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RelicShadow, on 26 September 2011 - 10:53 AM, said:

And of course you would have rolled up the hill backwards not expecting Germans up there  

Me being new, you should feel free to take this with a pinch of salt, but I personally thought that the pre-battle phase needed to be much more streamlined. We spent something like 45 minutes getting ready, mostly as players were trying to download, install, and figure out various 3rd party bits of software.

IMHO we should have gone with those that were ready, and not tried to get 11 people organised -- brief those who are ready and go. Let them take charge of individual tank platoons and lead those who haven't seen the plan.

Also, not a personal critique of GT at all, but the plans we had were, again IMHO, monumentally complex   I don't know whethet that was meant to simulate Stafka thinking, but once the map loaded up with all the arrows and everything, well... Anyway, just for a new guy and all that, I would feel more comfortable if the battle plan was much more succinct -- KISS and all that. And IMHO because the plan was so complex, it *needed* all those 3rd party bits of software and the long lead-up time.

If we could get the pre-battle time down to, well, 5 minutes, I would be very happy indeed to participate in another one of these.

Respect to GT, Ascender, and Zorin for organising the series.

SchwerePanzer, on 26 September 2011 - 12:33 PM, said:

I would have followed GT commands of course, and giggle silently if he mentioned "let's all rush the hill"  

Ascender,

1st battle: your plan was IMHO excellent, I have to admit, I was surprised by your rush and I was killed quickly ... only invincible KV was the reason you failed.

2nd battle: your plan was IMHO bad, 2 weak groups of Pz's were nothing to our T-34.

3rd battle: we dont want to win 3:0, so we let you rush and we didnt try hard to stop you  



And of course, our (GT's) plan was better than yours  

Other people are complaining, too - the Pz. IV had a very bad turning speed. I noticed it during HB not sure about training on Friday. In the past I never had problems with it but yesterday I couldn't hide behind buildings and rocks due to the lack of maneuverability. This is what killed me in the second battle when I couldn't get behind the railroad tracks feast enough to escape the KV.

Tried my best but failed, even got behind KV to block it but did not manage :/

SchwerePanzer, on 26 September 2011 - 02:27 PM, said:

Apparently they screwed up the panzerIV traverse on hard ground somewhere between Saturday and Sunday.
The amount of people (me included) complaining about this cannot be a random coincidence.

My guess is a Dev was looking into the parameters and set an extra 0 or erased one 0 (I'm a programmer myself, this things happen frequently). All it takes is a mistake and a 0.05 becomes a 0.5 and everything goes to hell.

Bug reports have been filed by other players, hopefully this does not go under the rug.

Since they obviously fixed this they will probably act like it never happened. Just like the nerf to Ferdi with mystic armor quality factor.

RelicShadow, on 26 September 2011 - 06:13 PM, said:

That would explain something....

sego, on 26 September 2011 - 01:55 PM, said:

Funny thing is our plan for the 2nd battle was broadly similar to the first Deny the hill to the soviets, and go from there. The problems were in the planning where i did not entirely take into account again just how important anti-flanking is in a battle like this - rather focusing on denying lone tankgroups being picked off by T-34's and KV's i tried to keep most people together. The first battle we all rushed up the hill, it went to hell as soon as we took fire knowing our plan was immediatly comprimised and flanked but once the hill itself was cleared i send one group to continue south and come down, when they were sufficiently secure on the lower part of the hill i send the groups still on the hill down with the groups at the traintracks to converge and basically slug it out, with the 3 (then still alive) Pz III's of the southern wing being dedicated to the KV. It did not work out.

Second battle i had half the tanks (3x Pz III, 3x Pz IV) on the ground and the other half (same number) on the hill. Things went to hell as two T-34's immediatly came up the hill and the KV was in the town with only a few tanks to support. I sort of relied on the guys in town winning to turn on the hill where also alot more secondary forces were present. The guys in town did not win and both the KV and the T-34 IIRC survived the engagement against 6 Panzers. From that point on it was doomed, and even on the hill itself the T-34's and co stormed the hill and won against 6 Panzers and 2 PzJg I's. I still don't quite understand how that battle could have gone so horribly wrong, as half my team was engaging half your team, and the other half engaging the other half, seperately they got slaughtered even worse than in the first battle moving as a group. As a result i am still not sure if it were to have been better to have had everyone in a single group or seperated as it was...

Third Battle without the limitations of a MUST KILL policy, the plan was simple and drawn up on the spot. Go through the woods, have the scout go ahead of everyone, kill whatever is there, but move fast and rush the base. After seeing how well the base rush went with Shermans and Sluggers back in Battle No.35 I figured we could pull this one off quickly and blizkrieg your asses back to siberia. And so we did. After the first enemy tanks got spotted people wanted to move ahead before they were cleared up. Realizing the soviets probably had not spotted our full strength yet and were unable to retaliate at full range (KV might have been at the far end) i urged everyone to hold back, snipe off the targets there first and then move forwards all at once. As it turned out the KV, though manouverable enough to avoid "capture" in earlier battles, was too slow to prevent his base from being captured, stuck halfway across the map.


Troubling signs i got during the battle i had not anticipated looking at the results of training were plenty. First of all the 43mm of penetration on AP shells which i deemed sufficient to penetrate the T-34's stock turret in the sides turned out to be unable to do even this. My PzJg I with 55mm penetration rarely bounced when in the sides on the turret's 45mm armor. Though in this battle these turrets also now regularly bounced my shells. This was the biggest "killer" in the battle of all. I planned on the Pz IV's being able to deal with the T-34's, but their firepower prevented them from doing so. As a result the Pz IV's would have to use either HE on them as well, which is completely inadequate on damage and efficiency taking too long, or kill only T-26's and T-50's which were not relevant as a factor anyway. I reckon if we had 5 more Pz III's instead of the 5 Pz IV's we sould have been in a much better shape, having more armor as well as better firepower and mobility.
The other thing obviously was locking in the KV to get a good shot at him. As it turned out the KV was never blocked from moving around and this resulted directly in him staying alive, even though several training runs concluded it should be very easy to do. I reckon that the fact that GT didn't have enough weight limit to run the stock tracks had a big factor in this - something we could not concider for the actual training run since it was only learned a day and a half later, as well as apparently the error just noted in the Pz IV's track traverse...