PZC System not much being said

[JonS1]

Another thought: Non-Combat-Loss-Rates (NCLR)

Currently: Vehicles have some (PDT modifiable) chance of losing strength as they expend movement points (MPs), and that rate can be upped substantially by flagging a unit as "Low Reliability". This reflects the overall fragility of vehicles when used for military purposes, and also allows the differences between, say, a Sherman and a Centaur, or a Pz IV and a Tiger, to shine through.

However, it has always struck me as a little odd that a game that ostensibly also tracks every man and gun pretends that the only way those are lost is through direct enemy action.

Proposal: Extend this principle to NCLRs for inf-type-units (ITU) and gun-type-units (GTU), again editable in the PDT.

For ITUs this would reflect sickness, leave, people going away on courses, being run over, breaking a bone while horsing around, training accidents, or any of the hundreds of other ways a man could find himself away from the front line. The NCLR would apply every turn, but would typically be quite low - for example in Normandy about .05% for the Allies. That would lead to an infantry bn losing about 4 men per day, while a division would lose about 50-60 men/day. Generally, the NCLR and the reinforcement rate (RR) would interact to produce a 'steady state' somewhere below 100% for units, which is entirely reasonable. However, that would only happen for units out of the line, since the RR doesn't apply to units expending MPs. For units held in the line the NCLR would produce a steady drain in addition to any combat losses.

For GTUs the NCLR would represent mechanical failure of the equipment - breech or bore prems, busted recuperators, etc. In practice, the GTU NCLR could be the same as either the ITU NCLR, or the vehicle breakdown rate. Given the small numbers of items typically found in a GTU, the effect would be rare but noticeable. For example, a US 12-gun bn might expect to see one gun lost every fortnight, but on the flipside a US inf div would expect to lose one of its many guns every couple of days, and a US corps would expect to lose a couple of guns every day.

Like vehicles, the GTU NCLR would only apply when the unit was expending MPs.

I would think that the NCLR would have a random element around the set value. So a rate of .05% would typically see 4 men per day per full battalion, but in practice it could be anything between 1 and 10, for example.

The rate might also be modified based on the unit's morale; .05% for A, .06% for B, .07% for C, etc, down to .1% for No Morale.

A similar modification for fatigue would make sense, since tired soldiers are more apt to make mistakes. eg "Green Fatigue + C Morale" gives .07%, "Yellow Fatigue + C Morale" gives .17%, "Red Fatigue + C Morale" gives .27%, and "Red Fatigue + No Morale" gives .3% (or 24 men NCLR'd per day). Again, with variation around the expected results.

For individual units the effect is slight, but across larger scenarios it would start to add up, and further encourage players to pull units out of the line from time to time to rest and recover, and punishes repeated use of exhausted and disheartened units.

Regards
JonS