eskuche wrote: ↑Tue Dec 09, 2025 3:37 pm
Trying this out. Detailed gameplay comments forthcoming, but one MAJOR balance issue/concern is that unit cost is prorated based on its max strength. A unit with max strength 3 and a unit with max strength 20 both cost 100 prestige. However, to replace one strength point of the 3 strength unit that has taken a damage costs the same as replacing 6-7 strength points of the 20 strength unit. This means that it's best to not even try to use the low strength units, since your 3 SP pioneer that took one damage costs the same to reinforce as half of a 12 SP stuka losing half its strength. This means that one can use the larger formations with almost impunity from a prestige standpoint. Maybe historic if you want to justify if that way?
Edit: this is a well-known issue, by the way. In Afrika Korps, there are 3 strength matildas that offer full unit prestige during surrender. You just have to hit them with one artillery to suppress!!
The concept of differential strength points is of course interesting but IMHO cannot be easily balanced in PC.
If you wanted to rebalance this, keeping the smaller units, there are two ways.
One is to decrease the cost of named divisions/units, particularly those with lower strength points. For example, if a generic schutzen costs 100 for 10 strength points, an understrength regimen with 5 strength points has a base prestige cost of 50. However, this opens up for abuse; we can upgrade a 20 str army to the 50 prestige unit for very cheap army level reinforcements. This COULD be prevented somewhat by leveraging heavy experience and prestige penalties for upgrading out of class.
Option 2, which is slightly less work, is to increase the price of generic non-named larger units proportionally so that each SP costs more for those. However, you would need to increase prestige gain to make up for this. All in all, no easy solution, especially if you want to keep PAKMOD base equipment file the same.
I think most sane people would shut their eyes and ignore this issue, but it's kind of a dealbreaker for me.
Hi dieskuche,
thanks a lot for taking the time to explain this in detail – I completely understand what you mean.
You are absolutely right about how Panzer Corps handles cost vs max strength:
a 3-SP unit and a 20-SP unit with the same base price are treated the same by the engine when you buy them, but not when you reinforce them. One point of strength on a tiny unit is “prestige-expensive” compared to one point on a big corps. That’s a known quirk of the PC engine (as you wrote, the famous 3-strength Matildas in Afrika Korps that you just suppress and capture for full prestige…).
When I designed Europe Total War, my main goal was to represent the different levels of units on the map, without flooding the player with hundreds of tiny counters:
strength 1 = special company / detachment
strength 2 = battalion
strength 3–4 = regiment / brigade
strength 5 = “standard” division
strength 10–15–20 = corps, depending on how many divisions it actually contains
That way I can keep corps on map (so you don’t have to move 300 individual divisions every turn) and still show some historical flavour with independent companies, ski units, security troops, etc. Those very small units are not meant to stand toe-to-toe with a corps; they are there for:
local occupation duties,
screening and ZOC,
delaying enemy movement,
reconnaissance / presence in historical locations.
So yes, from a pure min-max point of view you are right: it is always more “prestige-efficient” to keep big formations alive than tiny ones. In a sense, that even matches the historical logic (high-level formations and key divisions got priority for replacements), but I agree it’s not elegant from a game-mechanics perspective.
About your two rebalancing ideas:
Reduce the cost of named/smaller units (e.g. understrength regiment at half price), but that opens abuse with cheap upgrades…
I see the logic, but as you already noticed, this can be abused heavily:
you could build an “elite” army cheaply by upgrading small named units into full-strength formations at a huge discount, unless I start using very punishing prestige/XP penalties for out-of-class upgrades. That quickly becomes quite messy on top of an already huge scenario.
Increase the price of large generic units so that each SP costs more for them, and adjust prestige income…
This is probably the cleaner of the two ideas, but it would require a full re-tuning of prestige flow, and I’m trying to keep the base PAKMOD equipment file unchanged for now for compatibility and for my own sanity.
I’m at about turn 240 in my current test run (April ’44), and for the last two turns I already struggle to fully reinforce and upgrade units – which to me is part of the design: in the late war the “game” is exactly to see if you can crawl to May ’45 with Berlin falling historically or earlier, under constant prestige and manpower pressure.
So at the moment:
I don’t plan to change the e-file / base unit costs,
but I might play a bit with prestige income and events later (for example small extra prestige injections at certain historical milestones, or penalties when the Axis is doing “too well”), once I’ve cleaned up the bugs and OOB issues from this first version.
I fully agree with you that the “differential strength” concept is interesting but not easy to balance in Panzer Corps. Some imperfections will remain, and I’m aware of that. For now I prefer to keep the historical structure (companies → battalions → regiments → divisions → corps) and accept a bit of engine weirdness, rather than rewrite the whole economy around it.
Anyway, your point is absolutely valid, and I’ll keep it in mind when I revisit prestige and balance after I’ve finished fixing the more “hard” errors I’m still encountering in my own long playthrough of v1.00.
Thanks again for the very thoughtful feedback – it’s exactly the kind of thing that helps push the scenario to the next level.
