Thread: Polish OOB
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Old October 5th, 2015, 06:17 PM
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Default Re: Polish OOB

Thing about number of men is I have not found any evidence it works as Scorpio says. 19 men vs. 10 men seems to be the same effectiveness (eg. in accuracy tests). I believe that aspect is lowered when certain percentage of casualties is reached. That explains why eg. 3-4 men straglers from 10 men original squad are not as effective as full squad.

But it would be better to have developers speaking about that.

@Warnedava - about experience... that's a helluva topic that could be covered in a different thread. I generally say experience is OK as it portraits Polish army was fine, but nothing over the top in low-level leadership. It must be noted many 1920 experienced commanders were responsible for ineffective decisions. Also pressence of Polish volunteers in Spanish Civil War was weak as these men were considered criminals under polish law of that time.
Polsih doctrine was build on "eastern basis". It was sort of a self-invented blitzkrieg, but relaying on cavalry formations that should be used for long range independent attacks, encirclement and elimination of Soviet forces in the offence.
These concepts were badly stopped by actual Blitzkrieg doctrine.

If that appeared, I could only recommend a change in increasing morale to 70 as defenders were historically motivated and fighting for "survival" - Poles of that time well understood what lost war will mean to entire nation. Army did well when comes to motivation generally, there were few desertions, quickly organizing partisans, good ad hoc commanding. Quick note: it was not rare that officers and troops committed suicide when their positions were about to be overrun. There were cases that junior officers revolted against senior ones if those proposed surrender. Infamous Westerplatte case is not clear to this day.

@DRG - Platoon had 3 Wz. 28 LMGs - one per squad. There is one thing I forgot to mention before: the UR-35 anti tank rifle. It was officially provided to every platoon. It is currently well represented with "medium infantry" unit having option for those. If we split it into three "medium infantry" there will be a spam of AT rifles.
My suggestion:
1. Either one squad of support weapons be "Heavy infantry" and have the same things "medium infantry has" plus AT rifle.
2. Or platoon gets an integral "AT-Section" of 2 men carrying an AT rifle. It could also be solved by attaching "Inf-AT section" formation (having 3 ATRs) into company: player would dispose those among platoons.
Yet, not every division received those rifles.

I recommend option 1.

Militia: ON units should have an possibility to be bought in companies also (standard 3x Militia Platoon will do). Info about heavy weapons is scarce, but from what I see it could be 1 LMG per platoon. Thing is it was quite vary and it will be very hard to represent it to make it fully realistic.
There were several ON battalion types. Type IV is the best one, introduced in April 1939 but not fully adopted. In such battalion, company looked like this:

"1 kompania strzelecka (Rifle Company)

poczet dowódcy (HQ & Staff)
drużyna gospodarcza (technical team)
sekcja sanitarna (podoficer + 4 sanitariuszy + 2 pary noszy) (medical section: NCO + 4 medics + 2 stretchers)
3 plutony strzeleckie a. 3 drużyny (3 rifle platoons with 3 squads each)
pluton karabinów maszynowych a. 3 drużyny (MG platoon with 3 sections (?)) - unclear on this one
"


I can get you complete organization of that battalion. It had no integral MG Company, and according to equipment list, entire battalion should have 9 LMGs and 6 HMGs. That would split it roughly to 3 LMGs and 2 HMGs per company.
I am not sure if LMGs were integral part of a squad. Could be, 2 HMGs could have been theoretically qualified as platoon.

About DW: I was thinking of such option, but company would have enormous sizes in units and would really give too much advantage to the Polish player. Especially because BAR sections would have to be 0-sized units, such as Fallschirmjager LMGs. I am not sure if that would work well, so I proposed 6 unit platoon instead.

As of scenarios, current organization "as a whole" is correct. I am not sure if that would be necessary to update these scenarios.