GC Unit Revisions v12 beta2 (June 15, 2014)

[deducter]

GC Unit Revisions v12 beta2
Updated June 15

For Panzer Corps Patch v1.21+
CURRENTLY ONLY FOR GC39-42.

v12 beta 2 adds changes for GC42.

Recently, I was energized to delve back into modding thanks to discussions on another forum. I want to do my best to make the newest version of GC Unit Revisions the definitive version, because I believe the game engine is fully capable of supporting a challenging, historical full playthrough of the Grand Campaigns. Although I had started working on the update last summer using the new rules for Panzer Corps v1.2, I suffered from serious modding burnout. Apologies to the old fans of GC Unit Revisions who were anticipating that release.

If you are new to this mod, a brief summary:
Grand Campaign Unit Revisions revises the equipment and rules files for the Panzer Corps Grand Campaigns (GCs), also known as the DLCs. Almost every single unit in the game has been adjusted. This mod is designed to find a balance between gameplay and historical accuracy in to order to make the GCs a more challenging and realistic simulation of the German perspective of the Second World War.

Recommend using reform units. I also disband all the new “hero” units added in patch 1.2, but that’s just my personal preference.

All feedback welcomed! Since this is a beta, I have playtested a very limited amount, so the mod is likely not yet balanced. In particular, I want to know how the new exp.pzdat values are working (veteran units vs raw unit performance), tank attacks against soft targets in the open is working out, how 10 strength artillery/bombers are working out, and how the removal of ground attack for most fighters is working.

Installation:
1. Install the Generic Mod Enabler, linked here:
viewtopic.php?f=147&t=27158
2. Download GC Unit Revisions in the attachment.
3. Unzip the attachment into in the MODS folder of your Panzer Corps base directory.
4. Use GME to enable this mod.

Changelog:

Combat dice rolls capped at 10. Overstrength units no longer deal massive damage.
Rate of fire of most* units set to 10. Overstrength artillery/bombers are no longer super efficient. Also removes hidden game mechanic that confused players about the effectiveness of certain artillery/AA.
Most fighters can no longer engage ground targets. There are some exceptions, such as the P-47 and fighter-bombers like the Mosquito. No more traps vs AI fighters, but no more worrying about AI fighters knocking off 4 steps on your elite tanks. Also makes keeping too many fighters in your core less attractive. Historically the Luftwaffe fielded many more bombers than fighters.
exp.pzdat overhauled: in general more experienced units have more defense but less offense compared with vanilla. Some units are much more effective with experience. Nevertheless, even elite units should suffer some losses in most engagements, since initiative bonuses are cut way down.
Prestige soft cap removed as it is not necessary with the other changes.
Elite overstrength costs the same as elite reinforcement. This is because overstrength points no longer contribute to the current firepower of a unit. Rather, overstrength represents tactical reserves. This should make overstrength more attractive for units like infantry and medium tanks and less attractive for artillery and bombers.
Tank SA increased to make them more devastating in open terrain. The SA increase is generally higher for German tanks for balance reasons and to encourage the player to make more attacks against soft targets in the open.
SA of various tank destroyers increased; keep in mind the SA of these units no longer benefits from experience.
Removed some AA guns from the purchase screen. This is because of the ROF change, making it impossible for certain AA units to be significantly different.
Many minor changes, to be elaborated in the manual.
Manual coming once all years are done.

*The only exceptions are unique weapons like the Gustav Railgun.

I anticipate these changes, once completed for the late war years, will make the battles extremely tough. It may become impossible to win DV in many battles.

GCUR v12 b2

Supports GC42.
Corrected the transports of various units. For instance, Pak 36 should only be towed by trucks.
In general, bomber effectiveness reduced.
Strategic bomber costs significantly increased.
88 gun AA -1.
Panzer II SA +1. Its 20 mm main gun was inadequate against all but the most lightly armored targets, but still effective against soft targets.
Most artillery costs increased. The exceptions are the 7.5 cm nKA and 10.5 cm leFH. The latter is the standard division-level German artillery. The prices are structured such that the player is encouraged to use it for the entire war. This increase was also because artillery rarely take damage, hence a higher price is needed to justify some of the more powerful units.
Halftrack defense greatly increased, to 8. Prices also greatly increased. Players can now move their halftrack-mounted infantry forward as if they were on foot, at least in open ground. However, halftracks are not cheap; be wary of bankrupting yourself if too many infantry receive such equipment.
Truck GD slightly increased.
Artillery ammunition for many models reduced by 1. This is to encourage the player to rely less on defensive artillery fire. The exception are Soviet models, which get plenty of ammunition. Soviet artillery may have had poor fire control, but they made up for that in quantity: both guns and ammunition were available in large quantities.
88 gun cost slightly increased. This unit is amazing for its cost, able to wreck early war tanks and devastate planes with ease.
7.5 cm Pak 40 cost in 1942 increased. This was still a new AT gun in 1942; cost will go down in 1943.
Recon unit costs increased.
Exp.pzdat: Infantry CD bonus 200 to 100. Fighter AD bonus 200 to 100. Strategic Bomber SA bonus 200 to 150, Infantry AD 200 to 150. The 200 bonuses are simply unworkable; they provide too big of an advantage for elite troops.
Recon units costs increased.
Potez 631 stats slightly improved.
Panzer IVG availability date moved to the start of Ilovlya.
T-60 and T-70 switched back to tank class with spotting = 2. This will be the case until 1944, when T-34 production was finally sufficient for all tank corps to be fully equipped with medium tanks.
Corrected various minor oversights.

[Rockety]

Welcome back, glad to hear it!

[nikivdd]

Great to see you back in action, Deducter. You were surely missed.

[Cataphract88]

Welcome back, Deducter.

[scypion]

At last !!! Great that you return my Jedi Master

[McGuba]

Oh, hey, and welcome back!

I used your GC '42 as a basis for the modified stats of the Battlefield: Europe Mod. Some of your changes such as the increased price for bombers and artillery, main gun and armour standardization or the reduced effectiveness of AA added a lot to the historical accuracy of the mod in terms of OOB and AI behaviour. However, we (me and Uhu) made a few further changes for gameplay balancing and other reasons. Still, your original work was the basic foundation, and I am looking forward to further updates incorporating the new units added by the latest patches of PzC.

[deducter]

Oh, hey, and welcome back!

I used your GC '42 as a basis for the modified stats of the Battlefield: Europe Mod. Some of your changes such as the increased price for bombers and artillery, main gun and armour standardization or the reduced effectiveness of AA added a lot to the historical accuracy of the mod in terms of OOB and AI behaviour. However, we (me and Uhu) made a few further changes for gameplay balancing and other reasons. Still, your original work was the basic foundation, and I am looking forward to further updates incorporating the new units added by the latest patches of PzC.

I saw that in your thread, and I'm perfectly fine with my equipment files being used with some modification for your mod. However, in my newest update new set of equipment, gamerules, and exp files will specifically be tuned with dice rolls being capped at 10 and the rate of fire of all purchaseable units set to 10. In other words, it may not be applicable for any future scenarios.

The idea behind these changes is mostly geared towards late war, so that super cores will no longer crush the AI with impunity, but conversely weaker, historical cores will no longer be mercilessly crushed by the AI. You should be able to much more easily survive the AI onslaught with units like Panzer IVs and Bf 109s. You might even be able take on a 14-strength IS-2 with your Panzer IV! (Although without help, at best you'd just be able to delay it, but that's more than you could do in the past.)

Initiative bonuses from experience has also been cut way down. You can't use any of the old tricks like stacking overstrength with artillery, with bombers, with high initiative/high attack units to attack without losses. Defensive artillery will still be critical, but should no longer be the god of the battlefield as it used to be.

This should also make defense heroes much, much more attractive.

I look forward to hearing some feedback.

[Andor66]

1.) GREAT
2.) THANKS
3.) ...has anybody an idea how to merge this changes with my very personal equip-file - without doing all per hand?!
I would know how to automize it in excel, but I never had success in saving the equip-file from excel, so I am still using "good old" notepad

[jmacnamara]

1.) GREAT
2.) THANKS
3.) ...has anybody an idea how to merge this changes with my very personal equip-file - without doing all per hand?!
I would know how to automize it in excel, but I never had success in saving the equip-file from excel, so I am still using "good old" notepad

Can you post that Excel sheet? Merging functionality is pretty cool after all. I will find the time to use VBA to generate the equipment file from Excel and will post it once it's working reliably.

[Andor66]

1.) GREAT
2.) THANKS
3.) ...has anybody an idea how to merge this changes with my very personal equip-file - without doing all per hand?!
I would know how to automize it in excel, but I never had success in saving the equip-file from excel, so I am still using "good old" notepad

Can you post that Excel sheet? Merging functionality is pretty cool after all. I will find the time to use VBA to generate the equipment file from Excel and will post it once it's working reliably.

This would be really cool - I hate using notepad, and if You could find a way exporting the equip-file from excel this would save lots of time
I will add the file tomorrow - as soon as I know how to upload an attachment

[jmacnamara]

I just rigged up a proof of concept. Saves just fine... EXCEPT the bloody text encoding, which crashes PzC. VBA is so mindbogglingly primitive that I see no quick way of rectifying this. So, for the moment, nevermind.

I may have a way around this, but it involves some effort for the user. First check out this Excel sheet:
https://app.box.com/s/cue4fqp0059426bh798f
My funmod. Move along, nothing to see here. Really.
Two sheets, one named Equipment (guess what it contains) and one named Save. It's not really Save, but the base of a template. Check out the formula on the A column. I have the Equipment File in a database format for each sorting, selecting and other stuff. This affects the formula. Select the entire column, and paste into a REAL text editor. (Notepad doesn't count). Now do a replace all on double quotes. Replace them with nothing. Excel likes to treat every user as a complete idiot and includes quotes for our convenience. Yes, I hate them too. Last step, a good text editor allows the user to choose the text encoding. Pick UTF-16 Little Endian. Save. This will work in PzC, cause it certainly does in mine.

For a text editor, I use Programmer's notepad, which is free and can be obtained here: http://www.pnotepad.org/

[McGuba]

deducter wrote:
I saw that in your thread, and I'm perfectly fine with my equipment files being used with some modification for your mod. However, in my newest update new set of equipment, gamerules, and exp files will specifically be tuned with dice rolls being capped at 10 and the rate of fire of all purchaseable units set to 10. In other words, it may not be applicable for any future scenarios.

Sure, such changes would probably unbalance the existing and well tested mod(s), but nevertheless I will check your latest changes as soon as I find some time for it (currently I am quite busy with some real-life work and stuff).

The idea behind these changes is mostly geared towards late war, so that super cores will no longer crush the AI with impunity, but conversely weaker, historical cores will no longer be mercilessly crushed by the AI. You should be able to much more easily survive the AI onslaught with units like Panzer IVs and Bf 109s. You might even be able take on a 14-strength IS-2 with your Panzer IV! (Although without help, at best you'd just be able to delay it, but that's more than you could do in the past.)

As for the Bf-109, in the end I added three different sub-versions for the G (Gustav) version of it. The early G-2 version has just about the same stats as the plain G version of your GC '42, with the subsequent G-6 (available from 1943) and G-14 (from 1944) versions having increased stats and thus keeping the Gustav "in the ring" until the very end. Historically the Bf-109G was being produced and used from 1942 to pretty much the end of the war as most factories just could not change for the producion of the "K" version. And still, the final G-10/14 versions produced in 1944-45 differed considerably from the early G-2 in both performance and equipment.

I am also a big fan of the PzIV and like the idea to keep it in the OOB until the end as it comprised a large portion of the panzer divisions.

Initiative bonuses from experience has also been cut way down. You can't use any of the old tricks like stacking overstrength with artillery, with bombers, with high initiative/high attack units to attack without losses. Defensive artillery will still be critical, but should no longer be the god of the battlefield as it used to be.

This should also make defense heroes much, much more attractive.

I look forward to hearing some feedback.

Yeah, I would also go for more balance and I still feel that artillery is kinda "king of the battlefield", which should not be. I do think that in Panzer General it was more balanced: artillery was important, but not overly, unlike in PzC.

[Andor66]

When discussing the "king of the battlefield" , we will find that it is linked particularly to the kind of war taking place. A mobile warfare as originally intended by Guderian an his followers will decrease the importance of artillery for both attacker and defender just due to operational reasons, so imo it is totally ok and also historic to limit the artillery power as described by deducter.

When looking at the historic action, we will find that there is a slight difference between the eastern and western war theaters. Although Stalin himself named the artillery to be the "god of modern warfare" (in May 1941), the red army depended more and more on armor the longer the war lasted - they learned the lesson well the Wehrmacht gave them.
On the other hand artillery was one of the back bones of the anglo-american forces (air power was the second) on the western theater. This was strongly linked to the personality of the acting commanders. Esp. Montgomery was everything but a fan of the Blitzkrieg idea. At North Africa as well as at France after D-Day his tactics depended on detailed planning, caution and a massive usage of artillery. He definitely was no Patton (and all the less he was a Guderian or Eberbach), and his biggest try to switch to mobile tactics ended at the bridge of Arnheim with disaster. But also on the western theater it was a question of quantity, not of quality, and for this reason the unit data changes mentioned by deducter imo are align with the war history.

[Andor66]

I just rigged up a proof of concept. Saves just fine... EXCEPT the bloody text encoding, which crashes PzC. VBA is so mindbogglingly primitive that I see no quick way of rectifying this. So, for the moment, nevermind.

I may have a way around this, but it involves some effort for the user. First check out this Excel sheet:
https://app.box.com/s/cue4fqp0059426bh798f
My funmod. Move along, nothing to see here. Really.
Two sheets, one named Equipment (guess what it contains) and one named Save. It's not really Save, but the base of a template. Check out the formula on the A column. I have the Equipment File in a database format for each sorting, selecting and other stuff. This affects the formula. Select the entire column, and paste into a REAL text editor. (Notepad doesn't count). Now do a replace all on double quotes. Replace them with nothing. Excel likes to treat every user as a complete idiot and includes quotes for our convenience. Yes, I hate them too. Last step, a good text editor allows the user to choose the text encoding. Pick UTF-16 Little Endian. Save. This will work in PzC, cause it certainly does in mine.

For a text editor, I use Programmer's notepad, which is free and can be obtained here: http://www.pnotepad.org/

Thankworthy we will have a holiday tomorrow here in Germany, and as the weather is terrible, I will have enough time to spend to try it out as described. Lots of thanks in advance!
And of course I will have a closer look on Your "fun mod"

[jmacnamara]

Thankworthy we will have a holiday tomorrow here in Germany, and as the weather is terrible, I will have enough time to spend to try it out as described. Lots of thanks in advance!
And of course I will have a closer look on Your "fun mod"

As I am a westerly situated Nachbar of yours, I'll share in that holiday and the terrible weather.
The funmod is just a German adaptation of the DMP Amulet mod. I stripped the things I didn't like, kept those I did like, changed the transport system a bit and added the E Series. Ideal for playing nikivdd's LOV campaign.

[Andor66]

@jmacnamara: perfect - I wanted to try LOV anyway and of we are lucky the Sun will be back at weekend

[jmacnamara]

Just checked something. Excel to PNotepad saved as UTF-16 Little Endian messes up the umlauts. Well at least it doesn't crash the game. I'll continue to fiddle with this until I get it straight.

EDIT: Blank document in PNotepad. Change the properties to UTF-16 Little Endian. Then paste in the excel column. That works.

[Andor66]

Thanks a lot, I will start tomorrow using your advice!

[nvett]

welcome back Deducter look forward to the new revisions...

[scypion]

Deducter how is work going ? No word from you. If you need some help or betatester let me know