Good to hear from you , @jamesevans140 –

Certainly any praise I give these little tanks are said under conditions that favour them…

Oh certainly.  I use T-70s in PanzerBlitz all the time because, well, history gives me no choice in many situations.  I don’t find them terribly useful against infantry (at least once they dismount from halftracks or trucks) but their fast speed and relative expendability makes them fun to form into little battalions and sweep around German wings, looking for HW units, AA positions, hidden AT guns (88s ain’t shit when 88s are pointing the wrong way!)   In large numbers the AF value of those 45mms also adds up with startling speed, especially at close range.

… 45mm at short range will have time in the sun …

Absolutely.  Again, using PanzerBlitz as a guide … and I’m pretty sure Flames of War did too in a few places  😀  … that 45mm gets a 5 AF, which doubles to 10 at 300 meters or less (2 hexes in updated rules versions).  That is more than enough to slow down anything short of a Panther or Tiger (which usually have DFs of 12).  But PzKpfw IVs have a 6, 7, or 8 depending on the variant, so the 10 AF of a 45mm ATG is pretty solid.

I agree, though, the German 50cm is better.  The L42 version gets an 8, the L60 version gets a 10.  The range is also better on both versions.

At least my Pz-2’s have been banished to recon duties.

That was their intended purpose, after all.

The Russian doctrine for tanks is a little odd at this point of time as well. 

Yes it is, but that’s a beast of necessity.  Again referring to my favorite Soviet general Katukov, when Soviet tanks divisions were finally trashed in favor of the smaller, easier to handle tank brigade, one unfortunate side effect was that Katutov was “demoted” to command 4th Tank Brigade after the annihilation of 20th Tank Division.  He was promised as “consolation” that his new brigade would all T-34/c.  Whoops, sorry, Mikhail Efimovich … one of your two battalions will still be BT-7s, your favorite “Knights in Plywood.”  Best we could do, I’m afraid.  He made it work and 4th Tank Brigade quickly became the 1st Guards Tank Brigade *(yep, first).

Notice that in my army list for my broken army I will use the PZ-4 tanks as artillery.

Well, sure … as early as you  guys are playing that would be the role and the L24 7.5cm gun.  The L43 doesn’t appear on the PzKpfw-IVF/2 until later in the summer, I believe, much less the L48s on some of the Gs.

It will be bad enough waiting for Paulus to release my tanks.

Don’t be too hard on him.  He doesn’t have that many, at least once Hoth and von Kleist are done stealing from him.

This annoyed me towards the end of FoW when they started creating models and rules for these guys. Really do you want Patton on the table, please.

We are of one mind.  Although the idea of Patton demoted down to a company or at best a battalion commander is always humorous to me.

The dirty little secret about all wargames in general it that they are actually quite bad at simulating real war.

I can partially agree with that.  It depends on the level.  At lower tactical levels like FOW or skirmish levels like BoW, war is 90% managed chaos yet the game system has to be anything but chaos.  So there’s an intrinsic disconnect there.

Even more fundamental, the person on the other end of the table is a friend.  Not an enemy.  😀  I often enjoy dropping the cheesy “Oriskany Fortune Cookie Wisdom”  —  “It’s a warGAME.  Four letters in GAME, only three letters in WAR.  Relax.”

Is war an art or a science or both?

War is too ugly to be art and too fucking stupid to be science.   Oriskany Jim, 2019. 😀

You want complete control in your tactics and that is fine. I on the other hand is an idiot that restricts the tactics to the period. I could not bring myself to suddenly invent blitzkrieg in 1918 even though all the elements are there.

While I would disagree that all the elements of Blitzkrieg were in place in 1918 😀 … 🙂  I totally agree with the what you’re saying overall here.   I get this sometimes when I set up strictly recreated historical battles and then challenge the players to “do better” than their historical counterparts. Well, they can’t use <i>any </i>tactics they want, and we totally agree on that.  This is obviously because a … say … Panzer Leader or PanzerBlitz force is hundreds, usually thousands of men.  That’s dozens of officers, hundreds of staff, NCOs, etc, all trained in the doctrines you mention.

So just as players are not allowed to use M1A2 Abrams at Normandy because players “know that they’re better” than Shermans, players shouldn’t be allowed to use “unavailable” tactics or doctrine for the battle or time period.  Put more simply, players have no issue being limited to using period-appropriate equipment … they should also have no issue being limited in using period-appropriate men who’ve had period-appropriate training.

The catch here is that players sometimes feel as if they’re being asked to “roleplay stoopid.”  I have to line up my soldiers in big brown Soviet blocks and send them into German machine gun fire because the history tells me to.

Well, leaving aside inaccurate historical stereotypes born of shitty Hollywood movies, if one’s game is making them do  that… one needs to find a better game.  That’s just bad design (and research).  I feel that when players complain of “doctrinal” or “historical straight-jacketing” it’s the fault of the game design.  Games like PanzerBlitz (or more accurately, improved community-built expansions on PanzerBlitz) are well designed enough to where the units have strengths and weaknesses that are very subtle.  There are no special rules (outside of scenario stipulations). Nowhere does the game “tell” you, either in the rules or the fluff, what should work or shouldn’t.

But after a few games you quickly realize that certain gameplay styles work for certain forces.  This emerges organically.  Only later do some players realize they’re playing “Soviet Style” or “German Style” (and even that’s an oversimplification – a German panzergrenadier force plays different from an infanterie force or a panzer force or a panzerjaeger kampfgruppe or etc etc etc) … because that’s what works in the game.

Certain solutions work because of the abilities of limitations of the tools in hand, including the equipment (technology) and the men (training) and how they were welded together (doctrine) to form the maneuver force that you as the player (commander) were given on that day.