Infantry Defense Against Tank Assaults In Red Victory?

[Xerxes77]

The armor and vehicle characteristics in Squad Battles are amongst the oldest issues debated. Until we get a programmer and the motivation from the development team to work on the series all we can do is design scenarios that balance out these issues as much as possible and in that way keep the game system alive.

Unlike PzC and PzB the abstraction level in SB is much lower because individual weapons are deployed. Therefore in my experience squads that have no anti-tank weapons are almost completely helpless against an armored foe. In designing scenarios with armor I typically like to employ a healthy dose of satchel charges and other ad-hoc explosive devices to try and give the infantry a little help in this regard besides the obvious use of terrain and such. I personally feel the game does a pretty good job of conveying the terror which the unequipped man on the ground must of felt when faced with a huge armored vehicle bearing down on him. So I thoroughly enjoy the experience of both having armor or facing armor, but then I am also not hung up on winning as my record can attest. Lastly, vehicles break down often - are immobile and useless quite regularly on this platform so it kind of balances out in the end. See Warhorse's WW2 mod for some fantastic armor scenarios where they are both terrifying and terrible often within a single game.

Hi Ash, all very good points as usual.

It seems that there are two sides to the issue of vehicles. Based on some older posts, I see some folks complaining about their general lethality. I understand this is the result of the game equating armor with firepower (note we're talking exclusively about assaults here).

As far as the game is concerned, the bulkier the tank, the heavier the losses it inflicts.

I don't have a particular problem with this abstraction (even though the game doesn't really need it, and I can easily envision a more nuanced and realistic approach). Ultimately, lethality can be adjusted by tweaking the proper parameters.

The question of toughness is a different story. A tank with Armor 24 will take 50% losses in a given assault. Give it 25 Armor and it becomes invulnerable, regardless of the strength of the opposing force.

This looks like a bug. And it may be explained by a simple rounding error. If I were to guess, I'd say the "Hard Vehicle Value/Armor" multiplier applied to the assault damage against vehicles (as explained in the manual) is dropping fractions. When the Armor value exceeds the Hard Vehicle Value parameter, this multiplier becomes zero and nullifies all damage.

Seeing as a tank still has to take risks to get in position for an assault, including the danger posed by immobilization and AT weapons, the practical effect of all this can be subtle and situational. As you said, there are many ways in which a talented designer can work around an eventual exploit. In terms of game impact, I think the issue affecting the Di/Pi/De infantry assault values is much more prevalent and egregious.

Still, a few days ago in the naval thread someone pointed out a bug (a broken passive sonar, I believe) and got a confirmation that the issue will eventually be looked into. I believe that's an old series as well. One can dream