Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC45West, Mar 4 2013)

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orlinos
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by orlinos »

Delta66 wrote:I agree with you Scypion, Pz I and PzII were obsolete technically and for performances.
However I understand that the purpose of the mod is to encourage players to use units that were commonly used in the various years of WWII, and not to have corps only made of the "high tech", high performances units. And Pz I and Pz II were widely used in 1939 and 1940.
And they are still very usable, Delta66, if one uses low enough prestige settings. On my latest playthrough (this time - going the Western DLC path) I decreased my prestige in Poland to 40% (still not 25% I'm afraid!). I used both Panzer I's and Panzer II for the most of Poland – I only bought the 38(t) in Modlin. In the beginning scenarios of 1940 I only had one medium tank, Panzer IVD – to deal fast with infantry in open terrain; when attacked by enemy tanks I used 38(t), Panzer II and Panzerjäger.

When playing with normal prestige settings, it makes sense not to use lesser units – Panzer III and IV will always be a better choice.

I am against making early tanks too good, because they will have to become more expensive, so they do not become super weapons – and medium tanks are already expensive enough.

I’ve noticed, that in mid-1940-1941 I tend to leave some of the earlier tanks at home but mainly because there are too many other tanks, especially the captured ones – Somua, T-34’s, KV’s etc. Since I also tend to field lots of infantry, artillery, planes and at least one mobile AA – my heart always breaks when I have to make choices. ;-)

I had the same problem when I started DLC 1944 East. I left 1943 with a huge and very varied core. From Tigers and Panthers to different StuG’s, Marders, Panzer IV’s and even a super-over-strengthened Panzer IIIL or IIIM. When 1944 began, I had to leave much of it in reserve, because of core limit decrease.
Piotr 'Orlinos' Kozlowski
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by deducter »

In the second post is an update of the changes I made for the next version. The biggest ones are infantry HA tweaks, Panzer II tweaks, and reconmove added to Kavallerie and Kradschützen.

I'll probably release this version in a few days, possibly sooner. I'd like to just post the changes as a preview.
Delta66
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by Delta66 »

Sdkfz 232/8 vs Tank in 1940

I noticed that the Sdkfz 232/8 rad, where sligthly more effective to finish damaged allied tanks than the Pz III or Pz IV. I mean finishing tanks with around 4 strength points left.
Because the Sdkfz 232/8 is a soft target, it suffer less damage than the Germans Panzer who are hard target, especially vs the british tank with low soft attack.
Of course the Pz III would cause more casualties to such allied tanks, but when the allied tank is allready down to 4 strength points, the extra casualties are not relevant. Whereas the fact that the Sdkfz 232/8 ability to take less damage is.

Typically the Sdkfz 232/8 give me a 4-0 combat prediction, whereas the Pz IIIF will give me 4-1 for the same combat.

I think the Sdkfz 232/8 get out of trouble a bit too easily. (This is not a big problem either), and I think making the recon unit soft target is good overall.
In 1939 it was not an issue because I used the Sdfkz 222/6 rad which is a bit weaker vs tank. And I suspect that from mid 1941 onward it will not be an issue either because the Soviet tanks soft attack values would be significantly higher.

PS: Changes for 1.10.2 look good
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by ThvN »

One little thing caught my eye, the British Achilles TD has the 'fixedt' trait, but it should be 'rott' like the similar American M10A1 GMC I presume?

And as a suggestion, maybe the German Ta 152 H fighter could be made part of the 'Focke' family? People who want to upgrade those late-war F-W's are now paying 730Pr for one Ta 152 or 786Pr for a He 162. With the upcoming GC '45 West and its ahistorical scenarios this might encourage people to take a more 'realistic' upgrade path instead of switching to jetfighters for relatively little extra cost. Although the Ta 152 wasn't exactly common, of course...
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by deducter »

Delta66 wrote:Sdkfz 232/8 vs Tank in 1940

I noticed that the Sdkfz 232/8 rad, where sligthly more effective to finish damaged allied tanks than the Pz III or Pz IV. I mean finishing tanks with around 4 strength points left.
Because the Sdkfz 232/8 is a soft target, it suffer less damage than the Germans Panzer who are hard target, especially vs the british tank with low soft attack.
Of course the Pz III would cause more casualties to such allied tanks, but when the allied tank is allready down to 4 strength points, the extra casualties are not relevant. Whereas the fact that the Sdkfz 232/8 ability to take less damage is.

Typically the Sdkfz 232/8 give me a 4-0 combat prediction, whereas the Pz IIIF will give me 4-1 for the same combat.

I think the Sdkfz 232/8 get out of trouble a bit too easily. (This is not a big problem either), and I think making the recon unit soft target is good overall.
In 1939 it was not an issue because I used the Sdfkz 222/6 rad which is a bit weaker vs tank. And I suspect that from mid 1941 onward it will not be an issue either because the Soviet tanks soft attack values would be significantly higher.
I have no problem with recon being efficient at mopping up weakened targets, as of the current rules this is working as intended.

The recon unit component is hardly perfect, but without the ability to mod combat rules, I think the current system is the best compromise. In vanilla, of course, recon units are very fragile and basically disposable units. Here, recon units are more accurate as elite units, and hence they are much more survivable but also more expensive. And certainly as the war progress, their firepower becomes inadequate against all but the most vulnerable targets like artillery.

The ideal way to do things, if I could implement more rules, is to limit the amount of damage recon units can take when attacked. This would prevent units like the T-34/85 from one-shotting a recon unit. But until I can mod combat rules, the current system will have to do.
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by deducter »

ThvN wrote:One little thing caught my eye, the British Achilles TD has the 'fixedt' trait, but it should be 'rott' like the similar American M10A1 GMC I presume?

And as a suggestion, maybe the German Ta 152 H fighter could be made part of the 'Focke' family? People who want to upgrade those late-war F-W's are now paying 730Pr for one Ta 152 or 786Pr for a He 162. With the upcoming GC '45 West and its ahistorical scenarios this might encourage people to take a more 'realistic' upgrade path instead of switching to jetfighters for relatively little extra cost. Although the Ta 152 wasn't exactly common, of course...
As was pointed out to me, the Achilles had a slow, manual turret. I have updated the manual in the newest version to correct that mistake. However, I think the rott is inappropriate here, because I want the Achilles to act like most TD and get an IN bonus when attacked by turreted units. If I make the Achilles rott, then I'd have to give it a boost to IN, or it'd be a very, very bad TD. And if I give it a boost to IN, then it'd be more similar to the M18 or M10, which I think we can all agree that the British did not use their TD like the Americans.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the 1945 "wonder weapon" units, much less the boderline scifi units in the upcoming GC45West, but the Ta 152H as part of the Fw 190 family has been requested so much that I'll implement this change once GC45West comes out.
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by ThvN »

True, the Achilles had a manual turret, but so did the M10. Same turret with a different gun, later versions got a little more protection (a roof). So I was expecting both (M10 GMC and Achilles) to have similar characteristics, wether they are 'rott' or 'fixedt'. It's just the apparent inconsistency that I noticed. I hope that makes more sense then my previous post, sorry. If you have your reasons, leave it as is.

Those turrets were initially so difficult to traverse (even impossible when the TD was not nearly level) that counterweights had to be added to the rear of the turret. I just checked one of my books, and it quotes a time of 80 seconds to traverse the turret 180 degrees. That's extremely slow... Wikipedia quotes two minutes for a full 360, which is not much faster. The Panzer IV J was manual as well, but that could be cranked around a lot faster I believe.

To be complete: The M36 GMC ('Jackson') received a better, powered, turret which could traverse at 24 degr/sec, identical to the number given for the Sherman and the M18 GMC. So 360 deg. would take 15 seconds, very fast for its day. So I completely agree with the M36 and M18 having the 'rott', I just thought it was odd that the M10 and Achilles had different traits.

And I agree with your sentiment about the 1945 wonder weapons, one or two from the new GC '45 west in particular... not even borderline scifi, but proper retro scifi I think. I am very curious what sort of comments they will get in the forums. And how you will 'mod' them to make them more realistic, of course :mrgreen: . Fuel: 3, all attack values zero? :wink:
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by deducter »

Hmm, I'll do this then:

M10A1: rott, IN -1 penalty, to reflect the slow traverse of its turret
Achilles: rott, IN -2 penalty, to reflect its slow traverse of its turret and the differing British TD doctrine

Even though I'm not a fan of the new units in 1945West, I think the design decision is fine. After all, 9 GCs before this followed history fairly closely, and so why not have some fun with the very last GC, given that there's a huge branching path too? I'll be sure to allow the player a chance to play around with the wonder weapons, but they'll have drawbacks.
ThvN
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by ThvN »

deducter wrote:why not have some fun with the very last GC, given that there's a huge branching path too? I'll be sure to allow the player a chance to play around with the wonder weapons, but they'll have drawbacks.
Oh, I don't mind a healthy dose of 'what-if?' and fooling around for fun, and I'd be a hypocrite if I advocated making the Ta 152 more easily available while ignoring only slightly more rare or fictional units. These sort of things add flavour, and can be modeled quite nicely in some cases. It's just that this sort of unit gets quite a diverse range of reactions, and while they can be fun and interesting, the discussions involving fictional hardware often quickly get tiresome. Although I think you'll manage to make something nice out of them without trouble.

And even if I'm being sarcastic about wonder weapons, if you need any input, I have actually done some e-research on some of these units years ago, for a completely different game. But that will have to wait until the official release, if you want any input from me before that, we can use PM.
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by deducter »

Updated with lots of minor tweaks and many consistency fixes. See second post for details.
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by borsook79 »

Beta of 1.13 is here with slight changes to the equipment file...
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deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by deducter »

The beta patch should not have any effect on this mod, since the eqp file is installed into each GC folder. And the new wonder weapons don't come out until 1945, nor do I intend to enable them except for GC45West.
orlinos
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by orlinos »

Bugs:
Panzer 38(t) in the tank class in 1942 East (no upgrade to Marder).
Manual, page 70 – old SA and HA values of Panzer IIC and IIF (only in the "Table of German Recon Units 1939-1942").

I have just installed the latest version, so I cannot comment on the changes. Great work, as always!
Piotr 'Orlinos' Kozlowski
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by ThvN »

47 mm FRC changed to 25 mm FRC, to reduce the silliness of the Belgians/Dutch being equipped entirely with the best French AT weapon
Yes, it is a bit silly to let them have the best AT gun, but the Belgian 47mm FRC was quite good, actually. Nearly as good as the French gun, and certainly better than the 37mm PaK. Maybe give them the 37mm Bofors (Polish) gun instead? It's only a minor issue, and your current solution is fine, there is not much to gain here anyway.

BTW, I checked your stats for the 25 mm French AT gun, the HA seems a touch on the low side to me. The little 25mm SA 34 was very good, at short ranges ( <500m) it equalled the German 37mm PaK. So, the HA=4 seems a bit low? The Germans really feared the French AT guns, and reckoned the 25mm to be at least as dangerous as their own 37mm.

I notice that the French guns have been tweaked and mentioned in this thread recently, so here's another boring story, courtesy of me having nothing better to do at the moment;

To avoid any confusion: The French, Belgians and the Dutch all had their best anti-tank gun in 47mm, although the calibres were incompatible (the French, Belgians and Dutch all had different 47mm case lengths). But besides that, the French had two different 47mm guns... I'm not sure if you were aware of that, so my apologies if you already have accounted for that. It just seems to me that the HA=7 for the towed 47mm SA 37 is a bit low, considering its performance was not far off the German 50mm PaK and on par with the Czech 47mm gun on the Panzerjäger IB (which are HA=11 and HA=10 resp., I believe?). It's main disadvantage was that is was quite rare, as the French only had 1200 or so of the towed 47mm guns.

The towed 47mm SA 37 was more powerful than the 47mm one in their tanks (Somua/Char B1bis). The calibre of the AT gun was 47 x 380R, the tank gun was 47 x 193R. (the second nr. is the lenght of the shell casing). Tank guns had the shorter shell casing, a lower muzzle velocity but still decent penetration. The tank gun had a good supply of HE shells, the AT gun's HE shell was very rare, apparently.

This mess of different 47mm calibres may explain why the stock eqp file has the Belgians using the 47mm FRC with cloned stats from the French 47mm SA 37. The Belgian gun was a domestic design, the Dutch used the Austrian 47mm Böhler (the Italians too, as the 47/32 M35), and called it the "4,7cm Pag". The 47mm Böhler had penetration roughly comparable (slightly better and more consistent) to the 37mm PaK, but a far better HE performance (it was designed as a dual-purpose infantry gun). But for your mod, I don't think it is very worthwile to start tweaking all those different guns, so I'll leave it that. Here are some links, if you need sources or research material:

For the French guns, difference between the various 47mm French guns:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 2#p1345640

You've probably already come across the works of David Lehmann? (who has done some excellent writeups about French equipment):
http://www.tarrif.net/wwii/pdf/DL%20-%2 ... mament.pdf


Belgian 47mm FRC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/47_mm_Anti ... Model_1931
http://ww2armor.jexiste.fr/Files/Allies ... illery.htm


Dutch 4,7cm Pag (Böhler) (this is a short English article, the Dutch version is more elaborate)
http://www.waroverholland.nl/index.php? ... at-gun-pag
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by deducter »

Delta66 already provided similar feedback about 47 mm AT weapons.

Although the discussion on the various 47 mm guns is interesting, keep in mind that the 47 mm FRC comes up a total of 2 scenarios in GC40; those are two out of three scenarios in which there are even Belgian/Dutch opponents. And every single one of their AT guns is the 47 mm variant, and there are quite a few of them. The game only supports one AT weapon for the Belgian/Dutch, and I'd rather the player come across weaker AT guns in those scenarios.

The GCs only supports 1 type of 47 mm AT gun for the French, so the ingame guns perhaps it should be an average of the two historical types.

There are a lot of French and British towed AT weapons in 1940. I can buff the HA of all these guns, but then, what incentive does the German player have to get tanks, if all of them have paper thin armor and useless against almost everything?

Unless there's a significant demand, I think I'll leave the current Allied AT weapons as is for GC40. Once again, I must emphasize that I've intentionally tried to keep the early war fairly easy. I'm more interested in feedback once the Eastern Front opens up, especially in 1943+. It's where 80% of the work of this mod is done. I consider careful modelling of early war AT guns, which again come up in only one year that is meant to be easy, to be a low priority relative to the 50+ scenarios of the Eastern Front.
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 6 2013)

Post by deducter »

orlinos wrote:Bugs:
Panzer 38(t) in the tank class in 1942 East (no upgrade to Marder).
Manual, page 70 – old SA and HA values of Panzer IIC and IIF (only in the "Table of German Recon Units 1939-1942").

I have just installed the latest version, so I cannot comment on the changes. Great work, as always!
Both of these are fixed in v1.10.3
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by Uhu »

Deducter,

these stats are dedicated to GC44West or for all GC's (like GC44East)?
Because the 20mm guns to upgrade on SA 4 - well of course it's only my opinion but that leads far from the targeted reality. Same for the Pz IIIN SA valuable. And if you make that than the whole SA valuables for all armored units had to be changed (at least).
I played the Hungarian Campaign in 1939-41 with tankettes and tanks with SA = 2 and of course they were not dedicated inf killer (also because of their GD = 6) but they did the job - after some xp gaining - well.
deducter wrote:v1.10.2 (Feb 6, 2013)
...
deducter
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Jan 16 2013)

Post by deducter »

Uhu wrote:Deducter,

these stats are dedicated to GC44West or for all GC's (like GC44East)?
Because the 20mm guns to upgrade on SA 4 - well of course it's only my opinion but that leads far from the targeted reality. Same for the Pz IIIN SA valuable. And if you make that than the whole SA valuables for all armored units had to be changed (at least).
I played the Hungarian Campaign in 1939-41 with tankettes and tanks with SA = 2 and of course they were not dedicated inf killer (also because of their GD = 6) but they did the job - after some xp gaining - well.
The Panzer II 20 mm autocannon + machine gun surely warrants higher SA than 2. The point is that every unit should deserve a slot in the player's core. If a unit is underpowered or overpowered relative to other choices, then that's a balance flaw, and I will do my best to fix it. I agreed with other posters that the original Panzer II stats were underpowered. With SA = 4, this unit can get +2 SA at 3 stars, so it can perform reasonably well at mopping up weakened soft targets. This can be quite a useful niche for the tank, especially considering it is very cheap. But it has almost no anti-armor potential; even the BT-5 and T-26s are favorites against the Panzer II. So this seems to be both more historically accurate and better balanced.

As for the Panzer IIIN, its SA bonus kicks in in 1943 to compensate for the improved GD of infantry. Otherwise, this unit is not worth getting, because it is easily defeated by any T-34. The player would be much better off getting all Panzer IVs, which are much better against tanks. So, in this case, the stats aren't historically accurate, since the Panzer IIIN has slightly higher SA and much too high CD, but this gives the player some incentive to get one for 400 prestige. It can be very good at destroying soft targets, and decent in close terrain against infantry. In 1943, against anything but the T-70 recon tank, the Panzer IIIN is terrible. So this seems well balanced to me too.
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 7 2013)

Post by deducter »

As I am playing some of the late war years, I have some thoughts on balance:

1. Fw 190F/G AA, GD, AD slightly too high
2. Extra ammo on German infantry is noticeable; is this change too good, especially for SE infantry?
3. American and British HW Infantry along with Soviet Guards don't seem nearly threatening enough to tanks in close terrain due to their HA reduction

Do other players agree? These changes feel small and I feel they are marginal cases. If other players agree with me, I will make the changes. If not, I won't.
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Re: Grand Campaign Unit Revisions (GC44West, Feb 7 2013)

Post by orlinos »

Spotted a mistake in 1943 - the Hs 129B-2 bomber availability ends in 1.1.1943 - making it impossible to purchase a new one. Other years seem to be OK.
Piotr 'Orlinos' Kozlowski
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