02 Getting Started Utah Beach

[Nemo84]

Everyone has their own take on any game made should go in terms of pace of the attack.  Ask 30 gamers and get 30 different answers.

True, but if a historical title produces noticeably ahistorical results every single time a certain feature is involved, customers tend to notice and point it out.

Remember, that in a game, a player has complete control over their units.  Something historical commanders did not have.  The troops go precisely where you want them and attack with precisely the coordination the player wants.  Nothing worked so perfectly in historical terms.  And players can do this all game long.  Perfection in control of the troops.

There are ways around this when designing a game, though. In games like Combat Mission or Command Ops players do not have such perfect command, though there is of course no method of fully replicating the historical lack of cohesion and information. Panzer Battles puts the emphasis of its features elsewhere. My Panzer Battles units may always be perfectly coordinated, but so are my opponent's units. There are no convenient gaps in the enemy lines because some Hauptmann read his map wrong. The 116th Panzer Division will not fail to actually participate in the attack on Mortain. And so on.

It's always a matter of give and take when it comes to features. Wargames use abstractions and focus on certain aspects of historical replication and that's perfectly fine. But I think the end goal should always be to allow the player to mimic history, to present him with the historical choices and risks the real commanders faced. And this game is great at doing that, except when bunkers and heavy fortifications are concerned.

If a single company can clear a fortification in a single assault or two as you want, then Omaha would be a walk over.  Inland the Norman villages, all buildings built from local stone and noted ans quite strong, fortified by the Germans from several years of occupation would be too quickly taken.

Except the fortifications at Utah should not be so extensive nor so well defended as at Omaha. If making the fortifications at Utah less unrealistic negatively affects the fortifications at Normandy or inland fortifications, there is a major issue with how this game implements fortified positions. The defense of fortifications should be much more a factor of the soldiers defending it than of an arbitrary value assigned to the hex itself.

On Utah where, no matter how much concrete was above their heads, the German troops simply had little will or skill to fight and were thus easily neutralized, while at Normandy the defenders were much better trained and much more willing to stand their ground.

The player can make all their units move to the one hole in the line at maximum speed like a water heading for a drain rather than what actually happened where delays in exploiting a breakthrough occurred through out the war by both sides due to lack of knowledge of enemy's true predicament.

And the defenders can react much more easily to that breakthrough than real-life defenders could, so it all evens out in the end. Besides, from my limited experience the game already limits such an exploitation move by virtue of stack limits and unlimited attacks of opportunity from every enemy unit observing that hole.

What player halts their British XXX Corps tanks in any Market Garden game after Nijmegen bridge falls as happened historically to wait for the infantry?  What player has the XXX corps infantry tied up in Nijmegen?  They seem to be available in any game by any company i have ever seen.

If a game really wants a player to halt their XXX Corps tanks, it should implement command delay and confusion features to simulate such delays. Alternatively, I could ask what player has the luxury of getting a turkey shoot of German light vehicles and halftracks from 9th SS Recon Battalion attempting to cross the Arnhem bridge, instead of having to face a more coordinated attack.

I think if one takes the broader view that the pace of an attack in PzB  games can match that of historical rate of advances in most cases, then the game is a success.

Which is exactly the issue I'm debating for here. Whenever heavy fortifications are involved, any resemblance of a historical rate of advance goes right out of the window.

The fact that a veteran player was only able to achieve a draw means I achieved a relatively historical result.  Most of the beach defense was destroyed.  I was distracted a bit by the football game I was watching while playing the game during commercial breaks.

Except the historical result was a major victory in 5-6 turns in game terms, so your result was ahistorically poor. And consider such distraction a good substitute for the historical confusion and lack of coordination the game does not simulate

PS: And that's not football, that's handegg.

PzB games are designed to deliberately to achieve a draw result against players of equal skill in PBEM.  Getting a draw against the AI is just a matter of the artificial clock running out.

I don't do PBEM, and I think I'm far from the only one. As for the concept of an artificial clock, real-life battles were also often constrained by time schedules. The Utah Beach landing is considered a major US victory because the troops got off the beach ahead of schedule and with less than predicted casualties. Omaha Beach isn't considered a major victory because the troops didn't achieve their objectives in the allotted time schedule, causing delays to ripple through every subsequent battle plan. Even though they eventually still achieved all of the objectives in the end. I.e. their game clock ran out and so they got a draw.

This is a scenario one plays only to get the basics of the game functions. 
Do not take these games so seriously.  They are made for fun.  I, for one, believe they are very successful in being fun to play.

Especially in a tutorial one expects a walkover. They are also the first impression a game makes, and you only ever get one of those. In my case I took a serious gamble by spending 40 euro, which is a serious investment for some of us, on an unknown and untried game, at a time when I could be getting 3-4 AAA games on Steam for that money. When said game then immediately makes a poor first impression by presenting me with frustrating tutorial scenarios that go against everything I've learned in over a decade of wargames and history books, the mind automatically starts to wonder if this money was well spent.

Now I've since moved on to other scenarios which have all been quite fun and I am now quite satisfied with my purchase. I've now figured out how to reduce the negative combat modifier for each defensive hex type and I'm getting much more satisfactory and  historical results, though I'm still tweaking the exact value. Whoever came up with the idea of the Parameter Data tables and their editor is a bloody genius.

Wow, this turned into quite a reply. Apologies for the item-by-item dissection, but there were a lot of different ideas I wanted to touch on and this seemed the most legible way of doing so. I always like a good discussion and tend to get carried away.