Question: Recovery %age of enemy losses?

[scorpio_rocks]

Hiya folks,

I am starting a campaign where I want my troops to have limited resources available from "home" and have to "live off the land". I wanted to use captured equipment etc to refit my troops (I can handle the mobhack needed).

What I wanted to get the collective's opinion on was what / how many vehicles will be available after a battle?
Would you choose:
A fixed percentage of the enemies losses?
Only vehicles left abandoned or imobilised?
Something else?
...or not worry about it and add what I want?

Thoughts?

[Wiking]

Here's what I did for my last WW2 campaign:

Vehicles that are a total loss (as in the crew is dead and it reports destroyed on the refit/rearm screen) can only be replaced at the end of a "campaign" or "operation." Example: For Fall Weiss, no tanks can be replaced until you're preparing to invade France, and then once again, no tanks can be replaced until that operation concludes. The trouble is once you hit Barbarossa its just one continuous war, so you'd probably have to break it up into periods of operations (For example, maybe break it into June to September and then refit before Operation Typhoon and then no refits until March or April for Case Blue).

For infantry I would only replace damaged squads in a similar fashion, and for man-packed guns like mortars and machineguns I would try to replace destroyed ones immediately, often with an inferior quality captured one to make things more interesting. I figure mortars and machineguns would be reconstituted fairly quickly as their size is small and you can often recover the gun later. Artillery I rarely lost so I had no set system for that admittedly.

To make this more difficult; only repair infantry that are 50% depleted and allow damaged infantry squads to enter the field until they hit 50% loss of manpower. When I used to do that, my infantry losses skyrocketed because suddenly a mortar barrage could kill a 7 man team quite readily, especially since their morale is a bit brittle from losses!

[scorpio_rocks]

Thanks for the response.

Yes I wont replace any total loss vehicles - except with captured stuff. The question was how much stuff is available to be captured from enemy losses?

[Wiking]

Hard mode: Only vehicles that the enemy abandons on the battlefield, and are not destroyed by the end of the fight. Keep a running tally of the make, model and number of each.

Somewhat sane mode: Maybe go off of historical numbers of captured vehicles or what was used in the theater of operations? Or maybe construct a table of various tank and gun type that are possibly captured and do a random roll? I'd still try to break it down into heavy/medium/light/tankette though, so you don't have a KV-1 leading BT-7's...

[Imp]

If I am feeling like a bit of bookkeeping which is not often.
Vehicles which are a total loss have to wait 3 battles before replacing.
I then role a dice to determine what turns up, especially mid war on as Germans.
Can often be something worse or a Stug or TD in place of a tank.

Captured tanks I don't use that often criteria is really up to you but I use mainly as a stopgap.
Usually 2 to 3 battles & I get rid of them, if I capture another similar model I keep the original for longer but don't take the additional captured tank.
Reasoning spare parts & lack of ammo means I cant keep them running.

Halftracks are like gold dust I only have a slim chance of replacing it with anything but a truck, do role every few battles to see if I get a couple of replacements.

Makes you very wary of using them for infantry assault etc as the men would much rather them survive to move supplies etc between battles.

[scorpio_rocks]

Thanks for the answers so far folks!

I feel an automated spreadsheet coming on, lol.

Certainly in the North African campaign photos seem to show an awful lot of captured kit being used (especially by the DAK). I Wondered if anyone had any idea whether these were generally captured in battle / recovered afterwards or the result of overrun supply depots etc?

[DRG]

I would say any of the above would be applicable, one or the other more so depending on circumstances