Is it worthwhile to upgrade Wurfrahmens to Panzerwerfers?

[allophyl]

I'm just about to start Kursk Armory South in GC '43, so Panzerwerfers have been available to me for a while now but I haven't upgraded my Wurfrahmens yet because the upgrade comes with such a big decrease in attack strength for them. The improved defence seems somewhat pointless, as you still need to keep it well defended regardless and if your enemy gets a direct attack in against it, it's going to eat shit either way. It seems like at best, the extra defence will make it so you lose 1 less point of strength when being hit by counter-battery fire.

The main advantage to the Panzerwerfer seems to be the extra ammo it gets, but is it worth the drawback of reduced attack? With the Wurfrahmen, you can get roughly 3 attacks every 4 turns, while the Panzerwerfer increases this to 4 attacks every 5 turns. This means in a 20-turn scenario, the Panzerwerfer would on average only get in ONE extra attack compared to the Wurfrahmen (16 instead of 15), or a 6.67% increase in number of attacks. It pays for this with a 20% drop in Soft Attack and a 28.5% drop in Hard Attack.

Combining the SA drop with the increased number of attacks means the Panzerwerfer will do about 85% of the damage that a Wurfrahmen will do over the course of a scenario. Is there some hidden benefit I'm not seeing that makes this upgrade more worthwhile? Is the defence boost actually a lot more impactful than I'm giving it credit for?

[faos333]

Personally, for all the above reasons, I stay with Wurfrahmens

[Locarnus]

In vanilla Panzer Corps the Wurfrahmen 40 is misbalanced.
It should only have range 1 in 1941 and get range 2 with the better rockets available from late 1943 onwards.
Vanilla balancing just marginally takes into account that the Panzerwerfer 42 has many more "tubes" than the Wurfrahmen.
I tried to balance those issues with my "Addon" mod (splitting the Wurfrahmen into an early and a late version, giving them different rates of fire and so on).

So no, as faos333 said, there is imho no good gameplay reason to upgrade from the Wurfrahmen "40" to the Panzerwerfer 42 in vanilla Panzer Corps.

[heinzrondorf]

Combining the SA drop with the increased number of attacks means the Panzerwerfer will do about 85% of the damage that a Wurfrahmen will do over the course of a scenario. Is there some hidden benefit I'm not seeing that makes this upgrade more worthwhile? Is the defence boost actually a lot more impactful than I'm giving it credit for?

I think you nailed it in your post. The defence boost is not worth it IMO since Panzerwerfers defence is still not good enough against heavy Soviet armour and the decrease in SA is significant. It is better to stick with Wurfrahmen, just make sure you defend it properly.

[captainjack]

I do occasionally use the wurfrahmen and will upgrade for the extra ammo and because the slightly less effective armoured one is cheaper. But then I really don't like running out of ammo and generally won't use anything with less than 5.