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I've been suffering through 1942 as Axis with no German armaments points and an ever increasing manpower pool. The divisions are suffering from a shortage of rifle squads. I've expressed my frustration over in the tech support forum and posted a bug. I consider it a bug because the production decisions made by the production gremlins bear no relationship to historical reality.

For the German infantry divisions, this is made worse by the wrong TOE. As of turn 66, I am looking at 130000 armament points spent on producing cavalry squads that were not and would never have been produced historically. The source of this result is, of course, the brain dead production gremlins and the bad TOE. The TOE puts 18 cavalry squads in every German infantry divisions. This is two companies. Only the wave 1, 2 & 12 divisions had cavalry in their recon elements and then only a single company (9 squads). This is per Niehorstor (http://www.ordersofbattle.darkscape.net ... g_army.htm). All other divisions had bicycle companies. I suspect that as the cavalry squads attrited out, they were replaced by bicycle squads because: 1) the horses all died over the winter of 1941; 2) as demonstrated by WITE cavalry is expensive; 3) looking through my collection of 1942 Panzer Campaign OOBs, I cannot find a single cavalry company in any infantry division. In Smolensk 41, a few of the wave 1&2 divisions have that cavalry company. Panzer Campaigns does put a cavalry company in some wave 11 divisions which Niehorstor has as bicycle.

So, the bottom line is that there were not as many cavalry squads used in Russia as shown by WITE. By 1942, cavalry squad usage had dropped to nil, and at 65 armaments points per squads, the ahistorical cavalry squad TOE warps production in the wrong direction.

So, whilst I have 13000 armaments points worth of cavalry in my game, I am short infantry, 50mm AT guns and artillery. All of this would be largely made up by that 130K (extra 110K) allocated to building cavalry. The 2000 cavalry squads should have been replaced by 2000 (bicycle) rifle squads @ 18K armaments points. Perhaps 2x3 will create a new element that includes the slight added cost for the bicycles.

The good news is OOB fix is easy. Leave whatever cavalry 2x3 thinks is correct in the starting units, but replace the TOE recon elements with two bicycle infantry companies.

In my tech support post, I complained about motorcycle squads. At least these are in the TOE and were still extensively used into 1942. Not so for divisional cavalry.

'Onkel' Robert got a point; though me never playing a campaign so far, only the shorter scenarios, I did have to deal with the various TO&E updates. Fact is, and that surely can reflected or implemented, that:

By 1942, when the reconnaissance units were usually needed to per-
form infantry assignments, they were all too often not strong enough in
terms of personnel, and also too weakly armed. Despite that, they were
often thrown in as "division firemen", wherever the situation was serious
and men were needed. With the obvious change in the eastern campaign
at the beginning of 1943, the fate of the reconnaissance units was sealed.
All the mounted squadrons were gradually withdrawn from the recon-
naissance units and formed into new cavalry regiments. Since reconnais-
sance assignments rarely needed to be carried out any more, the remain-
ing parts of the reconnaissance units were formed into so-called fusilier
battalions (a type of light infantry, see also section "New Infantry Divi-
sions") and thus strengthened the constantly sinking combat strength of
the infantry divisions.

Klink, Oberst
Luftwaffe & Heerespersonalamt

Correction, There are cavalry platoons in the regiments of some of the divisions. So there are some divisions that have a TOE of 18 cavalry squads. I went ahead and counted divisions/squads by wave and got a an average of 7.5 cavalry squads/division for waves 1-20.

Niehorstor shows no cavalry in the Jaeger divisions: WITE gives them 8.

Throughout the Niehorstor OOB, the most frequent comment was cavalry elements being swapped out for bicycle elements.

Part of my issue with cavalry sucking down so many armament points is the added cost of the cavalry is certainly not related to armaments production.

One way to address the wide variation in recon types in the German infantry divisions is to split it off into a support element for each divisions. For example, we might have four: one with 18 cavalry squads and 9 rifle squads (bicycle), one with 27 rifle squads (bicycle), one with 9 and 18, and one with 9 & 9 for the divisions with a single recon company instead of two. Each division is assigned the support unit corresponding to its division type.
This has the downside of using up a division support unit slot. It has the upside of better reflection of historical TOE, allowing finer management of production by allowing the setting the division target TOE separately from its expensive recon elements for those who have cavalry. In addition, the scenario designer has another tool to manage the introduction of improved types - especially the 75mm AT guns which I predict will continue to be a problem. Placing, say, one of the AT Gun companies (12) in the support unit along with the three AT guns for the recon battalion allows the broken swap logic to fire separately and for a smaller number of elements.

Unfortunately, I do not have time to pursue this today.

So Pavel should make an .exe change so production priority is set more to rifle squads (at least aways from expensive equipment). And Jim should create a bicycle squad which partially replaces cav squads in 41/42 OBs and completely from 43 on.
Do you know what happened with ROM/HUN Inf units? They seem to have a rather large cav component.

So Pavel should make an .exe change so production priority is set more to rifle squads (at least aways from expensive equipment).

I hope these types of decisions are not in code but in hidden configuration (or rules) data. My preference for a code change is to take the decision for A types out of the AI and make it explicit. One of two ways:
- Do not produce this A element type. An on off flag. Or somewhat more difficult,
- Produce at a percentage of "normal" where percentage is a number from say 25% to 150%.

I would not advocate any .exe changes until we better understand the current .exe in the .42-44 time frame. In particular, I want to see how the 75mm AT guns roll out in human verses human play. My issues with the Pz 38 swap logic seem to be addressed by how few survive into 1942 in more intense combat.

Somebody wanting to look at the cavalry fix could create a campaign scenario that dropped the cavalry squad count to 6 and added 12 rifle squads to the 41 and 42 infantry divisions. Also replace the cavalry squads with infantry squads in the jaeger divisions.

I will eventually create a scenario that has addresses a host of my little issues. I think it will help the Germans later in the war when they need it more. Not on this months list.

ORIGINAL: Denniss

So Pavel should make an .exe change so production priority is set more to rifle squads (at least aways from expensive equipment). And Jim should create a bicycle squad which partially replaces cav squads in 41/42 OBs and completely from 43 on.
Do you know what happened with ROM/HUN Inf units? They seem to have a rather large cav component.

Not sure about the TO&E changes in the game; haven't played the campaign yet, but...
I found this site for the RO TO&E: http://www.worldwar2.ro/organizare/?section=24
And this site for the HU units: http://www.denes.us/forums/YaBB.pl

Naturally one can also refer to Nierhoester, but those sites offer some details, too.

Klink, Oberst