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The link below is about casualty rate during WW2..read Jason C comments he is very very knowledgeable and it makes you think about the casualty rates in CO and how it seems Co casualty rates are extremely high.

LINK

Here is an example..he also talks about ammo and usage rates...well worth a read and kind of relates o our issues with ammo usage and casualties which is then probably tied into units in CO being too brittle etc etc.

"The average casualties for a US division in a single day of combat in the ETO ran about 25, with 50 for the highest division totals across the force.

That average includes periods of low casualties - quiet fronts, pursuit operations with no defenders opposite, etc.

Offensive operations against serious opposition, the rate for a division-day could hit 300. It practically never went above that level for any period of time. I mean, there are single outlier exceptions like 2/3rds of one division isolated early in the Bulge fighting and captured, but those are once in the whole war affairs, not anything routine. 300 a day for an infantry division pushing through the hedgerows or battering against the westwall, happened often enough to count as normal for such operations.

The IDs sustaining losses that high had 9 infantry battalions, plus an engineer battalion, attached armor, recon, artillery etc. The casualty rates in the infantry were 3 times that of the other combat arms, but they were not zero in the other arms, and there are a lot of men in those other categories. The infantry battalion losses run 67-75% of the overall total. In the armor divisions, there are fewer AIBs; casualties per division day are lower, but most of the losses are still concentrated on the AIBs.

This means a typical US infantry battalion in heavy combat, with an attack role, might lose 25 men in a day. Vs. a whole war average, all operation types and tempos, of that much per division day.

CM players lose that much from each of their engaged companies in less than an hour and don't bat an eyelash. Our historical counterparts definitely did not mash their forces into the enemy that recklessly.

Losses go higher on some other fronts and periods - 500 men lost in a day of heavy combat happens in the east, for example, both in Russian formations and sometimes in German ones. They stay within a factor of 2 of the US figure given above - 50 per battalion per day at the outside extreme of "bloody", in other words.

Units taking losses at anything like those rates - 25-50 per battalion per day - need a strong replacement stream reaching them continually to remain combat effective. They burn out on a time scale of a few weeks otherwise, and a month of such action will wreck a formation even if it is receiving replacements, requiring a spell off the line to refit and train new men etc.

The number of occasions over the entire war in which possession of a specific territorial objective mattered more than losses, to justify anything like the scale of losses we routinely incur in CM fighting, can be counted on one hand. Critical passages in breakthrough fighting, that could seal the encirclement fate of whole army groups or avoid the same - about it."

Very interesting, Jason. I wonder all the time why CO casualty rates are so high. Some of it down to the commanders, no doubt, just chucking them in.

Casualties in games do not always represent an actual number of people KIA or WIA. Units sustaining casualties can lose effectiveness very rapidly.
The loss of some key personnel can render a unit unfit for service despite the fact that most people are unharmed. Infantry have a remarkable ability
to go to ground if not adequately led and directed. These troops are temporarily MIA and not doing their job, hence are casualties for game purposes.
A hectare of forest could contain a large number of uninjured personnel who were effectively "lost" especially in night ops. Even peacetime military exercises
result in loss of command and control which can render a unit ineffective. In the 80-90 day Normandy campaign the Canadian Army lost c5000-6000 KIA
and about 25000 WIA from two Infantry and one Armoured division, almost all infantry (from about 22 battalions of infantry). Since the strength of an infantry battalion
at that time in that army was around 500 combat personnel the rate of casualties was fairly frightful. If I do the math several infantry battalions were annihilated
a few times over in about three months. Some lucky ones only had 100+% turnover in that campaign. June, July and August.

I'd say 2 factors relevant to Command Ops, and one observation at the end:

1) All the scenarios are high-tempo operations where you'd expect to see casualties right at the top end. For obvious reasons that's the whole point of the game. So when Jason says "The number of occasions over the entire war in which possession of a specific territorial objective mattered more than losses, to justify anything like the scale of losses we routinely incur in CM fighting, can be counted on one hand" that matters for Combat Mission because there are often a lot of scenarios that represent 'an ordinary day pushing through hedgerows' but less for Command Ops because there aren't any scenarios where 'nothing much happened'.

2) I don't care about casualties beyond how they impact on what I can do in that scenario. I don't have to write letters to the dead electronic soldier's families and it would be a terrible idea to have a scoring system that punished the player for doing literally anything that caused losses, so this isn't really a fixable thing. I'm always going to send my guys once more over the top to get that last objective before the scenario timer runs out, and there just isn't anything you can do as a game designer to stop me from doing that beyond making casualties persistant from scenario to scenario (which CM does).

3) Remember that casualty rates were a problem in CO and we had to ask for them to be upped by increasing fire effectiveness and making sure that units could always request ammo rather than just running out and having to wait for nighfall. The game as a whole is massively improved because of that and I don't want to go back to the days of units being able to blast away at each other for 12 hours and cause no losses and make no progress.

Which in game casualty figures are you specifically referring to?

You can't really go with the overall end game casualty figure, as most of the battles that we command, are very different to what happened historically.
I think some of the encirclements I have managed to pull off would have resulted in a lot more surrenders, and less death, had it been a real life situation.

I think that a small unit engagement would be a better example of whether the casualty rate is about right. If you have an example of this I would interested to see it.
I personally think it is about right.
We don't want to go back to when a 35 man anti tank unit can hold off an entire Regiment for 2 days, do we?

ORIGINAL: dazkaz15

Which in game casualty figures are you specifically referring to?

You can't really go with the overall end game casualty figure, as most of the battles that we command, are very different to what happened historically.
I think some of the encirclements I have managed to pull off would have resulted in a lot more surrenders, and less death, had it been a real life situation.

I think that a small unit engagement would be a better example of whether the casualty rate is about right. If you have an example of this I would interested to see it.
I personally think it is about right.
We don't want to go back to when a 35 man anti tank unit can hold off an entire Regiment for 2 days, do we?

Keep in mind that surrenders are "casualties" as it refers to a force's strength.

They don't necessarily have to be buried or treated in a medical tent, but they're still lost to the command.

ORIGINAL: jimcarravallah


Keep in mind that surrenders are "casualties" as it refers to a force's strength.

They don't necessarily have to be buried or treated in a medical tent, but they're still lost to the command.

I was referring to the Surrender figure, as opposed by the loss figure, that can be seen in the AAR.
See here for an example:
tm.asp?m=3395481

Out of 32000 losses 10000 surrendered, the other 22000 died.

ORIGINAL: dazkaz15

ORIGINAL: jimcarravallah


Keep in mind that surrenders are "casualties" as it refers to a force's strength.

They don't necessarily have to be buried or treated in a medical tent, but they're still lost to the command.

I was referring to the Surrender figure, as opposed by the loss figure, that can be seen in the AAR.
See here for an example:
tm.asp?m=3395481

Out of 32000 losses 10000 surrendered, the other 22000 died.

OK, now I understand what you were referring to.

When I was managing a team tasked with developing a "soldier health" reporting module to support a near real time network enabled logistics "unit health" system report, "casualties" included killed in action, soldiers removed from battle for long-term medical treatment (which includes "shell shock" and disease), and unaccounted for (during combat reporting assumed to be captured).

The idea was that using a network and software to collate information, cross referenced with information from networked treatment centers, a commander up to the brigade level could get almost instant insight to a unit's readiness for combat (or training) instead of waiting for the traditional morning and evening paper form-based "reporting cycles" to accumulate information. So the definitions became pretty rigid to support the database designed to accumulate the information.

IMO, it would be a neat feature to have a "stragglers/MIA" casualty category that temporarily affected units. Stragglers would tend to occur during forced marches during the day, any movement at night, retreats, and routs. Some percentage of the stragglers would re-unite with their units at a later time- that night, the next few days, etc. The more 'severe' straggling- those resulting from routs and retreats- would take longer to come back, and with a lower percentage actually making it back. Some would show up as surrendered as well. Morale and determination would be variable affecting how well a unit recovered from straggling.