Situation Desperate!

[Preuss]

In one of my 2 games where I am playing the Reds, I've just suffered a major blow. ...I'll give a short description of my overall situation.
We were in snow after the first rains.
My clever opponent has all of his panzer corps in the area around Moscow. To the south, he is about 3 hexes shy of Rostov, on a line from just west of Voronezh through Kharkov.
In the far north, a pocket of about 6 corps lies encircled in leningrad, out of supply...he's currently reducing this pocket.
More of my corps are to the east of the Leningrad area, marching to relieve the Leningrad pocket...my hopes aren't high about getting their in time to save the city and it's new factories....I had evacuated some, but new tank factories seem to have sprung up in the interim.
This is where it gets nasty...
The Moscow area is a huge salient, with rings of corps three ranks deep in a huge 'C' around the city. All of the corps in the 'C' have either one tank and 4 infantry divs, or five infantry divs . Support units are in corps wherever I can place them. My Shock Armies contain 2 tank and 3 infantry div's with more supporting arms than the other corps. Entrenchment values were high...special emphasis on the 'were'.
With his panzers, he cut a diagonal line, one hex wide, from NE to SW directly in front of Moscow, effectively cutting off 1/2 of the Moscow defenses from their brothers to the east.
Every available corps attacked this line of steel, though due to Soviet command...or lack thereof...the attacks were disjointed and utterly unsuccessful.
Moscow is held in some strength, but I don't know how long it will hold...fortunately it's still in supply
Uncle Joe is not happy, and has sacked Zhukov, Konev, and Malinovskii... Our friend, Comrade Beria has his staff disinfecting the 'tools' of their trade while select NKVD men oil their pistols in the darkened chambers of the Lubyanka. The smell of fear permeats those halls of suffering.
My turn ended with the rains falling again...I've no idea what will happen next.

[Chairman]

I think you are going to do the same to me;) would you rethink your strategy and not take Leningrad and the southern pocket:rolleyes:

Anders

[Preuss]

Chairman,
That would go against der Fuhrer's strategy. Fuhrerbefehl 213 orders that the Kiev pocket be reduced and that the historic city of Lenin's name be captured and renamed Friederichburg.
Moskau will fall...in time. It's new name will be Bismarckstadt.
In all seriousness...taking Moscow before the first snows was never my goal. Now you just have to ask yourself: "do I believe him?"

[Ed Cogburn]

Originally posted by Preuss
All of the corps in the 'C' have either one tank and 4 infantry divs, or five infantry divs . Support units are in corps wherever I can place them.

Unless something has changed that I don't know about, you're overfilling your infantry corps. The stacking limit is 5, and a tank corps counts as 3. So with a tank corps and 4 inf divisions, the stacking value is 7. This will lead to random readiness losses of 10% for units in the corps. This may not make a difference in your situation, but a max stacking limit of 6 is suggested. With 6 you lose randomly about 5% readiness which may not hurt that bad, making it worthwhile to have that extra infantry division there. Does having 2 extra divisions, with 10% readiness losses, still add up to a stronger unit that one with only 5 stacking points?

[Preuss]

I've read about what you're saying in the pdf file that came with the game. I thought about it greatly, BUT...heavy emphasis on the 'but'...when you look at the enemy corps...and see "8? divs" (sketchy intelligence at it's best) seriously impeding your progress...and you know that the Reds don't have enough batteries for each corps to have 3 or 4 support units...then you bomb them...and see 600+ squads...with readiness not above 50% (at least 1200 squads, what say 4+ divs?)...then you have to reason that 'overstacking' is worth a slight readiness penalty.
Before reading that in the .pdf file...I thought I was being reasonable in only putting 4-5 divs in a corps instead of 8.
As the Germans, I go thinner, with never more than 4 infantry divs in an Infantry Korps, and 2 Pz/SS Motorized and one motorized Div per Pz Korps.
I think I'll have to put some of this to the test.

[Preuss]

READINESS and STACKING: A quick study
I just did a few tests on stacking within corps.
setup: Army commander rating (6)
Each corps had as supporting units one Sturmgeschutze bn and one artillery unit. The smallest corps had 2 Inf. divs while the largest 2 had 6 Inf. divs.

The smallest corps...with 2 divs plus supporting arms suffered the greatest loss of readiness, though all corps were in supply of 6,7, or 8.

The corps with 3 or 4 Inf. Divs suffered the lowest amount of readiness loss. The corps holding 4 Inf. divs maintained a steady strength of about 85. After 4 moves readiness was uniformly 78%

The next three corps, holding 5, 6, and 6 divs respectively started out at strengths of 105 to 123. But, after 4 moves all of them were actually weaker than the corps holding 4 Inf. Divs. They all suffered great differences in degrees of readiness, varying from as low as 60% to as high as 73%

No combat was done in these tests, just marching...So, Mr. Cogburn....I gess yer raite (said in my best southern drawl)