Slitherine

Horses were one of the most important transportation for the Germans throughout the entire war, why is there no trace of them in either vanilla campaign or GC?

Maybe because horse transportation has been considered "too boring/less commercially viable"?

Actually, there were quite a few horses, this link here is really interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in ... II#Germany

Also, given that most of the Wochenschau propaganda style movies on youtube only show a highly motorized/mechanized blitzkrieg-type German army...

By the way, there is a more historically correct/realistic force composition in Battlefield Europe: viewtopic.php?t=47985

There is a German horse transportation in the Official game but it is not activated

terminator wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 5:49 pm There is a German horse transportation in the Official game but it is not activated

Nico's mod activates the horse transport in his equipment file.

viewtopic.php?f=147&t=69744&start=560

Kasperlzhang wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 8:50 am Horses were one of the most important transportation for the Germans throughout the entire war, why is there no trace of them in either vanilla campaign or GC?

They are in the game. Any time a German infantry or towed unit doesn't have a mechanized transport, it has a horse. That's how it can still move. They just confused the matter by including horses for some factions in later DLCs such as Soviet Corps.

But proline, where does that leave the British who did not use horses for transport?

Most field guns and other infantry heavy weapons had quite large crews so could be moved around in the field in reasonable ground conditions. This is shown at times in wartime footage and training films, and in written reports which indicate that moving AT guns and field guns (plus other gear) a km or two was pretty much normal.Of course, infantry support weapons (lighter AT guns and infantry guns) were designed for this since bringing horses forward, hitching them up moving the gun, then unchitching and leading the horses away in the middle of a firefight would have been a bad idea. I's not too hard to find combat and training footage showing guns, mortars and heavy water cooled MGs being manhandled at quite a pace over reasonable distances, .

Of course, this is quite a different thing than large scale moves - eg heading off to the next city - or for shifting heavier guns for which horses (mules etc) or other transport would be essential.

captainjack wrote: ↑Fri Nov 16, 2018 8:22 pm But proline, where does that leave the British who did not use horses for transport?

When the Germans don't have trucks they move by horses, when the British don't have trucks they move by minions.

I'll be the first to admit that this is an imperfect way to conceptualize it, but it fits the game a lot better than what the devs were eventually pressured into doing, which was adding in visible horses for the USSR which they then made viable by giving them speed comparable to trucks and not needing fuel. Their only downside is they only pull certain units. In real life horses weren't at all as good as trucks.

I agree with you proline that it's important to visualise something that works to keep the feel of the game. I picture my troops hauling guns around by hand, but maybe your troops are more resourceful and using their own horses or "borrowing" horses, donkeys, goats and whatever they can catch to help out.

I agree 5 move is too fast for horse drawn transport. From experimenting, speed 4 horse transport is more or less the same as trucks across country but is a lot slower on roads, which is probably about right, but 3 move is too slow to be useful.

Having said that, one of my never-quite-finished mods has a couple of very hilly areas where mules with 3 alpine move were a nice extra for transporting light mountain guns.

dalfrede wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 6:14 pm They are in the game. Any time a German infantry or towed unit doesn't have a mechanized transport, it has a horse.

So then how do you explain that despite infantry and towed artillery has basically the same horse transport (or the venerable British/US minions ), basic infantry units on their own can move three times faster than towed guns (3 vs.1 hex)? I would expect that a horse team towing a gun should move at about the same speed as marching infantry as it happened for centuries of warfare. It is clear that towed guns in the game have only 1 hex move because it indicates that it is being manhandled (pushed/pulled by its crew) which is much slower than marching. Especially when it comes to bigger guns or when they have to move it off-road.

I am pretty sure that developers simply did not think about horse transport, and/or were not aware of the importance of horse traction in the Axis and Soviet armies. Instead, as it happened with many other things, they just took over the same mechanics and unit values from good old Panzer General as the main objective was to make a "spiritual successor" for that, in which players of PG will feel at home in the very first turn of the gameplay. And of course in Panzer General there was no horse transport at all.

Obviously adding usable horses to the Soviets only did not really help the matter and only increased confusion as this topic shows. Ideally it should have been added for PzC v.1.0 for the Germans and all other armies that depended on them. Or, alternatively, they should have been added to all these factions when the decision was made to add it to the Soviets, but then most likely all previous campaigns should have been updated as well for the use of horses but that would have required some more testing as that would have affected game balance. I guess this is what the developers wanted to avoid when the horses were added when Soviet Corps DLC arrived. In retrospect, it was not a good design decision to add horse transports like this, they should have been added to all factions that used them or to none.

Hopefully they will not make the same mistake with PzC2 and I think we should all do our best to convince them that Axis and Soviet horse transport is a must for any WW2 strategic game which takes itself seriously.

As for movement speed, I also think that 5 horse movement is way too fast for horse transports. In my mod I gave them about the same speed on road that infantry can move and made them slower off-road. But they are very cheap and I increased the price of most motorized transports to make the difference even bigger. It helps to make them a viable choice for the player, despite their limited mobility. Also, most WW1 era artillery with spoked wheels cannot even have motorized traction, they can only be moved by horses, as historically.

McGuba wrote: ↑Mon Nov 19, 2018 12:16 pm

dalfrede wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 6:14 pm They are in the game. Any time a German infantry or towed unit doesn't have a mechanized transport, it has a horse.

That's Proline statement not mine.
Mine:

dalfrede wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 6:14 pm Nico's mod activates the horse transport in his equipment file.
viewtopic.php?f=147&t=69744&start=560

The US infantry battalions had neither horse nor truck, they had legs. They hiked everywhere.
US Army had division level motor pools, which could supply trucks to move infantry if needed.
The US Army used trucks the way trains are used in PzC.

Sorry, yeah, my mistake, I did not realise.

McGuba, not a problem.
Typos are easy, but unless the site software screwed up that mistake takes effort.

McGuba wrote: ↑Mon Nov 19, 2018 12:16 pmSo then how do you explain that despite infantry and towed artillery has basically the same horse transport (or the venerable British/US minions ), basic infantry units on their own can move three times faster than towed guns (3 vs.1 hex)? I would expect that a horse team towing a gun should move at about the same speed as marching infantry as it happened for centuries of warfare.

A horse that's just carrying infantry is obviously going to go faster than one towing a gun. Hence the difference between artillery and cavalry. As for why British and U.S. infantry can keep up, that's another matter. The British had pretty much infinite resources relative to the Germans and Soviets (aside from the first couple years in North Africa) and the Americans were obviously incredibly well equipped relative to any other major power. So for them the 3 hex can just reflect that even when they don't have a full complement of trucks, they still have some.

McGuba wrote: ↑Mon Nov 19, 2018 12:16 pmIt is clear that towed guns in the game have only 1 hex move because it indicates that it is being manhandled (pushed/pulled by its crew) which is much slower than marching. Especially when it comes to bigger guns or when they have to move it off-road.

Dude, one hex usually represents tens if not hundreds of kilometers. They aren't being pushed by their crews. They have transportation of one form or another.

A horse cannot just “carry infantry”, there are two choices: either the soldier rides the horse, what the average soldier cannot do as riding a horse has to be learned, then it is indeed faster than marching, but not so much, and the other option is to put the soldiers into a coach drawn by horses but that one is not much faster than marching and I do not think it was used often in ww2. So the whole concept of infantry units moved by horses does not make much sense to me. As far as I know horses in an infantry division were used to tow the field artillery and the coaches that were filled with various equipment from field kitchen through ammunition to clothing and food. And then the infantry marched together with these horse teams at the same speed in one big column. So the average daily speed of marching infantry and horse drawn artillery was more or less the same.

As for what distance a hex represents it always depends on the map of course but as far as I know no official map has such a scale in which one hex represents hundreds of kilometers. Maybe only BNC’s global map mod comes close to that, even in my mod which covers all of Europe one hex represents about 40 kms. I guess in most official maps one hex represents less than ten kilometers. And what really matters is the time interval between two turns. If it is like one day, as it is the case with most scenarios, I can imagine that the artillery piece is being manhandled by its crew for a few kilometers during a day. It did not happen too often but there are certainly examples for that for instance the Vietminh drag their artillery in very difficult terrain up the hills and mountains around Dien Bien Phu which in the end made the difference.

In addition, horses were also used to haul supplies from a railhead as there weren't enough trucks (nor fuel) in the German army. There were also regular cavalry troops and "horse-borne" recon units...

McGuba wrote: ↑Wed Nov 21, 2018 2:59 pm A horse cannot just “carry infantry”, there are two choices: either the soldier rides the horse, what the average soldier cannot do as riding a horse has to be learned, then it is indeed faster than marching, but not so much, and the other option is to put the soldiers into a coach drawn by horses but that one is not much faster than marching and I do not think it was used often in ww2.

The horse carries their shit, allowing them to walk faster. Baggage and a towed artillery piece are not at all the same load.

McGuba wrote: ↑Wed Nov 21, 2018 2:59 pmAs for what distance a hex represents it always depends on the map of course but as far as I know no official map has such a scale in which one hex represents hundreds of kilometers.

Dude, the 1,300km north shoreline of the Persian gold is about 17 hexes long in PzC. Huge scales are also used in Indian, the Arabian peninsula, and pretty much all of Africa. Good luck pushing an artillery piece.

proline wrote: ↑Wed Nov 21, 2018 6:47 pm The horse carries their shit, allowing them to walk faster. Baggage and a towed artillery piece are not at all the same load.

Yes of course I understand, but my original question was how do you explain that infantry with horses to carry their equipment moves three times faster than artillery drawn by a horse team? Now I just made a quick search and found an article about horses used in the Napoleonic era. Although a completely different era, the role of the horses as pulling artillery was pretty much the same as during ww2:

Pulling Potential

The capacity of a healthy horse to pull a load was affected by a number of factors. Chief among these was the nature of the surface over which the load was being hauled.

A single horse can pull 900 kg on a smooth road and 1500 kg 20 to 23 miles a day over a hard-paved road. At the trot, on a good road, this is reduced to 420 kg . Gassendi noted that on a road a convoy of artillery could cover 0.94miles in roughly an hour, and that a horse carrying 75.6 kg and drawing 315 kg could travel on average 20miles a day.

https://www.napoleon-series.org/militar ... orses.html


Also, from wikipedia, from the German 10.5 cm leFH 18 article:

The motorized version was attached directly without a limber to either a SdKfz 6 or Sd.Kfz. 11 prime mover and could easily achieve a march speed of 40 km/h, equivalent to a day's march by a horse-drawn battery.

So it looks like a horse drawn battery could make like 30-40 km a day on average, and folllowing your thinking an infantry unit (with horses to carry their equipment) should then cover three times more during the same period, which means 90-120 km/day. As far as I know this is only achievable by like ironman style individuals and sportsmen, especially for longer periods. Another site claims the following about average daily speeds of the Wehrmacht:

MARCH DISTANCES. The infantry division normally can march about 20 miles in a day; under adverse weather or road conditions the rate of march may fall to 10 miles a day. The motorized division can maintain an average daily march of between 90 and 150 miles; the armored division from 60 to 90 miles a day. In the near vicinity of the combat zone, road movements without motor transport average 10 to 15 miles a day, while movements by motor transport approximate 30 miles a day.

The field handbooks, or General Staff handbooks have very detail information for every type of formation and terrain type.

https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/673 ... ent-598500

And also from here:

From the Officers' Manual, by Major James A. Moss, 24th U.S. Infantry, April 1917:

"The average march for infantry is from 15 to 20 miles a day; for cavalry, from 20 to 25, and for artillery from 15 to 25."

So in the end it looks like to me that the daily average speed of marching infantry and horse drawn artillery is very similar, about 30 km a day under ideal conditions. Actually, some of these sites claim that while a day's march of a horse-drawn battery is 40 km, infantry can only make 20 miles / 32 km on average, meaning horse drawn artillery is actually a little faster than marching infantry.

Marching unmotorized infantry usually only carried the minimum equipment like rifle, bayonet, gas mask, some ammunition, few hand grenades, food and water for 1-3 days, etc. The rest of the equipment were carried by horse drawn supply train. Horses did not "carry their shit" in that sense to make them walk faster, as the soldiers always carried their personal weapons and stuff anyway and the heavy equipment like spare ammunition, food, and all kinds of stuff that an infantry unit needs were carried by the horse drawn train.

Dude, the 1,300km north shoreline of the Persian gold is about 17 hexes long in PzC. Huge scales are also used in Indian, the Arabian peninsula, and pretty much all of Africa. Good luck pushing an artillery piece.

Sorry I did not know about this map and tried to find it, but not so sure which scenario you mean. Nevetheless, 1300 km/17 hex comes out as 76 km/hex which is still far from being hundreds of kilometers, but still I understand that it is very unlikely that it would be moved by its crew under normal conditions. However, as I stated, there were historical examples when soldiers did so, e.g. when the Vietminh soldiers dragged their artillery up the hills around Dien Bien Phu and in some cases they did so for tens of kilometers in a dense jungle terrain. Obviously they did not do it in one day. The Pakistanis also dragged their guns up to 3000 m high mountains during their wars with India which was also a nice and unexpected achievement.