would love to see the WEGO system used in those games plus previous ones like V for Victory and World At War games from Atomic in WITE 2.

I will start such project as soon as I will win a lottery.

Its quite easy we just need to make a multi-millionaire a passionate eastern front wargamer so he will pay a group of developers to make a WEGO WITE size game. So if you one day meet one, you know what's your job.

Yes, still waiting for one such individual. Thought sillyflower with his castle is such a rich man, but he refuses to fund my, er..., research. [:D]

I was going to fund you, but then I found something better, or so I thought, than WITE.....WOMEN!
So now I have nothing.

Any news on a WitE2 release? Still possible for 2017? Will be looking for the Beta testers link [:)]

Yes, WEGO would be very cool for a game like WiTE.

Cheers,
Jason

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

WitE Released Dec 2010
WitW Released Dec 2014
WitE2 Release ??

Maybe the start of a trend, although I can assure you one that's unintentional. [:)] There is a post somewhere in here where I went into a little more detail about why it might take more or less than 4 years, but really in the final analysis the "it's done when it's done" pretty much sums up where we're at. When we're alpha testing the full war (right now just testing 1941 other than AI vs AI tests), that will be a major milestone. When we're beta testing instead of alpha testing, that will be another major milestone. We do appreciate the interest and I wish I could give you a better idea of the timing.

Ok, did find this post...

Any chance that we could have halftracks and carriers added in as individual pieces of equipment? I.e. just like trucks, these vehicles should also suffer attrition and losses even if the squad that they are carrying isnt knocked out.

I think that your wish has already been granted. This is because of the new chassis production system. To create key equipment like a Panther or a Jagdpanther you first need a Pz V chassis upon which to build the rest of the vehicle. So to build a Mech Inf Squad which includes a HT - you must have a HT chassis first.

That depends what period of the war you're talking about. The Lvov-Sandomir Soviet offensive of July 1944 is a good example.

The Germans were well dug in. They had 16 Pz, 17Pz, and 20 PzG in reserve. They had chosen their terrain well. They got reinforcements during the battle, including 23Pz and 24 Pz.

The upshot was that the Soviets advanced about 150 miles in four weeks, at the cost of 289K casualties, 65K permanent. They lost 1300 AFV and 1800 guns. (C J Dick, From defeat to victory, page 132).

The Axis lost 45K POW at Brody, and maybe 150K all in all for those 4 weeks. So that's a loss ratio of 2 to 1, and close to 1 to 1 in permanent casualties.

ORIGINAL: Red Lancer

I think that your wish has already been granted. This is because of the new chassis production system. To create key equipment like a Panther or a Jagdpanther you first need a Pz V chassis upon which to build the rest of the vehicle. So to build a Mech Inf Squad which includes a HT - you must have a HT chassis first.

Sounds great! Will the losses also be tracked?

ORIGINAL: kch

ORIGINAL: Red Lancer

I think that your wish has already been granted. This is because of the new chassis production system. To create key equipment like a Panther or a Jagdpanther you first need a Pz V chassis upon which to build the rest of the vehicle. So to build a Mech Inf Squad which includes a HT - you must have a HT chassis first.

Sounds great! Will the losses also be tracked?

They are already tracked, or what do you mean?

haha... What I meant is whether halftrack losses will show up in the command reports

Will there be a feature for us to extract our current game data (situation) into a CSV file? I would love if there was an option to do it automatically during the same moment every turn (for example when production is calculated). This would allow the player to keep a historical record of his campaign is developing and also help us learn from our mistakes! The more information (statistics) I get the more interesting it gets! The in game interface is not bad once your learn how to use it but it is not as flexible as for example excel when you quickly want to know ratios and historical trends.