@GiddyXray:
I’ve considered a houserule including heavy tanks. My version would give the USSR heavy tanks from the beginning for historical accuracy and for balance purpose!
I wasn’t aware of the USSR having appreciable heavy tank forces at the start of WWII. Could you indicate what tank model you’re referring to?
Regarding Drako’s proposals: while I can see the attraction of wanting A&A house rules that differentiate between tank types (which came in all sorts of interesting varieties in WWII), I’d be cautious about introducing complex rules for using them (notably as illustrated by the proposed tank destroyer rules). A&A is a simplified portrayal of WWII technology, with diffrences between units are depicted in a simplified way. Basically, these differences are expressed by their cost value, attack value, defense value, movement value, and by special modifiers that apply when unit X is paired with unit Y.
As I understand Drako’s proposal (which I admit that I didn’t study in detail), there seems to be extensive use of pairing modifiers to explain why, for example, a heavy tank is different from a light tank. I think that these gradations between tank types are perhaps too fine to reflect accurately how armoured forces were used in WWII. Remember that A&A units represent fairly large formations (such as divisions or corps) and that WWII armoured formations generally were not homogeneous – meaning that, for instance, you generally wouldn’t have an armoured division consisting entirely of light tanks, another one consisting entirely of heavy tanks, and so forth. So it would be problematic to implement complex pairing modifiers which are based on the assumption that a particular tank unit consists entirely of one type of tank, and that this type of tank is sufficiently distinctive from other types of tanks to represent a fundamentally different type of fighting machine.
In WWII, tank differences were mainly a matter of degree rather than of fundamental type. At the time of WWII, technology wasn’t capable of producing a tank with superb performance in all three of the basic elements of tank design: firepower, protection and mobility. Designers therefore had to compromise: they could either produce a balanced design which delivered reasonably good performance in all three areas (medium tanks tended to reflect this design philosophy, though there were enough exceptions to make life interesting), or they could emphasize one or two elements at the expense of degrading performance elsewhere in the design triangle. The Maus, for example, was massively armoured and carried a very large and powerful gun, but it moved at a crawl, was incapable of crossing bridges because of its weight and was difficult to transport by rail because of its width. Tankettes, which were popular in the 1920s, were the reverse of the Maus in terms of their design: they were fast and agile and could be built cheaply in large numbers, but they lacked offensive punch and offered little protection to their crews. Even in the medium tank category, you can see design trade-offs. The Sherman, for example, was an excellent vehicle from au automotive point of view and was easy to manufacture and maintain (as one might expect from its Detroit origins), and by the standards of 1939 its firepower and protection would have been considered more than adequate. Unfortunately, by the time it went into service in 1942, it was facing tanks that made its gun and its armour look woefully inadequate. The Russians did much better with the T-34/76, and even better with the T-34/85, producing what was arguably the best medium tank of WWII. The similar Panther was technically superior in some respects, but it was much more complicated to manufacture and maintain than the T-34, so it was inferior to the T-34 in what could be called the fourth element of tank design: affordability.
Tanks destroyers are interesting because they tackled the traditional design trade-offs of tanks in a novel way: by scrapping the conventional hull-and-rotating-turret configuration of standard tanks. This allowed designers to produce, at relatively low cost, either light, mobile, but poorly-protected tank-killers (the American approach) or heavily-armoured, powerfully-gunned but slow tank killers (the German approach). The trade-off in both cases, however, was to produce a machine armed with a gun that could only be aimed at a target by turning the whole vehicle around, which was a tactical limitation; as a result, tank destroyers were more useful for static defense situations than for offensive action.