Moscow 42 Default vs. VMs Optional Rules

[BigDuke66]

I guess at first one must recognize that the stock scenarios of older games(I guess from the HPS era) never used the McNamara DB and because of that the use of certain rules was not needed or could have been counterproductive.

M42 used the McNamara DB from the start and it also used default rules that almost matched those that are needed for the ALT scenarios of VM.
The 2 differences are just the counterbattery and the Alternate Assault rule.
Regrading the counterbattery rule, I think it could be an error because the PDT files have values set for the counterbattry rule, so it's hard to believe that these settings are done but the rules for it not used.
Regarding the Alternate Assault, well that is a drastic setting because the hard attack value of the German infantry is just 2 while its assault value is 12, a big difference that surely has an impact on assaults. I think the designer rather stayed on the save side not using that rule, but later things were tried to make the Germans less a problem, first higher Russian HQ values to keep the Russians driving and after that by lowering the max unit size of German units, the later setting is now default while the moral change was dropped.

My approach currently is that I would use the counterbattery and also the Alternate Assault rule.
The counterbattery because of the fact that is was a normal part of the artillery to be able to do counterbattery fire.
The Alternate Assault rule I would try too, I hope that the more AT assets will lower the amount of assaults by the Russian tanks or at least lower their numbers, but still give them a better chance in assaults. So I hope that it evens out regarding play balance. One must not forget that the tanks already have a hardcoded rule that they get a penalty if assaulting without proper infantry support, so in exchange to that hardcoded rule using the alternate assault rule and by that depicting the lack of infantry AT capabilities is worth a try.