Morale Ratings for Danube 85

[Glenn Saunders]

If the morale ratings were not a concious decision for playability then what was the rationale for WP units better than American/NATO forces?

Marc Bellizzi who spent a lot of time on unit values with me adds these notes,

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US morale is a reflection of the post Vietnam syndrome/low readiness of the late 70’s/early 80’s, mixed with the massive changes of the Reagan years that culminated in the “Army of Excellence (AOE)”.

What players will find is that US units that field the newer equipment have the better (B) morale; the M60/M113 units predominately retain a ‘C’. This method was meant to reflect that the newer equipped units began to receive the better, longer and more developed training that AOE was all about - AirLand Battle, etc. This is not to say the M60/M113 units didn’t start to get better training; however, elements of the Army were still suffering the post 70’s malaise and I had to draw a line somewhere, so new equipped units got a B, most others a C (there are some exceptions to ‘spice it up’ but that is the general rule).

As far as the WP, what you will find is again a varied mix. Soviet units are predominately C morale. The exceptions are again units with newer equipment, and units that were ‘touted’ (and probably brainwashed to a degree) by the Red Army as the vanguard. 8th Army & 3rd Shock come to mind. While we know the Reds did not get the level of training NATO units did, these units in particular got the cream of the crop of troops, weapons and training. You’ll notice however that the Soviets are NOT nearly as weighted to B as they were in other titles; evidence just does not support that. Also realize that there has to be some play balance involved; if we really gave the Reds all D’s, would we have a playable game – so I wrote the build up to war synopsis to give the aegis that the Red propaganda machine was lambasting the troops with the party line, and the rank and file were whipping them into a frenzy of training.

The non-Soviet WP units tended to be a mix of the two extremes. You have the Czechs who didn’t really ‘toe the line’ nor have the stomach to want war and are thus a lot of ‘D’s; the Poles fit this bill as well since they were going through the whole Solidarity issue; but you have the DDR Volksarmee that was probably as fanatical a force as the SS of World War Two. Those guys certainly deserved B’s, and I would argue some of the more specialized units could warrant an A.

Finally, I consulted Col. David Glantz (ret) who wrote the US bible on what the Army thought the Soviets’ composition, disposition, strength and potential courses of action would be. It is his plan that the Grand Campaign is based on (that the 3rd Shock is the main effort, not the forces going through the Fulda Gap). He actually felt that the WP units were better than where I ended up putting them, and recommended the Russians be predominately B’s, so that gives you an idea of how subjective this whole debate is.

Regarding unit speeds, I actually redid all the speeds; I went to a combination of Wikipedia and any official sources I could find and tried to simply use the cross country speed of each vehicle system as a basis for unit speeds. This is an arbitrary measure, but when used across the board, it keeps things equal. There are probably some errors, but I think it fits the bill of what we need at this scale.

MLRS vs 8 Inch: the issue with this is that the MLRS fired in what were called “SPLLs” (shots of 6 or 12 at a time) which is actually the M269 LLM rocket pod. A vehicle carried 1 SPLL. While there were additional SPLLs in the supply chain, the problem in this game becomes thus; a MLRS can in theory fire every turn, 3 shots per turn. In a 45 turn game that equates to 135 shots per MLRS unit. Granted, that is at the extreme end, but even half this number is over 70 shots. There weren’t that many SPLL’s in the entire US inventory let alone USAEUR. So to ‘level out’ the fact that one SPLL can demolish a grid square, we made a compromise; we toned down the individual strikes, but net-net at game end you will find the MLRS kills more than an 8”. You just don’t really see it per-se in the shot that you fire. There was no way to make the MLRS unit only fire X number of shots before removal from the game. The system either has fully capable fire, or single use, so this was the compromise.

Hope this helps a bit.

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.... so you see - not something we did for play balance and obviously not something that can be proven with absolutes. It what we thought was best with the info we had.

There were a lot of OOB adjustments during this game and ultimately we knew that at some point someone would ask why is thing you a 7 and not an 8, or why is one unit a C vs. a B.

And we knew we could never answer these definatively.

Glenn