Equipment question

[Menschenfresser]

Maybe I'm slow here, but something just popped into my head. I know a little about how TOAW works under the hood, but not a lot. Most of you know far more than I do, so maybe you can help.

Am I correct in thinking that when the units belonging to both forces have less equipment in them, battles are more likely to be unpredictable?

Putting it in reverse: when units contain hundreds of pieces of equipment, does that make battles more predictable by some simple law of averages?

Like tossing a coin: You can toss it five times and get five heads. But if you toss it enough you end up with close to fifty percent...well...there's a certain range depending on the number of tosses, but it's closer than the 100 percent when you toss it five times.

Just wondering...TOAW number theory.

[JAMiAM]

Yes, that's generally true. When there are relatively few items in a unit, failed morale checks due to losses are more likely to result in evaporations, while failure to infict losses on either side may result in ridiculous run-on battles that burn out the turn.

IMO, TOAW plays best when the variance of results is reduced. Probabilistically, given the sequence of events within combat resolution this occurs when there is a larger number of combat results within specific combats.

Attrition divider modification can change this, though. Reducing the attrition divider modifier too much pushes the range of results toward more likely evaporations, reintroducing (or increasing) uncertainty to combats. Increasing the attrition modifier will push units toward taking too few casualties, and thus running out the turn.

[Menschenfresser]

The resident mathemagician! Thanks.

I've noticed this when playing scenarios where the scale is small...company sized units with only 10 pieces of equipment per unit. Like Bastogne44...

Whereas scens with regimental/division sized units, casualties are usually predictable.

But something seems to happen when you go way up the scale too. Seems like units get real fragile (evaporate easily) when they are corps/army sized. Especially when attacking for the first time as untried.

[JAMiAM]

But something seems to happen when you go way up the scale too. Seems like units get real fragile (evaporate easily) when they are corps/army sized. Especially when attacking for the first time as untried.

With division and corps level games, what you are usually dealing with is a relatively large number of passive defender pieces of equipment incorporated into the units. At this scale, flank attacks are so much more effective than in regimental scaled scenarios where the passive defenders are usually in their own separate units, and generally in the rear.

Remember that the flank attack allows "passive defenders" of the defender to be targetted during the direct Anti-Armor and Anti-Personnel fire portion of the combat. Since their defense strengths are generally much lower than infantry squads, or AFV's, and they usually don't have the "agile" tag (which allows for a sort of "saving throw" against losses) you can really push up the defender losses with flank attacks at division and corps scale. To a lesser degree, the attackers can also suffer higher losses as those "passive defenders" are subjected to defensive bombardments, and to direct fire losses as well. This can lead to attacker evaporations, where there is a large number of long-range support assets that are available, the defenders do not soon retreat, and the "passive defender" attackers are targetted.