PB Kursk '43 South impressions/discussion

[ComradeP]

The more I play the short scenarios where I have to clear bunkers, the less I like the randomness of it, I would really have appreciated some more advantages from flanking the enemy or being able to attack from multiple hexsides using either a double stacking limit or something like a 1.5 stacking limit or whatever for determining how many men can participate. It's not as bad as in Moscow '42 when you're attacking as the Soviets, but it can be a problem in the short scenarios.

I know Dog Soldier and presumably some others disagree that clearing bunkers is often luck based, but there are instances where I just don't see how skill could influence the result further.

Let's take Gertsovka as an example.

In a PBEM with me, Dog Soldier's first assault against a bunker by presumably a nearly full strength PzG company and 2 Pionier platoons resulted in one or two losses for him and 20 for my 50 man defensive units. His numerical superiority was about 5 to 1 and he had a quality and for the Pionier units an assault value bonus.

My casualties felt like they were a bit high, but I felt the result was overall reasonable.

In my games against the AI, I've attacked ATR platoons and HQ units with as many as 20:1 odds in manpower and the defenders still held. That's why I say it depends on a die roll.

If you move an X amount of men of a certain quality in a certain hex to attack a Y amount of defenders of a certain quality in a certain hex, the only other variable is the die roll.

Let's say Dog Soldiers assault would've failed. Would that have been due to any lack of skill on his part? No, he would simply have gotten a poor roll.

Now, a scenario like Gertsovka is balanced so tightly that if you capture all objectives, you could still lose or get a draw at best depending on your casualties. In essence, if you don't manage to kill the mortar unit and at least a couple of AT guns, you're likely to lose. If the Soviet player hides the mortar unit and AT guns, he substantially improves his chances of winning simply because capturing the objectives is not good enough for the Germans.

I'm currently assaulting the 10 point objective with its own supply source in a game against Outlaw Josey Wales. I'm guessing he was holding it with about 100 infantrymen, about 30 guys in the ATR Platoon and the HQ. He might also have had 150 infantrymen. After three assaults, the HQ and AT unit were disrupted but in the end the only thing that determines whether I capture the objective will be a die roll.

Let's say I don't capture it and Dog Soldier attacks the 10 point objective with its own supply source later on in our game against a similar number of defenders and he manages to capture it. Again: all other variables are equal, so the only difference is the disruption die rolls and the casualties both sides sustain from the assault. We're not talking about skill in this case, but about chance or "luck". You can't make your own luck, because you can't influence the variables beyond a certain point.

It's one of the few design decisions I still don't really understand in PzC and now in PB: you can only attack from 1 hex per attack, there is no bonus for having units at the flank of the enemy (like the tactical shifts in SSG games). The attacker and defender use the same stacking limit and as such the closer the defender is to the stacking limit the more difficult it is to remove them, without the attacker being able to do much about it.

This is also why the German replacement rate in Moscow '42 can be a problem: capturing a bunker held by 800 B quality Germans just isn't going to happen when you can attack it with a bit over 2:1 odds with D quality units.

At the moment, I don't really know what I would be supposed to do against a Soviet bunker hex held by 5 platoons, for example. The usual argument is that the defender who concentrates his men in a couple of hexes won't be able to hold a line, but that ignores the fact that there might not be a need for that. If the Soviets hold even 1 objective at the end of a Gertsovka game, they're likely to win. If they stage a short delaying action and pile their units in 2-3 objective bunker hexes, there's little the Germans can do except assault and hope they disrupt the defenders (which, as stated above depends primarily on a die roll).

At least in Kursk, we're mostly attacking with A quality German units, but we're also defending with C quality Soviets that don't get the "double whammy" of being both isolated and out of ammo, losing 2 morale levels and becoming much more likely to disrupt. Now, they just move to D.