02 Getting Started Utah Beach

[nim8or]

[quote]
Why did Firefly get canceled?  Rupert Murdock is the most vile betrayer since Darth Vader.  Excuse me.  I digress.

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.
[\quote]

Firefly...grrrr!  :)

[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.

[Dog Soldier]

Firefly...grrrr!  :)

After firefly " a bad kisser" took on a whole new meaning.  
Dog Soldier

[wiggum]

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.

So you modified the Parameter Data tables and now, attacking/assaulting bunkers and pillboxes plays out more realistic ?
Can you send me the files ?
And maybe you should send them to Strela to have a look.

Besides that i also agree, the first two tutorial scenarios are way to hard for tutorials.
I expect to win in a tutorial if i follow the instructions. This is bad for new players, especially the die hard bunkers at Utah can be really frustrating. Hope that get tweaked in the first patch now that many players have complained about bunkers / pillboxes being way too hard to assault.

[Nemo84]

So you modified the Parameter Data tables and now, attacking/assaulting bunkers and pillboxes plays out more realistic ?
Can you send me the files ?
And maybe you should send them to Strela to have a look.

Besides that i also agree, the first two tutorial scenarios are way to hard for tutorials.
I expect to win in a tutorial if i follow the instructions. This is bad for new players, especially the die hard bunkers at Utah can be really frustrating. Hope that get tweaked in the first patch now that many players have complained about bunkers / pillboxes being way too hard to assault.

I'm still playing with the values, so I don't recommend you using my files as some of the results are still way off. But I'll explain what I've been looking at, and they you can try some things for yourself. Basically I just use pbparam.exe to edit the PBNormandy.pdt table. There are 4 different tables that each scenario can choose from, but I've only looked at the Normandy one which seems to be applied to most of the June scenarios.

First I tried doubling and tripling the Combat Values for attacker and defender, but this didn't really give satisfactory results so I returned them to default. Single assaults, even when used successfully against disrupted units, would cause 20-30 casualties for the attacker. Defender casualties increased as well but far less excessively, so even a very successful assault by a full company against a disrupted MG section would still kill a lot more attackers than defenders. Units were wiped out far too quickly. Maybe someone with more experience with these parameters could explain in some more detail how they work, the manual is rather vague and I would like to tweak them a bit as well.

Then I looked at the Combat Modifiers at the end of the table and changed them as follows:

• Improved Modifier: -10 (was -20)
  
• Trench Modifier: -15 (was -30)
  
• Bunker Modifier: -20 (was -30)
  
• Pillbox Modifier: -30 (was -40)
  
• Bunker Defense: 10 (was 15)
  
• Pillbox Defense: 15 (was 20)
  

Basically each fortification hex now adds a bit less bonus to unit defense and degrades incoming fire a bit less. There's also a bigger difference between bunkers and trenches, which mostly makes trenches a bit less invulnerable to long range fire and artillery.

When applied to Utah Beach:

• Tanks still kill 1 bunker guy max per shot, but do so a bit more reliably.
  
• Infantry has a bit higher probability of killing someone, both in bunkers and trenches.
  
• Artillery and naval support is still bloody useless against bunkers, but a bit more effective against the trenches.
  
• I did however notice a lot more fatigue and disruption effects from infantry or tank attacks.
  
• Assaults do not seem noticeably more effective.
  

I still want to make assaults a bit more bloody. Each turn is 30 minutes, and 30 minutes of close assaulting a position should cause more than 3 or 4 casualties on both sides combined unless the defenders break. But so far my experiments have resulted in either the default casualty figures or massively unbalanced ones.

[Ricky B]

What I would suggest, rather than changing the PDT, for the Getting Started Utah is to simply reduce the BUNKERs to Bunkers in the scenario editor, leave the PDT as is, and see what that gets you. It won't impact assault losses, I don't know a way to do that without impacting overall losses as you saw, and that would skew the Utah landing losses to be much higher than historical, so you will lose that piece. Try this change and see how the breakthrough goes - and keeping your attacking stacks under 100 men will limit attacker losses without impacting the effect of the assaults much either - you are going for disruption as much or more than losses to clear the bunkers.

I say this because, although you stated earlier that the game "produces noticeably ahistorical results every single time a certain feature is involved", I disagree and that on Omaha, and many or all of the British beaches, the results are relatively close to historical - I know for sure that Omaha results are close to what happened in general terms and have the history notes to back that up.

Utah for the 2 southern exits came out relatively close in my testing also, and I have never found anything for the more northern exits that gave timelines or forces, just notes for example about a German LT being pulled from rubble of his position at exit 3 or 4 from the south at around noon, by other German forces - but with the note that the American advance had pushed off the beach by then too. So I will defer to what you have on the northern positions falling to a company - I know it fell by the end of the day but that is the limit of my knowledge. Anyway, my suggestion is try the above and see where it gets you, as an alternative to a global PDT change - although you can easily enough make your own scenario versions that call your custom PDT also, and thus be able to try different changes versus the stock.

Good to hear how it works out.

Rick

[Dog Soldier]

RickyB brings up a good point. If any one wants to create their own scenarios form the maps, OOB, pdt tools provided in the game, they can send them to me I will get them vetted in the blitz HTH system or help the scenario designer do the same. The blitz HTH area is a great place to get feedback from other members on your own game scenarios. We can then host them here at the blitz.

Dog Soldier

[Ricky B]

One other possible tweak, and actually the one I will lean toward the most with Strela/David if we decide to change things, would be to leave the positions alone but disrupt the defenders of the southern bunker position. That is essentially their state at the start of the landings, they were disrupted and put up little fight. This would put the defenders into the historical state (although without a shot being fired yet is the trade off) which was the best possible state from the US point of view at the time of landing. Broken state would go to far.

Rick

[wiggum]

But wouldn't they be able to just Un-Disrupt the next turn ?

[Ricky B]

They could, that is what the game is based on is things like that. If you want to watch history, then a documentary is best. The game, as in war itself, is not about what "should" happen, it is about skill and luck and happenstance, that results in what happens. Poor communications, confusion, the chance shot that takes a leader out or having panic spread. Just because on June 6, 1944, the Utah defenders didn't put up much fight doesn't mean that there wasn't a chance that these poor quality troops actually stand up and fight hard, as many did on Omaha - until the US forces pushed in close in some cases, then they gave up the fight.

So they might undisrupt, so what? Then the position is going to put up a tougher fight, as expected. If they don't they put up little fight and history happens - again, the situation couldn't be any better from the US perspective but it could have been worse, this would replicate that. And at D quality, it is unlikely the defenders will undisrupt en masse.

But lots of things can be tried, depends on what the designer is trying to replicate. History, then break the defenders or remove them entirely, they put up little enough fight and you will get what happened. Alternatively, remove the bunkers, that would give the ability to achieve exactly what happened. Although I don't think either would be much fun in play. Historical, then I think disrupting may be just the ticket.