Empirical tests of combat effects: The mortar

[Ande]

Very nice of you to do this indeed. I guess the interesting number here is the victory ratio. It is maxemized at 40 points overstack when defending unit is half the stacklimit. If I had my matlab simulation toolbox, I would try to plot victory percentage and it's variance over a couple of other variables. The first would be defending stackpoints and the second entrenchment.

[henri51]

I could be wrong, but my experience is NEVER attack at odds lower than 5:1 (as indicated by the numbers on the units). This seems to be somewhat confirmed by the high losses that you obtained for 2:1 and 3:1 odds. Even if the defender is practically annihilated, attacking losses of 20% or more for each attack will 1) rapidly whittle down your units to useless; 2) prevent them from getting any significant experience.

An interesting statistic would be the odds required WITH and WITHOUT mortars to ensure attacking losses less than 10%, which IMHO is what would normally be considered acceptable losses (does anyone remember the real number?). Correct me if I am wrong, but in WW2, for Western armies, losses of 30% were considered a terrible disaster ( the famous bombing attack on Germany that resulted in the complete stoppage of daylight bombing of Germany comes to mind - the Allies figured with those kinds of losses, they would soon have no bombers left to bomb Germany). The soviets with their almost unlimited manpower were a different story: as Halder noted in his diary, "...we destroy a dozen Soviet divisions, and they just replace them with another dozen."

Henri

[springer]

I totally agree that it is important to preserve INF. I also agree that good concentric (i.e., multi-hex) attacks at overwhelming odds are the best.

The problem is that INF saving can be very hard especially with low-tech attacks.
I think what the sims consistently show is that pure infantry attacks, even with support weapons are going to cost casualties. (Even the best 3 unit 40/5 attacks with 100% chance of victory cost about 32-35 INF I and 25-28 INF II ( ~28% and ~22% losses, respectively). I think what saves the infantry best is technology: armor, planes and artillery. But what does one do if the hex is a vital one but on terrain that negates technology?

In these low tech situations (e.g., situations when the terrain negates technology) The question becomes one of "how badly do you want that hex?" Is it really worth 49INF loss in a single assault?


You also raise a great issue about casualty rates over time. In terms of losses through consecutive attacks, I think ATG does a good job of giving a sense of historical flavor. For example, in the Sixth Army AAR from a year ago tweber and I discussed how the casualty rates some American divisions suffered nearly 200% casualties from D-day to V-day (tweber cited Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers and I mentioned the charts at the end of Peter Manoor's The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions in Europe.). That's nearly 20% loss of original strength per month. So even units that are treated well can expect to have their strength eroded if they are regularly used.

[phatkarp]

In response to Henri's general 5:1 rule, I would state the (obvious) point that sometime soldiers just have to die for the greater good.  This is especially true in PBEM games, where desperation is the constant companion of a beleaguered army.  More than once I've sent unready, understrength armored divisions to dash themselves on the tip of the enemy spear in hopes of blunting and slowing it. 

[henri51]

ORIGINAL: phatkarp

In response to Henri's general 5:1 rule, I would state the (obvious) point that sometime soldiers just have to die for the greater good.  This is especially true in PBEM games, where desperation is the constant companion of a beleaguered army.  More than once I've sent unready, understrength armored divisions to dash themselves on the tip of the enemy spear in hopes of blunting and slowing it. 

I don't disagree that there are cases like that - there are always exceptions. But what I do when I really really want a hex (say an enemy city protected by a big stack) is to hit it with as much artillery and air power as I can spare more than once if necessary, which will usually reduce it to low values. If that doesn't work, one can also surround the hex and starve it (but that is not always possible - for example an enemy port when one does not have a navy to blockade).

I also agree that in real life as well as in the game there will be units that take maybe 200% casualties over the game, and it probably happened in my AAR although I did not take count. But if the US had taken 200% casualties over its whole army, it would have run out of manpower[X(].

Henri

[springer]

Hi Henri,

I suspect I might be wandering far from the topic, but it might be worthwhile to compare ATG results to real-life.
(And you piqued my interest!)

Using the data from Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II. I did a quick bit of calculating to see what the average % casualties were like for US Divisions in the ETO.

For all 42 US Infantry Divisions in the European Theatre of Operations (ETO) the average casualty rate across the entire duration was 64% if one assumes a standard strength of 14,000 (including both combat and support units). Looking at the half of the divisions (21 divisions) that took the most casualties, losses are an average of 102%. (It's certainly not 200%, but it is surprisingly high!)

Of course, many of the casualties were due to non-combat causes. In addition, about 45% eventually returned to duty in the ETO. Still, the total casualties (troops not returning to combat) are about 210,000 soldiers.

[CSO_Talorgan]

ORIGINAL: springer

AT with MATLAB...

What is "MATLAB"?

[henri51]

ORIGINAL: CSO_Talorgan

ORIGINAL: springer

AT with MATLAB...

What is "MATLAB"?

Matlab is a high-level programming language.

Henri

[CSO_Talorgan]

Why are people enthusiastic about the idea of linking ATG and MATLAB?

[springer]

I think the reference to MATLAB is more of a joke about how one can turn ATG into an exercise in mathematical testing.

 MATLAB is used to test various mathematical equations and combinations with many variables.  The Analogy is to these tests, where we look at the interaction of factors in ATG (odds, SFT, terrain, supply, moral) and see how small changes interact just like scientist use MATLAB to see how small variable changes can change the performance of mathematical systems. (Interestingly, though it doesn't look like it at first glance, ATG is a complex mathematical system too.)


As an aside, I think that anyone who can program the editor in ATG could probably do a good job programming in MATLAB as well.  IMHO, they both make similar syntactic demands.

[Jeffrey H.]

ORIGINAL: CSO_Talorgan

ORIGINAL: springer

AT with MATLAB...

What is "MATLAB"?

It's a program used in science and engineering circles. It has some very powerful numerical analysis tools and a solid library of functions related to sceince and engineering.

It's most commonly used as a programming environment for problem solving or application development.

The programming itself is something akin to VB or FORTRAN.

I've used it for college coursework and a little bit in my office work, it's good. Most importantly for me it's a very powerful matrix function liabrary and it handles imaginary numbers intrinsically. Where as Excel is a little slow and clutzy for any of the hardcore number crunching.

[Ande]

As long as there is written somewhere exactly how combat works (targeting and pinning are concepts I'm a bit fuzzy on) a combat simulator shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

It would at least give an excuse to install matlab on my new computer.

[CSO_Talorgan]

OK

Thanks for the explanations.