Alpha AAR - A year at the front with Field Marshal Noob

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End of Turn 16: Still 20 miles from Moscow - rain clouds are building in the East.

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End of Turn 16: XIV Panzer Korps is poised to push past Tula.

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End of Turn 16: 2nd Army and 6th Army do the best they can around Kursk and Belgorod.

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End of turn 16: 1st Panzer Group turns South East for the final push on the Donbas, but von Kleist's divisions are on their last legs - 16th Panzer has 39 AFVs on it's books but only 25 are runners.

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End of Turn 16: GAIA evacuates Sevastopol without a fight. I still think she has got more things right than she has got wrong so far.

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End of September Front Line North:

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End of September Front Line South:

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End of September OOB: Note that over 600 AFVs are in the workshops.

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Any Questions before we move into the Mud,Snow and Blizzards?

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End of turn 17: It was probably about now I started to regret role-playing my way through this game. If I had changed Leaders around, I may have got the 4MPs that I needed for 3rd Panzer Group to attack across the River into the hex NW of Moscow. 10 miles from Moscow but the storm clouds have gathered - I will not see the sun again for 36 long long weeks.

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End of turn 17: Tula nearly bypassed.

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End of turn 17: (Note to self - Infantry Armies with no Motorised Units cannot take Cities quickly). Now you can see why I am Field Marshal Noob - Andy, Ron, Don and Jon are all laughing behind my back!

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End of Turn 17: 1st Panzer pushes towards Stalino.

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End of Turn 17: Probably the last pocket I will form for some time.

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Confession time:

From turn 18 onwards, you are seeing take 2 of the game. Because of hindsight, when the bad weather arrives every player has to make the decision whether they "Listen to Hitler" who wanted to keep attacking during the bad weather or "Listen to von Kluge" who wanted to move into winter quarters. Needless to say historically von Kluge got the sack. In take 1, I took the "listen to Hitler" option, and carried on attacking Moscow and towards the Donbas. I managed to capture one Hex of Moscow, and got to the outskirts of Stalino. On turn 25 the blizzard hit, and I got hit by a whole bunch of bugs as well as the soviet army which resulted in 1/3 my Army routing in the first 3 turns of blizzard. Some bugs were fixed straight away, but one ended up taking 3 weeks to find, and I had to play through the blizzard on full challenging mode to find it - this was the least fun I have had with this game.

For this AAR I hit the "chicken switch" and changed the settings to "Normal" which takes away the SU bonuses and set up the what I think is the "perfect" defensive line for dealing with the Blizzard, there was still a bug relating to Axis units routing that was not found during the course of the AAR, so you will see more Axis units routing despite my best efforts to avoid them.

Ultimately the First Winter has to weaken the Axis forces, but not by too much that they are too weak to attack in 1942, and the 1942 start line must not be too far from the historical start line, and getting the First Winter "Right" seems to have become my new mission in life.

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Start of Turn 18: The mud arrives and most of Panzer Group 1 is Isolated in a sea of mud (CV 1). In the information box you can see that "Off Rail MP" exceeds 100 which is the maximum distance trucks can carry supplies from a railhead. Movement points are calculated as if they were motorised movement costs, so obviously the mud increases motorised costs substantially.

My only option is to retreat back into supply range.

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End turn 18: Attacking in mud requires much higher odds than normal - someone else will have to explain some of the specifics. Here is an example of 2 SS divisions attacking one rifle brigade unsuccessfully.

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End of turn 18: Obviously isolated units have minimal CV, so I will continue to mop up isolated pockets during the mud turns.

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Front Line End of October North:

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End of October Front Line South: