Reply To: Continued Explorations of Normandy Wargaming

[oriskany 60771xp 0]

Okay, I’ve met up with @dignity and @avernos and gotten to the hotel at Historicon, so now I can give a better answer.

@piers – I would be interested in base numbers of AFVs killed by Tigers in “Normamdy.”  😀   I would imagine the number would be actually quite small, given naval gunfire, air superiority, and small numbers of Tigers deployed and available.

@jamesevans140 –

Okay, let’s talk about the guns.  Most Panzer Leader players are happy to “trust” the game.

Other madmen want to deconstruct the math and see how the game really ticks.

“Base” Shermans:

A US Sherman platoon has an AF of 11, range 8.  This is five Shermans.  A UK Sherman troop gets a 9.  Some people point out that the game is “biased” for the Americans, until they’re reminded that the UK troop has only four tanks (each Sherman is worth 2.2, x4 = 8.8, round to 9).

Of course UK troops tended to have a Firefly.  17-pounders get a 16 in a 5-gun battery (figure 3.2 per Firefly).  So three Shermans = (2.2 x 3) + (1 x 3.2) = 9.8, round to 10.    This explains the 10-A-8 values for “traditional historical” UK tank troops.

Again, we broke these squadrons into three all-base Sherman troops and one all-Firefly troop.

One may note that the 17-pounder AT TOWED guns have a 14 even though there are 5 guns in a battery, while the 5-vehicle batteries of M-10 Achilles with the same 17 pounder gets a 16.

So the same gun gets basically three different values?  (4 guns = 14, 5 guns = 14, 5 guns = 16???)

Yes.  Towed guns or fixed guns (assault guns, fixed-mount tank destroyers, etc) get a -1 or -2 for  their lack of traversing turret.  They engage targets a little more slowly as the whole vehicle has to swing to the next target.

Meanwhile the 17-pounder in the M-10 Achilles gets the full 16 because it is in a traversing turret and the game unit represents 5 vehicles (5 x 3.2 = 16).

Meanwhile, “Base” Shermans get the “A*” weapons class … so they don’t have to divide against soft targets the way “A” class does (like the 17 pounder).  This represents dual class nature of the base 75mm, including HE-FRAG and WP ammo.

Speaking of ammo, this is the reason they give the Easy Eight’s gun a slightly lower “A” class AF than the Firefly’s 17 pounder, although both guns were ROUGHLY similar from what I read … ) a relative lack of the very best ammunition for the 76.2mm M1A1 (?) gun somewhat degraded its real-life battlefield performance.

Hence weapons like the American Easy  Eight get the 14 AF, but that’s only because of a four-tank platoon.

I noticed Battlegroup also gives the American 76.2 and even 90mm very bad AP scores.  One of the very few, and very small things I don’t really like about the game.  I acknowledge they should be lower than the 17 pounder because of the aforementioned ammunition manufacturing and supply problems, but I feel they overdid it a smidge.

But hey, any game system that gives the Panther a better tank-killing number than a Tiger I has passed the Oriskany test.

Posts might be scarce over the next few days …