ORIGINAL: GamesaurusRex
Flav:
I'm not disputing the fact that the Soviet can find an occasional battle that will net him a German retreat... but neither you, nor any of the snake oil salesman, can show me any legitimate evidence that a Soviet player can achieve "10 to 20 1:1 once-rolled battles that sequentially result in retreats per turn" against a reasonably competent German player who is cognizant of the potential and does not leave his troops hung out in vulnerable positions at the end of moves.
It is statistically impossible to legitimately achieve this. It could only be achieved by rerolling combat results until the string of retreats was arrived at. That is illegitimate.
The 1:1 = 2:1 rule can be manipulated to do this very thing (and apparently it is being exploited), but it is still an illegitimate exploit of the rule.
GamesaurusRex, laying aside the needless accusation of cheating, I really think you are not grasping the key issue here.
If WITE has a conventional CRT its something like 1-1 = 100% hold; 2-1 = 100% defender retreat. Its not the old SPI Napoleon at War where 1-1 was the classic 50/50 AR/DR.
Where there is a random element is in terms of reserve activation, allocation of SUs and of course the individual fire exchanges - I can give you a video of a combat resolution around this.
Now if in NAW I got 10 1-1s generating DRs that is statistically exceptionally unlikely. But that is not what goes on here.
I am only making very limited attacks, where to the best of my slowly developing knowledge, I have stacked the odds. Most of the combats SigUp has shown are going on around Moscow - look at our respective AAR treatments. On my side I have unit density (the price is my Ukrainian armies are on the point of collapse) and am operating from good defense lines (I've been digging some since about T4). I have the best Soviet commanders in the armies and the fronts and have moved SUs from other sectors to the Moscow battles.
So I have optimised things, but I think in the spirit of the game? I'm certainly paying the price elsewhere.
Having done all that I am slowly learning what then takes all that preparation into a successful attack. Ideally I want 4 more units than my opponent (ie manpower odds of 2-1+). I do think that, plus the operational preparations above give something ilke an 80/90% of a 1-1 becoming 2-1 (the +1 rule) or a 2-1 escalating to 3/4-1.
Now this is hard to get, I need to pick my spots with care, and I also need to think about the sense of such a commitment. So while MichealT will no doubt be screaming about game balance this relative certainty of a given outcome (think of the 2-1 in the old Advanced Third Reich) has to be set into context.
That context is that in most games, in 1941 a typical Soviet player (I excluded Sapper here) is struggling to muster a defense line so to get a good attack in takes some hard choices. You also need to decide if attacking is the best thing to do (fatigue etc) or are you better sitting still?
I'll happily send you saves - SigUp's as it came to me, mine before I did the end of turn routine. Rerun the attacks, both those that worked and those that failed (which is what I have done myself as part of trying to understand this) and see if you come to a really different set outcomes. There will be some variance, but not a lot, most of what worked, works every time.
But its all pretty limited and set into the context of a lot of preparation.
I realise this won't stop you chucking allegations of cheating around, but hopefully it may give you a different way to frame your understanding of why limited, dangerous, Soviet counterstrokes are possible in 1941.
