Cool topic. Too bad Agent wasn’t still around.
The total land units work, but sometimes you have to take UK/US/Japan with a bit more caution.
The game basically revolves aroud Germany and Russia, thus most of the action is in the EE-UKR-Kar area, so the reason I said you need to take UK/US/Jap with caution is simply b/c their supply lines are greater.
It does the Allies no good if US has 60 IPC worth of newly placed units in EUS if Germany can use 2 tanks to defeat 1 inf defending Moscow.
So the important army totals are Germany and Russia’s. You obviously need your Allies but they are really secondary.
That was all more positional and kinda obvious stuff but I wanted to get it out of the way, b/c I do think it is key when looking at army vs army totals.
Now, on to some of the numbers. I’m going to exclude battles with less than like 10-12 units b/c the results don’t really solidify till stacks hit about 14-15 units.
Oh yeah, all assuming LL.
So, if you are talking about a 1-1 battle you need to spend in about a 4:3 ratio to take. And of this ratio, I believe the optimum Inf to Tank ratio is about 2:1. This is some what intuitive b/c what does a 2:1 ratio give you? 5 hit points almost a guarantee hit in LL, while a 3:1 ratio may seem perfect, I believe it leads to too much overkill. Perhaps that may be the better option when anticipating counter attacks. But if we are simply talking what is the “safest” cheapest way to win an attack it is approx~ 4:3 ratio.
Thus, if you have 20 defending if you need to attack with minimum 10 inf, 10 arm to take, however 15 inf, 7 arm yeild a better result, while 20 inf, 4 arm are not even as effective as the 10-10 attack. All these attacks cost the attacker 80, while the defender spent 60.
I’m kinda kicking around the numbers for a 1-2 attack, or a 1-2-3 attack, and obviously you don’t need the 4:3 ratio for the first attacker, BUT the overall battle will cost the entire attacking side much more. From my initial scribllings here you need at least a 2:1 IPC army adv. So a 1-2-3 punch on Germany with 30 defending inf, the allies (if 3 equal armies attack) would need 180 worth of attacking units. The greater the number for attacker 1, the lesser the remaining 2 need to be and the cheaper the overall attack will be to the entire attacking side.
I think when taking into account income, for each side you need a “correction” factor, for example subtract 30 IPC from the UK/US/Jap army totals just to signify that some newly bought units may not be immediately available. But that maybe like a step 2 or something.
I hope this is the kinda stuff you were looking for. I’m still trying to think of a much easier and concise way of working some of this out, but I wanted to get this down while I have the chance.
Simply speaking the “attacking side” needs to not only equal the defender in terms of army value but do so significantly just because it is much cheaper to defend.