A new Panzer Battle gamer

[phoenix]

I'm a relative beginner. It's easy to get started and start losing PBEM games, I've found. No amount of reading the manual can prepare you for the intricacies of fire and movement, and the order in which you should do things in certain circumstances - you just have to play over and over, I think. Questions like how much of three stacks surrounding a bunker you should use to fire (without assaulting) before your assault, and whether to assault with a number of them first (keeping some for a second assault in the same turn), and whether any tanks should sit back and fire or also assault etc etc, are in a way the bread and butter of it (especially in Kursk) and hard to learn except by doing, I feel. But PB is easier in that respect than the Napoleonic games, I think. And, all that said, I do keep meaning to read the manual more....

Someone in here told me - when I asked a similar kind of question not so long ago - that if you've time to practice against the AI then you would use that time much better 'practicing' in live PBEM games, and I think that's absolutely true. Just get a couple of games going (easily done by posting a request in here), be happy to learn and lose. Everyone seems very friendly and helpful here (unlike some other wargame forums, where you might face a barrage of fanboys and a tight clique of experts, lol), and you can easily ask questions of your opponent during the game. I have found the better players seem very happy to almost treat the games as tutorials and pass on a wealth of information as you play.

Normandy is a much more interesting game than Kursk, imho, if you have to choose. Kursk can be a slog, I think, as it was in real life.

Peter