Granularity of Unit Stats
One thing that I saw as a major limitation of older games like Panzer General and Steel Panthers was the very small scale of unit stats. Stats (defense, offense, etc.) were rated on 1-5 or 1-10 constantly. It made a lot of the unit variety superfluous, because the stats had to be nearly the same. I'm hoping you have a larger scale. Hopefully a lot larger. I don't know if there's a game engine limitation, or a programming one, but a scale of 1-100, or even 1-1,000 allows for meaningful differences between variants of the same unit, as well as a real differentiation between vehicles from 1939 and 1945. I don't know how mod friendly this game will be, but this will also satisfy people who have to have a Bf 109 E-4 when you have the E-7 in game. This will also prevent anomalies like a Pz. I unit having a chance to inflict casualties on an M4 Sherman unit.
As an example:
The SBC Helldiver (the biplane one) has two variants, the SBC-3 and the SBC-4. For most games, the only practical difference (if it changed the stats at all) might have been that the SBC-3 carried one 500 lb. bomb, and the SBC-4 could carry a 1,000 lb. bomb. But the SBC-4 was a little bit faster (14 mph), the range was a bit longer (41 miles), and the forward-firing .30 cal was replaced by a .50 cal. Now on a game of this scale, the range increase might not be important, but the speed and armament should affect stats like air defence, and ground attack. In fact, you could just dump the raw stats into a formula to give more abstract stats like the two I mentioned. If you feel that having 3 or 4 digit values might make the interface too cluttered or hard to interpret, you could always display a 1-2 digit value, which would be a rounding of the 'real' numbers. Thus a Pz. IV C and D might both display an armor value of 2, but the C would have an actual value of 22.9 and the D would have a value of 23.3 (just taking an average of certain armor thicknesses).
Anyhow, just hoping that there will be room for all the units to be unique and worth upgrading to as they become available.
Hi Seth, I wasn't subscribed to this part of the forum and was away on the conference, sorry for the delay.
In short, we are almost identical to Panzer General unfortunately.
There are a few reasons.
I was giving this much thought initially, I weighted two options - PG range of stats (1-20 mostly) or 1 to 100.
I ended going with smaller numbers, simply because there's lot of number comparing int he game, and it needs to be fast/easy to do to help the player.
So if you have a hard attack of 14 and an armor of 9, you immediately know where you are at whereas if you had a hard attack of 86 and armor of 58 you need to do a quick calc. I have a scientific background and am really fast at calculus but still I would need to pause on this example for 2 seconds.
Other reason is that most of the units are sufficiently different and submodels usually change a quite a few things that you can always have a visible difference between the submodels. In some cases a really small difference but then again this isn't a relevant change on the battlefield and that's how it should be.
Lastly, I made a game mechanics in such a way that small differences have a large impact on the outcome, so max difference on the to-hit chance that is visible is +15, and +1 attack/defense diff gives you increase of a to-hit chance from 35% to 39% - that's quite a lot. We have a cap of 5% and 95% so PzI CAN scratch T28 but remember that we are talking about brigades, so killing a strength point could be killing some supply trucks, HQ or cooks 🙂 We mostly focus on fighting units of course, but it's not a 100-tank on 100-tank in the open field kind of comparison.
In the Helldiver example above, agreed, the main difference would be ground attack, probably +2 to hard and soft, with air attack of +1 and a small increase of range. Airspeed increase would MAYBE merit a +1 on air defense in case of fighters, but in this case all the fighters can still catch up so no effect.
As for the Panzer IV, tank armor is around 10 for those types, and the only diff is C has 8 and D has 10, all other stats are the same, so C will take about 25% more losses in a duel. I think it is a significant difference, and mirrors nicely difference in models.
Also, I've spent less time then I planned on stats, so I am really hoping for a community feedback here when we start testing.
I have a feeling it still gives