Armor and Mech Blob - What Needs to Be Done?

[LOGAN5]

I think I changed my mind about the blob, it needs to be fixed.. I built only mech as soviets and was able to completely crush barbarossa even with all the penalties and marched straight into berlin within a matter of months.

Did you play vs AI?

Yes. was able to hold france until russian entry, there were a total of about 4-5 armor divisions in east germany but you keep hammering away not worrying about taking losses and you can pretty much punch through. You think a human opponent can beat that tactic? By 1942 russians have well over 2000+ pps

[Plaid]

I don't know, how "mech blob" will help you breaking german defences somewhere in poland cross-river. You will have like 1:7 odds for 1st attack, 1:5 for 2nd and 2:3 for 3rd (and no hex for 4th). So you will lose lots of soldiers and don't destroy german unit, which could be repaired/replaced next turn.
Problem with this "mech blob" is that you will not be able to attack any unit in defence line with more then 2-3 units, and also if you go for blobbing you will not have air support, so no chance to kill unit in 1 turn.

I played with normal soviet army against german defence in Poland in 1942 and casualties were terrible for USSR, and advance very slow.

[LOGAN5]

russians take horrible losses, but sooner or later you break through, i did have a 2nd front in france with us and british armor, couldnt even make it into brussels there were stopped dead in there tracks, I think because the easternfront is so big you are able to flood in and cut of a lot of german units for an easy kill. Just push everything forward as fast as you can and dont worry about taking losses.

[schwerpunkt]

russians take horrible losses, but sooner or later you break through, i did have a 2nd front in france with us and british armor, couldnt even make it into brussels there were stopped dead in there tracks, I think because the easternfront is so big you are able to flood in and cut of a lot of german units for an easy kill. Just push everything forward as fast as you can and dont worry about taking losses.

My experience as the axis player is that hordes of russian MECHs on their own are quite manageable provided that you have heavily researched the Infantry tech. In a couple of games, I have mown down hordes of russian MECHs and gone on to win because I managed to keep the russian loss rate very high. The thing I fear as a German player is hordes of FTRs and TACs because the Luftwaffe has great difficulty in opposing them during the poor weather and they can weaken a specific sector of a front, weakening the ability of the German player to mount effective counterattacks with reserve units. Hence, a well balanced force of MECHs, FTRs and TACs is more effective than a MECH horde IMHO...

[gerones]

russians take horrible losses, but sooner or later you break through, i did have a 2nd front in france with us and british armor, couldnt even make it into brussels there were stopped dead in there tracks, I think because the easternfront is so big you are able to flood in and cut of a lot of german units for an easy kill. Just push everything forward as fast as you can and dont worry about taking losses.

In the real WW2 by late 1944 and in 1945 the soviets began to have serious manpower issues: this was as a result of their huge four-years war effort against the germans. Let´s think that war in Eastern front did not allow to any side to catch their breath.

In CEAW GS, the russians rarely go below 75 manpower: this is because the players normally avoid less quality troops against the high tech german units. So good and experienced CEAW players normally avoid to take huge losses with the soviets because of this. So IMO, it is not that good to attack with the soviets without taking care about losses because you will soon get below 75 manpower and this means a poor performance against the high tech german units. It is only by the very end of the game, when you need to reach Berlin in time, when it makes more sense to attack with the soviets without taking care about losses.

[StevenCarleton]

I like Stauff's proposals for the short term, but I still don't understand why we can't have real production limits in some future GS release. Of course, its impossible to know the exact capabilities of the "engine" but it seems possible to add this logic on top of it. Realistically, the only nation that was able to massively increase its production capacity for a given weapon system was the US, and it had 2-3 years to plan for this. I really like how CEAW allows you to plan your techs several years ahead to match your future military strategy. Why can't this be done for production? If you want to build massive numbers of planes at some point, then you have to invest several years ahead and ramp up to it. Realistically, production was limited by factory capacity for a given weapon type, raw materials, and manpower. Hitler actually did consider producing about 1000 tanks a week, but the cost in Marks would have been more than his entire military budget! Production in say, aircraft, would be limited by available aluminum. Tanks need lots of steel hardened with minerals like chromium. Now some parts were shared (aircraft engines were used in tanks), but generally a tank plant is obviously different than an aircraft plant or shipyard, so you can't just say your factories can build anything, anytime. Players who properly plan ahead and match their military strategy to their production and tech planning should win, just like in the real war.

[Morris]

you are quite right ! truth does usually stands on the minor side .

[Peter Stauffenberg]

you are quite right ! truth does usually stands on the minor side .

This has nothing to do with truth, but with having simple rules vs having as realistic rules as possible. CeaW is supposed to have rather simple rules so you can play without having to read hundreds of pages of rules to understand what's going on. GS v2.0 has become a bit more complicated than CeaW (vanilla) and if we make it even more complicated we might cause players to feel it's too hard to understand the game mechanisms.

We could have added a build limit per turn dependent upon industrial capacity, raw materials, available PP's and so on, but this would make it much more complicated for the players to plan their builds. You will have to micromanage a lot of things and only grognards like such "chores". By adding such changes we need to store the usage and that means all existing save games will be invalidated.

The changes we added will not make the game more complicated for most players because you won't get in the situation where you overuse the build capacity of a certain unit type. The changes were meant to prevent a game strategy that ruined the fun for players and it seems we have succeeded with that.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Some games have force pools or gearing limits, but then each unit has different stats and we don't have that in GS v2.0.

One thing we could have had is something similar to War In Europe, i. e. use of cadres to form corps. E. g. when a unit is destroyed it will go into a cadre force pool. New units can only be built from cadres. You can build from scratch cadres and have e. g. cadres for infantry, vehicles, air, surface ships (hulls) and subs. The number of cadres you can build can be limited by manpower, game year, tech etc. So when you get units destroyed you can more easily form new ones (cheaper and they won't count against the build limit).

That's a realistic way to do it because when a unit was "destroyed" it was not wiped out, but weakened so much so the unit had to be withdrawn as a cadre. This cadre could be reformed into a new corps unit (or division or whatever).

Then we could have that units who were isolated would NOT form a cadre when destroyed so surrounding units would be good because it would deny the re-use as cadres.

These changes are rather fundamental and would not become part of GS v2.0 (maybe GS v3.0 if we go on with more developments). My point mentioning this is that if we would start to implement limitations to production (except to stop the blob) then it can better to rethink the entire build process instead of just adding a limitation

[Morris]

Thanks ! My professor ! I really learn something from your explianation . Let 's try our best to build the GS game perfect .