Armor vs. Armor assaults

[bwv]

any thoughts on whether it is advantageous to assault enemy armor units with your armor (assume no infantry on either side) rather than simply fire on them when the enemy armor is superior in quality but outnumbered by 4-1 or more? (thinking of T-34s vs Tigers in Kursk)

[Ricky B]

I think it depends on the overall relationship between the values of the armored units. Firing the lower quality units can be frustrating as having a HA less than target defense rating greatly lowers the odds of a kill, but if the defender is fresh an assault could be quite bloody to the attacker also. I will normally assault in these cases, as I seem to get better loss ratios this way, but each situation is different.

I think you need to try different things in different situations and see what happens.

Rick

[Volcano Man]

Also, if you have enough backup, you can assault the armor unit first, hoping to get a disruption from it, but most importantly -- assaults cause very high fatigue. Then follow that up with direct fire from other tanks. Sometimes that works well.

[Glenn Saunders]

Also, if you have enough backup, you can assault the armor unit first, hoping to get a disruption from it, but most importantly -- assaults cause very high fatigue. Then follow that up with direct fire from other tanks. Sometimes that works well.

Hmm - I might go the other way - fire first - see if you can get teh disruption and then Assault as youhave more to gain assulting disrupted units.

But the real way to check or answer this is to setup a test scn and try a number of repeats to see which works best. Statistically it may depend on teh die rioll so doing the test once doesn't give you the true answer.

Glenn

[Volcano Man]

Right, firing first before assault is preferred, but I thought he was referring to cases where the opposing armor unit has a very high hard attack value and did not want to exchange too many opportunity fire shots with it and/or cases where he outnumbers the enemy armor unit 3 or 4 to 1 (small units are hard to get losses on with direct fire). Maybe I was reading too much between the lines though...

[Glenn Saunders]

Right - took my eye off the ball for a second

[Glenn Saunders]

Nothing like a test to try it out.

Here is 32 C Quality T-34/76s taken at random
vs 8 A Qaulity Tigers - again taken at random

Try it out. I fired first and then assaulted.
Assaulted and then fired
...and from what I can see, it all depends upon the die roll. I never did see a disruption but that doesn't mean it won't happen.

NOTE _ I was using the Game standard OOB with teh default fire rules. You are of course free to use an altered OOB and altered rules but understand "your mileage may vary"!

Glenn

[bwv]

Nothing like a test to try it out.

Here is 32 C Quality T-34/76s taken at random
vs 8 A Qaulity Tigers - again taken at random

Try it out. I fired first and then assaulted.
Assaulted and then fired
...and from what I can see, it all depends upon the die roll. I never did see a disruption but that doesn't mean it won't happen.

NOTE _ I was using the Game standard OOB with teh default fire rules. You are of course free to use an altered OOB and altered rules but understand "your mileage may vary"!

Glenn

an assault (either with a fire first or after) does seem to be superior to three fires. In five tries, I always got 1 tiger kill w/ an assault whereas 2 of the 5 times got no kill with firing three times