Soviet Squads

[makigono1]

Got a balancing question for the community:
The game can pretty accurately represent a German squad, because, within reason, German squads would match their TO and have half a dozen riflemen and then the machine gun and it's crew, as well as the leader. However, with the Soviets, even though their squads officially had a machine gun and crew integral to them, in 1941 and 1942, they were so short of machine guns that often the squads would be composed of just riflemen and MAYBE one or two fellows with SMGs. So, it seems to me that the Soviets get kinda the short end of the stick, not only because they don't have the MG's that the Germans have, but because their rifle squads are the same number of men as the German ones, despite the fact that they would have had in some cases twice as many men in those squads (since the German squads would have their maneuver element, the riflemen, represented in the game by a squad of infantry, and the support weapon represented by the machine gun and crew in the game). The easy way to deal with this in making up a scenario is to put twice as many squads for the Soviets, but that would be unfair to the Germans, as those squads would naturally form separate maneuver elements and give the Soviets a tactical advantage they didn't have, at least to my limited understanding.

So, how do those of the community tend to handle this?

[jcb989]

Model the Soviet squad as lesser firepower but with 8 men, and the German squad as standard firepower, with 5 men?
Just my thoughts

[makigono1]

Sounds like a good idea to me. I lowered the range of the Soviet infantry compared to the German (a la Squad Leader) and I will try doing the larger man count.

[cbssecman]

Makigono1 - how did this turn out? If it worked, can you walk me through the directions to accomplishing it myself?
Thanks
CB

[makigono1]

Makigono1 - how did this turn out? If it worked, can you walk me through the directions to accomplishing it myself?
Thanks
CB

Hi, it has worked nicely thus far, but I've not tested it too thoroughly. As for how to do it, others have explained far it better than I, but what it amounted to was making a copy of SQUADS.CSV in the campaign folder with the manCount changed from 5 to 7, and HERange, HEReactionRange, and HE_Effectiveness all adjusted.

viewtopic.php?f=312&t=52775&p=556145&hi ... SV#p556145

Mind, I'm making some fairly substantial changes in these, due to the fact that since BA2's scale significantly differs from Squad Leader (example, a single hex in SL can hold three squads, a number of leaders and a number of points worth of support weapons, whereas a single space in BA2 can contain a single unit. Therefore, my read is that the BA2 grid square is about one quarter the size of a map hex in SL). So, I've increased the sighting and ranges and effectiveness and movement considerably.

[cbssecman]

Thanks. I had found the posts on changing the CSV and have experimented with it myself.
I had asked about the time and distance scale previously in another post, and according to Pip the ground scale is considered relative to the individual scenario...or at least that's what I understood him to mean... But I get what you're saying. I loved SL, but I don't think there's much future in trying to replicate it in BA2 - two many baseline differences that make representing proper tactics a completely different exercise between the two different sets of rules. Personally, I generally think of BA2 units as platoons rather than squads. Just my two cents...

[makigono1]

With respect, I'm not so sure about that. Modders who, unlike me, actually know what they are doing, have already tackled the leader units, which was key to it. Recently, in my hamfisted, newbie, way, I've managed to deal with certain tactical issues, mainly preventing 'run-and-gun' tactics. In addition to the accuracy penalties, I've assigned a pretty high AP cost for infantry to shoot, with checks during the firing procedure for sufficient APs available. The result is that a unit can move to the fullest extent, or shoot to the fullest extent, but not both, during a turn. I think it accurately reflects the 'prep-fire', move, 'advancing fire' set up in SL, but more simply, by just costing the unit time, in essence to do these things. IMHO, the way the units and support weapons are modeled by the game, squads and individuals is the most appropriate scale. Remember, SL's designers even admitted they too were abstracting a ton of stuff, so I think it's a fair approximation. Still a lot of testing to do, but, thus far, it's working pretty well.