(06-20-2012, 09:33 AM)Shad Wrote: This is awesome!
More questions!- tiny modules with no counters, such as Alaska's war, love 'em or hate 'em?
- How many PG players do you think really exist?
- How many PG buyers/collectors?
- Are there any units that you think just have outright wrong ratings?
- Why is the assault table only 1d6 and thus "flat odds" while the DF and OBA tables are 2d6?
- If you could "take back" one published PG title and rework it to new standards, which would you choose?
That should be enough questions to account for another night at the pub! 
OK, let's see here:
1) The ten-scenario "zippies" are good vehicles for exploring little-known historical episodes that produced only a limited number of combat situations. Alaska's War and Indian Unity fit this bill nicely, but unfortunately, a lot of zippies were produced to cover much larger conflicts in small bites. The Romanian Soil campaign and the West Wall campaign should each have been packaged into its own glossy book rather than being split up into a bunch of zippies, and I'm glad that the latter was eventually repackaged into Invasion of Germany. The thing that gave birth to all the zippies for those campaigns was the Printernator; since we had it in house we needed to use it to justify its existence, and printing zippies for sale on demand accomplished that. Had we continued to outsource all our print jobs, we probably would have produced more glossy books and far fewer zippies.
2 and 3) No idea. Mike carries all that information in his head, and the answers I got varied. Once he said a couple thousand, another time less than that. It's hard to say because a significant percentage of AP gamers are old guys who still don't use the Web much, so they won't show up on a site like PG-HQ. And if somebody buys a game or two direct from AP, that really isn't an indication of whether he's a PG player or just buying presents for someone else.
4) No idea again; I was the developer, and unit ratings are established by designers. I just took what they gave me and ran with it. However, see 6 below.
5) That was a design decision by Mike, and I challenged it while playtesting the original Panzer Grenadier game way the hell back in 1998. The original issue was that the direct-fire and bombardment-fire tables were way too wimpy. My co-playtester Perrin Klumpp (First Sergeant, 7th Infantry Division [Light]) said that if ranged weapons were really that ineffective, they never would have been developed and we'd still be going at it with knives and spears. The only effective table was the Assault Table, and in our early playtesting sessions we basically ran our units at each other and jumped into assaults. While arguing for stronger DF and BF tables, we proposed to then-developer Brian Knipple that we simplify things by going with 1d6 tables for all fire types. That would also make it easier to get much more effective combat results a lot quicker by way of column shifts, assuming that each column would have at least one more-severe combat result than the last one. Brian said no; he liked the bell curve for DF and BF and only wanted a linear table for assault combat (I forget why). Nevertheless, we were able to get him to make the combat tables nastier than the wimpy originals, and I think we got it right in the end.
6) Grossdeutschland 1946. It was a quick project Mike handed me to generate short-term cash, and right away I saw that the unit fire values were so high that they would put most combat results onto or near the rightmost column. Basically, the units are off the scale and belong in a later-period system like Modern Grenadier, where their fire values would be rescaled.
-- Doug
