Afghanistan

[bwheatley]

Myself & ara are going to play through grymmes afghan scen. Me as the afghans and ara as the soviets. I will try to put the AAR here.

[bwheatley]

here is the file i need for the first page

[bwheatley]

Here is the situation overview

[bwheatley]

For the first turn we got Quang Teai as an ally so we are trying to push forward. I will update more next turn.

[Grymme]

Cool that you are trying out the scenario, and as an AAR also. Let me know if you find anything strange in the scenario or if you find it unbalanced. You are playing the Resistance Coalition i gather?
 
Will follow this with interest.

[bwheatley]

Yes playing resistance. We played previously but ara wanted to restart since he was not aware of some of the things the rebels could do. So i pushed far in and took many major cities while he was not being aggressive enough. I felt like my forces were very weak by comparison but i was able to effectively keep cutting his supply lines which helped me quite a bit.

[Grymme]

I played one game as the Soviet/government forces against Lunaticus as the Resistance Coalition. I think my forces collapsed within 18 rounds or something like that (have to check). But at that time the "irregular movement" was 10 hexes/round regardless of terrain. So it was very easy for him to cut me off. The version you are playing should have irregular moving units moving at a maximum of (i think) 7 hexes/round.

So by the limited balancing of the scenario that is done so far i would guess that its more likely the balance is tilted in favour of the Resistance Coalition than otherwise. Of course its possible to change it a little by things like using scenario variants like USSR political advantage.

Let me know how the second game goes. And if you win again you can always try to play as the soviets. I remember thinking that the WWIII scenario being hopelessly tilted against the USSR. But after a while a couple of people started scoring victorys playing them. Balancing scenarios are really tough.

Hmm.. should clarify that the fact that Lunaticus beat me soundly is in no way telling wether a scenario is tilted in any way. He beat me first as the US/south vietnam in the vietnam scenario and then beat me even worse when i was playing the US/southvietnam and he was playing the VC.

[Tufkal2]

Let me just comment that I think this scenario is one of the most interesting I have played so far with a nice depiction of asymmetrical warfare. The first rounds I needed some adaption to understand how things work. I also think the scenario version I played with Grymme was tilted towards the Resistance Coalition, from my point of view mainly because of the possibility of bringing in more Afghan Clans and the Hezbollah.
And I agree with Grymme that balancing a scenario is the most difficult thing and takes large number of games. But it still a lot of fun playing.
Will also be following this thread to see what other players experience. Have fun.

[jjdenver]

Oh yeah I'm looking fwd to this AAR also. I almost got a game started but it fell through. I'm hoping to play it sometime in the future - looks really interesting.

[bwheatley]

Yea i'm a fan of it so far very much so get a copy of the scen jj and i'll play with ya

[bwheatley]

Last turn i put up partisans in every major DRA city so that i could by myself time to organize. In the screenshot you will see the 2nd irregular division trying to sneak up and flank ara.
Last game we had a staleamte around asasabad. Apparently my cutting him off constantly with my irregulars was really playing havoc with his supply lines.

[bwheatley]

It seems he's guarding his flanks alot better this game then last. Might not be so easy to cut his supply lines.

[bwheatley]

The 66th division capturse a prize and is moving on charak burjak. We will use those 2 cities to build engineers to link that northern and southern road for supply.

[bwheatley]

Situation map as you can see my forces are trying to spread out as quickly as possible to take the tiny cities i need for my military to grow.

[bwheatley]

I encircled some Soviet SF units and ara seems to let me know that they were not suffering for supplies and made me pay. And then said there would be alot more SF units in this game then last.

[Grymme]

Ahh.. you have encountered the Spetznaz. They can make you hurt a lot.

A small tip for the Soviet player (hope you dont mind). Strategicly transfer the superheavy artillery battalion to any front where there is major trouble (Assassabad for example). It makes mincemeat of everything,

Should this game end the same way you can always reverse sides.

[bwheatley]

We're tryign to hold them inside this encirclement we started. It's nice to see ara is finally putting some soviet units off the roads to protect his flanks. I've been running into that much more then the first game.

[bwheatley]

This is the northern front.

[bwheatley]

fyi we will take mahdar lam displaceing a whole soviet airborne division and that makes me feel very good. I was starting to feel like the soviets were invincible.

[bwheatley]

We took the city.