Some advice for an ex PG-player please

[grenadier98]

I played quite a few games of the PG series in the past (Panzergeneral, Allied General (mostly US), Pazific General and most of all Panzergeneral II (vanilla and with custom efiles and campaigns). So I know something of turn based hex tactics, but I'm no genius. I'm new to Panzer Corps. I started the normal campaign on an increased Colonel difficuly with increased AI, but it felt way to easy so I restarted at Fieldmarshall. Then I learned of the grand campaign and of the increased difficulty settings and how to activate them by cheating thorough the normal campaign, which I did, because I didn't want to play through all of the vanilla campaign just for activating them. So I started the Grand campaign which is really way more fun. I don't know what difficulty to pick. I don't like the FM experience penalty, it feels wrong, like your soldiers are all idiots and slow learners I don't wan't to play on Guderian or even Manstein - as I said, I'm not bad, but no Genius.

1) So that leaves me with two options General or Rommel. I started with Rommel and it adds the extra challenge to manage your core better and thinking ahead regarding upgrades and buying new units. I play with weather, supplies, fog of war,limited dice rolls and without recreating units. But from what I read so far on the forum it seems like you will get crushed in 1943 or later by the endless waves of the Red Army if you play on Rommel difficulty. Is this true? So should I just pick general difficulty and save big amounts of prestige for later use? Any hints about using elite reinforcements and overstrength?

2) What is and how does the prestige cap work?

3) Supplies and strategic bombers. So far I mainly used strategic bombers for attacking ships. How does negating supplies work with adjacent ground units and with air units?

[shawkhan]

This is a game you will probably play through many times.
I myself play on Field Marshal, with the advanced settings of limited dice rolls and a bump to experience so my troops learn a little faster. Usually about 75% is good enough.
Strategic bombers are quite elegant in this game. When you bomb a victory hex they can both neutralize the hex, prohibiting the placement of AI units as well as decreasing their prestige.
I use the strat bombers against well-armored AI units and against fortifications as well to both suppress and decrease their supplies.When AI units possess AA ability they also take no casualties.
It is easy enough to search for threads explaining the prestige cap. Basically, playing with all the best units decreases your prestige gain. Doing more with less is thus encouraged.
If you have started on Rommel already it might be interesting to see how far you can get on that setting. Sooner or later someone might be able to finish the campaign on that w/o cheating.

[Tarrak]

First welcome to Panzer Corps. Now to your questions:

1) I wouldn't recommend Rommel for your first playthrough of the Grand Campaign. The knowledge of the scenarios is a potent weapon that you will lack on your first playthrough automatically making the campaign harder (unless of course you plan on repeating every scenario until you get a satisfying outcome). Early on you won't notice much difference between General, Field marshal and Rommel anyway, it unfold over time. Keep in mind you will need to create a prestige cushion in the early war years to be able to survive the later years. To give you a picture: if you arrive at Stalingrad with less then 20k prestige saved you are probably going to have troubles later on. I personally would start on General and see how the campaign develops. If you are playing on PC you can anyway always change your difficulty settings after each scenario or use some cheat to give or remove some prestige to adjust the difficulty if you like it. Another option would be to use the advanced difficulty settings and create one that you think suits you.Here you can read about it detail.

2) You can read the explanation and further details about Prestige Soft Cap in this Thread. Just scroll a bit down to see it.

3)A prestige bomber if bombing a victory hex causes your opponent to lose prestige. If bombing any unit it causes said unit to lose a certain amount of fuel and ammunition. If bombing a unit stationed in a victory hex it does both. Additionally it got a chance to neutralize a city it's bombing. I am not 100% sure how high exactly the values are but i found following written by Rudankort (the main developer):

Strategic bomber efficiency is a parameter which determins how well it performs carpet and strategic bombing (i. e. how much fuel/ammo it destroys, what chance to neutralize a flag it has etc.) Base formula to calculate efficiency (in percent) is:

(20+10*stars)*strength/maxstrength

This formula was designed, so that a 5-star 15-strength overstrength bomber achieves full efficiency.

Every adjacent enemy ground unit reduces the amount a unit can resupply by 1/3. So if there are three adjacent enemy ground unit a unit can not resupply at all. As far i know air units only counts towards this if exactly above the unit and only if they could attack i.e. if it doesn't rain or snow.

[grenadier98]

Many thanks for your explanations. I did some testing on the supply reducing effect of planes. It doesn't work with fighters and the Tac- or Strat-Bomber has be directly above the unit, which is fine, otherwise you could limit the supply of up to seven enemy units with just one bomber...

I like the idea of the prestige cap. It should prevent those overstrength all Tiger/Me262/Pioneer Core. If I understand this correctly it only takes affect if the AVERAGE unit cost of all your fighting core is above 400. So an Infantry and a Panther Tank would be below the normal. Does Bonus units means SE units in this context?

[ThvN]

Does Bonus units means SE units in this context?

Yes, the SE units (and their transports) are not counted. So the softcap only uses the average cost of all the core units that are deployed on the map, minus the SE units.

The soft cap does, however, adds the cost of the core units' transports when calculating the average, so if you have an expensive infantry unit cruising around in a 200-prestige halftrack, you will quickly drive up the average points cost of such units. This has taken some people by surprise, so that is why I mention it.

[GSlapshot]

In the old PZ General you needed to capture victory hexes in a limited number of turns. In PzC you can take your time except in the Low Countries scenario since you must capture all objectives with 9 turns left. This way you don't need to rush yourself into ambushes or et caught in transport. The message is to read the victory conditions so that you don't go on a blitzkrieg during a defensive scenario.

[Longasc]

Hi Grenadier,

You can set the difficulty manually, as you already noticed the difference between FM and other levels is the XP gain penalty.

General is EASIER than Field Marshal, but it is also a bit more enjoyable. After 1942 the DLCs become more difficult and replacing units is a nightmare with the 50% xp penalty.
But FM reduces XP gain for a reason, General makes your units much stronger earlier, they take less losses and regain xp faster, it makes the game really a lot easier!
So maybe try FM, even if the penalty is annoying. It's up to you, I am often undecided between General and FM myself.

Regarding Rommel, Guderian, Manstein: I find the later year DLCs challenging enough. Guderian makes some scenarios extremely hard and Manstein somehow plays like an entirely different game as you have to fight very differently. Rommel on the other hand - I didn't try it! - sounds very challenging but in a punishing and annoying way with all the restrictions.

Regarding Strategic Bombers, besides busting ships, their suppression and relative resilience to flak fire make them very good. They destroy ammo and for units with only 4-6 ammo an experienced bomber is a nightmare, as it leaves them stranded with 1-2 shots left, so attack them while suppressed and let them waste their last shot and then go in for the kill e.g.. While you are going to play the Germans mostly, if you are playing against them, strategic bombardment of Tigers is often way more effective than a tank busting dive bomber attack.


Also, Gslaspshot said it already, in Panzer Corps you usually don't have races against the clock and more varied bonus objectives. Rushing ahead and blocking enemy cities from buying new troops is often not as necessary or rewarding as in Panzer General, as many DLCs have scripted unit spawns-

[grenadier98]

I followed your advice, parked my Rommel attempt and started the campaign as General. I took Modlin yesterday, so far I've only DV, but I ask myself if for scenarios like Modlin it would be smarter to settle for an extremly easy MV with some extra flaghexes, which I did on my Rommel attempt, without any or with just marginal strength losses instead of going for a costly DV. I didn't lose any units, but some prestige in form of overstrength on artilleries and I had to reinforce my Pioneers. I also had to reinforce way more units after this scenario which hurts the experience, because I didn't use any elite replacements until now.

Two more questions:

1) What is the purpose of large caliber artillery in Panzer Corps? It hits harder, but it lacks rate of fire - so what's the point using it? Do I need a certain hard attack value to penetrate certain armor of forts/entranchments? Additionally the have fewer ammunition and are more expansive, yet the same range.

2) Can I get two heros of the same type on one unit? So for example two movement heros on an infantry? Grenadiers with movement four would come in handy.

[Tarrak]

From the pure prestige saving efficiency it is sometimes better to stick with a MV but i personally kind of always try to go for the best possible outcome if it's possible without to many losses. You need to be careful with overstrengthing your units. Under the new 1.2 rules overstrength costs more and more the higher you overstrength. I personally tend to stop overstrengthing the fighting ground units at max. 12 points and only go higher for artillery as they tend not to lose that much strength points and airplanes. It may be worth tho to maximally overstrength your Tigers when you get them as they become then virtually untouchable by the AI forces.

To your questions:

1) The amount of suppression and kills artillery fire can create is depending on both their rate of fire and attack values. For infantry even smaller caliber are usually enough but with bigger guns you have a chance to suppress tougher units as well. The little 7.5 cm artillery got only 2 range which significantly hampers it's usefulness. The 10.5 cm is a very good one and i tend to use it and skip the 15cm guns totally. When the 17cm guns become available i usually upgrade some of my artillery to it and a few to the nebelwerfers. The 17 cm artillery got a perfect combination of attack values and rate of fire for attacking tougher targets like bunkers or some armored units while the nebelwerfers are infantry killers. At this point the poor 10.5 cm artillery slowly gets in trouble with the rising ground defense values of the stronger units appearing. I tend to never use the 20 cm artillery at all as it's RoF is way to low and the ammunition amount is a bit to low for liking as well.

2) Yes you can get multiple heroes of the same type on one unit unless some certain hero types are limited to only one per unit. I've seen multiple attack, defense and initiative heroes on the same unit so this i can confirm 100%. The other i strongly believe are possible as well but i don't remember seeing it.

[shawkhan]

Artillery is not accurately modeled in this game.
The outstanding ability of the 17cm gun for instance was counter-battery, as it had an enormous range(some 30 km) when most artillery could only fire at ranges of 10-15km.
Rate of Fire,in the length of time represented in turns, is essentially meaningless. It is a strictly tactical concept in an operational/strategic level game.
There was a thread representing the effectiveness of different artillery types done some time ago. The 105mm artillery was shown, I believe to be the most effective for suppression of soft targets due to its high rate of fire(ROF), while the 17cm was the most efficient caliber overall. The 21cm, which I personally never use, was best at killing hard targets. The 15cm was mediocre.
I sincerely hope that an upcoming update would fix some of the gross inaccuracies in the artillery model.

[Fimconte]

2) Yes you can get multiple heroes of the same type on one unit unless some certain hero types are limited to only one per unit. I've seen multiple attack, defense and initiative heroes on the same unit so this i can confirm 100%. The other i strongly believe are possible as well but i don't remember seeing it.

I can verify that you can get double (or even triple) movement / initiative heroes.
In one of my earlier campaigns I had a +5 ini Tank unit that was absolutely obscene in the offence.
In a more recent game I had managed a double movement Pioneers unit, perfect for assaulting cities and fortresses.

[ThvN]

1) What is the purpose of large caliber artillery in Panzer Corps? It hits harder, but it lacks rate of fire - so what's the point using it? Do I need a certain hard attack value to penetrate certain armor of forts/entranchments? Additionally the have fewer ammunition and are more expansive, yet the same range.

It's a bit technical, but here are some comparisons to show the effects of RoF (rate of fire), maybe you will find it useful?

viewtopic.php?f=121&t=46916#p444121

[grenadier98]

Thanks a lot. Now I think I understand the context behind ROF. I'll skip the 15cm guns and wait for the 17cm for some of my units. I only overstrengthed units to 11 until now, because it get's more expensive afterwards.

One more question. Maybe I just didn't read carefully, but I didn't find anything about it. Is there a way to tell your units to use another path of movement than the one shown by the white arrow? Or to be more specific to alter this arrow, using some kind of waypoint. For example when I want to relocate a plane and I'm pretty sure there will be enemy planes in the way because the arrow is above an enemy air field.

[Brenmusik]

Alas, there is no ability for waypoints. Other than the "recon" movement.

[grenadier98]

Alas, there is no ability for waypoints. Other than the "recon" movement.

OK, would be a cool feature, I think.

I keep reading about Special Hero Units. Not the SE units. I talk about Rudel and so on. I've restarted my campaign after loosing my safegame to some idiotic copying mistake. So now I reached the Norway scenarios for the second time, but I have never seen any sign of Rudel in his recon plane. Shouldn't he be around in first or second scenario? I don't mind this, because from what I read he will be quite unbalanced later on. I was just curious. Where will I find this guy?

[Tarrak]

The special (named) heroes arrive only in the Grand Campaign not in the other campaigns. Rudel appear in the first or second scenario of DLC 39 if my memory servers me right. If you are playing the Grand Campaign and are already in Norway you should have received already quite a few named heroes. If you don't haven them then something went wrong. Please check if you have your PC fully upgraded to the newest version.

[Tarrak]

The further discussion about the non appearing heroes problem was split of by me into a topic of its own for easier identification. See viewtopic.php?f=121&t=48061

[jaggy]

Yes, the SE units (and their transports) are not counted. So the softcap only uses the average cost of all the core units that are deployed on the map, minus the SE units.

I only found out about this after "antoniocapo" apprised me of this. Could relevant Softcap info be stickied in the FAQs? I think new players will find it especially useful.