Markus Stumptner - Sep 27, 2011 7:07 am (#45277 Total: 45528)  
ou may just have missed your last chance for incremental garbage collection. 	 

Well, on Friday night, we played the latest World at War, Famous
Divisions: Grossdeutschland Panzer. 

The scale is good; the rules are reasonably simple, and generally clear
enough, although some questions remained. The system uses chitpulls
(which I like) and simple step losses (which I also like), so the
chassis is pretty sound. There obviously was a great deal of effort
spent on presentation, and each scenario has historical notes and even
strategy recommendations. Very nice. One feels there was effort put into
the double issue. 

We played the Lutchessa Valley scenario because it was the shortest, (3
game days, or 12 turns IIRC). The Russians come in from two map edges to
take five hills scattered across the map. There are not enough Germans
to hold the front, and since hills tend to be good defensive terrain,
the battle to some degree centers around capturing the hills. Two of
them are close enough to each other (and one is part of a chain of hills
that protect the German artillery from Soviet artillery observation)
that the Germans can try to form a kind of front around them once the
Soviets have come over the river or from the south. Initially the
Germans are forced to fall back on the open flank and will try to
contain (and with the help of their pioneers, destroy) the bridges over
the river. The Soviets have lots of mechanised forces that can only
cross this river at bridges. (See, however, a remark at the end about an
important mechanism that we overlooked initially.) The scenario lasts
for three days, and although the victory conditions talk about "accruing
VPs" and such, they could simply have said "the Russians need to take
the five marked hilltop hexes to win." 

There is a chance of the Germans (who are essentially mechanised
infantry) to get a tank battalion and a mechanised artillery batallion,
which would strengthen their force immensely. To prevent this, the
Soviet player must refrain from taking a hill on the first day already,
pretty much a no-brainer. (See photo below.) It seems those
reinforcements weren't historically sent and I can't see a Russian
voluntarily allowing them into the game after taking a look at the
countermix. 

We stopped playing about two turns from the end, by which time three of
the hills had fallen, it was possible that the others would fall, but it
would essentially have come down to the event chits, and we just didn't
greatly care to find out any more. Which brings us to the bits we don't
like about the game. There are three types of combat in the game:
"combat" (the rules call it that - a terrible name as it, weirdly,
implies that ranged combat is not combat, so I'll put it in quotes as a
reminder), direct ranged fire and artillery ranged fire. The game
actually has a nice interplay between these three, it is just that each
of them, in multiple ways, gets things wrong. 

Let's start with "combat". It uses a normal odds-based CRT, happily
enough with a fair bit of step losses. It is very simple in application.
Results only ever apply to one side, so an attacker never takes any
losses in a successful assault. That's very old style, but so far, so
good. More importantly, the CRT was spiced up by the "event chits" that
fill most of the second counter sheet. We were quite excited when we set
the game up to see their effect. You have to count most of them out (30
of this colour, 25 of that per player) and put them into separate cups.
So we assumed they would give the players some different capabilities.
Would they represent differences in command control, doctrine,
operational art? 

Nothing of the sort. In fact the work of sorting the chits into two cups
is pointless. For each combat, each player pulls a chit. The colour of
the chit determines whether it has a positive or negative effect; which
player pulls it, or which player attacks, makes no difference, and as
there are so many chits that you will not really run through them more
than once, there is no learning or other selection effect associated
with them. You could just as well just put the red and blue chits in one
cup and pull two every time. (There is a third type, black chits, that
can be chosen to be played, but we found thye rarely applied; I think we
had two in the whole game.) Anyway, the blue and red chits work as
dieroll modifiers on the CRT: one colour negative, the other positive.
This ranges from the useless (when they cancel out) over the annoying
(when the effects are so strong that what happens on the map is
irrelevant - our first attack on a heavily fortified German hill
happened to get a +7 modifier - the dieroll didn't matter any more) to
the hilarious (when a +2 chit telling you that the attackers are raw
recruits is compensated by a -2 chit telling you that the attackers are
veterans). Something like that happened on our second combat.
Essentially, "combat" is a crapshoot depending mainly on the event
chits. 

(Oh yeah, there is another thing. Retreat results are towards the middle
of the CRT, obviously based on the reckoning that a defender loss is
worse than a retreat, and a defender unit elimination worse than that
and a total elimination even worse. Well, that is true in a way, but
retreats are mandatory, so a hill that is stacked to the hilt can be
cleared in one attack, by a middling dieroll result resulting in a DR,
because all the units then must bug out together.) 

Now, ranged direct fire I already talked about elsewhere. The salient
properties are: (a) except for four light tank units in recon and HQ
units which can't do ranged fire at all, all tanks and AT guns should
the same; the only variable is that some shoot to 4 hexes (and three
counter shoot to 5) while most shoot to 3, but the hit probability drops
off steeply after 3 hexes (1500m), so that the extra range is all but
useless. This makes both sides' historical use of heavy tanks as long
range tank killers (the Germans in the time covered by the game, the
Soviets mostly after it) moot (and the long guns of the day could
certainly hit tanks reliably out to 4 hexes). What is also odd is that
for the two effects of hits by ranged direct fire (pinning or outright
step loss), the mechanism used means that as the ranges get longer, the
STEP LOSSES take over - at extreme range, all hits will turn into step
losses, while close in, a much larger part of the hits are pins. Not
only is that weird in itself, since the chance of a step loss increases
with range, ranged direct fire is a great method for tanks to kill
infantry at a distance. It can't hit back, and the tanks take no risk.
The only drawback is that it takes more time. I don't remember tank fire
at 1000m being a major factor in infantry casualties during the war
though... 

In addition, the designer appears to rather overvalue the negative
effects of size (apparently he thinks that inability to hit was more of
an issue than the need to penetrate armor), so some of the
hardest-to-destroy AFVs (KV-2 and Elefant, the latter with an overall
10:1 kill ratio over its service life) have extremely low defense
values. A Tiger unit is no harder to kill than a T-34/76 unit (and
remember that the T-34 shoots the same out to range 3, and at range 4,
the Tiger only has a 10% chance to have any effect on the T-34 before
the T-34 closes and everything is on an equal basis). 

I was told that the low defense factors represent outflanking. But you
can't outflank someone from the front, 2-3 hexes away; outflanking means
coming at him from a significantly different angle. In fact that is how
such units would be historically defeated. Here it is a self-defeating
tactic, as units coming from two directions can be targeted twice as
often by opportunity fire as one big stack. The full frontal assault,
everyone in a dense stack, is the most effective method of attack! Oh,
and did I mention that the ability of units to move and then fire ranged
fire apparently extends to AT guns? Yes, AT guns, like tanks, can be
moved into range and then fire (and they are as durable as any tank
against opportunity fire, apparently the AT guns' gun shields protect
the towing trucks?). This turns AT guns in a quite effective offensive
weapon. 

Oh yeah, when a tank unit loses a step, its defensive value is halved.
This works ok with "combat", but makes no sense for ranged fire. In
exchange for that, a half strength unit still fires exactly as before.
All silly effects in this game seemingly come in pairs. 

That leaves artillery bombardment. Like direct ranged fire, it doesn't
use a table. You roll three dice. First, the sum has to be larger than
the range to get a hit. So no artillery unit can score a hit in
bombardment at ranges longer than 17 hexes. (Funny enough, all artillery
units have ranges from 21 to 29 hexes, and have no problems in firing
full strength combat support out to those ranges. It's only in
bombardment that they can't hit anything at that distance.) However,
this is compensated for by two other effects. First, artillery hits are
not modified by anything, type of target or whatnot. Artillery
bombardment therefore becomes an excellent method of swatting units in
highly defensible locations such as towns. They make no difference to
it. Walls, cellars, entrenchments offer no protection. In addition,
while ranged direct fire hardly occurred in our game and when it did was
subject to harsh modifiers for bad visibility, artillery observers can
miraculously spot full range (5km) through dense fog and snow. Do they
use seers? 

I also mentioned supply. Supply in the game is conducted by tracing from
a unit to its battalion HQ, and from there (a) along a unlimited length
supply lines off the map or (b) to another friendly HQ. The first one
was an old and well-known staple in the times of Command magazine; it
was what made me stop Rommel at Gazala (a game I otherwise admired) when
the Germans managed to avoid being put out of supply by tracing a
convoluted supply line, longer than the map was wide, into the heart of
Allied territory along a ridge, then out in a opening on the ridge right
near Tobruk, and then back to the German side. But I digress. The same
happened in our game - the Russians crossed the river at a bridge, had
their supply line across the river caught by German units. Now the rules
state that every turn without supply hurts a unit several and after four
turns (24 hours) it is inevitably dead. In our case, however, the
Russians traced a supply line through forty hexes of woods and forest on
the German-held part of the map (but not through an EZOC) back to
safety. It would have taken four turns for the first supply truck to
reach them by that route, but not to worry. Probably they refilled their
ammo racks and tanks at a partisan-owned gas station and gun shop. 

Now, condition (b) above is not much better. At one point the Russians
drove two battalions into a tiny cauldron in the middle of the German
position, where they were cut off. Because there were two battalions in
the pocket, they traced supply to each other and would have been fine
indefinitely. Imagine the two battalion commanders agreeing on a pact:
each uses the other side's stores. As neither battalion uses its own
stores, these stores will never be used up. Brilliant! Er...


Markus Stumptner - Sep 27, 2011 7:16 am (#45278 Total: 45528)  
You may just have missed your last chance for incremental garbage collection.

 	 
Ok, the last bit. I mentioned how important the river in the Lutchessa
Valley scenario is to the Germans as a defensive line. Well, the reason
why the Russians can only cross it at bridges is because except for some
late-arriving reinforcements, all their infantry is mechanised. But
wait... mechanised infantry can disembark from its vehicles, move as leg
units, and reembark. So the way to cross the river is to step out of the
truck, cross the river as a leg unit... and then step back into the
trucks waiting on the other side?! It's like a tour bus ride! (We only
realised this when the scenario was already pretty much over.) Not only
that, but theoretically the river cuts supply. However, as mentioned
before, everyone can trace supply as long as it's not completely blocked
by impassable terrain or EZOCs. So the Russians will be fine on the
other side as the Germans simply don't have the units to build a ZOC
cordon clear across the map. (I realise that this mechanism has become
favoured in a number of other tactical systems recently and one
shouldn't really single this system out for it, just because it is done
at such a clever scale that it shows why the mechanism is not a good
idea, while in the other games it's buried under long play or "oh, we
won't do that" rhetorics.) 

It appears the next game is already in the works, and there, the trusty
M4 Sherman has been relegated from the ranks of normal tanks - it
doesn't have ranged fire. So we have a game that bills itself as an
armor game but discounts the standard version of the world's most
numerous tank from normal tank combat. Again, the Sherman would fight
Tigers or Panthers at a severe disadvantage, but against PzIVs (or the
thinly armored tank destroyers) it should be perfectly capable of
defeating them at range. Such are the perils of an overly simple system.
(I should add that since Grossdeutschland was never a Panzer division,
it would only be fair if the next game was titled "Guards Armored.") 

So why do I keep writing about this game so much? Well, I really want to
like it. It has such a sensible basic scope and approach, that one wants
it to succeed, only to run into mechanism after mechanism that just
doesn't make sense. Anyway, we do want to try the game again, probably
with the Kursk scenario so we get some more ranged direct fire
happening. 

However, we'll probably do the following obvious things (unfortunately
not all are as easy as they are obviously needed): 

- use the original armor strength also for shooting at reduced tanks 

- apply a -1 to ranged direct fire of step reduced tanks 

- fix the fact that all guns fire equally well (i.e., increase the
chance to hit for some guns). This will be the trickiest bit; don't know
yet how. Perhaps apply a modifier for tanks whose "combat" strength is
greater than 5. 

- Prevent leg unit re-embarkation except if it's clear that the trucks
or halftracks could be at that point. (Perhaps we'll introduce a single
"truck park" counter for a whole battalion, just to keep track of where
they could go and not cross impassable terrain.) 

- find a way to apply the terrain modifier, at least for towns, to
artillery; perhaps by adding it to the range? 

- make artillery observation subject to the same issues as ranged fire;
if I can't see a tank 500m away, why can I shell a unit 5km away? 

- rule out supply trace through "enemy" areas 

- rule out "mutual supply trace" in pockets 

I predict there are two demographics that will be fine with the game as
is: first, solitaire players who are interested in narrative and nothing
else (for example in whether the narrative makes sense). The chitpulls
and the event chits are both good for solo play, and if all tanks shoot
the same you will not be faced with intricate decisions for both sides,
so you don't suffer brain overload. It should also be fine with the
legions of players who claim these things are always "just a game"; in
its current state, this one certainly is, but since many people don't
care as long as they push tank icons on a map, it might even be a hit.
It's a good chassis; I hope they roll it back into the garage and
replace all the sputtering and sparking subsystems before they send the
next one on the road. But I'm not hopeful.