Hmm, I was wondering who made this map. I'm all about tanks now, so this map is god sent to me. Trouble is I get it confused with the steel beast map, so I might be off on my next observation.
I like to play the German side and upon entering the battle all the panthers and tigers are rightfully taken. On high player count nights even the PzlV's are taken up, which puts you down to using either the short or long barreled stug, or the Pzlll. In my opinion since the soviet side has all 76.2mm cannon armed tanks and up (85mm, 122mm and 152mm) the German side needs to delete all Pzlll's and short barreled stugs from the spawn point and replace them with PzIV's and long barreled stugs.
Regards,
s.SS.Pz.Abt-102
Hi Bubba:
Foo'Bar made this excellent map. Its original basis is Keystone's Excellent Debrecen Map, although obviously there are now only subtle similarities between Debrecen and Alt Ziegelei.
On map balance -- I had sort of swayed back and forth in my opinion the first 100 times I played the map (I have literally played this map hundreds of times). Germans have too much -- Russians have too much. I am now of the opinion that the map is very well balanced. The MkIII is actually a good match-up against the T34/76 -- at least with the AB-Mutator. I think the only thing I would do to AZ is drop the clown car completely and perhaps add one T34/85 to the Russian initial Spawn location. But it's Foo'bars masterpiece, so someone else monkeying with his work is sort of
sacrilege.
There are various team stratagies which can be implemented on this map that can make it almost impossible for the Russians to win. But this happens so extremely rarely as to make it a non-issue in map balance. Players act too independently (read incoherently) which is actually much more of disadvantge to the Germans than the Reds -- at least on AZ. It is of interest that players who like to play infantry on AZ and hunker down in Grantlerhof or the village of Alte Ziegelei tend to work a bit more coherently and cooporate more so than tank drivers on the map.
The AZ map dynamics are such that MkIII vs T34/76s are -- at least in my experience -- not occurring very frequently. It might be more interesting to eliminate all T34/85s, IS2s, Tigers and Panthers from the map to see how it plays with PZkw IVs, IIIs and T34/76s. Also loose the clown cars. But again, it's Foo'bars map, so they would have to be changes he was interested in doing.
The T34/85s, IS2s, Panthers and Tigers tend to dominate the AZ map. MkIVs and Stugs do well enough with decent players at the helm. The T34/76 optics and reload rates are a real challenge for Russian players. This is where the MkIII has an advanatge -- particularly when playing the more realistic Armor Beasts Mutator. Also -- use your APCR.
When playing stock RO, tank armor is such that angling T34/76s makes their front just about invulnerable to the MkIII. Even with extreme close range hits in the gun mantlet.