Matrix Games Forums

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Charles22:
skukko: To my knowledge there are no limits for AC or artillery in the preferences menu, and it seems noone else has seen them either (I'm not at home so I can't look).

There is. It's the "Air Sections" on the right side. It starts at XXX - which allows a historical amount of them, accoring to the manual. But it can be reset, like all the other Pref's, and the number there is how many Air Sections you can have at max.

Alex

Preferences section:

"Air Strikes" setting.

This will limit how many aircraft are available for each side.

BA Evans

Thanks guys, that ought to improve the game a lot. I'm wondering though if you've ever tried it? I noticed it too last night, considering such a notion was mentioned and perhaps what I have to say will be a surprise. When you pick totals for yourself and your opponent as to size of force for total force composition, the XXX is the default setting for what is being played. Perhaps something has changed since SPWAW's inception, because there used to be a 'negative' amount that went below the default level. Considering that this no longer works (try hitting the force reduction button when you're at XXX, to see what I mean), the amounts that you get when hitting the upward increments, at least 'used to be' what you "added" to the default force, to where if your air sections were defaulted to 26, any number you would have on the plus side beyond the default would only make matters worse.

Given that the default no longer goes to the negative, it would make sense that the numerical amounts in there are now 'totals', without consideration for the default, but I'm wondering if that's truly the case. I obviously don't mess around with those settings very much.

Originally posted by Charles22:
Surely, when you say 26 planes, you have to be exaggerating, surely you mean 26 'airstrikes' instead (some of the same planes, over and over - which is bad enough).

I don't know about the battle he was in, but when I played a WWII campaign as the Germans, I faced at least one battle with this many aircraft. After my first battle with the Americans where I got clobbered by aircraft, I then checked each time I faced Americans, if aircraft were not available to me, I would spend 3/4 of my support points on AA. That is on top of the 88AA and flakpanzers in my core. The worst battle was 24-26 aircraft of which I shot down all but one before it got to the target. Because I was so AA heavy (never bought any ob artillery at all from 1943 on), I never suffered the sort of core degradation that normally would occur. I ended the war with over 50,000 unspent repair points because I wasn't losing units to airstrikes.
thanks, John.

JohnG: You can achieve this in games against AI. Games against human comes trickier, because human opponent lets his/hers arty to drop bombs innthe smoky hexes. When this happensyou would move your AA-units, but they are pinned, so if there comes more bombs in same area your 88:s are unusefull. Same happens when you get them to map and fog of war takes LOS off them. I use 20mmflakvirgls because they can move independent, which is important if smilies keep their AC:s on the air: >When plane comes to hit its target, it hits 88:s mover, not 88KwK.

mosh

john g: Wow! Somebody that's actually finished a long campaign! I haven't been deep enough into campaigns due to the upgrades, but I noticed how the liberal amount of upgrade points might make things easy (but if you get slaughtered the first battle or two you really need it). Such a liberal amount though, and I've mentioned this before on the forum, might leave something to be desired. I don't recall which game it was in, perhaps Panzer Strike, but the amounts were less, or so it seemed. On top of that, if you fixed too many of your losses or upgraded too much at one time, you ended up missing battles. It made the game interesting, because you knew that the more of the monthly battles you missed, the less points you could score (seems like the co-op campaign I played with an old friend of mine, ended up with us getting like 57,000 points ), but this had to be balanced against putting new units in. I think it allowed you to use 10% of your core total, to apply to fixes and upgrades without a delay penalty, but I believe 10.1%-19.99% would delay you a month, and each 10% after that would be another month. So, if you had 1/2 your tanks wiped out (the computer would automatically fix some of them) you could still fight the next month, as long as you didn't replace too many. I do miss that strategy involved, in that bit, of that game.

Hey here's a weird idea (at least I think so). Some people have talked recently of multi-national forces. I wonder if any of these people have ever thought when picking support, of choosing AC from another nation? Imagine a P51 flying for the Ruskies.

Originally posted by Charles22:
Hey here's a weird idea (at least I think so). Some people have talked recently of multi-national forces. I wonder if any of these people have ever thought when picking support, of choosing AC from another nation? Imagine a P51 flying for the Ruskies.

The problem with that is the crew characteristics are generated for the nationality that you took the plane from. I noticed this when buying German equipment for the Spanish Civil War. The equipment comes with German crew if bought off the German list. Not quite the chance for an army to run captured or lent equipment like the docs make it out. If you are running a unit like the rag-tag boys who used any captured vehicle they came across, you end up with odd crew characteristics.
thanks, John.

Oh I suspected that the crew would be from the nation that I was taking in, which was precisely the point, to take in foreign units so it really was multi-national. In the USSR's case I would think the P51 unit and crew would be an upgrade.

Hey

Sorry this comes this late. When I had those 26 planes they all came at once and could not be coming to an other strike as there was no strikes before that. The fact that they were not all shot down is that those damn sturmoviks were hard to shoot down and my flakwirlings just ran out of shots in the end. Hard to say if I was mad about that as something like that may well have happened in the real life as I remember that they made more than 30000 of those sturmoviks and there was a lot of them around.

Also loosing the king tigers was my own fault as I was not mooving fast enough and the aircraft got them even with the timelag from the bomb command to the actual bombing run. Also the kings are so slow and when they fire they can not really move around. So the lesson - use panthers.

Originally posted by JTGEN:
Hey

Sorry this comes this late. When I had those 26 planes they all came at once and could not be coming to an other strike as there was no strikes before that. The fact that they were not all shot down is that those damn sturmoviks were hard to shoot down and my flakwirlings just ran out of shots in the end. Hard to say if I was mad about that as something like that may well have happened in the real life as I remember that they made more than 30000 of those sturmoviks and there was a lot of them around.

Also loosing the king tigers was my own fault as I was not mooving fast enough and the aircraft got them even with the timelag from the bomb command to the actual bombing run. Also the kings are so slow and when they fire they can not really move around. So the lesson - use panthers.

I have to disagree with you, I had 4 platoons of tanks survive the west front (never ever took them to east front), with all the American air attacks, I only lost 2 during the long campaign to air attack, admittedly I often had 30+ flak guns there to protect them.

I compared how panthers did against tiger I's after the fact to see if I had made the correct decision in not changing to panthers when they came available. When I fought 2000 points of panthers vs 2000 points of tigers, letting the ai run both sides all but one of the panthers was destroyed, only 2 of the tigers were destroyed. It seems clear to me that tiger I's will outfight panthers. The only advantage the panthers have is more movement, if you push your tigers like I did, full movement every turn accepting the occasional breakdown, you get the same movement you get nursing the panthers along. The kicker remains once they start shooting at each other the tigers will blow the panthers apart.

Tigers with their thicker armor and larger size will also survive bomb hits better. I have yet to see a tiger destroyed by any means that didn't have at least one crew survivor, and survivors are the key to keeping your exp up in a campaign game.

When they came available I upgraded to PzVIb and never changed to any other armor after that. To my playing style it is the perfect tank, it has all the qualities that a tank needs.
thanks, John.

I belive the accuracy of the panthers long 75 beats the tiger 1's. I prefer using both heavy tanks as well as faster panthers. Tigers will keep enemy from their objectives and panthers will flank them and get your objectives.

It is true that many of the crew survives the aircraft destruction and my tanks were sually in the next battle again experience of 95+. But if there comes an other bomber it can wipe out those survwing tankers. Happened a couple of times.

Now playing Utah to Rhine so no problems of the AI's use of aircraft so far.

Originally posted by john g:
...
I compared how panthers did against tiger I's after the fact to see if I had made the correct decision in not changing to panthers when they came available. When I fought 2000 points of panthers vs 2000 points of tigers, letting the ai run both sides all but one of the panthers was destroyed, only 2 of the tigers were destroyed. It seems clear to me that tiger I's will outfight panthers. The only advantage the panthers have is more movement, if you push your tigers like I did, full movement every turn accepting the occasional breakdown, you get the same movement you get nursing the panthers along. The kicker remains once they start shooting at each other the tigers will blow the panthers apart.
...
thanks, John.

Using the AI as a test tool has its advantages but also its limitations. The AI tends to move straight forward, a train wreck style of fighting as it has been called. This tests the basic features of the tank, armor, speed, etc. but does not test its capabilities.

A human player can take the panthers and maneuver them, taking long range shots with its long 75mm gun that is more accurate and has better penetration than the short 88mm on the Tiger.


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An old soldier but not yet a faded one.
OK, maybe just a bit faded.

The Panther may penetrate better, but the Tiger's superior shell size more clearly leads to a tank's destruction (25% larger).