Matrix Games Forums

 Forums  Register  Login  Photo Gallery  Member List  Search  Calendars  FAQ 

My Profile  Inbox  Address Book  My Subscription  My Forums  Log Out

RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic

 
View related threads: (in this forum | in all forums)

Logged in as: Guest
Users viewing this topic: none
  Printable Version
All Forums >> [New Releases from Matrix Games] >> Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa >> After Action Report >> RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic Page: <<   < prev  1 [2]
Login
Message << Older Topic   Newer Topic >>
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/22/2016 6:16:01 PM   
Flaviusx


Posts: 7750
Joined: 9/9/2009
From: Southern California
Status: offline 		Poor activation rolls early on aren't a product of "bad luck." You have to take some pretty heroic measures in order to get anything like a reasonable rate of activation.

The vast majority of the border armies have initiative ratings between 5-15. A couple might be much more than this (up to 40ish.) But by and large they are zombies with only a very small chance of doing anything.

A marshal might raise this initiative to somewhere around a 20-25. Still bad. Focus card and Zhukov add another 45, and now you are in business, but you can only do that in one theater. Or you can throw Zhukov directly at an army for 60, but that's good for one army only.

These initiative ratings are abysmal.

_____________________________

WitE Alpha Tester

(in reply to Vic)
Post #: 31
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/22/2016 9:34:48 PM   
FeurerKrieg


Posts: 3397
Joined: 6/15/2005
From: Denver, CO
Status: offline 		Doesn't the early game Luftwaffe offensive push down activations as well?

_____________________________


Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks

(in reply to Flaviusx)
Post #: 32
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/22/2016 9:46:37 PM   
Speedysteve

 

Posts: 15998
Joined: 9/11/2001
From: Reading, England
Status: offline 		It does indeed if you select specific choices in the d+2 air offensive yup

_____________________________

WitE 2 Tester
WitE Tester
BTR/BoB Tester

(in reply to FeurerKrieg)
Post #: 33
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/22/2016 9:59:10 PM   
ChuckBerger

 

Posts: 278
Joined: 8/10/2006
Status: offline
quote:

Poor activation rolls early on aren't a product of "bad luck."


Well, of course right at the start most armies won't be activating most of the time. But you can still do better or worse than average, and luck still plays an important role.

All activation rolls aren't equally important. Some are critical, in the sense of being the difference between the complete destruction of a large reserve army (SW or Western MD, for instance), or its ability to pull back to a line that could be defended for a few turns. Even doing all you can with improving the odds, sometimes one of these critical rolls fails.

Such is the ordeal of playing the Russian in this game.

From a design perspective, it can be nearly impossible for the Russian player to recover from especially bad activations in the early game. In this game, things like the total encirclement of SW Front and his inability to get anything at all into Riga or Tallinn cascaded through the rest of the game. They were the result of chance, not bad play.

There is no question of skill here. The random setup and activation rolls meant there was nothing at all in Riga on T1, and no ability for Vic to get anything there by T2, when I moved in to the city with no resistance, followed by Tallinn on T3... Narva T7, Leningrad T9 followed as night follows day.

I challenge any Russian player to do any better in 1.02 - but fortunately we won't have to, as PBEM re-balancing update is on the way!

(in reply to Flaviusx)
Post #: 34
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/22/2016 11:11:35 PM   
Flaviusx


Posts: 7750
Joined: 9/9/2009
From: Southern California
Status: offline 		Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming Vic here or implying I could do better. But I don't see this as "bad luck" at all. Given completely ordinary luck these armies will never activate. What would be lucky is them doing otherwise.

You have to assume that no Soviet army is ever going to activate without you kicking them in the ass one way or the other. And your foot isn't big enough to kick all of them thusly, only a portion.

Modest proposal: non activating armies should improve their initiative by 1 each turn. This should help normalize matters. As things presently stand, the game something of a feedback loop in terms of activating or non activating armies. Any activation including partial improves initiative. And an army that never activates will never get any better.

Alternately, army initiative is simply too low as is. 5-15? That's a joke. Put the floor at around 20. As things presently stand, I'd argue that taking the no purge option for the Soviets is probably required in competitive PBEM play. That will raise everything across the board by 20. Which means your zombie armies are really anywhere between 25 and 35 initiative...not amazing, but also not completely worthless. They will be mildly ambulatory zombies.

(in reply to ChuckBerger)
Post #: 35
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/23/2016 7:32:24 AM   
olivier34

 

Posts: 1055
Joined: 5/10/2010
From: montpellier
Status: offline 		Interesting thoughts. I have started my two first pbem games as soviets with the goal to play the same strategy in both of the games.
vs Isokron : a very bad random setup. only two officers with initiative ratings above 15 (30 and 40). First turn 0 activations, second turn only one partial, third turn only one partial. My only way to not lose everything and maybe slow down the german advance was to garrison Minsk and Odessa and put some garrisons. (maybe a threat on a city could ramdomly active a soviet garrison in it. This is strange to see the map empty of soviet troops !
vs Grab : very good starting position, 5 officers with good initiative ratings, a few partial and total activations per turn. Sorry grab if you read this



< Message edited by olivier34 -- 1/23/2016 8:34:17 AM >

(in reply to Flaviusx)
Post #: 36
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/23/2016 9:49:23 AM   
warspite1


Posts: 41353
Joined: 2/2/2008
From: England
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: ChuckBerger


quote:

Poor activation rolls early on aren't a product of "bad luck."


Well, of course right at the start most armies won't be activating most of the time. But you can still do better or worse than average, and luck still plays an important role.

warspite1

One of the things I find frustrating with most computer wargames is the 'black box' that governs things. With say MWIF I have a table, I have a dice; I know what the chances are for each outcome before I roll. I can easily see if I've been lucky/unlucky or whatever.

What is, with the most extreme good fortune imaginable, the most that the Soviets can achieve in terms of activation? Is it 100%? Is this kind of information purposely restricted or can this be made available?

Similar question for land battles and the range of outcomes for an attack.

Just curious.


_____________________________

England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October 1805



(in reply to ChuckBerger)
Post #: 37
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/23/2016 2:43:26 PM   
Flaviusx


Posts: 7750
Joined: 9/9/2009
From: Southern California
Status: offline 		Warspite, theoretically you could get 100% activations in the same way that theoretically you could win the lottery.

Odds are terrible.

Let's assume, arguendo, that each Soviet army has an average 10% chance of activating each turn. (Which is close to correct on turn 1, less so afterwards.) So the odds of everyone activating in full are .1 to the nth power, n being the number of such armies.

Good luck with that. You're going to need it. It is in fact quite likely that nobody will activate, save perhaps for the odd leader or two in excess of 15 initiative.

Army initiative is so poor that it's very easy from a mathematical standpoint to see that your odds aren't good here. Raise the floor, please.

_____________________________

WitE Alpha Tester

(in reply to warspite1)
Post #: 38
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/23/2016 10:03:35 PM   
ChuckBerger

 

Posts: 278
Joined: 8/10/2006
Status: offline 		Warspite: one of things I love about this game is the fact that there is no CRT to view, that combat is to some degree a black box. In real life, generals had to make decisions based not on some transparent, perfect CRT, but rather on an intangible assessment of troop numbers, terrain, supply, experience etc etc. Too many wargames turn into an actuarial exercise when the CRT is known and can be min-maxed. Also, in too many wargames attacks never really fail, because the attacker can see when the odds are not in his favour. But in reality, attacks failed often, and often with terrible losses. In my opinion DC3 gets this exactly right. You have to make an educated guess about the chances of success of any given battle, and even a seasoned player will sometimes get it badly wrong!

Flavius: I actually don't think activation rates are a problem. Bear in mind that something like 5-6 Russian armies "failed to activate" at the beginning of Operation Typhoon, so as late as October 1941. In game, the Russian player usually can rely on good activations by that point. I think activation for the Russian should be an ongoing big problem all the way through December. What is a problem is that (a) Germans probably don't take heavy enough casualties; and (b) Russians don't appear to have the resilience of real life Russia, the ability to rebuild credible defensive lines very quickly after crushing defeats. IRL, Russia lost its entire central frontier armies within days, and rebuilt on the Dniepr. Then they lost the whole centre front again at Smolensk, and again rebuilt it all. Then they lost 5 entire armies at the outset of Typhoon, again virtually their whole AGC, and rebuilt again at Mozhaysk in time to save Moscow.

In DC3, if the Russian player loses 5 armies to encirclement in AGC after the frontier battles, it's game over.

I also think German casualties, especially for reducing pockets, need to be increased somehow. It feels like too often the German infantry armies are battling around Moscow with hardly any losses from earlier battles. In reality, the Germans took major losses all along the way. Smolensk was a huge German victory, but Glantz notes that German Motorised infantry units (in the Panzer and PzG divisions) were as low as 30-40% strength following the Smolensk battles.


(in reply to Flaviusx)
Post #: 39
RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic - 1/24/2016 12:11:43 AM   
Flaviusx


Posts: 7750
Joined: 9/9/2009
From: Southern California
Status: offline 		German losses I think are fine...provided they are attacking well entrenched defenders, or defenders in non clear terrain.

You can really see this against the Soviet AI where the Germans have to clear out more or less every city location from garrisons. That adds up after a while. It's a lot bloodier. Plus, fort spam, which tends to appear in very handy locations. It's a lot tougher to steamroll Western Front, for example, if the game starts with forts along the Berezina. It'll die, but the butcher's bill won't be so cheap.

But in PBEM, they are mostly fighting out in the open in mobile conditions, and the Soviet hardly has a chance to get dug in somewhere unless they fall pretty far back in the center. In the south, you really can't get dug in anywhere north of Dnepropetrovsk, or for that matter east of it. And conscripts out in the open are just chewy toys.





_____________________________

WitE Alpha Tester

(in reply to ChuckBerger)
Post #: 40
Page:   <<   < prev  1 [2]
All Forums >> [New Releases from Matrix Games] >> Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa >> After Action Report >> RE: V1.02f balance test - Chuck Berger v Vic Page: <<   < prev  1 [2]
Jump to:





New Messages No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages Locked w/o New Messages
 Post New Thread
 Reply to Message
 Post New Poll
 Submit Vote
 Delete My Own Post
 Delete My Own Thread
 Rate Posts


Forum Software © ASPPlayground.NET Advanced Edition 2.4.5 ANSI

0.672