What should be the CPP loss from this battle?

[Beethoven1]

This is a battle from the No Time to Die 4v4 player game:



As you can see, the attacker won the battle with 44:1 odds.

If all you knew about the battle was the odds, you would probably think it must have been an easy battle, no big deal.

Under the .41 beta patch, the CPP loss numbers are as follows:

Deliberate attack

<20 to 1 odds – 50% reduction
>=20<35 to 1 odds – 40% reduction
>=35<50 to 1 odds – 30% reduction
>=50 to 1 odds – 25% reduction

A 35<50 to 1 battle... This qualifies as a pretty trivial battle according to the CPP loss table.

Is that really realistic in this case?

It seems to me like this was actually a difficult battle for the attacker. Germany had to dislodge not just 1, not 2, but 3 Soviet rifle divisions, each of which also had a support unit, in heavy woods when there was also heavy snow and snowfall, all of which AFAIK makes it harder to attack. If you totally ignore all of those things and focus solely on the final CV odds, you get a pretty misleading picture of this particular battle, I would say.

The Soviet general Akimov is not great (but he has a 5 infantry rating, so by Soviet standards he is not that bad either). But the other 2 divisions were also commanded by Zakharov and Govorov, 2 of the best Soviet generals.

Whatever else one might say about his battle, it seems to me like a totally different thing than winning a battle with high odds because you are swatting away a weak airborne brigade or NKVD border guard. It is not a trivial attack that took no preparation/planning etc to do. Trivial attacks are not the sort of thing that require you to attack with 100,000 men as Germany.

This is only one battle, and certainly not all battles are like this.

Also, please understand that I am certainly not trying to say that the CPP changes should be reverted. In general, they are a good change. But I have to question if it should really apply in cases similar to this when it is an actual big real battle, especially when there are 3 divisions defending in good defensive terrain with fairly high nominal initial CVs. If Soviet CV can collapse from 425 to 8, and turn a battle that started off with 1:1 odds all the way to 44:1 odds... then you are going to get quite a lot of cases where Soviet CV similarly collapses when you are in less good defensive terrain and/or with fewer units defending than a triple stack, etc.

[Mehring]

Shouldn't such a question begin with "what does CPP represent"? The manual states at 4.8.3 "They represent allowing units
to rest and build up for an attack" but this makes no sense at all since both duplicate and conflict with other game concepts. "Rest" duplicates and in certain circumstances conflicts with fatigue. A unit with high CPP can fatigue itself traversing friendly territory through a blizzard losing little or no CPP. Likewise "build up for an attack" merely duplicates stockpiling of supplies and a unit with no supplies could theoretically have high CPP.

If the entire concept of CPP isn't flawed, its implementation certainly isn't worked out. Similarly morale, which supposedly is not morale at all but battle doctrine, turns out under examination to be something of a fudge of both concepts.

So what could CPP be? Units prepare for specific operations, using intelligence and familiarity with the immediate terrain and enemy deployment to pre-register fire, log command posts and defensive installations in preparation to neutralise them. They rehearse tactical operations, acquire or improvise equipment in anticipation of dealing with specific obstacles. Perhaps they might represent to some extent a morale boost from understanding the importance of tactical objectives within an operation. I find it hard to understand realistic CPP as representations of anything that can travel around the map with a unit. They are, realistically, an abstraction of preparation for a tactical immediacy and should be shed as a unit moves in my view. Operational success, then, should not be dependent upon them. They are overblown in their current form.

[redrum68]

Setting a side that the CPP system is very flawed as we have another thread on that.

This is an example of starting CV ratio being very different from final CV ratio and since the current CPP rules only consider final CV ratio if the defender CV collapses like that then you get this kind of odd result.