@DrLarsen:
I understand completely what you’re trying to say about the WotC convention being what it is.
Here’s where I have a concern about it in terms of practicality…
So far, WotC tanks have all been within the same category. It thus didn’t matter if you mixed in, say, the skinny version of the Panther with the wider version or the British Matilda with the British Sherman… A tank was a tank was a tank.
Of course, different countries=different colors, too.
But once we have different types or levels of tank that are the same color, will it be so easy?
Having already experienced the difficulties of using just shape because I’d long been using the (smaller, pre AA40) Stukas as Tac Bombers and bf109’s as fighters, I’m concerned that more differentiation might be helpful once we have multiple tank types, just as WotC radically increased the size of the Stukas once the addition of Tac Bombers became “official.”
Do y’all think the current Stuka/ bf109 difference is too great as well?
(I hope you don’t think I’m being argumentative, I’m just trying to struggle with the dialectic between compatibility/ recognizability thoroughly in the hope that we can find a consensus, so that TT and possibly other future accessory venders will have the clearest possible feedback.)
The Japanese Type 95 was a light tank, not a medium tank like the other A&A tank units. The A&A sculpt for the Type 95 is the shortest one on Reloader’s list (19.5mm long), so it’s at the correct end of the size scale.
The Stuka size increase illustrates the principle that major size differences in A&A sculpts are used to differentiate types of units, not models within a single type. The original A&A Europe game incorrectly used the Stuka in the role of a fighter, even though the aircraft was actually a dive bomber. The Stuka sculpt was, however, in the correct size range of the other fighter units in the original Europe and Pacific games. The later introduction of the Me109 fighter (in Bulge, I think) fixed the problem of having a true fighter in the fighter role. When Pacific 1940 came out, the new Tac Bomber type was introduced and its type size was pegged at midway between the bomber types and the fighter types. Europe 1940 applied this convention to the revised Stuka (now being properly used as a dive bomber) and bumped it up into the Tac Fighter type size range, with the Me109 sculpt continuing to occupy the fighter role (and type size).
I agree that recognizability between units is an important consideration, but one way of looking at the issue is to consider the relationship between the size/shape of a unit and function. Large variations in size and shape can be seen to correspond to large variations in function. To pick some deliberately extreme examples: aircraft sculpts look radically different from ship sculpts, carriers look radically different from submarines, and half-tracks look radically different from tanks. When we narrow the focus to units of broadly similar types, the differences in appearance start to become smaller, but we can still get a fair degree of differentiation: for example we have big strategic bombers, medium tac bombers and small fighters (aircraft with fundamentally different missions).
Things would start to get tricky, however, if we lobbied TT to introduce too large a range of models that are fundamentally of the same type. I’d love to see each nation get its own distinct type of medium tank, and I can see the point of each nation also having one light tank (at or just below the low end of the A&A tank size range) and one heavy tank (at or just above the upper end of the A&A tank size range), but that’s probably as much variety as could be introduced in a practical way. Giving every single country multiple types of medium tanks, for example, would be redundant. Distinguishing their appearance would be as difficult as distinguishing their performance. Even though I’m an avowed piece junkie, I don’t see much practical point in a single country having multiple models of units whose missions and performances are virtually identical. A&A combat rules don’t much take into account the real-world performance differences between a Nation X tank and a Nation Y tank, so the rules would not be well geared towards taking into account the performance differences between multiple models of tanks fielded by Nation X. So a situation in which we were having trouble differentiating on the board between various sculpts might not be telling us that the sizes weren’t chosen properly; it might instead be telling us that we have too great a variety of unit models of the same basic type serving the same basic role.
