Balance discussion/suggestions

[Strela]

Direct fire and assaults should be different tools, suitable for different situations, just like it is in panzer campaigns.

That being said, maybe assaults have become too tame in Panzer Battles compared to Panzer Campaigns (relatively to direct fire):

Panzer Battles: Combat Losses (per 1000 combat value):
Fire Low Value: 20 Fire High Value: 100
Attacker Low Value: 50 Attacker High Value: 250
Defender Low Value: 25 Defender High Value: 150

Panzer Campaigns: Combat Losses (per 1000 combat value):
Fire Low Value: 10 Fire High Value: 50
Attacker Low Value: 40 Attacker High Value: 200
Defender Low Value: 20 Defender High Value: 100

Strela, it would be interesting to know why you reduced the relative effect of assaults compared to direct fire in Panzer Battles...

Bayes

Hi Bayes,

A worthy question. I have just gone back to the archives to find the answer.

The 'original' game in the series (now the follow on to Kursk) was suffering with high casualty rates. We initially started with the original PDT values from that title and they looked like so;

Original Panzer Battles: Combat Losses (per 1000 combat value):
Fire Low Value: 35 Fire High Value: 175
Attacker Low Value: 140 Attacker High Value: 700
Defender Low Value: 70 Defender High Value: 350


As part of our testing for Kursk we realised these values were off the scale and came back to the ones you see here. There was a clear reason why we didn't align these closer to PzC's. Assaults were viewed as being more bloody in PzC because they occur in such a gray area of "all combat between 0m and 1000m" but at the PzB scale we assumed that the enemy can disengage and fall back easier, and that the true casualties should come from direct fire, while assaults really are for "taking the terrain" i.e. the last 250 meters.

This is another area that obviously can be tweaked and we actually have a test version where these values can be scaled by a modifier for hard attacks. This allows a different combat value for hard attacks vs soft attacks if desired. If you want to make your hard attacks more lethal you just use a modifier greater than 1 etc.

As I have mentioned in other threads (on other games), John has provided the designers huge latitude with the parameter data. The trick is to find values that deliver the expected results and with multiple variables its important to work through them systematically.

We spent a lot of time looking at combat values and comparing the results from a number of test scenarios to what actually happened historically. We found that was one of the best barometers for deciding if the representation was correct.

Hope that's a little clearer...

David