Scenario Design Questions

[ComradeP]

I guess you pulled the formula from the manual somewhere? I must have overlooked it, thanks for pointing it out.

Yes, it's labelled under Range Effect, which is somewhat confusing as in practice it's a modifier so you'd look for Range Modifier.

I don't understand one thing though--PzC classifies "Hard Targets", and you'd think that would enable the game to limit the effectiveness of 82mm mortars, for instance, vs tanks? I guess what you're saying is that artillery vs tanks is still fairly low odds (because the arty's low hard values are against the armor's relatively high defensive values?) but still results in more armored kills than it should?

It's low odds, but mortars can fire twice and it's a simple matter of low odds attacks in such numbers that you'll get a hit at some point. It's not like you will knock out a tank company or the like, but I usually knock out about 3 or so tanks per scenario with mortars in Panzer Battles as the Soviets.

What is amusing is that units with a very low defence value, like Marders with a value of 3, are actually not all that much more vulnerable than most German medium tanks with a value around 8-10 or so. When my opponent concentrated the fire of about 8 gun artillery and 2 Katyusha units on a stack of Marders, I tended to lose about 2-3 Marders per turn, which is acceptable. They're still using the same die roll of converting losses in men to a percentage chance of knocking something out after all. For the same reason (whether there's a loss depends on the die roll, and the maximum is generally 1 vehicle per barrage), soft vehicles like AA vehicles are also less vulnerable than you might expect, even though artillery SA values are generally much higher than their HA values.

With a 50% chance of knocking something out (for example), there's also a 50% chance something survives, possibly with a small increase in fatigue. Attacks against vehicles or guns are an everything or nothing affair.

On average, my artillery knocks out more tanks than AT weapons as the Soviets because the 76mm AT gun isn't that good not to mention the 45mm, for the Germans it's different as their artillery is generally less powerful and/or less numerous than Soviet guns and their mid war AT guns are excellent.

Rocket units tend to have good HA values, at least in Panzer Battles, so they're more likely to knock out tanks than gun artillery.

For the sake of clarity, I'm talking about average tanks here, with mediocre to good defence values. Units with excellent defence values like Tigers are unlikely to lose vehicles to artillery fire, but it can still happen.

By the way, the various degrees of Digging in suffer from a similar problem to what vehicles and guns suffer from: higher defence values, or in this case a decrease in the intensity of incoming fire, only lowers the chance something gets killed, it's not absolute protection.

In my opinion, the difference between a bunker and a trench is too significant currently, particularly for low morale units like most Soviet units. In trenches, they will just disappear when attacked by a good German force. In bunkers, they can hold out. This does depend on average unit size. A 600 man Soviet battalion in PzC has a significantly higher survival chance unless it gets ZOC locked and assaulted than a platoon or company in PB. In the former case, casualties will still be brutal over time, but at least the unit will still be there after several turns.

After tweaking a few parameters (see end of post), my experience is rather different: I have small units (2-5 vehicles) wiping out other other small units at two hexes, at one hex it is a real bloodbath. I think I actually need to tone things down a bit...

If you're tweaking with the extent of the variability of the high/low fire values, or significantly decrease defence values, your result is likely to happen. In a stock scenario, with the McNamara (sp?) database values for units, casualties are likely to be low per turn. Tweaked values are also at the core of the high casualties of the FWWC series, where units will get mowed down by the dozens if not hundreds by units that in PzC/PB would inflict maybe a dozen, possibly a bit more casualties per fire action.

As to assaults: I feel assaults are too unpredictable and too weak in many cases. You're encouraged to Disrupt a defender first before assaulting, which can be problematic, also as it gives an incentive to a min/maxing style of play where you concentrate fire on a unit until it disrupts and then move on to the next unit, Delayed Disruption reporting being off by default in most cases. This is one of the few wargame series where assaulting is necessary to occupy a hex, but assaulting by itself isn't the most efficient way to do so. In other wargames, support weapons and a preliminary barrage would soften up the defender, possibly removing entrenchment levels or at the least reducing readiness/inflicting some casualties.

The fact that odds are essentially irrelevant here because casualties are determined by a check for high/low losses also adds to the unpredictable nature of combat. That isn't a bad thing per se, but in my opinion it can go a bit too far sometimes.

After the support fire, the defenders would still be able to resist and stop the assault. Furthermore, assaulting generally causes more casualties than direct fire. In PzC/PB, firing inflicts more predictable (and sometimes higher) casualties on average as I recently tested. Not reliably being able to disrupt a defender through assaulting can be a real pain, particularly with both sides using the same stacking limits making it difficult enough as it is to get good odds.

When you say that Soviet rockets don't seem to have much effect, do you mean the "old" Katyusha's without a minimum range or the "new" more powerful Katyusha's with a minimum range?

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Edit: as to the Jump Dialog: in Panzer Battles, the Axis are blue and the Soviets are red, so maybe there's a file that determines the colour which could be imported to PzC.