Captured equipment

[Horseman]

As Winston Churchill said about eating words. Having restated the campaign and focused nor on capturing units and having the “Trophies of War” trait, I’ve been able to capture enough enemy equipment to totally replace my Panzer1bs with T-26s. That really helps a lot!

That's the catch 22.

Without high density of enemy armor... there are not enough opportunities to capture, and then re-field, those units yourself. The base game suffered from this, in both a scarcity of armor and also scenario progression being relatively fast. For example there are only 2 or 3 Char B tanks in the 3 or so scenarios you fight against the French in 1940. Which maybe is historic, but it doesn't lend itself to fun gameplay mechanics of capturing Char B, and then putting them into battle yourself.

We're not blind to people saying there are ahistoric amounts of tanks in some scenarios. It's an acceptable trade off to get more tank combat (in a game with 'Panzer' literally in the title) and also present more opportunities to really get the capture system a chance to shine. That system is entirely dependent on what the enemy puts on the field, even if it is now also supplemented by some bonus objective rewards and hidden caches.

Also even with so many T-26 captures, I still keep a few Panzer Ib. That 150% RoF is very helpful to chop through 15 base strength enemy infantry.

If the designers had kept to historical ratios for tanks......well we'd be lucky to see one or two units in a given scenario. In 1941 Even a Panzer division only had one regiment of tanks to 2 regiments of infantry and there really were not that many Panzer divisions compared to infantry!