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RE: Sherman v Pz IV, is there a rating problem?
I think the basic Sherman pretty clearly deserves a 4 armor rating, while the Panzer IV also pretty clearly deserves only a 3 armor rating.
The Sherman is much better protected. With slope effects included, essentially the entire front (hull and turret) resists like 90mm of armor before any side angle is taken into account.
The Panzer IV has 80mm on the upper front hull only, essentially without slope, and has a much more vulnerable 50mm on the turret front. The lower hull is also relatively weak, though a small area.
Compare the T-34 which gets a 5 in the game, and had 45 at 60 on the front glacis, which resists like 100mm vertical, but only 70mm on the turret front.
The Panzer IV with a 6-8 gun and 3 armor fights a Sherman with a 5-8 gun and 4 armor on even terms. Which is right, they were entirely comparable in a duel, with the German having a better gun but worse protection.
The high armor rating of the Panzer IV seems to reflect an insufficient appreciation of how dated and poor its no slope armor layout was by the standards of either the mid to late war allies, or other late war German AFVs.
The German late war tank destroyers get notably underpowered armor ratings. For example, the Jagdpanther had superior armor to the Panther, in the sense of having just as impenetrable a front hull glacis, but without the 100-110mm turret front that was the Panther's weakest plate from the front. In the game, the Jagdpanther is given the same armor rating as the late Panzer IV models, which is frankly insane. The only thing they have in common is that the front plate thickness is 80mm, but the Panzer IVs is 80mm nearly vertical, with no slope effect benefit, while the Jagdpanther is 80mm at 55 degrees from the vertical, doubling its effective thickness. Giving it just a 5 is like giving the T-34 a 2 armor rating. It deserves more like a 7. It took a US 90mm or British 17 pdr, or a Russian 122mm to defeat it from the front if the glacis was hit (nearly all the front area). he gun mantlet has less slope but was 100mm thick to compensate, and is quite small, much smaller than the 50mm thick vertical turret front of the Panzer IV, which is half the thickness.
I get the impression that someone only saw the raw thicknesses, or just assumed that by late war so numerically important a tank as the panzer IV would have been uparmored.
Not how it works. The IV was at the limit of the weight the chassis and drive train could reasonably handle at 80mm front hull thickness, and there was no way to improve its early war, pre-encounter with the T-34, boxy vertical armor layout, which was the least efficient possible for the weight. The only way to get slope on that chassis was to take the turret off, which is exactly what the Germans did with the Jagdpanzer IV and IV-70. Which in the game are again not given sufficient benefit for their sloped armor layout. Yes the front plate was 60mm not 80, but at nearly 60 degrees slope, twice that effective thickness and therefore "proof" against Russian 76mm and US 75mm front the front.
Games like Combat Mission on the computer or Jim Day's Panzer 2nd edition get these things right. Stock unmodded Panzer Grenadier does not.
For what it is worth...
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