Alpha Test Late War Scenario-1944/45

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: ComradeP

Thanks for the late war screenshots.

Is that horde of German construction battalions real, or some bug with the screenshot?

no bug, there are lots of eng Bat in the game, and they are needed to try and keep the rail lines in order, my Partisans did a number last turn (and to be honest, as the German, you are always going to be wishing you had more !)

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

Wow. What's up with those Soviet engineering brigades? Some of those look tougher than rifle corps!

no, those are stacks, so you are seeing the stack total, some of them have Corps stacked with them, the Assault Eng's are in themselfs weak, but working with other units, they help a lot in digging out the bad guys

[Great_Ajax]

Those construction battalions are deploying to repair all of the rail damage the Soviet partisans inflicted the previous turn.

Trey

ORIGINAL: ComradeP

Thanks for the late war screenshots.

Is that horde of German construction battalions real, or some bug with the screenshot?

[RSGodfrey]

I'm no expert but is this credible. I thought German troops were far superior and would have expected Soviet ground losses to be greater.

Richard

[Flaviusx]

ORIGINAL: Hard Sarge




no, those are stacks, so you are seeing the stack total, some of them have Corps stacked with them, the Assault Eng's are in themselfs weak, but working with other units, they help a lot in digging out the bad guys

Heh. That's kinda neat that the game calculates stack values for you like that. Is there an option to toggle that on and off? (I can think of situations where I might want to know individual unit strengths in a stack.)

[elmo3]

You click on the stack to see individual units to the side.

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: RSGodfrey

I'm no expert but is this credible. I thought German troops were far superior and would have expected Soviet ground losses to be greater.

Richard

not sure what you mean ?

but you got to remember, this is the Destruction of Army Group Center

by this time, the Russians were getting pretty good at conducting a armored attack, and had the troops and AFV to keep on going, and by this time, the Germans were pretty much being bled white

[Hard Sarge]

LOL

don't get cocky, you may get a surprise

[Hard Sarge]

figures, go to work, come home and computer crashed, so lost most of my screen shots of what I was going to show, so, going to have some gaps in what was going on

now this is something you will not see too often, I got him surrounded, and he got me surrounded !

but mine is easier to break

I started to cut him down now

[nicwb]

Hard Sarge,

I like the refernce in the aboove screen shot to units getting renamed to Guards units - is that an "earned title" in the game ?

[elmo3]

ORIGINAL: nicwb

Hard Sarge,

I like the refernce in the aboove screen shot to units getting renamed to Guards units - is that an "earned title" in the game ?

Yes.

[Grisha]

The Soviet tank armies ended up being the premiere instrument of Soviet operational exploitation, and their development spanned nearly the entire war. Starting off as a very unwieldy formation in 1942, the tank army by 1944 was a robust versatile formation, well suited for maneuver into German operational depths.

How does the game cover these formations (of which there were 6 by 1944)?

[Hard Sarge]

not sure how to reply to that question

but here is one of my SU Tank Armies

I use them for my break though, the Mech Corps is really nasty

[Joel Billings]

The following rule was added last week to give the Tank Army a bonus:

When a motorized unit is performing an admin leader check, leaders of Tank Armies, Panzer Armies, or Panzer Corps involved in the admin leader check receive a +1 to their admin rating during the check. Among other things, Admin checks are made to determine MPs for the turn, and when checking repair of damaged elements.



Aside from this, the formation of very powerful Tank and Mech Corps take time, admin points and the evolving TOE of the units. From the manual:

Soviet Tank and Mechanized Corps: It takes 3 tank brigades to create a tank corps, and 3 mech and or motorized brigades to create a mech corps. Once built, they break down like a German division into 3 parts (in this case brigades) and may only build back up together. Soviet Tank and Mech corps will suffer a 25% experience loss from the existing units’ experience when they are first formed. There is a cost of 20 Admin points to form a Soviet Tank or Mechanized Corps. Broken down Soviet Tank or Mechanized Corps with brigades designated 1/2/3 may assign one support unit to each brigade. When the parent corps is first broken down, any attached support units will be divided up 1 per brigade. If the parent corps is reformed, all support units attached to the 1/2/3 brigades will once again be attached to the parent corps.

Designers Note: The major difference between tank & mechanized corps versus rifle and cavalry corps is that that tank/mech corps have unique TOEs they follow while rifle/cavalry corps are simply the sum of three divisions. Therefore while you can form a tank corps from three tank brigades, the TOE of a tank corps is not the same as the TOE of a tank brigade times three (i.e. tank corps contain combat elements not found in tank brigades).


Please keep in mind that the 3 part build-up break-down is an abstraction and does not match the actual parts that made the units. The key is that once the unit is created, it will take on the additional replacements needed to fill out the TOE of the Corps. Notice the large experience loss when the corps is formed. Over time, this can be built back up. Also, the 1942 Tank Corps are 1/2 to 2/3 the size of the later war Tank Corps, so they grow stronger over time.

[janh]

Do I read correctly that the above Tank Army only has 52 tanks?  Depleted?

[wosung]

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

Soviet Tank and Mechanized Corps: It takes 3 tank brigades to create a tank corps, and 3 mech and or motorized brigades to create a mech corps.

1. So you decided to leave out an organic brigade for each corps type?

IRL wasn't it 3 tank brigades plus a mech/mot brigade for a tank corps, and 3 mech and or motorized brigades plus a tank brigade for a mech corps... Plus several organic regiments with assault guns? No small difference.

2. About German tank strengths end of June 1944:
Your figures “4971 (4819)” (22.6.1944), in post #6 of this thread, are too high.

AG North (end of June 1944):
30 tanks, 206 assault guns (plus 12th Panzer Division, maybe 100-150 tanks max., which end of June, after the beginning of Bagration, left for AG Centre.

AG Centre (22.6.1944):
118 tanks, 452 assault guns

AG Nordukraine (end of June 1944):
1510 tanks and assault guns (some 1300, 86%, ready)

AG Südukraine (11.7.1944):
424 tanks, 390 assault guns, 40 assault howitzers

altogether:
some 3270 tanks, assault guns, assault howitzers for the time around the start of Bagration.
Operating with the above micro-readiness-rate of 86% overall you’ll get some 2812 ready tanks, assault guns and assault howitzers.

Source: Karl-Heinz Frieser (ed.), Die Ostfront 1943/44. Der Krieg im Osten und an den Nebenfronten [The East Front. The war in the East and on the minor fronts], Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 8, Munich 2007, pp. 532, 624, 687, 736.

BTW: I'm curious about Russian unit density in late war short of Berlin. Three corps plus support per hex seems a bit low.

Regards

[elmo3]

ORIGINAL: janh

Do I read correctly that the above Tank Army only has 52 tanks?  Depleted?

No that is just the HQ for the tank army.

[ComradeP]

1. So you decided to leave out an organic brigade for each corps type?

IRL wasn't it 3 tank brigades plus a mech/mot brigade for a tank corps, and 3 mech and or motorized brigades plus a tank brigade for a mech corps... Plus several organic regiments with assault guns? No small difference.

Based on what has been said/shown thus far, the extra brigades will just be added to the overall TOE, but the stacking limit is 3 units/hex, which also means the merge limit is 3 units/hex. Early on, you would as you say have a Corps that could have enough men to have 4 brigades on paper split into 3 brigades. Late war Corps could have around 6 brigades if SU units and possible heavy tank support is included, so that would be 6 brigades splitting up into 3 brigades.

I'm guessing that the Corps would split up just like the Panzer divisions, so they would form combined arms brigades, not Mechanized, Motorized Rifle or Tank brigades when splitting up. That's similar to how a Panzer division break down into 3 predominantly infantry based regiments with possibly around 50-75 tanks each, not into two Motorized Infantry/PzG regiments and a Panzer regiment, with the artillery, AA, AT, recon and pioneer assets split between them.

-

As a question: it has been mentioned several times that motorized >brigades< can form a Mechanized Corps. What about motorized divisions? Do you have to create brigades to form a Corps?

[janh]

ORIGINAL: ComradeP
I'm guessing that the Corps would split up just like the Panzer divisions, so they would form combined arms brigades, not Mechanized, Motorized Rifle or Tank brigades when splitting up. That's similar to how a Panzer division break down into 3 predominantly infantry based regiments with possibly around 50-75 tanks each, not into two Motorized Infantry/PzG regiments and a Panzer regiment, with the artillery, AA, AT, recon and pioneer assets split between them.

That would be a very sound implementation of splitting formation. Formation of mixed "Kampfgruppen", combat teams, was essentially this was one of the major innovations of German doctrine that was later adapted by allied and russian armies. It was a crucial factor giving the Germans high flexibity and substantial force despite smaller numbers.

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: janh

Do I read correctly that the above Tank Army only has 52 tanks?  Depleted?

no, you are reading the info the wrong way, those 52 tanks, are with the HQ, that is not counting the tanks that are in the 3 units assigned to the HQ (let me see if I can find it and some screens)

Okay, here is the attachements to the Tank Army HQ, that is where the 52 tanks are from, the Tank Reg