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Truthfull how Guards are treated here is a pure Soviet Wet Fantasy.

I may say -historically-, and know of what I speak, but the fact is in front of everyone.

A Guard Unit gets promoted on the field. That does not mean that 'magically' the unit is 'better'. (The game treats National Morale as 'National Average Human Material & Training Quality')

There is the fundamental difference in how an Axis elite unit is (Factually created with criterias of human material selection pretty much).

Soviet Guards were veterans (yes that is covered by Experience at this stage and Unit Morale that can go above the 'national average human material & training quality' ahem ... National Morale').
So a Soviet unit wins battles, get some morale points, gets experience for its ground elements - there, Guard Unit.
That's in no less way the same behaviour your mundane German Division ought to have.

What should a realistic and historically coherent Guard Unit?
Larger TOE? Yes.
Prioritized reinforcements? Yes. You do that via REFIT! (As I am sure many Axis players keep on Refit the SS / Elite formations)
Superior Personnel by default? No.

It's in front of everyone - I repeat. A unit that wins some battles already gain morale / experience. To have a sudden oomph up ... is pure magic.
Soviet Guards then were oft used as spearheads / core units for relevant offensives, thus kept up a good 'training level' by getting their own troops to bleed and fight persistently.

If there is an admittance that 'it is a completely and fully ahistorical game mechanic for the sake of the game balance and the shifting of strategic initiative' this is a totally different matter.

Ideally Guards should lose their +10 NM, have expanded ToE, and their HQ should have a +1 Morale maybe (as SS HQs should get it) to represent a slight of added motivation / prestige of the unit / fanaticism.

Either that, or Germans should get their 'Veteran' promotions too! Win battles, *snaps finger* magically soldiers get ubermensh too!

Guards get higher national morale simply because it's to help them perform better in combat due to how the mechanics work. Morale seems to have a higher share in unit performance than individual TOE element experience.

I agree with that statement. What I am saying is that it is a pure game mechanic. Simple as.

IMHO Soviet Guard Unit farming is a clear exploit of a game system weakness. I don't do it as Soviet player and I also seek agreement from my Soviet opponent to also "play" historically.

Guards farming is a necessity if you want to have a strong 42 as the Soviets. You get guards rifle corps immediately as soon as you can scrape together 2 guards. These will be your heaviest hitters for a long, long time.

I do think it's gamey but on the list of things the soviets can do to game the system, it's not a particularly big problem I think. It would be nice if guards promotions was more complex than simply "win battles", though.

Both sides can farm wins, however. Typically you'll see some axis players do it for Romanians to get above their atrocious national morale.

IMHO Soviet Guard Unit farming is a clear exploit of a game system weakness. I don't do it as Soviet player and I also seek agreement from my Soviet opponent to also "play" historically.

That is a perfectly reasonable position to start from, but how can you possibly implement in practice ?

It is normal play for the Soviets to gang up on weak Axis units to cause casualties with a good loss ratio and increase their own units morale and experience. Sometimes it goes wrong and costs the Soviets heavy losses. It is all a fine judgement and guesstimate of when an attack is worth it or not.

It also farms wins that produce guards units. That is going to be part of the assessment as to whether to make an attack or not. Is it possible to not take this into account knowing it has a major impact on the game, or to assess if your opponent is doing more attacks than can be justified - I wouldn't want to play a game under those sort of conditions.

The resolution has to be to take farming wins out of equation for creating guards.
The simple solution is to get the guards percentages more appropriate. How they are created doesn't need to be complicated, maybe even make it just one win and then all Soviets players would get similar amounts, as Axis do for elite units.

ORIGINAL: tyronec

It is normal play for the Soviets to gang up on weak Axis units to cause casualties with a good loss ratio and increase their own units morale and experience...

The resolution has to be to take farming wins out of equation for creating guards.
The simple solution is to get the guards percentages more appropriate. How they are created doesn't need to be complicated, maybe even make it just one win and then all Soviets players would get similar amounts, as Axis do for elite units.

In my opinion the Guard units are as "veteran" as any "normal" German unit with some time on the front...and I doubt they can be considered "elite" in the same sense of elite Wehrmacht units, probably yes at the level of replacements and weapons, but not at the level of human elite, they do not represent a selection of the most suitable.

Having said that, that would be ideal... but I don't know to what extent this mechanic, at the moment, is essential for the further Soviet advance (at least for the AI). Although what you propose seems to me the most coherent (and I would prefer it to be) I would like to know how the Soviet AI works without that extra spearhead with added steroids.

In any case, whatever treatment those units receive at the NM level, at least the most sensible thing would be for the Guard units to be numerically as close to the real amount as possible, after all, the German player also cannot have more SS units or "Grossdeutschlands" than the real ones.

If you Surrender a Soviet unit with Wins (destroy it), when it comes back does it still show those Wins?

No it has its Win/Loss counts cleared.

Thanks carlkay58

something to bear in mind, if you merge a non-Gds brigade or division to create a corps it sheds its original win total, so while in WiTE1 (if I recall) this was retained and you could build on that total to eventually push the Corps to Gds status, in WiTE2 the corps is created with 0 wins - and needs to gain the wins for Gds status in its corps configuration (unless its created as Gds - if so it still has 0 wins but that doesn't really matter)

Confession [:@] - not sure how this is handled if the corps breaks down/rebuilds - I *think* the sub units take the unit wins and bring back that plus their individual wins. I'm pretty sure about the break down/retain but really not sure about what happens to wins accrued while broken down

something to bear in mind, if you merge a non-Gds brigade or division to create a corps it sheds its original win total, so while in WiTE1 (if I recall) this was retained and you could build on that total to eventually push the Corps to Gds status, in WiTE2 the corps is created with 0 wins - and needs to gain the wins for Gds status in its corps configuration (unless its created as Gds - if so it still has 0 wins but that doesn't really matter)

Confession - not sure how this is handled if the corps breaks down/rebuilds - I *think* the sub units take the unit wins and bring back that plus their individual wins. I'm pretty sure about the break down/retain but really not sure about what happens to wins accrued while broken down

Are you sure about this ?
I thought I had seen a rifle division in a rifle corps being promoted and then the corps being promoted without the corps having 9 wins in itself. But I may be mistaken.

AFAIR in Rifle and Cav Corps the basic units retain their individuality and their victory count (just shown when split i believe).
So if you have built a non-guard corps with one guards div and later another div of the corps divs get promoted then the corps is force-update to guards as 2/3rd of their units have individual guards status.

To exemplify my situation, again, in the game vs Loki....up to September 1943....I've 78 units (including SU) that have 9+ wins that are non-Guards....I'm not swimming in them....

You need to remove the HQ units for this table to have relevance since they don't get upgraded in the same way.

ORIGINAL: Denniss

So if you have built a non-guard corps with one guards div and later another div of the corps divs get promoted then the corps is force-update to guards as 2/3rd of their units have individual guards status.

I can confirm, I had this happen in StB, where a non-Guards rifle corps upgraded to Guards after 2 of the 3 divisions in the Rifle Corps upgraded to Guards Divisions.

@Jubjub - Has full relevance before as it does now as it was sorted that way then without HQ's...89 units now. Showing all units as I don't care if Loki sees them now:

nvm

@Jubjub - Has full relevance before as it does now as it was sorted that way then without HQ's...89 units now. Showing all units as I don't care if Loki sees them now:

Oh I misread the first table since I thought the HQ names were the unit names.