Updated T41_Alt

[Bayes]

Thanks for the thorough reply Volcano Man!

Just to be clear, I think that the previous ALT changes are really great, consistently giving units, equipment and terrain more distinct, realistic and characteristic behavior. I also enjoy the fact that e.g. a Superior or Elite Panther tank battalion behaves the same way, independent of which title I am playing. I also appreciate your devotion to including explicit supply in the games.

I base my comments on the QFM of 10 only on calculations using the game mechanics formulas. When studying isolated effects, like firepower, kill rates, etc., I then get the exact effect, instead of a more or less accurate estimate from performing experiments in the game. (Performing in-game experiments can produce deceivingly inaccurate results without an extensive amount of trials).

What I perhaps may like about the QFM of 10 is that with such a high value, weapon deadliness is to a much larger degree affected by troop quality (skills, training, moral, etc.), instead of merely hardware (gun, armor, etc.). An elite tank commander may for instance use a "mediocre" StuG III and achieve a large kill ratio against for instance T-34s, simply because of his skills, like Wittmann in his StuG III. Conversely, an average tank commander (C quality) may get a lower kill ratio even with a Tiger.

However, I also have some concerns:

* Are Superior troops (B quality) really able to make weapons twice as deadly in combat on average compared to C quality troops (Average), or are what we read about in the literature outstanding events, not reflecting the average? Weapon deadliness becomes even more extreme with elite troops (quality A), producing 3.5 times more kills than average troops. This is the case for both Men, Guns, and Vehicles as far as the formulas go. E.g. a tank kill ratio of 3 to 1 turns into 6 to 1 when unit quality goes from C to B (with a QFM of 10).

* The decision of making 88mm the only elite units in DAK seems a bit arbitrary. I guess there existed other units in DAK with similar skill level (quality). Why pick out just the 88mm for elite status? The high performance of 88mm could be a result of the gun itself.

* Only handpicking a few A quality units means that the majority of units needs to be fitted within the smaller range E-B, making it more difficult to distinguish between different quality levels.

* "Soft factors" like skills, morale, training, ... (i.e., Quality) and "hard factors" like gun, optics, armor (Hard Attack, Soft Attack, ...) get mixed together, with mechanisms being designed to represent soft factors being used to represent hard factors. When using high Quality to model deadly units instead of a high Hard Attack value, one also enhance all the other soft factors at the same time, instead of just the weapon deadliness.

* It sounds like an extensive task to translate a QFM of 10 to the other titles in the series, perhaps drastically changing game balance in each title.

If it is mainly the optics and gun of the 88mm that makes it better than e.g. a 75mm (and not the German AT teams manning them), why not simply increase the Hard Attack Value of 88mm instead of making extensive changes relying on tweaking the concept of Quality?

What I describe above may not happen every time. Also, other factors may sometimes enhance these effects, and sometimes reduce the effects (like terrain), but on average, over several fire exchanges, I believe the "extreme" effect of a QFM of 10 will take place.

Maybe I will like these effects when experiencing them in a real game. :-)

That's it! Thanks for your attention

Bayes

The concern is understandable but have you even tried the changes yet? The difference is not very noticeable with B quality units as far as I can tell, so that concern is mostly moot IMO. And also, intentionally so, there aren't that many A quality units in the OOB to begin with and I only cut down on the number of those by 10 or 15 units in total (units which I elevated to A to add "chrome" to begin with IIRC).

After testing this myself it isn't a bad thing that the B quality units are 100% more effective instead of just 10%. Where it really becomes noticeable is with killing vehicles only, and in disruptions, which was the intent. I did try all manner of values below "10" and none of them made much of a noticeable difference to be honest.

You can also assume that if I made any changes then yes those changes are desirable. ;) Of course my desires are often not perfect, but I update things to reflect feedback in those cases. Now the question of course here is what the changes do in the long run, but I don't see a problem at this point. For example, with QFM set at 1, a B quality German infantry company fires onto allied infantry and eliminated, on average, 6 men. With QFM set to 10, the same situation averaged 8 men eliminated. The differences are just not that drastic to be concerned -- it doesn't directly translate to say, 12 men eliminated on average (ie. double). That said, I will certainly keep an eye on this and check it again -- maybe my test was faulty, but this is where I need feedback from the community too.

As you hint, you probably liked the 88mm HA ratings at 52 and I may go back to that one day, who knows. But the reason the values have changed is because in order to get them officially adopted into PzC, John felt that the values were scaled too high overall so I dropped them by 25% to address that, while he in turn addressed some of the issues with ranged fire (by turning the Ranged Modifier to a floating point number) and by introducing the QFM value for small units. So, within those limitations I am trying to make the lower HA ratings work within the new capabilities of the engine, so please just be patient and try it out. If people find these changes disgusting then I will likely change them back, or go back to a ranged modifier value of "1". All of these things have yet to be figured out. ;)