RE: Utter madness... if you didn't believe something was wrong before
Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 2:43 pm
I don't believe simply criticizing the op for his frustration is warranted. As the axis there is very little room for error, so frustration for what may otherwise seem like a small issue is warranted.
The first thing that needs to be stated is that a lot of losses are disruption, which is to say the attacker didn't actually loose that many men. A lot of frustration could be abated if the combat report diferentiated losses (just for the attacker). So instead of ATCK lost 800 men DEF lost 800 men it would be
ATTCK losses DEF losses
200 killed 800 men
200 disabled
400 disrupted
The second thing is that almost certaintly what killed most of the units was the artillery and the Il-2s. Now the game seems to treat artillery as all or nothing. Either it participates or it doesn't. If it participates then it will be firing on the attackers troops at long range and they will take casualties. I can understand this in some cases but not in others. not so much. There is a window within which artillery can fire, which goes from its maximum range up to when the attacker gets too close to the frontlines that it risks shooting up its own units (the hug the Germans tactic the soviets employed in Stalingrad). In a Kursk like scenario it makes sense that the artillery would fire during the entire window, but that is more the exception then the rule, a great part of the art of the offensive is precisely reducing to the minimum the amount of response time that the defender has before the attack comences, so for example, one could make it so that the attacking general gets a series of checks to see when the combat will actually begin taking place. If he fails the first check it starts at 4k meters, makes the first fails the second starts at 3.5k meters etc. That way a greater variability of scenarios gets contemplated. The second issue has to do with motorized units, which seem a little too vulnerable to arty fire at the momment to be honest and whose speed in combat doesn't seem to be properly modeled. A motorized unit's greatest strength is precisely its speed, and methinks that some combat tweaking is necessary to account for the fact that the defender can fire many more rounds into an infantry squad moving forwards then a halftrack.
The last issue has to do with aircap, too many fighters are getting shot down by flak, which really makes no sense. The fighters are intercepting the Il-2s, which are flying over the german units. So how are the fighters getting hit by soviet flak? Also, the efficiency of ground support could use a tweak. Even if an Il-2 doesn't get shot down, it is simultaneously trying to evade a fighter whilst it also attempts to attack german units. That greatly reduces the Il-2s effectivness. What I would suggest is that if an air group is engaged by the CAP of the opposing player, its accuracy should be reduced by half to simulate how hard it is to line up an attack approach whilst doing evasive maneuvers.
The first thing that needs to be stated is that a lot of losses are disruption, which is to say the attacker didn't actually loose that many men. A lot of frustration could be abated if the combat report diferentiated losses (just for the attacker). So instead of ATCK lost 800 men DEF lost 800 men it would be
ATTCK losses DEF losses
200 killed 800 men
200 disabled
400 disrupted
The second thing is that almost certaintly what killed most of the units was the artillery and the Il-2s. Now the game seems to treat artillery as all or nothing. Either it participates or it doesn't. If it participates then it will be firing on the attackers troops at long range and they will take casualties. I can understand this in some cases but not in others. not so much. There is a window within which artillery can fire, which goes from its maximum range up to when the attacker gets too close to the frontlines that it risks shooting up its own units (the hug the Germans tactic the soviets employed in Stalingrad). In a Kursk like scenario it makes sense that the artillery would fire during the entire window, but that is more the exception then the rule, a great part of the art of the offensive is precisely reducing to the minimum the amount of response time that the defender has before the attack comences, so for example, one could make it so that the attacking general gets a series of checks to see when the combat will actually begin taking place. If he fails the first check it starts at 4k meters, makes the first fails the second starts at 3.5k meters etc. That way a greater variability of scenarios gets contemplated. The second issue has to do with motorized units, which seem a little too vulnerable to arty fire at the momment to be honest and whose speed in combat doesn't seem to be properly modeled. A motorized unit's greatest strength is precisely its speed, and methinks that some combat tweaking is necessary to account for the fact that the defender can fire many more rounds into an infantry squad moving forwards then a halftrack.
The last issue has to do with aircap, too many fighters are getting shot down by flak, which really makes no sense. The fighters are intercepting the Il-2s, which are flying over the german units. So how are the fighters getting hit by soviet flak? Also, the efficiency of ground support could use a tweak. Even if an Il-2 doesn't get shot down, it is simultaneously trying to evade a fighter whilst it also attempts to attack german units. That greatly reduces the Il-2s effectivness. What I would suggest is that if an air group is engaged by the CAP of the opposing player, its accuracy should be reduced by half to simulate how hard it is to line up an attack approach whilst doing evasive maneuvers.
