Let's Take a Look at Urban Combat Again

[Rosencrantus]

Previously the last time before urban combat was adjusted urban hexes were far too easy to capture and were actually a detriment to your defense to have them on the front line. Now after the adjustments were made it seems Urban hexes are now practically impossible to capture unless you have them isolated (in which case they are laughably easier to capture).

It seems that once you have about 30k+ rested troops inside a city it seems that even attacking with around 200k+ troops with initial CVs of 200 will never yield any results.

This is contrary to what happened in real life when the Germans were able to capture cities like Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Rostov in 41 through assaulting the city itself. I would try to give examples from the Soviet side but from 43 onwards they mostly captured cities by outflanking them and forcing the defender to withdraw to avoid encirclement. The way the system is right now makes capturing Stalingrad practically impossible as encircling it over the Volga has 0 chance of happening and makes taking Voronezh and Rostov a significantly larger headache than it should be when it's usually captured by axis players in a 42 offensive.

The main issue is the fact that attacks on cities are all or nothing - a limitation of the game engine as units can't remain in the hex after the combat is over. This is contrary to what happened in real life where if the attackers weren't able to drive the defenders out in one go they usually just began entrenching in the buildings that they did capture and urban close quarters combat would commence.

Here are some changes I'm suggesting that are hopefully within the limitations of the engine to try and make urban combat not so black and white. These are just general ideas.

The simplest solution - lower/remove the unisolated 4x urban CV buff for the defender so that cities actually can be taken by attackers without having to always isolate the city first. If this is done then the isolated CV penalty for defenders should also be lowered/removed as well. As even cities with 10k+ stored freight become paper defenders unless 500+ tons of supply is dropped by air which makes no sense.

More complicated solution - Lower combat delay for deliberate attacks on cities/urban from 9 to 5 just like hasty attacks. But also make it so that as long as there are enemy units next to the urban hex, that for every attack that goes past certain odds a small CV debuff (this can be stacked) is applied on the defenders to reflect the fact that the attackers have made progress in the city and more subsequent attacks may soon expulse the defenders from the city. This should give time to the defenders to pour more units into the city to delay it's and incentivize them to launch counter-attacks on the enemy's flanks to drive them away from the city to remove the debuffs.

I hope that the change I'm suggesting above reflects the fact that attacking cities without starving or surrounding it's defenders was a slow and costly endeavor, but possible. There are honestly problems with this such as the fact that it doesn't account for the city defenders itself launching counter-attacks but I'm out of ideas on what can actually be done to improve urban combat to a more satisfactory level aside from the simple changes.

The changes above certainly benefit the axis more than the Soviets, but it honestly doesn't matter too much in a balance perspective as from 43+ onwards the Soviets can always just encircle or outflank cities, they don't ever need to dive into slow grinding urban warfare that the Axis did. Though if they want to, the changes above will let them do so.

Thanks for reading all of this, definitely do not want to seem like I'm rambling and am bringing this up to try and make the game as best as it can be

[Wiedrock]

[...] lower/remove the unisolated 4x urban CV buff for the defender [...]

There are way more multipliers active than this x4. I guess you are talking about the x4 density multiplier, that one is also affecting the attacking CUs. So if you attack with AFVs into a dense area your CV will be lowered and if you attack with infantry, your CV will increase IIRC.

Maybe this post can give you an idea https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 4#p5046314

This is contrary to what happened in real life when the Germans were able to capture cities like Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Rostov in 41 through assaulting the city itself.

The Germans never captured Stalingrad. I guess some mediocre historians will call it captured, but in reality it never has been captured.

[MarkShot]

16,000/day starved/froze civilians in Leningrad for lack of rations; many might have left, but they stayed to dig trenches and produce munitions. Sometimes, logic and logistics are defied by human behavior.

This included children too.

[Rosencrantus]

I mean captured from a gameplay perspective. The way it is right now no Axis player can ever take the city against an experienced Soviet player.

[Wiedrock]

I mean captured from a gameplay perspective. The way it is right now no Axis player can ever take the city against an experienced Soviet player.

I don't want to speak for the developers, but imo this game isn't all about gameplay and multiplayer balance but about realism/historical accuracy.

[Mehring]

Can't speak to your solutions, or whether Urban combat is too difficult, I don't know the mechanics here. But your observation of laughably easy captures of isolated hexes, even when copiously supplied, I would extend to Sebastopol which is not urban as I recall, but a level 5 fort. Had a nasty experience there where for the cost of 900 soldiers the Axis took the undamaged fort with 40k odd fresh defenders in just one attack. Didn't strike me as a plausible result.

However, are you sure the context of Axis urban captures supports your argument regarding unisolated urban hexes? Again, I can't comment on the specifics of other cities but I was reading about Voronezh recently, which was not well defended in 42. It's plausible that by autumn/early winter 41 too, some Russian cities like Rostov were not well defended either, coming so close after the Kiev debacle. I know 12th Army was in the area and not long (re) formed and was defeated in front of the city. Might have been a virtual walk in. Also, the fact you cite that the Soviets went for encirclement forcing withdrawal argues for the difficulty of capturing urban terrain. The problem may be that Kiev debacles are too rare where the Soviets are not incentivised adequately to defend forward and by the time the Axis reaches Kharkhov and other urban hexes they're met with solid walls of fresh defenders and their own weakening supply lines.

[fighterf4u]

This is contrary to what happened in real life when the Germans were able to capture cities like Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Rostov in 41 through assaulting the city itself.

As others have said, I wonder how many of the cities you listed here, the soviets actually invested resources to defend. Rostov in 41 came after the Kiev disaster, where the Soviet forces in the south were completely gutted. Likewise, in the initial phases of Blau, the Soviet forces in the South were also weak, because of both Timoshenko's Kharkov disaster and the fact that Stalin expected a 42 drive to Moscow. Even then, if I recall correctly, the capture of Voronezh was behind schedule and threatened to derail the Blau plan.

I mean captured from a gameplay perspective. The way it is right now no Axis player can ever take the city against an experienced Soviet player.

As for Stalingrad, well, it was basically impossible for the Germans to take the city as long as supply lines over Volga were feeding the determined defense. And oh boy did the Germans try -- 6th Army was the largest Army-level formation in the entire Wehrmacht.

[AlbertN]

I quite agree with Rosencratus.

[exalted]

Currently playing a game and late into 42 currently and so far its been laughably easy to take Urban and Heavy-Urban hexes with well rested german forces. Sure I use overkill (200k men, 2k guns, lots of pioneers and good leaders) and some have been isloated but my casualties are way to low for such fights. Only Moscow has actually taken more than a single assault.

Isolated cities should not be considered isolated if they have ample supplies, give them CV penalties so it is possible to take them but not automatic.

Assaulting cities should suffer 2-3x the current casualties.

I also noted something strange in my Moscow battle which I don't know if its true for all urban fights but it sure was for that one, the siege mortars 600mm inflict good damage for their shots but my artillery fired a lot of shots but did 0 damage. We are speaking about 600+ 122-155mm artillery pieces and they did 0 damage No clue if it's a one off.

[jubjub]

The simplest solution - lower/remove the unisolated 4x urban CV buff for the defender so that cities actually can be taken by attackers without having to always isolate the city first. If this is done then the isolated CV penalty for defenders should also be lowered/removed as well. As even cities with 10k+ stored freight become paper defenders unless 500+ tons of supply is dropped by air which makes no sense.

Isolation CV penalties have never made sense to me regardless.

[jubjub]

A big issue is that support units take almost no casualties during urban combat. This reduces the losses to both sides, and causes 40-60% of the manpower on both sides to not directly participate in the battle.

For example, if the germans have 60k men in a fort, the attacker really only needs to disrupt 20k troops to get a rout/surrender.

[Gunner Garidel]

Greetings!

I will not try to discuss the CV penalties and the like, as I have not been playing long enough to do so. I can, however, point to current events as an example. In the war in Ukraine, I think much can be learned from the sieges of Mariupol, Kherson, and Bakhmut:

It took the Russians months to finally secure Mariupol, in spite of the numeric and firepower advantages enjoyed by the attackers. Several hundred determined Ukrainian troops held off Russians far longer than many thought possible.

As you probably know, the Russians have been trying to take Bakhmut since the summer. They have thrown everything, short of tactical nukes, at Bakhmut, but only in the last 10 days have they gotten into the eastern part.

Kherson, on the other hand, being on the west bank, was invested by cutting off supplies, and reinforcements, using firepower, with little loss of life, and the defenders finally withdrew rather than being totally cut off. In addition, however, the Ukrainians were forced last summer to withdraw from two cities in Donestsk. They were in danger of also being isolate and withdrew rather than suffer catastrophic losses.

Having been to war a couple of times myself, I guess what I'm trying to say is urban combat is a different animal. There are many factors which play into urban combat, and they are not all necessarily straight-forward. From what I've read so far in this thread, it seems the game is acting in a similar manner.

[Mehring]

The main issue is the fact that attacks on cities are all or nothing - a limitation of the game engine as units can't remain in the hex after the combat is over. This is contrary to what happened in real life where if the attackers weren't able to drive the defenders out in one go they usually just began entrenching in the buildings that they did capture and urban close quarters combat would commence.

Re reading your suggested remedies, I don't really understand them. I'd suggest use of the retreat loss mechanism and adjustment of the final victory odds in such hexes to express the potential partial gains and losses of urban fighting. For example, say final odds of 2:1 - 5:1 are an attacker victory but don't result in a defender retreat, only a degree of defender retreat losses (and as the game unfortunately has them, CPP loss) to represent retreat from a part of the hex.

Alternatively, and this is a bit whacky and doubtless a job of work to implement, but what if hovering over such a hex revealed a pop-up of large scale hexes depicting the city at, say, 2.5km per hex? A defender could deploy units in these hexes and if faced with an invincible total hex CV an attacker could opt to enter his units at the edge of the city at this scale and fight for the city block by block.

[Zebtucker12]

Is there not a system in wite1 regarding urban tiles not surrendering before falling below a certain fort level?