Effectiveness of Mines

[Dragoon 45]

Don't know if this has been addressed before or not. Is it just me or do mines have more effectiveness in the game than is historically accurate. I.E. the Germans a lot of times cleared a path through minefields with Tigers. They very rarely lost a tank this way, but did have a lot of track and suspension damage. Most of the time in the game, tanks are total kills if they hit a mine instead of a mobility kill which from my research seems more accurate. Is there a way to lessen mines effectiveness in the game vs tanks? Infantry are rightfully so terrified of mines but generally tanks could bull through them suffering mostly temporary mobility kills.

[KG Erwin]

Hmm--tough call, Dragoon45. While they are essential parts of many scenarios and the MCs, I do NOT use them for vs AI long campaigns, as this gives the human player an unfair advantage in defend/delay missions. If you use mines in generated battles, then consider them fudged in favor of the AI. While not completely realistic, the AI needs all the help it can get. It is a moot point, in any case--mines are hard-coded, and can't be edited.

[Gallo Rojo]

ORIGINAL: Dragoon 45
the Germans a lot of times cleared a path through minefields with Tigers. They very rarely lost a tank this way, but did have a lot of track and suspension damage.

I guess you mean that they cleared anti-personal mines with tanks.
An anti-tank mine would destroy a Tiger as it would destroy any other tank (Tiger's belly armour wasn't much thicker than other tanks belly).

The mines in the game represents both anti-personal and anti-tank mines. That's why they can take a tank. I think that it would be great if the game could distinguish between anti-tank and anti-personal mines, so you should buy either one or the other for different pourpouses (and the anti-tank mines should be more expensive), in the same way that barbe-wire and anti-tank obstacles are differet thinghs. But that's not the way it is in the game.

[Dragoon 45]

If you read any histories of the Heavy Panzer Battalions, it was a common practice for them to clear mines by driving their tanks into the minefield until a path was cleared. Tigers were rarely destroyed by AT Mines, they suffered a lot of track and suspension damage and the tanks were imobilized until repaired.
Modern AT mines with tilt-rods and command detonation are designed to attack the belly armor but WW II mines were pressure detonated not with a tilt-rod. The only way a tank would normally set one off was to drive over it with a track. So rarely was the belly armor attacked by the mine just the suspension and tracks. That is not to say that the AT mines didn't destroy tanks during the war, they did but not in the numbers and frequency that most people believe.

ORIGINAL: Gallo Rojo

ORIGINAL: Dragoon 45
the Germans a lot of times cleared a path through minefields with Tigers. They very rarely lost a tank this way, but did have a lot of track and suspension damage.

I guess you mean that they cleared anti-personal mines with tanks.
An anti-tank mine would destroy a Tiger as it would destroy any other tank (Tiger's belly armour wasn't much thicker than other tanks belly).

The mines in the game represents both anti-personal and anti-tank mines. That's why they can take a tank. I think that it would be great if the game could distinguish between anti-tank and anti-personal mines, so you should buy either one or the other for different pourpouses (and the anti-tank mines should be more expensive), in the same way that barbe-wire and anti-tank obstacles are differet thinghs. But that's not the way it is in the game.

[Riun T]

Hey guys,just poped by the forums b4 tryin to kick a little German butt,march13th/45 town of Clemere. Anyway some facts I've foundout about tanks and mines in mine and my godfathers experience.{ he served in the British forces in Africa/42} and I'm a ten year vet in the North Saskatchewan Regiment and am a DEM TEC for 8 of that. As a demolitions expert I got to see,arm, and fire all the big toys, like the effect of a 90/100/120mm AT rounds on impact. With mines,the problem boils down to whether the antitank charge is big enough to cause fire or flip as we use to call it, in the start of the war all the tanks were going with a small lighter chasis,so a 8 to 12 pound explosive charge was capable of either completely chuking a tank like a PzrIIc or vickers 2medium right on their lids or worse onto another mine within its proximity,or causing enough explosive spawling and fragmenting of things like the track,bougies/casters or parts of the actual body of the frame/underchasis to buckle in and damage said things like cooling system,luberication and fuel systems, or detinate the ammo stores from brisance or flashthrew, all of which cause fire. Now u really got to appretiate the German thinking at the time in inventing that there Teller mine; it used a molded pie canister with the amitol cut into slices to allow the weight of the mine to be a max of 10kg when full which would be enough to take out a two lane wide wooden truss bridge under any tank tiger or better, or set up with the same peuter lined glass pencil type detinator,which would blow from being bent or crushed, would let u take some of the slices of explosive out and replace with any parifinalia like bolts or bearings to make a AP mine, the mine casing was shaped like a large flat Panzerfluase warhead so it was designed to forcecone the blast up and even a tiger can't take that. And as far as I and every one who has really been in and worked on tanks, the first two thirds of the bottom from the bowplate armor,to the forward engine compartment firewalll is refered to as the scrape plate so the tank doesn't get large treestumps,rocks,the occasional low angle shot, or any obsticle that it crosses like stonewalls,concrete rimmed ditches or rubble can't come threw the bottom when the full weight comes up into it. some tanks would have a bottom hatch for emergency egress and to be able to do maintenance without having to crawl the full length of a tank that only has 8inches of underspace. I've been told that quite a few crews would try to use this hatch to get out to try and right the track if it was hit but getting tools threw it and the lack of working light under the tank in battle conditions makes this pretty amazing. And it hasn't even been mentioned how many concussion killed crews were pulled out of perfectly servicable tanks???gonna bath back in a bit!! RT

[Major Destruction]

Dragoon, you said "temporary mobility kills"

In the scale of the game, if a vehicle is removed from combat it is deemed to be destroyed.

Temporarily out of commission might be several hours in real terms but few SPWAW battle last several hours.

Consider a tank hits a mine and the driver veers to one side and slides into a ditch or bomb crater. At this angle, the gun can not be trained on any target. The crew exits the tank and walks back to supply for another one. They have no intention of remounting their disabled tank. Let the ARV come in and make the repairs in the shop. In real terms the tank is disabled. In game terms it is destroyed.

In game terms all mines are created equal. Sometimes you can run several vehicles over a mined hex with no damage. In reality, perhaps these vehicles tripped some mines and kept on trucking. In game terms you saw nothing.

If you believe that Tiger tanks should be more resilient to mines, or be used as mine clearing vehicles, then reclass your tigers as engineer tanks. That should work.

[Dragoon 45]

I personnally don't believe Tiger's per se should be more resilent to mines. I believe that most of the larger tanks should be more resilent to mines; not take a mine blast with no damage, but being immobilized more often than destroyed. There should be more mobility kills and less destruction of tanks by mines. True sometimes the crew panics and dismounts a damaged vehicle but by the same token an experienced crew after they shake off the effects of the mine could provide valuable fire support. For light armored and soft vehicles the mines seem about right to me as does effects against dismounted infantry. But in a long campaign does it not cost more to replace a destroyed vehicle than to repair a damaged one? World War II AT mines worked by pressure detonation, i.e. the track passed over the mine and then it detonated. The only documented instances of command detonated mines I can find are instances when the Japanese would put a man with a hammer down in a hole with an aerial bomb to take out passing tanks, needless to say the "volunteer" had a messy end also. Tilt rods were put into production after the war from what I can find out.

Yes tanks can do crazy things when they lose a track. Won't argue that at all. But from my experience with the game, I would place the chance of a minestrike destroying a tank at about 95%. All I am saying there should be more disabled tanks in minefields than destroyed ones. Probably something on the order of about 40% destroyed, 30% abandoned, and 30% still manned but immobile.

I see your point on vehicles passing through mined hexes and not being destroyed, they didn't hit one or the mine was ineffective. No argument there. But when a tank during WW II hit a mine generally it suffered a mobility kill; suspension or track damage rendered it immobile. In some cases the crew bails out and diddy bops to the rear, sometimes the crew can repair the damage in a given length of time, and sometimes the crew stays with the tank and supports friendly forces with fire as much as possible.

ORIGINAL: Major Destruction

Dragoon, you said "temporary mobility kills"

In the scale of the game, if a vehicle is removed from combat it is deemed to be destroyed.

Temporarily out of commission might be several hours in real terms but few SPWAW battle last several hours.

Consider a tank hits a mine and the driver veers to one side and slides into a ditch or bomb crater. At this angle, the gun can not be trained on any target. The crew exits the tank and walks back to supply for another one. They have no intention of remounting their disabled tank. Let the ARV come in and make the repairs in the shop. In real terms the tank is disabled. In game terms it is destroyed.

In game terms all mines are created equal. Sometimes you can run several vehicles over a mined hex with no damage. In reality, perhaps these vehicles tripped some mines and kept on trucking. In game terms you saw nothing.

If you believe that Tiger tanks should be more resilient to mines, or be used as mine clearing vehicles, then reclass your tigers as engineer tanks. That should work.