What exactly are tanks good for?

@The-Big-E Historical Board Gaming on Shapeways has the best option for a Red Baron fighter plane. Fits well with OOB planes and after painting up red and decaling looks great.

France:
The powerful French Navy MUST help clear the Atlantic for safe shipping to the continent.
Then, a French reinforcement of Albania and/or Egypt is a good tactic.
France needs Infantry buys for several rounds before advancing on the Germans, in my opinion.

When playing as the US, I usually have 2-3 transports waiting in New York Harbor for over-seas duty. I mix in 1 tank with the rest of the shipment because I find my US army gets involved in smaller battles of about 10 units (Africa, Mid-East, Eastern France etc). As I can only ship a limited number of units per turn, the tanks absorb hits every round and survives to be bolstered by the freshly arriving 2+ infantry.
For everyone else I think tanks are money poorly spent.

Anecdotal Evidence

Starlight Sniper

@Auztria:

I think that for a more fluid game we need cavalry units as well as adjusting the price of tanks. Tanks are devastating in large groups, but it’s hard for most nations to produce large groups of tanks at 6 ipc’s. Plus the early game is pretty monotonous with only masses of infantry and artillery attacking and counter-attacking. Cavalry could help spice it up a bit, maybe with 1/3 atk/def and a movement of 2 with blitz. If they cost 4 but could be boosted by artillery, they’d be a fairly viable unit but would probably fade a lot when tanks arrive.

To say that cavalry played a major role in the war or even that it had an equal level of survivability as infantry is a misstep at best, and revisionist at worst. Cavalry units were consistently BUTCHERED against machine gun-defended infantry lines, and quickly became obsolete. I actually think that the omission of cavalry from this game is one of the better choices of the designer. The early game is “monotonous” (as you’ve put it) with infantry and artillery, because the early WAR was “monotonous”; 1914-1916 was a period hallmarked by mass artillery-supported infantry attacks.

Now, I will grant that on the Eastern Front (as well as in other parts of the world, Mid-East, etc.) cavalry played a slightly greater part than on the Western Front, but I still don’t think it is worth adding an entire other unit to the game to represent this limited role.

If you ARE going to represent cavalry in the game (which I don’t recommend), you must then differentiate between entrenched infantry and mobile infantry, and make the cavalry 0 attack against entrenched. This is the only way it would make sense.

Tanks are useless in penny packets, devastating in large spearheads; just as the French found out in 1940.

One option is to build a phalanx of French tanks and then reinforce the breakthrough with British infantry before the enemy can counter-attack. Or use American infantry to shield a British tank army, as the UK can usually spend more on tanks than France.

Austria-Germany can do the same on the western front; Germany-Austria in the East.

But the main use of tanks is to convert an industrial advantage into victory by effecting a breakthrough into enemy tt, ending the stalemate. When the Allies start building a large tank army its usually the writing on the wall for the CPs.

Personally, I’d like to see tanks made available to buy a round earlier.

@Flashman:

As long as you have infantry to absorb hits on counter attacks, tanks will repay this by deflecting hits on your next turn.

One possible strategy is to build a stack of French tanks, attack with them, then reinforce the area next turn with British infantry.

But see tanks primarily as a means of breaking through a defender who cannot afford to hit back. They’re a war finishing weapon once you have the upper hand economically.

+1. Good post!!

I much prefer to make Switzerland worth 4 IPCs. The non-aligned tts in the game are, essentially, those countries who never became involved in the war as an active power (the one problematical exception is Greece), hence they cannot be assigned an alignment.

I don’t like anticipating history by making them into some fictional alliance of neutrals. Would Switzerland or Sweden really even think about mobilizing because the Russians crossed the Afghan border?

Bulgaria, for example, listened to offers from both sides before joining the Central Powers; largely because they promised it a large slice of its enemy Serbia.

Has anyone read Crowns in the Gutter by Ted Racier?

He designed Paths of Glory.

Book is published by Strategy and Tactics Press.

http://shop.strategyandtacticspress.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=B002