Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Gary Grigsby’s War in the East: The German-Soviet War 1941-1945 is a turn-based World War II strategy game stretching across the entire Eastern Front. Gamers can engage in an epic campaign, including division-sized battles with realistic and historical terrain, weather, orders of battle, logistics and combat results.

The critically and fan-acclaimed Eastern Front mega-game Gary Grigsby’s War in the East just got bigger and better with Gary Grigsby’s War in the East: Don to the Danube! This expansion to the award-winning War in the East comes with a wide array of later war scenarios ranging from short but intense 6 turn bouts like the Battle for Kharkov (1942) to immense 37-turn engagements taking place across multiple nations like Drama on the Danube (Summer 1944 – Spring 1945).

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janh
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by janh »

ORIGINAL: carlkay58
3) Expanding on #2 and thinking on it a bit, the best solution may be to calculate the unit's MP at the end of the friendly turn. Any attacks by the enemy will also expend the unit's MP BEFORE you get to use it. This gives the initiative to the side that is able to attack while allowing the defenders to do spoiling attacks and bombing missions to slow down the opponent during their own turn. I seem to recall somewhere that there was a mention of this for WitW - but not sure. It seems at first thought that
it would solve several problems but it would definitely require a major re-write of the code and the AI to do - not something that would be a 'patch'.

+1

Something I found missing as well. That would change dynamics for both sides, and even "wasteful" brigade and division strength counterattacks against the Germans would sudden serve some sort of "attrition purpose", even if essentially not causing any casualties.

In order to avoid having to adjust MPs to account for it, I would set MP cost for defensive action at say 2 / 3 MP per attack. As long as you compute the MP prior to the next turn start, AI should be able to cope. It could act a bit more aggressive in that case, but that should be tunable thru general threshold in the code (those, that are also affected by the morale difficulty setting for example).
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by janh »

ORIGINAL: 76mm
I'm not saying that units should make "random lurches", I agree that that would be unplayable. The main difference between your position and mine is that you are saying that unit movement rates can be reduced at the beginning of the turn via an admin role result and shown to the player, and I am saying that reductions in movement rates not be known until the player actually moves the unit, so the player won't know exactly how far the unit will be able to move that turn. Frankly I don't see how that is unrealistic.

As long as MPs are clearly know (with all other unit or leader stats) to the player at the beginning of the move, you will not get the impression of "chaos" at all. A sluggish slow move, which is perfectly good as Trey stated, but there won't be bad surprises or chaos -- you'll always feel in control, no matter whether you are to slow to retreat or not.
As you say, it requires some sort of effect that "randomly" kicks in during the move. A random reduction of MPs possible after each step, a break down of a deliberate attack, or even more along the lines of the order issues you raised: random lurches. Both should in principle be in effect throughout the game, affect low proficiency units worse than high, but occasionally also a Guards unit or Panzerdivision should screw up. If not overdone, it would be a fun feature.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by 76mm »

For the record, I'm not in favor of these "random lurches", which I guess means units moving in the wrong direction altogether. That's neither playable, necessary, nor realistic under most circumstances in my opinion.

In fact, the whole point of losing a random number of MPs during movement would be to reflect a unit's difficulties in executing its orders for whatever reason, including any random lurches it made during the intitial stages of its movement (ie, any random lurches it made are not shown explicitly but simply reflected in the reduced MP of the unit towards its designated destination).

To explain again, this mechanism is really very simple--players would simply not be shown the results of the admin roll prior to moving the unit, and when they directed a unit to move to a particular location, it might not be able to reach the location because its MP had been reduced by some amount.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Uxbridge »

Small thing, but ... I dearly like to see the feature that pressing an "F-key" a second time would revert the view back to the former mode (except for F1).

When air scouting, for instance, and working in F5-mode, it would be great to only have to press F11 to move between seeing where I have alreday scouted and being able to continue doing it. If I'm in F1-mode and want to see the battle reports, it would be great if I didn't have to locate the F1-key to get back to normal, but pressing F11 a second time instead.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Zonso »

The random lurches thing would simply be annoying. I think it was Forge of Freedom or Crown of Glory, or both, that implemented that 'feature' and I disliked it immensely.

The Russian army in '41 and '42 suffered from many handicaps not reflected in WitE. As mentioned above there is the whole administrative tail of route planning, supply and fuel etc. and then the 'simple' act of conducting the military operations themselves, from company level to army, which requires training and experience. It is one thing to draw or write up a plan on a piece of paper, quite another to have the competent men, top to bottom, on the ground able to implement it, something the Russian Army clearly did not have for some time. The Russian Army in 1943/44 was quite the different beast from the one in 1941, and vice-versa for the German Army.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Jim D Burns »

The simplest solution that might actually stand a chance at getting done would be to simply add one more calculation to a units calculated movement points. If a units higher HQ passed its admin check, it gets full movement points as normal. If it fails, it gets its movement halved to simulate the sometimes crippling command confusion/inaction the Russians suffered from in the first months of the war.

This would be a halving of the final movement allowances that we see now. Then you gradually reduce the reduction penalty each month. So in June you lose 50% of your movement, in July you lose 40%, August 30%, September 20% and finally October 10%. By November we're back to what we have now.

I'm no coder, but I'm thinking adding this to the end of the current calculations might actually be doable in a patch. Perhaps not. But the thinking should be to make any changes as simple as possible if we want to see a change actually get done.

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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Flaviusx »

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns

The simplest solution that might actually stand a chance at getting done would be to simply add one more calculation to a units calculated movement points. If a units higher HQ passed its admin check, it gets full movement points as normal. If it fails, it gets its movement halved to simulate the sometimes crippling command confusion/inaction the Russians suffered from in the first months of the war.

This would be a halving of the final movement allowances that we see now. Then you gradually reduce the reduction penalty each month. So in June you lose 50% of your movement, in July you lose 40%, August 30%, September 20% and finally October 10%. By November we're back to what we have now.

I'm no coder, but I'm thinking adding this to the end of the current calculations might actually be doable in a patch. Perhaps not. But the thinking should be to make any changes as simple as possible if we want to see a change actually get done.

Jim


Good luck ever getting your reinforcements anywhere with this mass of bumblers in 1941. I note that by mid July an enormous mass of reserve units had shown up in front of AGC and was giving it a very hard time. This would be more or less impossible if half or more these guys were running (I use the word advisedly) around at 8 mps.

Just gobsmacked by how many folks buy into this image of the Red Army.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Jim D Burns »

Guess I should have made it clear, I'd only advocate for this change if you made the Soviets much more durable in combat, no more 1 CV counters all over the place. The goal is to make the Soviets tougher but less mobile in the first few months of the war.

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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Flaviusx »

Regardless of how durable they were, reinforcements and reserves simply would never reach lines they were able to do so historically. This would actually encourage runaways. People will move the Red Army in unison at the speed of their slowest units, and place them that much further east, rather than feed them into battle in dribs and drabs. No battle for Smolensk. Leningrad even more vulnerable than is already the case. No line on the Dnepr, etc.



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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by 76mm »

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx
Regardless of how durable they were, reinforcements and reserves simply would never reach lines they were able to do so historically. This would actually encourage runaways. People will move the Red Army in unison at the speed of their slowest units, and place them that much further east, rather than feed them into battle in dribs and drabs.

I think you're right if something like this were not accompanied by revised VC to encourage holding ground, which is also important.

While you might not agree with some of the proposals being bandied about, personally I am mystified as to why you think that everything is hunky-dory with how weaknesses in Sov C&C are reflected in the game. You say that the surprise turn and admin rolls are all that are needed, but I don't agree for the reasons outlined in this thread (but please don't go on about random lurches or reducing MP outright, as I've never suggested these).

Let me ask this--do you think that when the Sov player moves his units in the summer of 1941, he should have the same degree of confidence that his units will execute their orders properly as the German player?
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Jim D Burns »

Granted I've been away from the game and forum for over a year so I might be mistaken, but the apparent general consensus I picked up on after spending a week or so reading before my PBEM started was that the Soviets run away without any real fight now in most games. I was appalled by what I read but it appears there is no real reason to stand and fight according to the community so slowing their movement capacity might help prevent that.

Granted it's a gamey reasoning, though based on the historical fact that the Soviet high command suffered from severe lethargy in the first few months of the war. But the utter gaminess of simply running away and counting on your replacement system to build an army anyway is even worse in my opinion. That said the gaminess of the Germans leaving Soviet territory to avoid winter is even worse in my opinion and likewise needs to be addressed.

The Soviets should be required to fight (and have the ability to fight as well), running away should be a last resort forced on a player after severe losses leave no other option. And any German player that has a large percentage of their troops leave Soviet territoy should lose the game instantly.

The more I think about these issues, the more I remember why I stepped away from the game in the first place. The game doesn't focus on strategic or regional goals, other than evacuating factories there is no reason for a player to want to hold any given location. The game needs a way to make players want to risk it all to defend a given location.

Cities in general need to be more of a focal point of the game. Perhaps if the supply system were more reliant on cities close to the action to act as distribution centers or something.

Baring that what we have is a game map where no location is really any more important than another so players have no reason to care about holding anything and now the winning game strategies that have become commonplace are all about overall army sizes and strengths. Regional control plays no part in the strategies I've read about at all, because there is nothing to make players care about control other than the total number of hexes between the front and Berlin.

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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by turtlefang »

As a long time student of the Eastern Front - as in 30 years - I'm having a hard time with the whole random reduce movement point roll argument. As it is, Soviet infantry can barely move next to advanced German units with full movement points - which average in the first couple of months 12 to 14 pts - and can't generate enough points for more than one attack - assuming that they could win one or at least keep enough strenght to launch a second one.

I haven't ever read of anything that caused this type of problem after the first week - maybe two - of the invasion. In a very few historical cases, the German Panzer units could outrun the Soviet Infantry. And, in the game, this can still happen if you can achieve a breakthrough. But usually, the Soviets always seemed to get a line of troops in front of the Germans. Now, the Germans could punch through in many cases.

And on top of that, if the German's decent, the Soviet's don't have the ability to fight in a pocket the way they did historically or hold out in selected cities like Odessa. So reducing the Soviet mvt pts just don't doesn't make any sense to me - either from a game balance POV or a historical POV.

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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by Flaviusx »

76mm, I would hope that Soviet units can move around at least as well as they could in real life. Really, truly, large numbers of units got to places as quickly as the game already lets them. If we start cutting these movement rates by almost half for anybody who doesn't pass an admin check (which is already reducing the MP to 12 from 16 for the most part) I do not see how this can happen. We're creating a situation where on the one hand, the stuff on the border all dies, and the stuff in the interior cannot get forward in a timely fashion. This doesn't strike me as any improvement over the present situation.

Jim, what you're looking for is more properly addressed by VPs than tinkering with movement rates. It's a political question, properly speaking, not a technical military matter.

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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by amatteucci »

Turtlefang,
I totally agree with your analysis.

Uncoordinated attacks? You already got them: Soviet units rarely have MPs for anything but hasty (i.e. not multihex) attacks, if any.
Units not doing the operational counterattacks you ordered? You already got them: reserve units that, typically, are not committed at all.
Cut off units wandering without clear objectives? You already got them: normally you won't be able to move a single hex in EZOC!
Units potisioned miles off the desidered position? You already got them: routed units typically displace in the most inconvenient places... after the first move I have many divisions teleported into the Pripyat' marshes!

I barely manage to move my units along the historical defensive lines at the start of July. With reduced MPs even this would be impossible to achieve. Soviet tactical and operational defensive capabilities are already under their historical level during the summer of 1941, no need to do the same service to their strategical capabilities.

Improve the effectiveness of Soviet forward defense in 1941, reduce the effects of blizzard on the Germans, fix the logistic and combat routines. This is the way to go. And, as far as I know, this is where the next patch and the upcoming WitW/WitE2 are going to.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by 76mm »

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx
76mm, I would hope that Soviet units can move around at least as well as they could in real life. Really, truly, large numbers of units got to places as quickly as the game already lets them. If we start cutting these movement rates by almost half for anybody who doesn't pass an admin check (which is already reducing the MP to 12 from 16 for the most part) I do not see how this can happen.

But again, I'm not advocating reducing MPs more than they are now--just not telling the player how many MPs they will have before they move. To repeat, its not how far they move, but how easy it is to perfectly coordinate every movement of every single Sov unit for the whole summer.

OK, this topic has been rather beat to death, and very knowledgeable people seem to like how things work now. That said, I've read more than a couple books on this conflict and have to say that for me the perfect C&C that I have does not seem realistic, and don't think that all of these problems went after after the first week or two of the war. I guess we're not going to convince each other at this point...
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by carlkay58 »

76mm - I have no problem with not knowing how many MPs each unit has - however I think this should apply to both sides and not just the Soviets. I personally believe that the current system penalizes the Soviets sufficiently for their bumbling in the first few weeks of the war. In some cases, such as combat value and the isolation penalty, are probably too harsh.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by timmyab »

If the Soviets are forced to fight forward and C&C failures are better simulated then the Soviet units can be made more powerful so that whenever a chain of command passes all it's dice rolls a whole army or even an entire front could become truly dangerous.This will keep the German player on their toes as they wont be able to take Soviet weakness and immobility for granted.It would also give a better sense of the patchy, uncoordinated nature of the Soviet defense in 41.
No doubt the C&C stuff would be a major programming job, but I suspect the Soviets could be powered up and forced to fight forward relatively easily.That would certainly help the game a lot.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by 76mm »

ORIGINAL: amatteucci
I barely manage to move my units along the historical defensive lines at the start of July. With reduced MPs even this would be impossible to achieve. Soviet tactical and operational defensive capabilities are already under their historical level during the summer of 1941, no need to do the same service to their strategical capabilities.

Improve the effectiveness of Soviet forward defense in 1941, reduce the effects of blizzard on the Germans, fix the logistic and combat routines. This is the way to go. And, as far as I know, this is where the next patch and the upcoming WitW/WitE2 are going to.

For the umpteenth time, I for one am not talking about decreasing movement points. I wholeheartedly agree that Sov units should be made stronger, but to make them stronger without reflecting some of the Sov's serious C&C deficiencies would give the Sovs too much of an advantage. If you increase Sv "tactical and operational defensive capabilities" to their historical levels--as I agree should be done--then you also need reduce their "strategical capabilities" to their historic levels, because in my view they are overstated in the game, at least for the first several weeks.

There are any number of mechanisms that could be used to do this; I've suggested one that I think would be easy to implement, but I'm sure there are better approaches. But the main thing is to recognize that none of this can or should be done in a patch, because there are enough serious issues to be fixed as to require essentially a new game.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by janh »

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns
...
Granted it's a gamey reasoning, though based on the historical fact that the Soviet high command suffered from severe lethargy in the first few months of the war. But the utter gaminess of simply running away and counting on your replacement system to build an army anyway is even worse in my opinion. That said the gaminess of the Germans leaving Soviet territory to avoid winter is even worse in my opinion and likewise needs to be addressed.

The Soviets should be required to fight (and have the ability to fight as well), running away should be a last resort forced on a player after severe losses...

The more I think about these issues, the more I remember why I stepped away from the game in the first place. The game doesn't focus on strategic or regional goals, other than evacuating factories there is no reason for a player to want to hold any given location. The game needs a way to make players want to risk it all to defend a given location.

Cities in general need to be more of a focal point of the game. Perhaps if the supply system were more reliant on cities close to the action to act as distribution centers or something.

Indeed, reducing the MPs would just misuse the system. It would make no sense to make the soldiers slower than ants to mimic lethargy of command. And beyond that, not every step East for SHC or West for Axis is such a retreat. You kind of would have to bind groups of units to cities or other strategic targets and check whether this target is abandoned, because some rearward moves may just be necessary to get into flanking positions, counterattack or whatever.
Besides, would one want to disallow any retreats, or would it be ok if players could chose the terrain to fight at least occasionally? One means bowling/steamrolling if one side can't retreat and is basically static, while militarily would be wisest to do so, say in very poor open terrain like the south. How much freedom should every side have to correct its lines, chose the terrain to fight? Could retreats, say of 3-4 hexes per unit move spent rearwards while the enemy is within 5 hexes plus a city is adjacent, be linked to paying some AP?

Since WitW is said to have major changes to logistics including depots, this could already affect the role cities have to players. Otherwise, oftentimes battles over locations that were not of major logistic importance were fought just because Stalin needed the morale show, or Hitler got one of his "Feste Plätze" flashes, which both in some way are rather arbitrary reasons. Such would be best modeled by something that can be tuned in arbitrary fashion as well, like victory points.

I think the others here are right that a victory point system on per turn basis like in the smaller scenarios would also be best for the GC. Right now, the symmetry is the sudden death (alt) or the final victory points, which means people will play only towards these goals and optimize their play in the interim without needless battling and such. Now there ought to be the question whether those per turn VPs ought to be static for each city for the entire GC, or change every year, or maybe have even a random factor in them that surprisingly make a random city a major target for just a couple of turns. But definitely I can see that this would mean a very different dynamics, and a balancing act in not loosing cities too early, getting them back early and also with choosing destruction or manpower or Red Army over VPs or so.

ORIGINAL: turtlefang
As a long time student of the Eastern Front - as in 30 years - I'm having a hard time with the whole random reduce movement point roll argument. As it is, Soviet infantry can barely move next to advanced German units with full movement points - which average in the first couple of months 12 to 14 pts - and can't generate enough points for more than one attack...
...
And on top of that, if the German's decent, the Soviet's don't have the ability to fight in a pocket the way they did historically or hold out in selected cities like Odessa. So reducing the Soviet mvt pts just don't doesn't make any sense to me - either from a game balance POV or a historical POV.

Agreed, I also am oftentimes quite annoyed by the lack of Soviet MPs. The mobile units are penalized badly already, but with the poor SHC leadership and resultant rolls, my infantry has a hard time approaching the enemy to counterattack. Part of that is because I find the MP cost for flipping enemy hexes changes to drastically with morale. If you only have some 8-15 MPs, the difference is enormous whether you need 1, 2 or 3 MP to make a step. Holds true for the Axis minor ants as well, but maybe there should be one fixed value, and not such a large variation.

Now: lacking MPs for deliberate attacks, doing hasty attacks with this combat engine, which often for forces very disparate in strengths, formation types (armor, no armor, air support etc), or morale/experience generate results they read like several k casualties to none, makes no sense with the Soviet ants. Given that, you cannot replicate the historical attrition and counterattack strategy the Soviets used, in which case it becomes logical to refrain from that, chose a purely passive defensive stance, and chose the terrain to do so as well -- which includes the need for Soviet retreats, or call it a tactical withdrawal away from the open front areas to wooded or hilly areas found beyond Pskov, the Valdai, Rhev, etc. But that kind of use of military doctrine is exactly what people don't like here.
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RE: Things I would like to see in "the patch"

Post by janh »

ORIGINAL: 76mm
But again, I'm not advocating reducing MPs more than they are now--just not telling the player how many MPs they will have before they move. To repeat, its now how far they move, but how easy it is to perfectly coordinate movement of every single Sov unit for the whole summer.

OK, this topic has been rather beat to death, and very knowledgeable people seem to like how things work now. That said, I've read more than a couple books on this conflict and have to say that for me the perfect C&C that I have does not seem realistic, and don't think that all of these problems went after after the first week or two of the war. I guess we're not going to convince each other at this point...

The more I think about this, the more I like the way this "C&C" chaos, breakdown of chain of command, command lethargy, misinterpretation of orders etc. is handled in Forge of Freedom, but your suggestion with hiding the MPs (or default showing 40/15 at start) sounds good, too. Right now I may be upset about poor MPs, lost admin rolls or whatever, but there is absolutely no sense of "chaos" or loss of control. I perfectly know the MPs available, every stat of every unit, there is no delay or misunderstanding between higher echelons and executing units. They may be slow, but control is perfectly predictable. As if "C&C" were perfect.

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