Matrix Games Forums

Hello,

hopefully JEB Davis still hangs around.

I recently came back to SP:WAW after a break period from gaming in general. I recalled a brief conversation with him
back in the day about lowering the hyper soft casualties inherent in SP:WAW due to it's backbone being based off of SP:III
(which always had such a tendency.....having owned that game)

My own ad-hoc solution was to increase just the INF toughness value.....initially to max (200%) but later I reduced it by half to 150 because
it made the built in scenarios in particular very hard to play. I noted in your signature that you had an entire
set of Preferences designed to encourage "Low Carnage" and make the game behave towards soft targets more like how WinSPWW2 treats infantry.

Some of the settings though seem to suggest cross purposes however. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the whys for each setting.
The Arty vs. Soft rating for example would seem to counter increasing the INF toughness.

Anyway, just looking for feedback before I try most of the settings for myself (sans Tank Toughness)

Steel Panthers Forever baby........ Been playing since the original came out in 95....back in days when Floppies were still used. lol.

Yup, still hanging around. Here's a brief summary of the why's for the settings that directly affect infantry casualties:

Default for all is 100.
80 Hitting - reduces the chances for direct fire to hit it's target.

150 Infantry Toughness - Reduces casualties by 50%, note 150 is a round-off point which turns results of 2 casualties into 1.

180 Artillery vs Soft - Gives indirect fire back most of the effectiveness it lost when v.8.403 came out (memory is hazy here as to whether this happened with 8.4 or 8.403). Without this boost, artillery fire is anemic, and I'm not sure 180 is high enough, honestly.

As in my sig. line there are other settings too. To me they just all work together to increase the realism feel of the game.

Hi,

Thx.

That answers my primary question. The other settings all made sense in the context of lowering WAW's legendary lethality vs. grunts. (A holdover from the SP:III engine WAW was based off of)

The arty vs soft and hard settings though seemed counter-intuitive and drove my question. Don't recall but vaguely complaints about arty being de-toothed in the final version of the game. I seem to recall it was initially way over the top, but was adjusted downward.

Will play around with it. Admittedly some of the in-built scenarios play smoother when using the default settings and with this in mind i revisted default from my usual setting change (which was 200 Inf toughness initially, then 150 because while 200 made INF alot harder to kill it made winning scenarios all but impossible in the time frame given in turns)

Have to admit....it was "fun" to be able to melt INF units with but a few good bursts of late war Shermans with the big gun and all those MG's.....but after wiping out the third or so company's worth of infantry with just a Section....I realized default wasn't going to cut it.

I can vouch for using "Low Carnage" settings, as they are particularly useful in my USMC vs Japanese battles. They are both great infantry to begin with, and LC greatly adds to the historical feel of a USMC or Japanese long campaign. If anything, during the 1942 battles the Japanese are almost TOO tough to kill, so you've gotta maximize your firepower against them. It really makes one understand why the USMC made their squad sizes bigger, and increased the number of BARs in a squad in 1943, during the E series reorganization.

This is one of the main reasons I'm still playing the game. Thank you, Jeb! [&o]

Wow! That's cool KG... you're very welcome!