Updated Normandy'44_Alt (third time, 13 AUG)

[Volcano Man]

Bah. I started last week, and I am on turn 6 already of the big campaign. I am playing as the Germans, but even so, I feel the Germans were too powerful.

As for using tanks as attritional units...guilty as charged. Your example of 50 panthers is flawed though. I would send infantry in first to dig in next to the enemy...then drive in 96 pzIV's, with a hundred AA guns out of LOS behind them. Then inflict losses everturn until I feel the hex is weak enough...then assault with engineers/pzgrd from the other adjacent hex.

If the hex has AT guns, then I hit them with artillery, and tank fire. Or use the tanks elsewhere. You will have trouble getting them adjacent to my tanks.

The replacement rate always seemed high to me as I could afford to rest a couple divisions behind the lines and swap them out. 2% is very high. 1% is fairly high, but is the lowest it will go. After the storm...all units were back to full strength anyways.

Not sure if this is just an observation or what, but I am confused if you are suggesting that additional work should be required or if you are just giving additional reasons why the previous _Alt version needed some work.

That said, I did a great deal to help balance the campaign, changing German quality levels to be more realistic, lowering replacement level, and already the HA values are much different than when you played it the first time -but that is not say that there isn't some exploit lingering. If you want me to admit that even with the latest changes there still might be an exploit or imbalance present, then fine, I admit it.

But really it does come down the players in the game too. I mean, for example, when you were putting 100 AA guns in a hex, and 96 tanks in an adjacent hex, and probably as many panzer grenadiers in another hex, and using them as a steam roller -- did it not feel like maybe you shouldn't be doing that because it wasn't quite realistic? Stacking limits are called into question here (with 100 vehicles in one hex) as something that could probably be lowered, but the stacking level can only be so low otherwise I think the Allies couldn't get off the beaches in the beginning so that really has to be kept relatively high. One day I would like to a see a rule introduced where anything in a hex over 50% of the stacking limit starts to create a penalty for the defender's defense value vs direct and indirect fire. Perhaps at 100% stack level the penalty is 50% of the defense value for example, to represent the fact that there are so much stuff in a 1000m area that they are forced to be a very close interval and they cannot seek cover efficiently. But really though, there is only so much "balance" that can be done in any wargame really, and the rest is really sort of up to player to abuse or not to abuse the system. BTW, have you tried this tactic in the stock game? I feel that although it might not replicate itself exactly, it still can be an issue simply because there are so many tanks here. I am not trying to call your sportsmanship into question, I am just suggesting that maybe certain things could be avoided for the sake of having fun.

Still, in the example, I just don't see why the allies cannot match your tanks with his tanks in those areas either, but then again, we are talking about 750 turn monster campaign which may be impossible to balance simply because it keeps exponentially piling on more units after 250 turns so I don't know the relative tank strength levels at that point (but I do know that the Panzer IV isn't invincible either which is why I cannot understand why they cannot be countered in like kind). I think that after turn 250, it is anyone's best guess as to what the situation will be -- from a scenario design point of view you just keep making arrivals for more reinforcements and "hope for the best". But perhaps one very bad thing here in the previous _Alt was because the HA values were so high before that it made it almost impossible for allied tanks to stick around very long. In any case that aspect has been much reduced now.