New Re-inforcement Rules

[PGtomli]

Panzer Corps is a great and well designed game. That said, there still is some room for improvement!

One area that I think would improve the overall game quality, strategy and design is the re-inforcement mechanism.
Here is my suggestion to improve that part of the game:

1. Each turn (for each side) starts with a reinforcement phase (this is before the Movement/Battle phase)
During the reinforcement phase the player (human and AI) has an opportunity to reinforce units that are within supply lines (being inside enemy controlled territory means no possibility of supply).
New units can also be procured, and placed at available re-inforcements locations.
The current game design allows the player to add new units at any time during the turn which can be exploited by sacrificing a low unit and freeing up a core slot to buy a new unit and place it in a weak sector.

2. Reinforcements should consist of a pool of available (reinforcement) equipment.
In the purchase screen each unit will have a number detailing how much strength is available to supply under strength units on the map. This pool is defined in the map design in a unit/turn table describing how many additional reserves will be avaiable at the start of each turn. This is how it would work to supply a unit:
Let's say the Fallschirm unit has 20 strength units in the re-inforcement (purchase) screen. I have a Fallschirm at 6 strength and supply it using up some prestige and leaving 16 available units left in re-inforcement. Now, let's say I purchase a new Fallschirm using up more prestige. After this purchase the reserve will be down to 6. I won't be able to buy a second unit due to lack of reserve.

Implemeting this design would make the scenarios more realistic, improve custom designed scenarios and add another layer of balance.
Usually a player will just buy the best troops, but in reality the best troops were not always available (even if the player has prestige).

- The reinforcement pool could be affected by capturing objectives and destroying enemy units too. There may also be scripted events for increasing the reinforcement pool. Additionally the player may gain/capture enemy equipment as well.

NOTE: Reinforcements would still cost prestige points.

Hope this aspect could be considered in a Panzer Corps sequel

[deducter]

I am in favor of some sort of system like this, with a predefined pool of units that one can choose from, for SP only. I would be very pro such a system for an expansion. This is a work-around currently: you can always just choose to play with inferior units, as I am doing in my video AAR, and assemble a historical army that needs to rely heavily on clever tactics rather than brute force to win DV.

However, in MP, I have defeated many opponents who always get the best equipment, because that is not necessarily the most efficient use of your prestige. Such a system would severely limit the potential for creative strategies and cause other unforeseen problems, for instance, if I knew the map pool had 6 fighters and I shot down all 6, I can then run rampant with bombers without opposition in the air.

[PGtomli]

Also keep in mind with this type of system you would have a lot of freedom to custom design maps so no map would necessarily be predictable. There could also be a random factor for replenishing the re-inforcements pool. And it would be easy to set up "difficulty" adjusters.
With regards to buying the best units ... units should always be bought to match opposing units and take best advantage of the terrain. It's true that spending too much prestige on expensive units could leave you vulnerable especially if you have a broad front to hold up and several less expensive units can defeat the high cost unit ...

[brettz123]

Its an interesting and realistic way to model reinforcements but does implementing it make the game no longer Panzer Corps?

[ivanov]

I think it would be a good idea ... but not for this game. It would add another layer of complexity and slow down the gameplay significantly, whereas the main merit of Panzer Corps, is it's simplicity and playability. Right now, the players can play fast a significant number of turns, focusing on the combat and ignorig completely other potentially important factors, that would be important on the real life battlefield. It's all about simulating interactions between various types of weapon systems and enjoying the simplicity - the success of PG series and PC are based on it. There could be other elements added to the game, like the manpower pool, reasearch and most of all the supply, but that would mean creating a completely new system or a new game.

The proposed system seems realistic, but It would probably require a completely new model of how the loses are calculated in the game. The loses would need to be divided into the manpower and equipment and there would need to be an indication how many of them are irreversible casualties and how many of them are just temporary... The current loses in the game are much higher than the units would suffer in the reality, the supply is not really seriously hampering the reinforcing process, so I think of it as a reorganization of the battered units, rather than actually reinforcing them. For example a unit can be down to the strenght of 1 or 2 few times during the same scenario and the player can reinforce it as many times, as the prestige allows him to do it. In reality, such a unit would need to be withdrawn from the front for a couple of months for refitting, reorganization and training. The current system allows players just to ignore those altogether.

[brettz123]

Well thought out and well put.

[Treebeard]

I'd say that Panzer Corps has borrowed quite a lot from Panzer General 2, and in Panzer General 3 (which I haven't played for years but I liked it a lot), there was a reinforcement phase before the movement phase. It should be fairly simple to implement this for Panzer Corps too.

I highly doubt that a reinforcement phase would slow down PBEM turns by any significant amount and the complexity is not very high. Basically you can only buy and put in reinforcements at the beginning of your turn instead of at any time in your turn. You have a button for ending the reinforcement phase and that starts the normal movement phase, or you can opt to just check for as soon as any unit has moved, then buying and placing reinforcements can't be done any more on that turn. This is a TBS, not a real-time strategy game and therefore I think it should have a deeper ruleset. Likewise, having a defined number of reinforcements available for each troop (instead of unlimited) would be good I think. This number can dynamically change during the course of the map and will make the game more interesting in my opinion. There can be random event triggers, and objectives event triggers etc to modify these available reinforcements. That would make each map more replayable and remove static strategies and force the players to be able to adapt to new conditions more.

Basically there are many things that Panzer General Scorched Earth (and PG 2) did that I find are missing in Panzer Corps.

Also, supply lines makes sense. If a unit is cut out of supply, it makes the game deeper and a player can use mobility to cut enemy supplies as an additional strategy. Good for para troopers and other mobile units to help the war effort.
Perhaps units out of supply should be marked with an icon to notify the player that they are out of supply and cannot be re-supplied until they get into supply lines again. This is in addition to the current less supply based on adjacent enemies. Also, perhaps prolonged out of supply should affect initiative or movement negatively (slightly) to simulate a lack of food, etc.

Did anyone here play "Blitzkrieg: Battle At The Ardennes". That was a cool game (- for the Amiga computer). There might be concepts that would serve Panzer Corps well (if the developers are planning on expanding Panzer Corps):
http://www.mobygames.com/game/blitzkrie ... e-ardennes

[Razz1]

Allot of this can be obtained now by how you play the game.

Reinforce only in the beginning.

As far as the other idea your talking about prestige constraint.
PC currently has way too much prestige.

If you only had a little prestige you would see a much more realistic game and players using older a a variety of equipment as it is more effective.

You should try some of the MP maps of mine where every PP counts.

[Treebeard]

Allot of this can be obtained now by how you play the game.
Reinforce only in the beginning.
As far as the other idea your talking about prestige constraint.
PC currently has way too much prestige.
If you only had a little prestige you would see a much more realistic game and players using older a a variety of equipment as it is more effective.
You should try some of the MP maps of mine where every PP counts.

Personally I'd like to see the reinforcements phase locked into the beginning (or at least that it is an option for the map to be locked to the start of the turn). In MP there is no guarantee that the players will follow household rules and making household rules is not as good as actually making an option for it in-game.

I think that decreased prestige (budget) on maps may be good too. But it doesn't cover a "supply and demand" model. To just lower the prestige is not as flexible as defining the number of available equipment in the pool for different units. The Axis or the Allies on the map could be allowed to have a "high" prestige in order to buy a lot of common units, but they can't buy other particular/special units due to the cap. A real supply and demand model opens up some more interesting strategies.

However, as a simplified and less dynamic approach, decreasing prestige would be a good first step. A "supply and demand" model could also be implemented by adjusting prestige costs for units on a "per map" basis. On some maps, some equipment will cost much more than on others (instead of the units having a static cost of prestige). If the units' prestige costs can be scripted to change during the course of the map, then some units could have their costs increased based on timed triggers and events on the ground, which would remove the need for a separate "equipment pool".

Finally, a progressive cost could be implemented where the cost of a unit that is purchased/resupplied will go up. I.e. if you buy a lot of units of a certain type, then that type will go up in prestige cost. This can be made to not apply to all units (there may be low-end units that are in such high supply that they won't be in short supply and therefore not increase in cost).

In the end it seems like a supply and demand model perhaps can be accomplished with more map scripting and more advanced maps.

The whole supply and demand model could in addition be made optional when starting the map, in order to give players who don't like a supply and demand model the option to use the current simplified model.

Ps: It would be nice if a good supply and demand model would be included in the game engine. This model could have some in-parameters so it becomes easy for the designers to set supply capacity and cost for each unit in the map. Perhaps only "supplyCapacity", "currentCost" and "defaultCost" attributes would be needed. The "supplyCapacity" attribute is then used by the supply and demand formula in the game engine in order for the currentCost of the unit to be determined. This "supplyCapacity" attribute should be able to be changed by scripting. Lets say we have a Tiger tank: Tigertank.supplyCapacity = 5 is the start and it makes the unit change in currentCost at a certain rate (depending on how many units the player purchases). The Tigetank.defautCost could be set too. So a Tigertank.defaultCost = 750 would make the tank start out at 750 PP. Tigertank.currentCost should also be able to be modified by scripting (- so events can set it directly).

[PGtomli]

Using the "equipment pool" model, will allow map makers much more flexibility and ease to create and custom design maps allowing for many different strategies and/or enhancing their historical accuracy. Basically we add a new variable to the supply system (a one variable system, i.e prestige only, can be a little limited from a scenario design perspective).

As I mentioned before, there could also be a random factor for replenishing the re-inforcements pool and include "difficulty" adjusters." In campaign mode the tables could be modified by how the war is going (campaigns could include a strategic option what/where to attack next).
I think this would be well worth testing for a PanzerCorps II or just a PanzerCorps add-on.