hmm.. Support Squads are way more important than it looks

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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fbs
Posts: 1048
Joined: Thu Dec 25, 2008 3:52 am

hmm.. Support Squads are way more important than it looks

Post by fbs »

Thought of sharing some numbers I crunched:

This is for the Soviet Union, on 6/22/1941. The numbers below are for the Armament components in Active units (pools excluded); that is, those components that are just produced under the "A" numbers in the Production screen. That means they can built in any quantity, any time, provided there are enough Armament points and Manpower. Therefore, their number depends only on the OOBs we choose (provided there are enough Armament points/Manpower). It does not include AFVs, as these have specific factories producing fixed numbers per week, therefore their number depend only on the factories.

Total Men:
148,000x Support uses 2,950,000 men
49,600x Rifle Squad uses 546,000 men
10,300x Sapper Squad uses 113,000 men
26,700x 7.62mm mg uses 80,200 men
9,220x 45mm AT uses 55,400 men

all other Armaments use 345,000 men. Given that the Red Army has 4,460,000 men, Support units alone use 66% of that. So this is saying Red Army is 33% combat, 66% support, and that I find a bit hard to believe.

Total Cost:
All Artillery types cost 1,000,000 (76mm and higher)
All Infantry types cost 512,000
All Support types cost 295,000
All MG/Mortar types cost 165,000
All AT types cost 160,000
All AA types cost 149,000 (SPAA excluded, of course)
All Engineer types cost 115,000
All Motorcycle types cost 131,000
All Cavalry types cost 97,000

So, Artillery alone makes 40% of the cost of Armaments.

Total CV:
49,600x Rifle Squad make 149,000 CV
148,000x Support make 148,000 CV
10,300x Sapper Squad make 30,800 CV
26,700x 7.62mm mg make 26,700 CV
2,400x Motorcycle Squad make 7,300 CV

all other units with CV value make only 7,000 CV. So, oddly enough, both rifle squad and support units make 40% each of the CV for Armaments - talk about getting the cooks to defend the trenches!! This means that, AFVs excluded, support squads are as important as rifle squads to make the defense CV value (although a good part of them go into the HQs and air bases, and I didn't exclude those).

Best efficiency of CV/Men goes to 7.62mm mg (0.33 CV for each men); all infantry/engineer types are the same as 0.27 CV per men, while cavalry gets 0.25 CV per men. I find this unfair: mortars control an area as large as mg, but they have 0 CV, so don't count here.

Best efficiency of CV/Cost goes to Labor Squad, which has CV=1 and Cost=0 (probably a mistake in the 41-45 scenario); then Support Squad at 0.50 CV per cost (what a surprise); then Rifle Squad at 0.38 CV per cost, 7.62mm mg and SMG Squad both at 0.33 CV per cost, and Sapper Squad at 0.30 CV per cost.

Just food for thought.
Gabriel B.
Posts: 501
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2013 9:44 am

RE: hmm.. Support Squads are way more important than it looks

Post by Gabriel B. »

Generaly on map combat units (inf, mot, cav, airborne, mnt inf ) use 65-66 % of the support aquads with the rest going into :

21 % -Hq
7 % -airbases .
5 %- arty (at, aa, at).
0.5 % -rest .

this is as of march 1942, 4.3 milion men in supportsquads , out of a 7.5 milion men army , so the overal ratio is about the same as
at start .

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