Looking for assistance in ranking WW2 tanks

Hey folks,

I’m working on research for a trading card game that I’m designing and I’m hoping to be able to use your WW2 knowledge to help make it “right”.

The game (Reclaim Earth) takes place in the not too distant future, in a setting where the Earth has suffered a catastrophic event that has set it back to square one. Governments, structure, technology advancements and such are all dismantled. It’s Earth reborn basically in an altered state.

Game play will focus on players battling for and taking ownership of each territory, reclaiming the land.

One of the main driving forces of the game concept is that players will rediscover old technology and use that technology to build up their military power. The technology that they will find, in this phase of the game, will be WW2 era planes, ships and tanks.

This game has been in the works (scribbling notes on a pad) for quite awhile. The proper usage, and getting things right, of WW2 units is very important to the game and what I hope the game achieves in regards to enjoyment and authenticity. Before starting this project my knowledge of this area was low. But as I’ve researched the topics, I find it very interesting and I’m glad this project has brought me down that road.

I’m planning on using 150 ww2 military units. 50 planes. 50 ships. 50 tanks. I’ve decided to use units from 5 nations; USA, Germany, Soviet Union, Japan, and United Kingdom.

So… each nation will have a set of 30 units. (10 air, 10 sea, 10 land).

I’ve also drilled down further to have different unit types. And those types will have their own attack properties.

So, in essence, I’m looking for help with 2 main things. 1. The categorizing and inclusion of 50 tanks and 2. a general ranking of those tanks. I could go the easy route and piggy back existing games out there but going to the source would be more accurate / satisfying.

I’ll list the units (50) that I’m planning on using as of now (but certainly have flexibility) and the family of unit type they fit into. When looking over the planes that were included think of what you’d want to see in a game, meaning… there may be more powerful rarer units than those listed but I wanted to include units based on importance, popularity, production numbers, relevance, etc. And I didn’t want to get into different variations per each unit type.






Here’s the 50 units…


Light Tanks - 15 (targets air & land units)



Medium Tanks - 15 (targets air & sea units)



Heavy Tanks - 5 (targets sea & land units)



Tank Destroyers - 10 (targets land units)



Anti Aircraft Tanks - 5 (targets air units)





The formatting for the above charts didn't transfer but it was a list of the units. You can see the same information lower in the post.







When I was planning on which tanks to use, as mentioned, I wanted to use 10 from each nationality and to end up with sets of 5, 10, or 15 of each unit type to give all air units an organized structure. So that lead to some decisions, some tanks got cut out in order to achieve that. But with that said… is there any gross omissions? Are there tanks that are in the wrong category? Are there tanks that should be replaced by another? This may look like a simple chart to those that are knowledgable in this area but it took a fair bit of research to get here seeing as I started from scratch. For me to just move forward as is, without getting validation from those in the know, would be doing the game and WW2 enthusiasts an injustice. So I kindly ask for your assistance here.

Probably most important is my second ask. How does each tank stack up against their peers? For values I will be using 3 properties. 1. Attack speed. 2. Damage power / range. 3. Life / Durability.



Also, each tank will have a general overall score. Although this overall score won’t be displayed to the player it will assist me with checking the overall effectiveness of the unit and making sure it resembles the rankings that I’m able to put together from research and hopefully this thread, and others like it. Any info that you want to share about speed or power or durability is great. But having someone go into all that is too much to ask. Even if you can give a general ranking of each unit that would be incredibly helpful. I have already ranked them but I don’t trust it.

Along with your own rankings, also helpful would be any links or resources that you think could help. I’ll add a list below to copy and paste to make giving feedback easier, along with the rank (1-10) that I had used up to this point and for testing purposes, knowing that some of them are way off. Another thing that I had to take into consideration when ranking was that there had to be a certain amount of 10’s, 9’s, etc in the full 150 card set, so that influenced some rankings.

Light Tanks
M24 Chaffee 6
T-70 5
Mk IV Churchill 5
M5 Stuart 5
Type 95 Ha-Go 4
M3 Stuart 3
Mk III Valentine 3
Panzer II 3
Type 94 Tankette 3
T-60 2
Mk II Matilda 1
Panzer I 1
Type 4 Ke-Nu 1
Type 98 Ke-Ni 1
Type 97 Te-Ke 1

Medium Tanks
T-44 10
Panther 10
T-34/85 9
Panzer IV 9
T-34/76 8
Mk VIII Cromwell 8
M4 Sherman 8
M3 Grant 7
Panzer III 7
M3 Lee 6
Mk VI Crusader 6
Type 89 I-Go 6
Mk V Covenanter 5
Type 1 Chi-He 4
Type 97 Chi-Ha 2





Heavy Tanks
King Tiger 10
IS 2/3 10
Tiger 9
KV 1/2 8
M26 Pershing 7



Tank Destroyers
Jagdpanther 10
SU-85 9
Stug III 8
M36 Jackson 7
Sherman Firefly 6
Achilles 5
SU-76 4
M18 Hellcat 4
M10 Wolverine 2
Type 1 Ho-Ni 2



Anti Aircraft
Flakpanzer IV 9
ZSU-37 SPAAG 7
Mk VII Centaur AA 5
M16 Half Track 3
Type 98 Ko-Hi Half 2



So that’s it. Hopefully I haven’t scared too many off with the super long post. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. This isn’t an established gaming company working on their next project. We’re just a couple of guys wanting to bring this game concept to life. Dependant on success, we have a few things planned for the future for this concept, but it starts with a card / board game. Its in play testing now. It’s very enjoyable. But we’re working on getting things right. Mechanics, unit strengths. It all has to be “right”.

So, what do you get out of it? Not much unfortunately. But if this game ever lands on your shelf, or anyone else’s, wouldn’t it be nice to know that you’ve contributed to the shaping of the authenticity of the WW2 units. I think that would be pretty neat. Also, I plan to reference any source that assisted in the making of the game. Also, if the board takes an interest in the project I can certainly keep anyone up to date with how things are moving along and in time, a launch date.

Maybe if all goes well, kids will be marvelling over old WW2 plane trading cards like they do with whatever fantasy based creatures they collect these days, taking an interest in the topic like you have.

That too, would be pretty neat.



If you’ve enjoyed reading this post and wish there were 2 more just like it, good news…. I’m posting separate threads in each of the air, sea, land forums.



Much thanks for taking the time,

Jesse Galloway

 

First thing I'm going to throw out is that the Churchill and Panther should be transferred to the heavy list as they both finish the war at over 40 tons and 150mm frontal armor.

Second I was part of a WW2 FPS tournament for a number of years. One thing they did was create a price sheet of WW2 vehicles and equipment.

Here is an detailed list Use the bottom tabs to move from nation to nation. You can equate price as overall rating. Please note most tanks had multiple variants. If you want more detailed information select both columns C and Q right click and select SHOW.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/l4hepiwmve0zw0z/Equipment3.50.zip

Here is a simplified list
http://www.mediafire.com/view/a0bkbrpl22a35b6/WaW27-TankSheet-V2.pdf

A link to the tournament. http://www.bfewaw.com/forum.php


A final question. In this instance your still asking for "Attack speed/Initiative" Would you consider this to be the speed the tank travels or the speed of the reloader ie: rate of fire.

Game mechanics are of course yours to decide. I'll simply note that in WW2 regardless of most other considerations the defending tank usually fired first.

 

Thank you. I will absorb the info in the links you've provided.

For attack speed... same as all units, it's a simplified value. Who's gonna get the first shot off? So, it would be a combination of vehicle speed and reloading rate. Quickest to get in range and quickest to hit (and re-hit) as a combined value.

 

Why are the medium tanks not targeting land targets?

76mm Sherman and T-34 /85 are essentially equal same with the 75mm Sherman and T-34 PzIV depending on type might be as good as either of them or not quite. That's if you are only considering immediate combat value. Reliability and supportability considerations will likely change the values quite a bit. Are those to be considered seperately or not?

 

The King Tiger leading the "Heavy tank " list is nonsense, the M26 being at the bottom of the list is even worse.....what did you base your assessments on? Other computer games? "Fury"?

 

As he posted his WW2 military knowledge is for the most part "common knowledge". That's why he came here asking for our assistance.

 

Well the M26 was originally rated as a medium and is perhaps best comparable to the Panther. I'm not sure having seperate scales for the various types of tank is a good idea either. For instance the M-24 was supperior to the early war medium tanks in most cases and the various types will run up against each other.

Rather than starting with a cumulative rateing perhpas it would be better to rate the various catagories such as: AP, accuracy, HE, armor, speed, reliability, human factors, rate of fire, secondary weapons, etc.

 

Looks like you have your work cut out for you Zedder.

 

Haha. I most certainly do. But this is good. Very good. What's prominent in the replies to all 3 threads is that it's apparent that a lot of my rankings came from throwing darts. I'm gonna go back through each reply and answer any questions.

 

To tell the forum that I'm looking for authenticity then have medium tanks not hitting other tanks is odd. I get that. But part of the mechanics of the game is to have players have to make choices on what units to use at certain times. I don't want all tanks to be able to hit other tanks. For the game to able to play how I want it, some things need to be stretched.

Once I get a good collection of feedback I'm gonna go back through all rankings and use your guy's feedback and reshuffle the deck. The only values I'm concerned with are 1. how fast can the tank hit (so this would be a consolidated value that takes things like top speed, maneuverability, reload rates into considerations) 2. how powerful is it (what damage will it do) - a little more info for this value... damage will be decided by a dice roll . So in that damage range Ideally i'd build wide ranges from less accurate tanks and smaller ranges for more accurate (that's not really important here, just trying to explain all the things that will ideally go into final numbers). 3. The third value is "hit points' or some term like that. Durability, Armor, reliability, supportability. All that good stuff goes into how hard it is to knock that unit out of the battle.

So again, I'm hoping for the best / most realistic values I can achieve without coming into this project with a lot of knowledge in the field.

Thank you for your feedback.

 

Gruff, I like it.

Skyline. If I said my rankings were based on computer games or Hollywood movies that would be an overstatement. I'm not giving rankings and defending them. I'm simply asking for your rankings to help me out.

I've posted similar threads in the boat and plane sections as well. Check out the reply that Takao gave on the air forum. That's what I need. Obviously any feedback is good feedback. Some may be over my head but I'll look into anything that's brought up.

So, how about a re-ranking? The goal is... ranks that make sense, without just copying what other games have done. Anyway, if you can put the time in, I'd appreciate it.

 

What type dice? I'm not being facetious, I'm serious.

 

So... M26, too low. Maybe could be used as a medium tank, got it.

I think what you're suggesting is not to organize tanks in set categories as there's some movement of such throughout the war?? Or maybe thats not what you're saying.

Either way, I require that categorization within each unit for things to work in game. As for how deep i want to dig into each aspect of what makes a tank good or bad... not that deep. It's a card game.

 

d4, d6, d8, d10,d12, d20

Allows unlimited damage ranges. At this stage (WW2) you wouldn't have ranges that would require a d20 range but later it will be used.

 

The problem here is that the most common tanks used in land warfare were light and medium tanks and for overall effect mediums were the most important.

I'm not sure top speed and maneuverability have any impact on how fast a WWII tank can "hit". For that you are looking at target aquisition, turret movement, accuracy, and to some extent rate of fire.

Well damage is dependent on the projectile, the target (AP rounds vs soft targets are less leathal than HE rounds the opposite is true of armored targets). Damage is range dependent but something of a step function for most AP rounds (although not for HEAT or HEP/HESH). Accuracy is usually a matter of hitting the target and not so much the amount of damage done.

Reliability and supportability aren't as important when you are talking about actual battle. They tend to determine what percentage of your force can make it to the battle or be available for the next battle.

Since you are talking about WWII tech being available and not necessarily the actual vehicles themselves why not forget the specific WWII vehicles and allow people to "design" their own systems based on the rating. For instance you could find tech that allows you to build a medium tank with the following options:
Survivability 3-8
Firepower 4-6
RAM (reliability and maintainability) 5-9
Speed 2-6
then there would be costs for each level so a tank that was a 3,5,7,3 would be cheaper than a 3,6,7, 3
these are just example catagories by the way for instnce firepower could be broken down into antiarmor, anti infantry, anti (unarmored) systems (trucks, artillery, etc), anti air, anti ship, etc
If you have research trees that would also allow people to raise the level of the systems i.e you could start out at 0 (or some other value) for all the systems and improve them over time.

 

"Echelons of Fury"...Now that is a WW2 CCG that I have not played in years. IIRC, I still have the cards packed away upstairs
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6436/echelons-fury

 

That's all good info IWD. I'll definitely take all that into consideration.

You mentioned some ideas for game mechanics. Great ideas, wrong game. The game that I'm collecting info for is a card game. I play a card... boom, i hit your tank. You lose life points. We all have fun. Rinse, repeat. I'm striving for a streamlined strategic game that is fun to play. So although customized tank composition and parts collection is a much more indepth and likely enjoyable game to play on a different medium it's not the vision for the current project.

Full disclosure, this concept started out as something bigger, and there is a bigger game concept collecting dust on the shelf, but it's not my focus but I do appreciate your feedback as I know those are very good ideas.



Just to get this back on track... can anyone give a shot at re-ranking the 50 units?

Just an overall score. Don't worry about speed, damage or life.

 

I think there may be something missing here - namely the crews that operated the tanks. In many ways crew competency is more important than tank specifications. Just a thought.

Regards, Marc

 

Yes, I'm sure that's very true.

But for my purposes, let's dial the authenticity dial down about 3-4 notches.

 

From what I gather, this is a CCG(Collectible Card Game) - Think "Magic: The Gathering". As such, much of what has been posted is going to be mostly irrelevant, since the game mechanics of a CCG are not that detailed. This game is probably not meant to be an Advanced Squad Leader but played with cards type game, but and Axis & Allies(beer & pretzels) type game played with cards. So, crew rating, turret speed, ammunition type, etc. are not going to enter into play. That's not saying that these items cannot be added. Much like an "add-on" card that enhances the original card's abilities...Say "Experienced Crew: +1 to attack and +1 to defense" or "Armor Piercing Ammo: +2 to attack".