82mm MTRS - Bogadukhov

[ComradeP]

There are a number of separate, but related, things to consider.

First, casualties per hit relative to unit size. Currently, those are (very) low for gun and many vehicle units compared to infantry direct fire from units with at least a halfway decent SA value.

Early war tanks are equally incapable of causing sufficient losses to stop an infantry push as most gun units are. To use the Hannut scenario as an example: the French tanks are incapable of stopping an infantry assault wave.

Due to the low casualties they cause, I often don't use small gun units at all but just park them somewhere safe. They might also end up getting interdicted when moving to the frontline. As Xaver mentioned, they tend to be "free points" for the attacker as they can't cause more losses than their own value in points.

The very detailed OOB in PzC and PB has a significant effect on both unit performance and playability when you consider how the mechanics work. The playability argument is fairly simple: in a full PzC campaign game, there might be up to a few hundred German regimental AT and infantry gun units that can't be combined into a larger unit.

That means a few hundred extra clicks each turn, which is cumbersome. As a result, I end up not using particularly the AT guns, as the benefits of keeping them at the front are not worth the clicking. Infantry gun units tend to have regimental spotters, which you can work around by keeping a battalion of each regiment close. At least you can stack the infantry guns per division without going over the road movement size limit, which helps.

In PB, those same small units are there, but their relatively speaking larger size compared to the average individual unit size of (combined) platoons makes them more useful. Still, I don't use infantry guns much.

Then the unit performance part, which ties into the initial discussion. As a simplified explanation: mathematically speaking, combined gun/vehicle units perform better than the performance of the sum of their parts if they would be firing individually. As terrain and quality fire modifiers are percentage based, higher fire values have a more notable increase or decrease.

Lower fire values are more likely to drop below the casualty causing threshold, which is why you see all those No Effect results from small gun/vehicle units.

That is also why even high performance units, like Tigers, don't perform well in small numbers. See the Franz' excellent adventure scenario for Kursk as an example.

Second, there's casualties over time. This is one area where artillery can theoretically outperform infantry units, particularly if infantry SA values are mediocre. As an example: American defensive artillery fire, aided by an indirect fire bonus for defensive fire, tends to hit like a ton of bricks compared to a single infantry salvo.

This is also why I was somewhat concerned about balancing off-map artillery firing in support, which it wasn't capable of doing until a recent patch.

In longer scenarios, direct fire elements normally have enough time to cross most of the map and might, in fact, have enough time to nearly clear the map like in some full day Kursk and Normandy scenarios. However, in a scenario with a fairly large amount of artillery and a low number of on-map units, like Bois du Homme - Quarry Hill for Normandy, artillery can be a real killer.

When it comes to changing the casualty causing balance in favour of indirect fire units (or any gun/vehicle units), treading lightly and making sure the system isn't broken in the process will require prolonged testing. Both the PzC and PB system feature lethal battles with high casualties, and scenarios are balanced towards that. Making the system less lethal would be welcome, but as I said: everything would need to be done in small steps.

Personally, I'd prefer experimenting with global changes and/or parameter data values over changes to the effect of artillery in certain terrain types or for certain unit types as a starting point for changing the system.