Patch?

[Dog Soldier]

The problem now is you can see a tiger destroying a tank at 3.500m or you can see 2 Tigers unable to kill a tank from a full soviet company at 250m.

I do not see this as a problem, but actually a good simulation.

At long distance the Tiger only needs to adjust the turret angle a few degrees to acquire a new target and fire on it.

At very short distances the defending Tiger might have to rotated 25% - 40% to acquire a target. Or never acquire the target because the target is too close moving at a tangential angle that was too large to begin with. The Tiger turret rotation cannot close the angle or keep up with the moving target. Then there is the issue of another tank in the Soviet unit stopped and aiming at the Tiger while the Tiger is furiously rotating to get a shot at the original moving Soviet tank in the same unit, oblivious to the new danger.

What I am trying to say is tanks did not move like the counters. They do not move in blocks, stop all together in a line or even always stay in a recognizable formation during combat. The counters on the map in the game are just a representation of the approximate location of the unit, like on a Command HQ table.

To see a Tiger miss at close range then have the T-34 counter fire back and take out a Tiger is not a simple issue of the two being in in each other direct line of vision the entire turn firing at each other. Many things are going on at a micro level during those 30 minutes of a turn. The damage report after each shot is just a game mechanism. Taken together as a whole, these individual shot reports aggregated at the end of a turn are yielding historical results. The shots made by or on a single unit counter are not significant to judging the game system. What matters is how many tanks were lost compared to the number engaged at the end of the turn in the victory dialog.

Since we can assume the T-34s in a single unit counter are not all moving straight at the Tiger counter, it does make sense that the Tiger is a better killer at longer ranges than very short ranges because the number of to - hit opportunities is decreasing with range and are not constant or increasing.

Tanks of the era had to stop to fire. At least they did to have any chance of real accuracy. But once the shot was taken, in many cases they were moving again then stopping and firing again, all inside the hex where the counter on the map sits still and takes three shots in the player's turn. Now and again we see results in armor combat where a number of vehicles are destroyed at close range in a single turn.

Simulating which vehicles are moving / evading to get to a firing position on the defender and which have stopped to take a shot in a definitive manner is beyond the scope of the PzB game system. We never intended to be that specific. (Squad Battles does though.)

If one thinks about what is happening during a turn, IGO/UGO, looking holistically at the turn, many things that happen simultaneously are being presented as my turn / your turn format on screen with the end result pretty close to what could or should happen historically.

Dog Soldier