Damage dealt to small units

[ComradeP]

In every scenario I've played thus far, I've noticed that small units below a certain number of men (50-60 or so) take significantly less damage from assaults, artillery and in many cases direct fire.

As far as I can tell, the mechanics behind this behaviour for non-artillery fire are not documented, but it does seem to be happening consistently. The only modifier to casualties that's mentioned in the manual is for the stacking limit starting at half the stacking limit (125 men, casualties normal and fire value at 100%) up to the stacking limit of 250 men (casualties double and fire value at 200%). It's almost as if there's also a third modifier, for half of the first value, so about 60 men.

The alternative indirect fire rule mentions casualties being inflict on units "proportionate to their strength" which presumably explains the lower artillery losses for smaller units, but it isn't clear how it works or how it is determined.

It can be problematic when assaulting small units, as often positions end up being held by a handful of guns or a couple of men who refuse to disrupt. As disruption is all that matters, small units can have an ahistorical impact on progress.

It has been said that the results supposedly model small units taking cover or not exposing themselves, but there is no explanation about that in the manual, nor does it make sense for assaults. If you have 10 men and the enemy has 100, you're very likely to lose. In the game, that isn't necessarily the case.

This ties into the main flaw of the assault system: it depends solely on getting the defenders to disrupt, which is a matter of chance and not skill, and encourages manipulating the assault system by either placing numerous small units in a hex (with each unit, the chance of the stack disrupting lessens) or by breaking larger units down to achieve the same thing.

As the attacker depends solely on a die roll for getting the defenders to disrupt, and in the case of large stacks also uses the same stacking limit, such situations can cause disproportionate delays to attacks. Direct fire from infantry units can yield reasonable casualties, but it doesn't work against bunkers.


In a current II SS PzK July 5th game, if my opponent decides to place the Guards sapper battalion in the north in the objective and supply bunker hex and split it up in 9 different units, that alone will probably mean I'll lose the game regardless of anything else that happened, simply because it is very difficult to counter such a strategy as the attacker. Yes, you can use direct fire from tanks, but the casualties you inflict are really not that great from two hexes (which is where you need to be firing from in this case, as the objective hex is also a village hex that will soon be reduced to rubble, requiring assaulting infantry to be next to it) and even if I'd fire at it from an adjacent hex, the odds of disrupting 9 units are not good.

You can only assault with an equal number of men at best, the defenders are not isolated because their hex is a supply source (this is also why I don't like objective bunker hexes having their own supply sources) and in this case they have a good organic assault value themselves. The result will probably be quite predictable.

For vehicles, the small units taking less damage situation means that one or two vehicles can survive and keep taking out your vehicles whilst you have to spend an again disproportionate number of units to deal with them.

In the current Gresnoye game against Landser34 for example, he has a Broken and isolated T-34 unit with a single tank sitting somewhere that is essentially invulnerable. Assaults by 90 men motorized Rifle units have no effect, and neither do attacks from anywhere between 30 and 50 T-34's or an assault by 12 T-34's. It just won't die. This occurs regularly, it is by no means a unique situation. In another game, a single gun holds against an assault by two PzG platoons.

For me personally, this is where a large part of the frustration of playing the game that I sometimes experience comes from: there seems to be an undocumented mechanic or a mechanic not necessarily working as intended, which results in strange behaviour which results in ahistorical events and which has a disproportionate effect on the results of a battle.