Delay Tanks

Anyone who has followed my forum comments over the last 18 months knows that I am a huge advocate of using artillery as a force multiplier. Properly employed, artillery increases enemy casualties, and reduces your own casualties because it reduces the time required to eliminate an enemy formation in close combat ("melee") with your own ground forces. In order to use arty from behind your own front lines, however, you must protect it from tactical bomber attacks with a fighter CAP and/or anti-aircraft units incorporated into the arty battery's stack. This seems to be beyond the tactical grasp of the average COW rookie, and, sadly, even many experienced players. Not using arty is a lost opportunity.

That said, I don't think delaying light tank production by a week is the solution. There are several ways to make arty more attractive (without unrealistically increasing its offensive strength), as well as providing a better balance of armor vs. all other unit types, so that we see a greater diversity of unit types in more games:

1. First, increase the number of hit points for the conventional artillery regiment from 5 to 10. There is absolutely no good reason why conventional arty, with the same number of personnel, should have 50% of the hit points of anti-aircraft, anti-tank, self-propelled AA, and self-propelled arty regiments. Currently, conventional arty has fewer hit points than any other ground unit ---- why, for example, should an arty regiment be twice as easy to kill as an AA regiment, and three times easier to kill than a militia regiment?

2. Second, impose a daily manpower upkeep requirement on all armor-class units, including tanks. It is one of the great mysteries of COW that tank brigades and other armor-class units have no daily manpower upkeep, and this is one of the reasons we see a disproportionate number of tank units (instead of infantry-class units) in the middle and late phases of the typical game. Adding a manpower upkeep requirement for tanks and other armor is not only more realistic, but would require players to reconsider the number of armor units they produce and adjust the mix of units that they use.

I disagree that artillery is under-used. In games among experienced players, artillery is a commonly-used and very effective unit. It is true that we don't see it much in games with much rookies; this is probably because in the mindframe of most people, when you say "WW2 game" they think "tanks". Everyone who has played the game for a while realizes the power of artillery though and starts using it in numbers AT LEAST equal to tanks (or at least, until huge air forces are deployed to becomde "flying artillery")

There is absolutely no good reason why conventional arty, with the same number of personnel, should have 50% of the hit points of anti-aircraft, anti-tank, self-propelled AA, and self-propelled arty regiments.

Oh yes there are several VERY good reasons for this. Artillery was always meant to provide INDIRECT fire support to the battlefield, and thus, not designed for melee combat. For example, the guns would have no armor shield while AT guns always did. Also, the ammunition was mainly high-explosive shells (thus the ammo supply was VERY dangerous to the own unit when under direct fire!) while hits to AT ammo are not very dangerous to unarmored targets like SELF (which is exactly why the AT unit has a very low anti-infantry value). There are several more unit-specific factors, like commonly used towing vehicles for various gun types, but they are too technically detailed to discuss here; but in short, units meant for melee combat (AT and AA) were simply better equipped for getting fired upon than indirect fire units.

Finally, the manpower crew of a howitzer (the main artillery gun) has a much larger crew than AA or AT guns. Since the CoW unit has the same manpower requirement, we must assume that there are simply less of them in a single CoW unit (which would also explain the reduced metal cost). Less guns, less hit points... simple as that.

K.Rokossovski wrote:

Oh yes there are several VERY good reasons for this. Artillery was always meant to provide INDIRECT fire support to the battlefield, and thus, not designed for melee combat. For example, the guns would have no armor shield while AT guns always did.

In the abstraction of war presented by Call of War (and numerous war games played on old-fashioned boards which preceded computers and the internet), there are three primary characteristics which determine the fighting ability of an in-game unit:

1. hit points;

2. offensive strength points; and

3. defensive strength points.

For greater realism, we further subdivide our in-game ground units into armored-class and infantry-class units, and then assign different offensive and defensive strengths vs. those two classes of units to each unit type. Thus, for example, an anti-tank regiment has different offensive and defensive strengths, and those strengths also vary whether they are facing armored-class or infantry-class enemy units.

It is the "hit points" factor that determines the resilience of the in-game unit to an enemy attack before it is effectively destroyed. And I can assure you that 1,000 professional soldiers in an artillery unit are going to put up the same or better defensive fight against an enemy ground assault than 1,000 professional soldiers in an anti-aircraft regiment or (heaven forbid) 1,500 part-time amateurs in a militia regiment. In real hand-to-hand combat, whether the arty tubes have any kind of defensive shield is irrelevant because the soldiers of the regiment will be fighting as infantry.

If you want to account for the relative defensive strength of an arty unit in "melee" combat, then reduce its defensive strength points against both armored-class and infantry-class units. Modern artillery was never designed nor intended to be used on the front line of battle, but that does not mean that 1,000 professional soldiers in an arty unit who are suddenly thrust into a hand-to-hand combat situation are somehow easier to kill than 1,000 professional soldiers in an AA unit.

Let's start with a comparison of arty to infantry.

I would say manpower amounts for arty (AND AA AND AA btw) compared to infantry are grossly exaggerated. An arty regiment would usually consist of 3 battallions of 12 pieces, with crews of six men each, is only 3x12x6=216 soldiers. If you double that for supply train, spotters, staff, etc etc, it's barely over 400 people. An infantry regiment would be about 2,500 - 3,000 soldiers, so seven times that much, quite something else than the CoW manpower ratio (1,000 : 1,500). The infantry would also be better trained (arty unit training was soaked up by ballistics training as well, for example, and many more arty-specific stuff), plus they would have hand weapons but no infantry support weapons like mortars, machine guns, and AT rifles (bazooka's, Panzerfäuste, and the like). If the arty personnel was fighting like infantry as you suggested, their combat values would be far less than they are in the CoW tables. We'll have to assume that they are using their primary weapon (howitzer, AT gun, AA gun) to create the combat stats that they are boasting.

Howitzers are big and cumbersome weapons. To prepare a howitzer for transport (or to set it up somewhere else for that matter) takes 30-60 minutes. It can only fire once in 20 seconds (if the loaders aren't hit yet and crews are complete). An attacker basically has to duck, and can advance for free for those 20 seconds while the crew frantically reloads their gun (under fire - do they make their rate of fire from the book under those circumstances??). Aiming devices are focused on indirect fire (plotting grenades to coordinates on a map), not direct fire (aiming the barrel at some approaching enemy), so fire efficiency is very low. And if they decide not to use their gun but use hand weapons instead, see above... they're heavily outnumbered by the attacker.

Both AT and AA guns are relatively light. They can start firing within minutes from deployment, and have a rate of fire of, for example, 13 rounds per minute for an AT gun(German PaK 5cm) and much higher than that for most types of AA guns. Storming an enemy position usually isn't feasible; instead it must be attacked methodically. It is really much, much harder to destroy.

So all in all, I'd say half the hit points for the artillery compared to AA/AT is actually a decent representation.

Interesting points guys. I am a newbie I'll just listen.

Having participate in several fire fights with 105mm artillery loaded with flechette rounds, I can attest that they are extremely effective against infantry at close range.

Conventional AAA are equally effective, if not more so. My father's battery of 8X quad fifties dispatched many enemy infantry in a direct fire support role.

WayneBo wrote:

Having participate[d] in several fire fights with 105mm artillery loaded with flechette rounds, I can attest that they are extremely effective against infantry at close range.

I'm in the process of typing a more-detailed response to K.Rokossovski's comments above, but the U.S. Army artillery regimental organizational structure he cited above was replaced in 1940 with a battalion-based organization that survives in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to this day. It appears he relied on an inaccurate Wikipedia article for that information, and the personnel numbers appear to be guesswork.

No, it was simply not based on American army data. It may surprise you to know that there actually WERE different nations involved, you know. Also, this is a WW2 game, so "At least since WW2" doesn't mean very much.

K.Rokossovski wrote:

It may surprise you to know that there actually WERE different nations involved, you know.

It would be helpful to this discussion if you would share specifically which nations' artillery units your information refers to, and share any published sources for that information. Of course, there is no "official" history of the Wehrmacht, but as best I can tell, the organizational structure you outlined above does not accurately describe the German army's divisional artillery, either.

For the U.S. Army's organizational structure of its artillery units in World War II, I am relying on Janice E. McKenney's The Organizational History of Field Artillery, 1775-2003 (2007), an official publication of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. It's quite detailed, presumably reliable, and was peer-reviewed by military historians from both the U.S. Army and American civilian universities.

https://history.army.mil/html/books/OH_of_FA/CMH_60-16-1.pdf

K.Rokossovski wrote:

Also, this is a WW2 game, so "At least since WW2" doesn't mean very much.

I'm sorry Montana, I don't have the time to write a detailed analysis on various artillery organisations during the war. It would help if you told us exactly what you are disputing, which wikipedia figures you think I used that were so wrong,

I'm not referring to any nation specifically, I'm taking an average of the unit that various nations called an "artillery regiment". British were smallish @24 guns per regiment, but used two per division; Soviets were even smaller with 20 per regiment but those were taken away from the command of individual divisions up to army level after Barbarossa (PLUS the Katusha's comprised a big part of their artillery); American were largish with 4x 12 guns, German situation was extremely mixed but seems to average to about 3 btns of 12 pieces each, with a very problematic ammo supply. Minor nations used everything in between those. So what exactly are you disputing?

Apparently I was wrong about the total manpower requirements for these regiments. Some quick googling indicates 1,900 personnel in the American regiment of 48 guns, which means that only around 20% of the soldiers were gun crews. Mea culpa.

I'm a bit sceptical of the value of howitzers in a direct fire role, specifically against tanks. After all, why would ALL nations deploy specialized AT units if howitzers could do a same if not better job? Why would hollow charges (AT ammo) ever be invented if high explosives were good enough? Why would grenade velocity and long vs. short barrels be discussed in all articles on armor-piercing values of guns? Why would the famous German 88m AA gun (NOT a howitzer!) be the fear of any Allied tank crew, while there's hardly any mention of tank columns being ambushed by 105mm howitzers? Why would so many records talk about the difficulty of artillery commanders to set up their batteries in a way that they were safe from being overrun in this new mobile way of making war? But please, enlighten me!