Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: 76mm

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ORIGINAL: Lobster
It sounds like you are saying it should be an equipment/man limit. That would be a hairy concept indeed. While equipment does have volume I don't think it has anything to do with how much space it takes up since a two man team and a 204mm howitzer have the same volume of 999. Perhaps the limit in TOAW is related more to command control than overcrowding.

I don't really understand what you meant ("a two man team and a 204mm howitzer have the same volume of 999") but actually the concept is not very hairy at all, it is pretty simple, although as I said it is not perfect. It is certainly better than an arbitrary number of units of indeterminate size (division, battalion, company? Doesn't matter).

I don't think that having stacking for command and control reasons makes much sense either--all of the units could be from the same unit. If the point is to limit span of control, that is a worthy aim but surely there is a better way to do it than stacking rules.

Scale 		Allowed Density
2.5km/hex 	68
5km/hex 	100
10km/hex        250

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ORIGINAL: Lobster

I'm probably answering my own question here but...

Each army has a SOP for how much frontage a unit should be responsible for either on the offense or on the defense. Obviously there are times when this was ignored because of the situation. But, if the scenario designer could have control of stacking limits this could be modeled in a scenario and any time these numbers are violated a penalty could be imposed as it is now. Bob had it right when he mentioned hex scale. And he said smaller units would cause a problem but if you could use unit equivalents then you could take care of most of that.

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Of course, in reality armies couldn't move an unlimited number of units over the same road simultaneously, but you could do it in the game if you move one unit at a time.

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Just a thought: wonder if the BTS thingie could solve this, if applied to movement on roads.

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ORIGINAL: Meyer1

19.1.1 Equipment Density
Up to nine units may be grouped in any particular location, but
in many cases this is a bad idea. Each location has a specific al-
lowed Equipment Density:

50 + 2 x Scenario physical scale 2

Scale 		Allowed Density
2.5km/hex 	68
5km/hex 	100
10km/hex        250

Any location with more than the allowed number of Vehicles
or Horse Teams suffers from traffic jams (increased movement
costs to enter). Any location with more than the allowed number
of “active defender” equipment suffers from increased losses in
the Event of combat.

--------------------------------



So what the number on the right means? Number of team horses or trucks?

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The only problem I see here, is that, as far as I know, these supply penalties are not represented in the supply number that you see in the hex.

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ORIGINAL: Meyer1

Of course, in reality armies couldn't move an unlimited number of units over the same road simultaneously, but you could do it in the game if you move one unit at a time.

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50 + 2 x Scenario physical scale 2

Scale         Allowed Density
2.5km/hex       68
5km/hex          100
10km/hex        250

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay



For traffic jams it represents vehicles (counting horse teams as vehicles).

For combat it represents active equipment.

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Of course they are. Traffic penalties affect the movement point cost to the target hex for the supply path.

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ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson

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50 + 2 x Scenario physical scale 2

I think you mean 50 + 2 X (( scenario physical scale ) times (scenario physical scale))

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Why is the 2.5km/hex not 62.5 instead of 68?

Scale         Allowed Density
2.5km/hex       68
5km/hex          100
10km/hex        250

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the "2" after the scale is the exponent..

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay



I see that as a non-problem. If you do the math you can move a huge number of vehicles down a road - absent traffic jams.

At 20 mph with 50 feet between vehicles it works out to 2,000 per hour. At 6-hours per turn that's 12,000 vehicles. At full-weeks per turn it's 336,000. That's about all the vehicles the Germans had in Barbarossa.

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It's traffic jams that clog roads. And that is already modeled.

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ORIGINAL: Lobster



I also see no problem with how it is now. Your first example of three divisions is the only reasonable example and three divisions could easily move down the same road in the same half or full week time period without a traffic problem.

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ORIGINAL: Lobster


Dunno, maybe modify BTS so it can be used for movement?

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...maybe modify BTS so it can be used for movement?

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ORIGINAL: Lobster
So to base unit stacking limits on how much space a unit takes would be difficult because you would have to use the dimensions of each and every piece of equipment. Further, deployed equipment may take up more or less space than undeployed equipment. Thus the difficulty in programming stacking based on how much space everything takes. Do you use the deployed status? Do you use the undeployed status? A unit using road movement takes up more linear space but since it's undeployed may or may not take up more total space depending on what the unit consists of.

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ORIGINAL: Lobster
Regarding command and control. Does anyone ever use units all from the same parent formation in the same hex? If you have ten units in a hex from ten different formations you would have ten different C&C sources. Cooperation could become a problem even if all of these units were set on free cooperation. This is not an assumption, this is a fact.

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ORIGINAL: Meyer1

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay



I see that as a non-problem. If you do the math you can move a huge number of vehicles down a road - absent traffic jams.

At 20 mph with 50 feet between vehicles it works out to 2,000 per hour. At 6-hours per turn that's 12,000 vehicles. At full-weeks per turn it's 336,000. That's about all the vehicles the Germans had in Barbarossa.

This is wildly optimistic. Fist of all, for WW2 scenarios, figures I've seen for march speed are 15-20km/h for motorized elements, and even less for tracked vehicles. Interval between vehicles varied, but I think usually were bigger than 20 meters (wider for day marches, closer for night ones). Besides, road curves, accidents, breakdowns would take the avg. speed down.

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This alone would change the calculation, but it's only the beginning of the problem.
Columns did not march non-stop for hours and days, they have to stop frequently to perform maintenance, and to rest/resupply. Usually 30min-1hour for every 2-4 hours of march.

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BTW: the figure usually quoted for Barbarossa is 650,000 motor vehicles plus 600,000 horses.

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Now, an example of what can be achieved in the game (check screenshot):

I could move the middle Pz-Division for that road and ending at the final of the movement. The other 2 could do the same, passing for the same hex that the middle one, and ending in the same hex, or other adjacent. Using the stacking limits, I could move 27 Panzer Divisions for the same hex at the same moment, heck actually I could use all the adjacent hexes I may end up moving 50 or more divisions for that hex.
Considering the scenario scale (1day/10km), in an interval of 3 hours and a half, we have 50 armoured divisions using the same road. Yeah, I see it as a problem, even if consider that the "road" in the hex it's a abstraction and not just one road.
Also, the "abstracted" supply traffic should be take in account, that should clog the roads even further.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay



I would guess that the figures you're quoting pertained to moving through enemy territory - with the tanks unlimbered. In that circumstance, TOAW imposes hex-conversion costs. At a minimum, those costs will expend half the unit's movement allowance. That's far more than adequate to accommodate the issue you raise.

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The only circumstance where this might still be an issue would be moving behind your own lines, through your pre-converted grid. In those cases, tanks usually moved limbered - lifted on trucks. That allows faster movement with far less breakdown. You are also moving in much greater confidence from enemy attack.

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I wasn't talking about the capacity of the units - but rather the capacity of the road itself. While the units might have to pull over and rest/refit, the road would be in continuous use. That very duty cycle would allow multiple units to use the road as if they were fewer units - especially if they are just sharing an intersection, and then spreading out to different end locations. Furthermore, under emergency conditions, both lanes of the road could be commandeered in the same direction for a bit - doubling capacity.

You can fiddle with the figures a bit, but it still turns out to be a huge number - far greater than normal usage.

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Sources vary, and they have to be put into context. My source said 322,000 motor vehicles crossed the border in June. Maybe your figures were for the entire campaign? Regardless, most of the vehicles would be in the rear areas, strung out in supply lines. I doubt there were ever even 100,000 front-line vehicles at any one time in Barbarossa.

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Let's start with the fact that the units in that case violate the stacking limits for 10km hexes (250 vehicles). A panzer division would probably be modeled with from 400 to 500 front-line vehicles. So, regiments would be more appropriate for this scale. Regiments are going to be incurring stacking penalties if they move through each other - again, adequate for the issue if that occurs.

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Even without that, three panzer divisions only amount to about 1500 front-line vehicles - easily within the 3 1/2 hour capacity of the road

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The extreme examples you give are absurd, of course - and would have incurred plenty of stacking penalties regardless.

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KH Frieser book of the 1940 campaign (great one BTW), where it says that Gruppe Kleist alone had over 41,000 vehicles. Also great traffic jam story there

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ORIGINAL: Meyer1

Actually, the only difference between a march where no enemy contact is expected, and one where there is, is that in the latter an "advance guard" is formed, and in the first case the wheeled vehicles are sent ahead to the next stop instead of travelling alongside the tracked elements.

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I wouldn't say "usually". The Germans had early in the war in their "Leichte" Divisions, the "Panzer-Abteilung (Verlastet)" with the Pz.I and II transported on trucks, but that was the exception, and this is also dependant on road conditions.

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Also, in TOAW, a unit could be moving over recently converted "friendly" hexes, well behind enemy lines. You won't see the tanks over trucks in those cases.

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Anyway this is a moot point, because the tanks over trucks-thing is not modeled in the game, so we have to assume that all armoured movement happens over tracks or trains.

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Sorry, I disagree completely. There's no way that you would see two units using the same road with one advancing when the other stops. That's a recipe for disaster.

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I would say that for an "emergency" what changes are the interval between vehicles. But, again, I don't think those "emergency marches" occurred, armies had normal and "forced" marches, the latter with fewer stops.

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More like 4000 total vehicles per division, I don't think we have to make a distinction between front-line and the others, to calculate how clogged a road should be.

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probably the thing that I dislike the most about Toaw 3 is the fact that graphics look unacceptably bad for a 21.st century game,

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ORIGINAL: Jakers123

Don't know where to ask, so I'll try here, I am a more or less a new player of Toaw 3, the latest patch, and I was wondering how much will Toaw 4 be different from it? Would it be a whole different game, with hopefully new graphics (I think I read somewhere that it will be in 3d, can't find where) , bigger resolution and so on or will it just be a bunch of small changes and fixes that only experienced players would notice?

Here are some of the things that I, as a person who recently started playing toaw really struggled with, 1. probably the thing that I dislike the most about Toaw 3 is the fact that graphics look unacceptably bad for a 21.st century game, even for a strategy, when I say that I am talking about the resolution which is painfully small, the terrain also looks bad because of it, there is some idiotic stereotype that you can either have good graphics, but not a good strategy or vice versa, bs, if toaw got a better resolution and new, more detailed textures, it would already look way, way better. 2. Layout is really, really bad. Strategies more or less are supposed to be hard, but because of this layout, where you have a ton of buttons that at first all look the same it is really hard for a new player to understand what's going on, even though its not, the fact there is no real tutorial also doesn't help, there is the tutorial scenario where you open a pdf. or something outside the game, but...why? Why not just create a small, simple tutorial level inside the game and change the awful layout and put buttons that aren't really needed to a drop down list or something like a majority of games do, for example there are some 4, maybe even more buttons that are about ,,show next unit/formation", why? Who needs that button when they can simply click all units on the map? It is just making noncomplicated things complicated. 3. Is weapon penetration considered? If not, it should be. The editor is a horror to figure out, again, a drop down menu of some sort would solve the problem. 4. there isn't a custom map maker where you could import real maps, so many scenarios that you can download have awful looking maps that aren't even slightly realistic, an awesome thing would be if you could import real maps and have invisible pixels on top of the map that would determine what kind of a terrain is it, so in the editor you'd for example find a part of the real map that is mountainous, then you would place there a ,,mountain brush" , and when you go with your units there, you would have the mountain effects, but you wouldn't see the low resolution pixels, but instead a detailed real map you imported.