PB Kursk '43 South impressions/discussion

[Strela]

And if they do go low ammo due to regular gameplay, they are going to drop two morale levels as they will be unable to resupply.

Just to make certain everyone understands we have removed low ammo & low fuel in Kursk. The only units that can go 'unavailable' is artillery. That's why Jeff there is no double jeopardy as Dog Soldier calls out. Units can be set up low ammo & low fuel by the scenario designer but they won't go into that state during a scenario.

Also to be clear, this is a rule only for Kursk currently. Other battles will probably have in scenario supply considerations. At Kursk both sides were amply supplied and there was little mention of shortages during the engagement.

David

[ComradeP]

The more I play the short scenarios where I have to clear bunkers, the less I like the randomness of it, I would really have appreciated some more advantages from flanking the enemy or being able to attack from multiple hexsides using either a double stacking limit or something like a 1.5 stacking limit or whatever for determining how many men can participate. It's not as bad as in Moscow '42 when you're attacking as the Soviets, but it can be a problem in the short scenarios.

I know Dog Soldier and presumably some others disagree that clearing bunkers is often luck based, but there are instances where I just don't see how skill could influence the result further.

Let's take Gertsovka as an example.

In a PBEM with me, Dog Soldier's first assault against a bunker by presumably a nearly full strength PzG company and 2 Pionier platoons resulted in one or two losses for him and 20 for my 50 man defensive units. His numerical superiority was about 5 to 1 and he had a quality and for the Pionier units an assault value bonus.

My casualties felt like they were a bit high, but I felt the result was overall reasonable.

In my games against the AI, I've attacked ATR platoons and HQ units with as many as 20:1 odds in manpower and the defenders still held. That's why I say it depends on a die roll.

If you move an X amount of men of a certain quality in a certain hex to attack a Y amount of defenders of a certain quality in a certain hex, the only other variable is the die roll.

Let's say Dog Soldiers assault would've failed. Would that have been due to any lack of skill on his part? No, he would simply have gotten a poor roll.

Now, a scenario like Gertsovka is balanced so tightly that if you capture all objectives, you could still lose or get a draw at best depending on your casualties. In essence, if you don't manage to kill the mortar unit and at least a couple of AT guns, you're likely to lose. If the Soviet player hides the mortar unit and AT guns, he substantially improves his chances of winning simply because capturing the objectives is not good enough for the Germans.

I'm currently assaulting the 10 point objective with its own supply source in a game against Outlaw Josey Wales. I'm guessing he was holding it with about 100 infantrymen, about 30 guys in the ATR Platoon and the HQ. He might also have had 150 infantrymen. After three assaults, the HQ and AT unit were disrupted but in the end the only thing that determines whether I capture the objective will be a die roll.

Let's say I don't capture it and Dog Soldier attacks the 10 point objective with its own supply source later on in our game against a similar number of defenders and he manages to capture it. Again: all other variables are equal, so the only difference is the disruption die rolls and the casualties both sides sustain from the assault. We're not talking about skill in this case, but about chance or "luck". You can't make your own luck, because you can't influence the variables beyond a certain point.

It's one of the few design decisions I still don't really understand in PzC and now in PB: you can only attack from 1 hex per attack, there is no bonus for having units at the flank of the enemy (like the tactical shifts in SSG games). The attacker and defender use the same stacking limit and as such the closer the defender is to the stacking limit the more difficult it is to remove them, without the attacker being able to do much about it.

This is also why the German replacement rate in Moscow '42 can be a problem: capturing a bunker held by 800 B quality Germans just isn't going to happen when you can attack it with a bit over 2:1 odds with D quality units.

At the moment, I don't really know what I would be supposed to do against a Soviet bunker hex held by 5 platoons, for example. The usual argument is that the defender who concentrates his men in a couple of hexes won't be able to hold a line, but that ignores the fact that there might not be a need for that. If the Soviets hold even 1 objective at the end of a Gertsovka game, they're likely to win. If they stage a short delaying action and pile their units in 2-3 objective bunker hexes, there's little the Germans can do except assault and hope they disrupt the defenders (which, as stated above depends primarily on a die roll).

At least in Kursk, we're mostly attacking with A quality German units, but we're also defending with C quality Soviets that don't get the "double whammy" of being both isolated and out of ammo, losing 2 morale levels and becoming much more likely to disrupt. Now, they just move to D.

[ComradeP]

A test:

1 German company and 2 Pionier platoons at near full strength (a couple of losses to make them fit into one hex) and A quality vs. a 50 men C quality Guards Rifle platoon.

Values:
121 - 31
Attack modifier 50
Defense modifier 0.

Defender disrupts and retreats: 27 out of 100 times.
Average German casualties: 6.14
Average Soviet casualties: 16.25

Average casualties for the first 50 and the second 50 turns (to split the results at 50 for the sake of the example) are similar, so the average casualties are fine and work within the system, it's the Disruption result that matters and that's giving very variable results.

The casualties include casualties from defensive fire when the defender was targeted for an assault, but don't include casualties from moving into the hex they're assaulting from.

As can be determined, the result Dog Soldier had is uncommon and on the "good to excellent" end of results. Yet, the forces are identical to a situation where he would have had a 5 - 8 result. The variability influencing Disrupting the defender with assaults (against bunkers) can feel like it influences the game too much for a die roll (the game shouldn't be decided by if you get Disruption rolls early against the bunkers you need to assault).

[Strela]

ComradeP,

I'm always happy to see analysis. That said 'war' is the confluence of so many factors that it's hard to build a formulaic approach that all but guarantees a 'win' or victory. There is always luck, whether it's a hero bring sniped or the opposition being psyched out and retreating when they could have held.

My take from what your saying is that the root cause of the issues is the tightness of the number of turns. This seems to be a particular issue when playing HTH as humans tend to be smarter than the AI. I again am happy to tweak the number of turns officially for the HTH version if results are proving skewed too far one way. I have done this with prior games and put the updates up here till an official patch comes out.

That said, this is a new series and I'm looking for flawed logic, broken scenarios or issues with the engine. I'm all ears, let's just make certain enough scenarios are played before making significant changes. We have done a lot of testing but there maybe things that have been missed.

David

[ComradeP]

Running out of time is the result, not the root of the cause.

The root is that the current stacking system favours the defender if he isn't forced to spread out his units, and allows him either to create roadblocks of sacrificial stacks that wouldn't happen in a campaign game or stacks units in objectives to a degree that makes it difficult to impossible to win a scenario with average rolls.

Often, it's not a major problem in a campaign or large scenario where you can outflank the enemy, but in short scenarios where flanking either isn't possible or where you have to capture certain objectives to win it can be a problem. How a system handles extremes is often as important as how it handles the average.

In the case of the example, the Germans are at more or less at the stacking limit with one of the strongest possible stacks they can create for assaults aside from pionier only stacks, and the Soviets are fairly weak with only a single platoon, so I was expecting maybe as much as a ~40% success rating as things only get worse for the Germans as more defenders are stacked in a hex, just like you need to take a detour as the Soviets in Moscow '42 when you encounter 800 men units.

I might be too analytical in the approach, but spotting how and why something might not work (preferably when it only exists on paper and no coding has been done yet) is what I get paid for as part of test teams or when working on Unity of Command. It's sometimes difficult for me to keep work and relaxation apart when playing wargames. PB, like PzC, has good core mechanics, but there are some things that in my opinion can leave too much of an impression on a game.

[theophilus4]

Great job on the new Panzer Battles: Kursk game! I really enjoyed playing it over the weekend. Having played a number of Panzer Campaign and Squad Battles games, I found it to be a good blend of those two series. The scale was just right.

Future titles of this series will be an automatic purchase for me. Please keep 'em coming.

Any information about a possible next title or release date?

[Strela]

Any information about a possible next title or release date?

NO!!!

[Aaron]

Any information about a possible next title or release date?

NO!!!

What other title? Need to sell at least 100,000 copies of this one than maybe theyll let us do another.

Aaron

[Xaver]

Ummm the NO!!! used by Strela has 3 "!" they look like a group of palms... all we know that 2 or more palms form an oasis... O MY GOD!!! PzB moves to the desert!!!

This is a dramatization i'm not responsible for possible hype

Naaa i think that first we need some patches in Kursk... i dont expect a new PzB title in a year... over a year lets see, the "hard" job is done, now is time to polish engine and explore options.

Maybe they can create a thread to explore options based in players ideas, in my case i am a pro-desert because has 3 things that Kursk doesnt have.

1-is not an east title and you can cover diferent years (1940-41-42)
2-are a lot less units in map and is possible create what ifs to complete title.
Even the bigger battles are under Kursk level and you have more fluid battles (except El-Alamein and maybe Gazala).
3-documentation is all in english and are a lot of resources.

Other point is explore new features like dust, battles over 1 day of duration and explore rules to recover vehicles.

I have the money farmed for the next title and if you do a double or triple release i am ready to

[ComradeP]

Were all of the Korps sized scenarios balanced towards a German victory if it happened historically? Let's take the II SS Panzer Korps July 5th scenario as an example.

You start with the same forces you have for Hill 228_6 as your active forces. However, the Soviets have all of their artillery available to them, and artillery limits are high considering the amount of casualties Katyusha's cause combined with the requirement for overstacking if you want to launch credible assaults.

I moved my men up and as the Soviets targeted the Pionier units with the artillery. Casualties were acceptable, about 13 men or so. The next turn, I assaulted the Soviets with the couple of units that could assault. None of the SMG units disrupted.

As the Soviets, I targeted the large assault stacks, which resulted in one company becoming combat ineffective. Another company followed next turn. For the cost of having lost the combat effectiveness of an entire battalion in just 2 turns of action, I captured 2 objectives. A few turns afterwards, 2 Soviet companies activate and my men are stuck, hammered by artillery.

The result was entirely predictable: good artillery, high artillery limited, only a handful of friendly units and a lot of objectives to capture. That wasn't likely to work. It often doesn't work in Hill 228_6 and it doesn't work when the Soviets have all of their artillery at their disposal, a significant chunk of which can fire at your men. It's a similar problem to what can happen in PzC: large artillery concentrations cause high losses in a limited amount of time. That combined with the rather variable results of whether or not you can capture bunkers means your men are very vulnerable.

The historical outcome of the scenario was probably a major victory: the SS successfully penetrated the first Soviet defensive lines. I wonder how many playtesters got that result.

What tactics were used to counter the Soviet cherrypicking units to attack, making them combat ineffective for the rest of the game? Isolated units can still spot, and as long as you are adjacent to a Soviet unit, it's very easy for the Soviet player to simply direct an overwhelming amount of artillery at your spearhead. Without any means of replacing your strength, that's a disaster for the Germans.