Matrix Games Forums

Urban population densities

http://www.demographia.com/db-intlua-area2000.htm

Average Population per Square Mile of Urban Areas for a few choices examples from that table:

Eur 7,400 (non UK)
UK 10,000
US 2,500
Can 4,000
Hong Kong 76,200
Japan 12,500

Obviously it should not be possible to get densities of soldiers up anywhere near these, but indeed 72 per square miles is nowhere near the lowest urban population densities on that table (2,500 for US urban areas).

Yes, I know I'm a scientist and should use metric, but for geography miles is SO MUCH more intuitive! [:D]

ORIGINAL: Shark7
Seems to me...
Those complaining about having massive numbers of troops wiped out by huge stacks of artillery are possibly putting huge stacks in defense as well. After all, how are you still holding against that huge stack if you don't have a huge stack of your own.
Basically big defending stack has a lot of troops in a small area, and the more troops you have in any given area, the more effective an artillery barrage will be.
The problem may be more of a stacking issue than an artillery issue TBH.

[8|]

Right. My opponent, the Japanese player, stacks a hex full of infantry and artillery, nukes me to death, threatens to overrun the hex...and it's MY fault for trying to hold the hex by bringing in as much infantry to reinforce as possible?

[8|]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

ORIGINAL: Shark7
Seems to me...
Those complaining about having massive numbers of troops wiped out by huge stacks of artillery are possibly putting huge stacks in defense as well. After all, how are you still holding against that huge stack if you don't have a huge stack of your own.
Basically big defending stack has a lot of troops in a small area, and the more troops you have in any given area, the more effective an artillery barrage will be.
The problem may be more of a stacking issue than an artillery issue TBH.

[8|]

Right. My opponent, the Japanese player, stacks a hex full of infantry and artillery, nukes me to death, threatens to overrun the hex...and it's MY fault for trying to hold the hex by bringing in as much infantry to reinforce as possible?

[8|]

Nope, what I'm saying is that the game allowing those huge stacks is the problem. And if you do stack that many in a hex, expect heavy losses since artillery works best against concentrations. There should be stacking limits on all hexes for both sides.

There should be stacking limits on all hexes for both sides.

 
Again, I say: seems intuitively like a good idea, but exactly on what basis would such a limit be imposed? As I've shown above, the nearly 400K soldiers in the hex in question only works out to be ~72 soldiers per square miles, which is not compared to modern urban pop densities of 2,500 per square mile that high. It is not even high relative to half or one-fifth modern pop densities.
 
Moreover, as Vaned74 points out
 

These types of concentrations were by no means uncommon in world war 2 (and certainly not in world war 1).  For example, Anzio - the allied front in february was less than 20 miles across - and no more than about 10 miles deep; in it were packed about 75,000 Allied troops opposed by almost 100,000 German troops within about 15 miles of the front.  In other words, on an area basis about 1/4 of the space of the 46 mile wide hex in question.

 
Assuming his memory of the space is correct, there were at Anzio 75,000 allied troops in a roughly 200 square miles area, and another 100,000 Germans in a 150 square miles area. 175,000 in a total area of roughly 350 square miles. That works out to be around 500 soldiers per square mile, which is 690.% higher than the in-game example in question.
 
*Note: your actual mileage may vary as a result of the presense or absence of spanners . . .*

The solution is easy, and obvious:
 
Play vs AI.
 
Playing vs AI avoids the gamey "unbelievably huge stack of units".
 
Thus, playing vs AI is the best, most satisfying method of enjoying WitP:AE.[:)]

ORIGINAL: Shark7
Basically big defending stack has a lot of troops in a small area, and the more troops you have in any given area, the more effective an artillery barrage will be.

You’re looking at it wrong, it isn’t the density of troops that would matter, rather it’s the dilution of artillery that would matter, thus reducing, not increasing overall casualties if every single unit was fired upon.

In the cited example the Japanese player had 2,406 tubes, attacking an area of roughly 1,600 square miles. But even if we assume every single defending unit was within 3 miles of the front lines (extremely doubtful), that’s still an area of 120 square miles to bombard in order to affect every single defending unit.

On pages 218-219 of Breakout and Pursuit, it discusses the force and artillery assigned to VII corp for the attack. In total 7th Corp HQ had 258 tubes of artillery under its control for the attack. Then you have all the artillery of 6 infantry divisions and 2 heavy armored divisions added to that. And finally the two flanking corps (VIII and XIX) and their divisions added support to the artillery fire as well.

Now when you add in all the mortars for all the divisions, along with their intrinsic heavy artillery and infantry guns, I’m sure you’ve got well in excess of the 2, 406 tubes Japan was firing in the above cited example, but there is far more heavy artillery being used by the US here than Japan had available in the above example.

All these tubes however were not spread across 120 square miles of frontage attacking 8 full Corps, 2 divisions and myriad other units. No at Cobra all the tubes were directed to saturate an area roughly 5 miles by 2, or just 10 square miles of land directed at just a single division and any small units attached to it.

Now just for arguments sake, let’s assume the number of tubes firing in both attacks is identical. That means that Japan could only afford to direct 20 tubes per square mile in their above attack. But the US could direct 240 tubes per square mile in theirs. And to top it all off, first 350 fighter bombers, then 1, 800 heavy bombers, then another 350 fighter bombers and finally 396 medium bombers were to also saturate the target box area.

According to the article in my first post, before the battle Panzer Lehr was short 2,506 men, from an initial strength of 14,699 when it arrived at Normandy. That would mean it had 12,193 men at the commencement of the Cobra bombardments.

A little over one week later on 1 August, Panzer Lehr reported strength of 11,018 men, which means they lost 1,175 men during Cobra and the ensuing breakout battles. As noted in the article about 950 of these men were lost in the 2 day breakout phase that included the intense bombardments.

With so much firepower directed at it, the Cobra example would make it obvious that a bombardment with just 20 tubes per square mile would hardly be felt, and casualties would be minimal. The individual units themselves should barley lose a squad or two with such diluted firepower.

Jim

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
These types of concentrations were by no means uncommon in world war 2 (and certainly not in world war 1).  For example, Anzio - the allied front in february was less than 20 miles across - and no more than about 10 miles deep; in it were packed about 75,000 Allied troops opposed by almost 100,000 German troops within about 15 miles of the front.  In other words, on an area basis about 1/4 of the space of the 46 mile wide hex in question.

Assuming his memory of the space is correct, there were at Anzio 75,000 allied troops in a roughly 200 square miles area, and another 100,000 Germans in a 150 square miles area. 175,000 in a total area of roughly 350 square miles. That works out to be around 500 soldiers per square mile, which is 690.% higher than the in-game example in question.

*Note: your actual mileage may vary as a result of the presense or absence of spanners . . .*
[/quote]
A game hex is 40 miles across, so it is 1,600 square miles in area. if it is in nautical miles, that makes it 46 statute miles across and 2,116 square miles in area. Gee whiz, that is a little bit bigger than Anzio and gee whiz that is very close to all of Normandy which was 45 miles from Auderville to Coutances and 55 miles from Coutances to Troarn (assuming I can read a map right). If I remember my history right there was some british divions in there and a few Canadians and some US doggie divisions too. I don't think they all shot at the same time either.

I agree with Jim on the analysis and also Mike earlier about supply consumption.

Stacking is not really the issue.  Supply consumption for artillery is way off, by maybe a factor of like 10+.  Increase supply consumption considerably and your a long way there - imagine as Japan having to pour 10,000 tons of supplies a day into a bombardment of this magnitude (and as noted above, this is not a big bombardment by WW2 standards - most of the 2400 guns were small 75mm in the divisions and brigades and I'm guessing there are probably 800-1,000 mortars of 81mm or less in size in that total as well).  All told you may be talking about a total of 800 guns of 100mm or more and those in the 155mm to 240mm perhaps less than 200.  Not a lot of heavy arty by western standards for basically 18 division equivalents.

Effects as Jim pointed also need much tweaking - it may not be the 'effect' per individual gun but the distribution and/or replication of that 'effect' on the units in the hex.

Remember that the main effect of bombardment, especially on the tactical offensive, is generally neutralization - as was cited vs. Panzer Lehr. This is particularly more true in the case of troops in fortifications - the primary effect there is neutralization and disruption of communications/spotting until your assault troops can close in. Note that artillery used in the immediate tactical defensive is generally more destructive in its effects. Although, on an operational level it can be very disruptive - think of the pre-assault phase bombardment by the Soviets at Kursk designed to disrupt the German assembly areas. Not an overly 'destructive' bombardment but caused a lot of delay and loss of coordination/timing amongst the assaulting troops as they had to take cover (I would liken this to a "bombardment mission" in WitP by the defenders).

So, I think in terms of the following changes to AE:

1) supply consumption increased dramatically for bombardments; perhaps even the toggle to select a bombardment level and or type (rear area disruption vs. front lines, etc.; counter battery...)

2) better counter battery fire effects

3) more disruption caused by the attacker's artillery in deliberate or shock attacks; more destruction caused by the defender's artillery when subject to deliberate or shock attacks

4) less destruction and more disruption caused by straight bombardment missions

By the way, supply consumption for warships reloading their primary armament is also way off - by similar if not greater proportions.  For example, to refill a standard 9 gun battleships main armament may cost me something like 9 guns * 1 ton per round * 9 'ammo' per gun or 81 tons.  The 'ammo' represents a lot more than 1 round; but, when resupplying it only appears to count as '1'.

I am sorry Jim Burns, i did not see your post before I did mine. You are right, artillery did not spread itself out over square miles artillery shot at targets and sometimes shot lanes for an advance. It is very closely directed so that my young a$$ does not get to be a friendly shrapnel casualty. It is sharp and directed and specific and the bunnys are the best there ever was even the doggie bunnys. Artillery is a pointed stick it is a 10 mile sniper it can't smother a square mile as much as we would wish it could, but it does smash the gomers in that little space in front of my hole.

ORIGINAL: castor troy

bombardments have been looked at for patch 2, we will see how it was dealt with...

Good!

A nice solution would be that the bombardment causes disruption and fatigue, but far less casualties. Also should use up supply at double the rate (or even triple) it does now, to stop those multi-day barrages that could never have been kept up.

It took Montgomerey something like 2 weeks to prep for his massive arty bombardment when the allies crossed over into mainland italy.

Forces are - realistically - not distributed uniformly in a hex, and artillery is aimed at targets (beyond the view and control of the player) . . . not carpeting the hex uniformly.

Perhaps some of you geeks should check out some real battlefields and read up some more about the actual application of weapons. [8|]

ORIGINAL: vaned74

I agree with Jim on the analysis and also Mike earlier about supply consumption.

Stacking is not really the issue. Supply consumption for artillery is way off, by maybe a factor of like 10+. Increase supply consumption considerably and your a long way there - imagine as Japan having to pour 10,000 tons of supplies a day into a bombardment of this magnitude (and as noted above, this is not a big bombardment by WW2 standards - most of the 2400 guns were small 75mm in the divisions and brigades and I'm guessing there are probably 800-1,000 mortars of 81mm or less in size in that total as well). All told you may be talking about a total of 800 guns of 100mm or more and those in the 155mm to 240mm perhaps less than 200. Not a lot of heavy arty by western standards for basically 18 division equivalents.

Please remember that in the idiotic WITP land combat system, "guns" include HMG's, "knee mortars", 37mm AT pieces, and all kinds of other things that no self-respecting artilleryman would consider a "tube". I wish this designation was withheld for things that could actually perform a "barrage" mission. Field pieces of 75mm +, mortars of 80mm +, rockets of 90mm and up..., basically units with enough range and punch to be of some effectiveness.

And because the differential in rate-of-fire and weight-of-shell are pretty much inversely proportional, the weight of ammunition expenditure per tube would remain fairly constant per tube except for the "super-heavies". I doubt that even 1/4th of those 2406 "guns" would fit my description of "bombardment effective tubes". But even then 600 tubes firing at a sustainable rate for 8 hours is about 16,800 TONS of ammunition expenditure in 1/3rd of a turn!

Ten turns of that is 168,000 supply points of just ammunition. In real life it would take the Japanese a year to move that to the front in China..., if Japanese factories could produce that many shells to begin with. And that's before you even consider ammunition for the other "guns" and the infantry, POL, food, replacements, spare parts, and all the other misc. supplies an army uses up. The whole situation is absurd.

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

Urban population densities

http://www.demographia.com/db-intlua-area2000.htm

Average Population per Square Mile of Urban Areas for a few choices examples from that table:

Eur 7,400 (non UK)
UK 10,000
US 2,500
Can 4,000
Hong Kong 76,200
Japan 12,500

Obviously it should not be possible to get densities of soldiers up anywhere near these, but indeed 72 per square miles is nowhere near the lowest urban population densities on that table (2,500 for US urban areas).

Yes, I know I'm a scientist and should use metric, but for geography miles is SO MUCH more intuitive! [:D]

I lived in Hoboken, NJ where the population was about 40,000. Although the city was 1.1 square miles, only 2/3 a square mile was residential with the rest being industrial/warehouse. So basically it approached the population density of Hong Kong in your chart. Even then there was plenty of room for streets, sidewalks, and so on. If all the multi-story buildings were one story barracks-like for troops, there would still have been lots of room left for maneuvering, combat, and what not.

Clearly stacking is not the answer, even for casualty rates. The concentration of troops would have to increase by perhaps 4 orders of magnitude to reach the point where the artillery was hitting people just by shooting in a general direction.

Nice info. Thanks for digging it up.

Basically:
having 100,000 men with 1000 guns against 200,000 men with 2000 guns concentrated in the same area should result in about equal loses - as troop density is doubled, effects of the artillery fire are also doubled.

"Normal attacking frontage" of division could be somewhere between 1-5 miles depending on oposition.

Also the defender should suffer more disruption and attacker more kills in attacks as attackers units are exposed, have to cross open areas while defenders often sit in their trenches, foxholes, bunkers, ...

It's not at all a given that double the number of troops pack into the exact same space at twice the density. There is loads of extra space in the hex behind the front lines of each side, and the game does not try to model things down to that level. Given the mix of troop types (different militaries), unit types, range of weapons, tactics & doctrine, etc. it just doesn't make sense to compare the density of the two forces as though they are, in effect, different numbers of checkers packed into identical spaces.

Even further, the artillery is aimed at something(s) or some point(s), which the code also does not attempt to model. The principles you mentioned about troop exposure versus being within trenches, fortifications, etc. make sense to apply, but the troop density relationship seems way to uncertain and variable.

All I know is that a fix is needed.  In my game with Miller, he just arrived at Nanyang.  The Chinese have 2,000 AV behind four forts and have never been disturbed in the game - plenty of time to get dug in and prepare for the enemy's approach.
 
The Japanese have four good divisions and four artillery units.  Here's what happened: 
 
Day One Japanese bombardment - 836 casualties.
Day Two Japanese bombardment - 2,192 casualties.
 
836 is disproportionate and ridiculous.  The Japanese can sustain that indefinately and my well-dug in, 100% prepped troops will just evaporate.  The Japanese won't have to attack and won't even expend much in the way of supplies.
 
But 2,192???  In one day???  That's the Japanese Artillery Death Star on Steroids.
 
[8|]

I am playing as Japan, and I agree; it's out of control. It's not just a Japanese thing either I am sure, we just see it there first. Once an Allied player has 6 artillery units in a hex, they will do the same thing to the Japs.

A fix is coming, but I also don't want to turn the clock back to WITP; in WITP, massed artillery was pretty useless, and not even worth it in China. As Japan, all you could accomplish with artillery in China was to train Chinese troops.

The best spot is somewhere in between.

ORIGINAL: Whisper

A game hex is 40 miles across, so it is 1,600 square miles in area. if it is in nautical miles, that makes it 46 statute miles across and 2,116 square miles in area.

Area of a hexagon is calculated by summing the area of all 12 triangles formed by the apothems of each side. Not by multipling "length x width" as with a square.

Not that I _knew_ that before I found this site, but here ya go [:D]

ttp://www.math-prof.com/areavolume/hexagon.aspx

Hexagon 46 miles across:

Area of hexagon = 5,497.53 square miles

ORIGINAL: Q-Ball
but I also don't want to turn the clock back to WITP; in WITP,

But WitP still treated artillery too effectively, at least in the sense of casualties caused. Where it lacked proper effects was in disruption/fatigue/and morale loss caused. A massed artillery barrage was sufficient to render a division combat incapable for 24 or 48 hours, but it was not capable of killing off vast numbers of men in just one or two barrages. And it wasn’t something that could be launched day after day after day like we see in game.

Artillery lethality during WWII was real, but it was the total sum of hundreds of thousands of barrages that occurred during the war that generated such large casualty figures being caused by artillery. Someone has read too much into the fact artillery was the big killer of the war and far overcompensated for it. The Cobra example I gave is probably one of the most, if not the most, intense barrage any one unit received during the war. And yet it lost fewer than 1,000 men as casualties to the barrage.

Casualty figures being caused in AE actually need to be toned down even lower than what WitP and CHS allowed, but disruption/fatigue/morale loss needs to be increased. But only for one or two units max, no country ever diluted the strength of an artillery barrage by targeting dozens of divisions at once, they always focused fire at the main point/area of attack.

A hex with 8+ corps of infantry present should not be a hex that you can simply batter your way though with pure artillery firepower by decimating every single unit at once, that simply didn’t happen during WWII. Most large concentrations of troops in WWII were not defeated through firepower. Most were defeated by being surrounded and isolated from supplies.

Japan tried bashing their way into Changsha starting in 1939 and they failed every single time they tried it. They had some tactical successes in the different battles fought to try and take the city, but in the end the sheer mass of Chinese defenders was simply too large to overcome and they retreated from every assault they made.

Maneuver was king in WWII and in a case like the historical situation at Changsha where firepower alone couldn’t win the battle, Japan should have tried to outmaneuver the city and isolate it from supplies. But of course they lacked sufficient units to do it because huge portions of their armies were already tied up defending their rear area supply net.

Here we have this beautiful new map with lots of room to maneuver on in China, and we find the changes made in AE actually reward players for concentrating their forces to bash away at frontal assaults instead of trying to outmaneuver an opponent.

Large stacks of 4, 6, 8, 10 or more corps (read division for all but the Chinese) of troops should be virtually impregnable from direct assaults, especially if they are well fortified. It should be a requirement that they be first isolated and then starved out before any hope of overcoming them occurs in game.

Jim

ORIGINAL: Q-Ball

I am playing as Japan, and I agree; it's out of control. It's not just a Japanese thing either I am sure, we just see it there first. Once an Allied player has 6 artillery units in a hex, they will do the same thing to the Japs. Glad I am not the only one who sees that this door swings both ways...

A fix is coming, but I also don't want to turn the clock back to WITP; in WITP, massed artillery was pretty useless, and not even worth it in China. As Japan, all you could accomplish with artillery in China was to train Chinese troops. Massed artillery is never useless...., provided you mean "massed" in the Russian sense. More than 5,000 artillery tubes per hex (25,000 WITP "Guns") WILL disrupt your opponent! Of course it will also require 12,000 railway boxcar loads of ammunition to fire one 8 hour barrage with all those artillery tubes. Artillery will work..., but it is FAR MORE expensive to use it than the game implies.

The best spot is somewhere in between. Agreed.

The original WITP made what amounted to a 60 minute night "shoot and scoot" naval bombardment into a tactical nuclear strike. After much complaint, naval bombardments were reduced to something much more rational. Hopefully, rational minds will again win out and bring land based "bombardments" back to the realms of reality as well.