A few weeks ago in April I hinted that I would like to suggest an idea for playing Panzer Corps in a slightly different way. I want to go into this in more detail today.
It's all about the difficulty level. Usually, most players start with the default setting (Colonel) and the combat cases on “Normal”. This is also how I played through my first campaigns. Later, I set the combat randomness to “Dice Chess” (this is another topic in itself and will not be discussed further in this article). I gradually increased the difficulty level to “Rommel” during the test phase of D2R. This was also because I realized that some players were getting into prestige trouble with DAW, while I had no problems in this regard. Keeping my losses very low has never been difficult for me in strategy games.
With this approach, you basically choose a suitable difficulty setting, adjust it so that you can reach your DVs relatively safely and play through the campaigns in this way. This can be quite enjoyable and also bring some fun, but in the long run it becomes like chewing gum that is kept in your mouth for too long. You can also see this in the Let's Play videos for Panzer Corps. Even at higher levels, it gets boring at some point if 95% or more of the game ends up being a DV. It's a bit like a high jump competition where the jumper places the bar 10 cm below his own best mark and then jumps over this lower height again and again without changing the jump height again. As a spectator, the best you can do is wait for a failed attempt or stop watching at some point.
For most players, the rough difficulty setting (Colonel, General, ...to Ultimate) is also too far apart. To come back to the high jump analogy, it is roughly the same as if the jumpers would only jump the heights 1.00 m / 1.50 m / 2.00 m / 2.50 m. Almost all good jumpers would jump over 2 m and then fail. Almost all good jumpers would jump over 2 m and then fail. After all, Panzer Corps has fine-tuning options that only a minority will use. I would like to focus on these fine adjustments with my suggestion.
Panzer Corps has been cleverly equipped with a very finely adjustable difficulty setting. If you now use these setting parameters flexibly and constantly change them, a player can easily test his own limits. Specifically, I suggest creating a difficulty scale, as I have shown here as an example. Following this scale, you start at the beginning of a campaign at the standard level (Colonel - 100). With each DV you jump to the next level (101, 102 etc.) for the following mission. If you achieve an MV in a scenario, you remain at the same level in the following mission. If you complete the scenario with a “Loss”, the difficulty level is reduced by one. The mechanism is therefore very simple and requires no additional study. You only have to reset the level at the end of each scenario (with DV + Loss), but with a little practice this can be done within 10 seconds.
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The number scale (70 - 206) is strongly oriented towards the main difficulty levels (Colonel, General ... to Ultimate). For the easier levels such as General or Field Marshal, the level value is only increased by 1 or 2, for Rommel by 3, for Guderian by 4 and for Manstein by 5. This results in 51 different individual levels, 10 simplifying, the standard position and 40 aggravating. The player moves up and down these levels during a campaign, depending on his own success. Level 175 corresponds almost exactly to the Ultimate setting. The field marshal levels are a special feature. Normally, this is based on a reduction in player experience. However, I have already reduced this in DAW anyway, which is why I didn't want an additional reduction at this point. Conversely, this increases the experience of the AI units, which can be very aggravating in the later course of a campaign.
The advantage is that this entire system can be used for a wide variety of campaigns, not only for DAW, but mainly for longer ones. But you can also play a short campaign this way if you offset the starting point a little, for example starting at 125 instead of 100. The even greater advantage is that it can be used by all players, not just old, experienced veterans of the game, but also new players.
As more scenarios are completed with a “loss”, the question remains as to how to deal with scenarios that complete the campaign in such a case. You could then repeat the scenario, or alternatively use a cheat to switch to the next scenario while downgrading the difficulty. For this reason, among others, I have extended the scenarios in DAW that lead to a conclusion by 2 or 4 rounds.
Below I have statistics for 2 test campaigns. First, I put together a campaign from a whole series of missions that I had not played in my 2015-16 run, plus initial scenarios where key units were assigned. In the second example, I played the 4th campaign of DAW with the starting team for 1944. That was a really tough ride, as you can see at the end. This motivated me to add a number of small improvements to the missions. You can see from the two examples that the breaking point for the Grand Campaign was 155-160 and for DAW (4th campaign) 140-150.
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I'm not saying that this is the ideal way to play campaigns in Panzer Corps. It's an alternative way to do it. But you definitely reach your limits, you get bruised and suffer casualties. It's not for people who need their DV success at the end of a mission, although I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I also prefer a DV to narrowly failing. However, you ultimately learn more from such borderline experiences with individual defeats than from easily achieved successes. In any case, it is more important to preserve the substance of your troops and get as many units through to the end as possible than to achieve a single success. So try it out with any campaign.
