Ratings for modern tanks in toaw ii and cow

[jaja94mustang]

Hello everyone I am new to this board. I have toaw 2 but am going to buy cow when i find a copy. I have a question. In toaw 2 I have an issue with the ratings givin to modern tanks and am wondering if cow has the same ratings.
The game gives American tanks much superior armor ratings than the Russian tanks. I know in Desert Storm t-72's were ate up and spit out with no losses to our own tanks but in Iraqi Freedom we lost 16 tanks.( None to tank on tank) How can t-80 and t-90 tanks have such low armor ratings? The Iraqis dont even use the real t-72 tanks. They use an export version that has less armor among other things. Hell the new t-90 tanks have some kind of active anti tank missle jammer. I know this might sound like nit picking but the armor ratings dont sound right to me. I dont have my book with me right now to give the numbers but I remember that an american m-60 a3 had a rating if not better then slightly less than a t-72. That makes no sense to me. Also the game gives a Sherman tank with a 76mm gun a 100? for the gun. And then it gives a German Panther a gun that is less. How is that possible? The Sherman tank with the 76mm gun in real life was only slightly better than a Sherman with a 75mm gun. Everyone knows that the Panther and Tiger tanks were grossly better than Shermans. Only our numerical superiority let us win any tank battle. Other than the armor rating for tanks I love this game and cannot stop playing it but I hope when i buy COW these ratings are more realistic.

[Southern Dandy]

I guess I'll be the first reply to this.....

Your concerns with armor ratings have been noted previously. In fact, they've been the subject of at least two (that I can recall) somewhat contentious threads in the past. Don't have time to hunt down a link to them so you can peruse those discussions, but I'm sure someone else here could point you to them...it's raining here and I promised the kids that we'd go outside and stomp puddles (toddlers :love: are so much fun at times!).

Anyhow, long story as short as I can make it....some of the things you brought up do seem quite inconsistent. I'm not sure anyone would disagree with you on that point. It seems that ultimately the scenario designer has to take these into account when setting proficiency levels and the like in order to give a certain scenario the correct historical flavor (if it is a historical scenario), or at least have reasonable outcomes. Norm Koger, last we knew, was working on a patch beyond what we have available now for this fine piece of software....whether any tinkering with the equipment database is in the works to smooth some of these issues out or not is not known to me! :crosseye:

Not sure that this helps in any way, just my 2 cents (3 Canadian) based on my observations.

John

[Dan Neely]

The early 90s state of the art tanks in cow (m1a1 t90) have roughly comparable armor, but the later m1a2 model is nearly indestructable. The biggest problem I have with modern armor ratings is that the AT ratings do not increase with improved ammunition. I play spmbt occasionally and it's database has ~50% improvements in the pact125 and nato120mm guns from deployment to present.

In Iraqi Freedom none of our tank losses were catastrophic kills. (ie they could've been fixed) They were all cases where an RPG disabled the vehicle (generally by blowing off a track) and our rate of advance precluded field repairs or detaching a unit to gaurd it until it could be towed back to a depo. Instead we destroyed them ourselves to prevent the risk of thier being captured. Even that wasn't easy, many of them took multiple point blank hits from annother tanks maingun or multiple thermite grenades down the hatch before they went boom. Even at pointblank range we don't have any weapon that is consistantly capable of generating a catastrophic kill. The problem with modern weapon ratings is that since the 70s there's never been a situation where two sides with state of the art weapons have gone head to head so that all values are at best SWAGs.

The sherman76 v panther debate's an old one (if you dig on the forum you can probably find multiple threads on it), and the database values only appear to fit if the 76s ratings were chosen to agree with higher power ammo that didn't see widespread usage until after the war. Splitting the sherman76 into a model with common ww2 ammo and an improved version with the better ammo for use in post-ww2 scenarios has made next patch wishlists before but wether Norm will oblige us is unknown.

Cow Values
Tank AntiArmor AntiPersonal Armor(heat)
Panther 13/10/13
Tiger 1 12/28/10
Tiger 2 19/28/19
t 34/76 late 7/10/8
t 34/85 13/16/9
m4/75 Sherman 8/12/8
Sherman 76 16/12/9

m60a3 32/29/25 - 1970's
m60a1 (improved) 42/29/27(57) - 1980's
M1 32/29/40(68) -1980
M1 (improved) 32/29/60(100) -1984
M1A1 60/31/60(100) -1985
M1A2 60/31/82(138) -1990's
t72 40/32/28(39) -1972
t72 (improved) 40/32/35(48) -1977
t72 (late) 50/32/39(84) -1980
T80 50/32/35(78) -1984
t80 (improved) 50/32/49(112) -1988
t90 50/32/54(120) -1990

[Dan Neely]

Originally posted by Southern Dandy
I guess I'll be the first reply to this.....


1st to finish a reply at least. I started on mine about a half hour before yours went up but delayed posting to free some ram to let me open the editor and copy armor values out. :-P

[MikeJ]

Well, in particular for modern MBTs, it doesn't really matter too much. Much of the information about today's MBTs are still classified and things like the effectiveness of Kontakt-5 (Russia's 2nd gen reactive armor) are still not fully known.

Most western MBTs are shaky in respects to what the precise makeup of their armor is and in almost all cases you aren't going to find reliable data on armor thickness anyways.

Some sources say Kontakt-5 can shatter DU-APFSDS rounds based on German military testing. Others suggest its only really effective against HEAT rounds and is nothing more than a 5mm RHA skirting plate against SABOTs.

So it's an effort in futility really.

Besides that there is an editor that lets you modify the database out there, so if you really want you could go modify the values.

[CommC]

Mike,
Could you or someone post a link or file to the TOAW database editor?

In any case, the TOAW-COW scenario designer can adjust tank effectiveness using the proficiency setting (or the shock event) to give the armored units the settings he believes are the most accurate.

[MikeJ]

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/yves.lr/Bioed/Bioed.htm

[Southern Dandy]

Originally posted by Dan Neely


1st to finish a reply at least. I started on mine about a half hour before yours went up but delayed posting to free some ram to let me open the editor and copy armor values out. :-P

Hee hee! I was surprised that no one touched this usual hot-potato of a topic in the roughly 8.5 hours before I got to it! :surprise:

Last time we had the Sherman vs. Panther debate by the time I read through the thread, reindeer on the tundra were involved...and I was only about a day behind the boards thanks to a lousy week at work! :confused:

John

[jaja94mustang]

Thanks for your answers and COW has different ratings than toaw2.
The ratings the one guy gave were much more realistic than the ones i have for toaw2.
I found my book and here is why I could,nt believe the ratings.

anitarmor anti per. defense
t-72 140 32 81, 111
m60 112 29 125
m60a1 112 29 127, 165!
m1 112 29 157,262
m1a2 216 31 255, 426
t-80 140 32 81,144
t-90 140 32 105,228
m4/75 44 12 25
m4/76 112!!!!! 12 25
Panther 48 9 42


The m4/76 gun rating is absurd! The m60a3 rating for armor is also absurd but not nearly as much as the m4/76 gun. To say that the USSR/Russians didnt have better armor than a 1970's tank until the t-90 blew my mind.

I couldn't find any copies of COW in the stores and I went to every store in a 50 mile radius that sells games to look. I guess I'll have to buy one from talonsoft itself and get raped over the price. Thanks again for your help because as much as I love toaw2 COW seems to have fixed the bad ratings. When I get my game I look foward to playing agains't people maybe even you guys.

[Floyder]

Yeah many of the ratings for the vehicles in this game are incredibally innacurate. The M1a2 is not the indestructible monster that so many make it out to be, if for no other reason then it was designed for open plains warfare and not close city-fighting which is so common today. And giving the M1a2 an armor value 150% higher then that of an T-90 is truely laughable and demonstrates the great prejudice some still continue to have about US technology. Alas I suspect the main reason for this prejudice is for no other reason then most of the modern russian MBTs were developed under a heavily socialistic society which of course means they have to be far inferior products. hahaha This is kinda funny when you consider that Communist Russia was always on the cutting edge of military research and design, devloping not only the first effective MBT and IFV but also the most versatile assault rifle in the world the AK-47.

The rest of the innacurate armor values always kinda bothered me (especially the Panther vs Sherman debate). But the grossly innacurate values for Russian vs. US equipment are just insane.