Some undocumented game mechanics

[K62]

I used to play WiR a lot around 2005 and recently came back and looked at some of the old posts. I'm not sure how many are still playing this old classic, but just in case here is some information that's not easily accessible in one place elsewhere. I hope it may come in handy for someone else one day. Let me know if anything is unclear and I'll try to explain better.

1. Shatter mechanics

Normally units shatter with less than 10 effective squads at the end of combat, which shouldn't happen too often. (E.g. korps with 50 squads at 20% readiness are pretty rare.) But there are two common situations where effective readiness is stealthily penalized and units can shatter much more easily.

The first happens during summer 1941 (for Soviets) and first winter blizzard (German). Units with high readiness (especially tanks) will suffer high losses in combat. At the end of combat effective readiness is quartered for shatter checks. Losses are taken from this reduced ready state, but the losses are based on the normal readiness of the unit.

Example: A special supplied German division with 200 squads at 90% readiness is attacked during first blizzard. There are 200*90% = 180 squads exposed to enemy fire. Of these 41 squads are destroyed in the attack. For shatter calculation, ready squads are reduced to 200*25% = 50 squads. Then the destroyed squads are taken out leaving 50 - 41 = 9 effective squads. Since this is less than 10 effective squads the division is shattered.

The second situation happens for HQs with few OPs left. For each division a random number between 1 and 50 is generated. If this is higher than OPs left in the HQ effective readiness is halved for that division. Then the shatter calculations proceed as above.

Most of these shatters will be avoided by not using special supply in these situations. Try to keep defensive HQs above 20 OPs, preferably even higher.

2. Replacements

Each turn land units may receive up to 60 squads and 10 of each equipment type. (This is obviously influenced by HQ replacement % and pool levels.) Units with a supply level < 4 may randomly get none. The new experience is a weighted average of the unit's old experience and replacement experience. This varies by year e.g. in 1941 German replacements have 60% experience and Soviet around 25%.

Air units may receive 10 replacements per turn (or 30 for aircraft with >1000 in the pool). The replacements arrive as damaged aircraft. Each turn about half of damaged aircraft is repaired. Air units that receive replacements lose some experience based on current levels, up to 5% for units with >75%. Air units in training gain 2% per turn up to 60%.

Watch out those experience levels for air units, if they drop below 60% you may want to take them out of combat and train up.

3. Air combat

Combat value for aircraft is calculated differently based on combat type:

Fighter vs. fighter: antiair + experience/4
Fighter vs bomber:
- fighter or heavy bomber: cannon*2 + antiair/3 + experience/8
- light bomber: cannon/3 + antiair/3 + experience/8

This gets multiplied by national effectiveness e.g. in 1941 Axis aircraft of comparable experience and stats are about twice as effective as Soviet. Enemy losses in actual combat depend on a random number between zero and the computed combat value. No air group may lose more than 30% of participating aircraft in a single combat.

E.g. The P-51 shows up in 1944 with 29 antiair and 50% experience. You'll need FW-190A groups with 74% experience (23 antiair + 24%/4) to fight against them on equal terms.

It's often preferable to have 50 fighters at 70% experience than 100 at 50%.

[DavidFaust]

And some information here i did not know.

I miss the old days when this game was played.

[Zovs]

Well there is these new here days and a lot of us are playing War in the East 2 which is much better than this old lady