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RE: Simple Panzer Grenadier system (variant)
Matt - how do you know? You've never tried it. But I especially liked the part about my not understanding the game, its scale, or its thesis. Um, hardly.
As for critical of the game system, why wouldn't I be critical of what I want to change? On the other hand, would I bother trying to save something if I didn't think it was worth saving? You won't find any mods of Candyland in my outbox. Also, why wouldn't I be critical of what is clearly just flat out wrong, that plenty of other tactical WW 2 games at this scale and thos a step down in scale manage to get right?
"No, see, the reason a Panzer IV H gets a 5 armor rating is not that the designers thought it had better armor protection than a Sherman, they were just trying to account for the fact that according to Signal Magazine, the Ubermenschen rule because they eat their Wheaties" or something. Sorry, beyond hopeless, out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The panzer IV was a mediocre tank that did OK because it had a good gun and got it relatively early in the war by the standards of other country's tank upgrade cycles. It doesn't deserve a better armor rating than a Sherman, and a Jadgpanther doesn't deserve one no better than it; there is no way to justify such things. They are clearly just outright mistakes.
The Jadgpanther has 80mm thickness front armor, and the Panzer IV has 80mm thickness front armor on its upper front hull at least, and the game gives them both 5 armor ratings. But the Panzer IV armor was flat, no more than 10 degrees off the vertical, so it resists just like its thickness. But the Jagds armor is at an angle of 55 degrees from the vertical, so it resists AP penetration like *twice* its physical thickness, because a horizontally traveling shell has to get through twice the thickness of armor to get from the outside to the inside. To ignore this in giving out armor ratings is simply a mistake, not a matter of a different scale or focus or about doctrine or crews (from the same Panzerwaffe, in the same year) eating Wheaties if they have a turreted tank but not if they have an SP gun.
The designers clearly just didn't know, and they guessed, and they got it wrong. They may also have simply passed out escalating ratings looking at other vehicles in limit sets - this one is better than that one, and so one, ratcheting up marginal improvements on one side as full factor increases before shifting to another country. But the result makes nonsense.
Anyway, that is a separate issue from the redesign.
Why the redesign? Because the original games falsify all real combat arms relationships from WW2 tactical combat, but they can be saved and are worth saving, and are fun and a good realistic game after the modifications. More to substantiate the above in later posts; have to run.
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