Question on Combat Vehicles & MG's

[cathar1244]

One of the things I will do with my lab scenario is test some runs of something like historical divisions, and then check that against runs in which one side has its medium machine gun quantities doubled [or something similar]. Object will be to see how much difference the MG increase makes when heavy weapons like artillery are in play. In the past, I've gone though Dupuy-style efforts at rating weapons and noticed the artillery's effects tend to overwhelm that of the other weapons.

That is not to say that I don't think historical quantities of equipment aren't desirable in TOAW scenarios ... but it will be interesting to see how critical of a game factor it is concerning rifle-caliber weapons.

Cheers

[cathar1244]

Getting back to the question of, "how critical is the machine gun count"? I tested this using a lab scenario, and mentioned in the "Under the Hood" thread,

Summarized in a different way, a 100% increase in machine guns caused a rise in rifle squad loss rate of 15%.

The lab scenario mentioned was one of identical armies of five divisions on each side. The divisions were structured much like U.S. World War II divisions with an attached tank battalion. The object of the testing was to see the effect on casualties if the quantity of medium machine guns was doubled. As seen by the statement above, the additional machine guns caused more casualties ... but their overall effect is dwarfed by bigger weapons like artillery and tanks.

As to Mussey's question of how many MGs to include in a count, my sense is to follow r6kunz's advice and count only the weapons in the "teeth" battalions (as well as noting what he stated about providing infantry defense for division artillery etc.) The lab testing demonstrated that a force with double the machine guns will cause a significant (but not dominant) uptick in rifle squad, and probably, all soft target casualties. Over time, this difference may accumulate enough to bias scenario outcomes in favor of the MG-heavier force.

Cheers