First try

[Arstavidios]

Ok I've just tried a campaign german first turn.
Played the tutorial and had a try.
first impressions:
Moving the units and fighting is fairly easy. At least for the basics.
I'm far from understanding all what's going on. Fights were pretty much as it goes. don't have a clue how the air force works AI does the trick so I'm happy with that. Same thing for logistics. Just done a bunch of Panzer pushing. Which was quite fun actually.

Game runs smoothly. Though I have a bit of a problem. The bottom part of the game window does not appear on screen[8|]
so scrolling down with the mouse does not work. Keyboard works just fine and is actually very practical anyway.

Had a look at the soviet side of things, but It's somewhat of an awful mess. so I'll wait until I understand things somewhat better before I have a try.

Here's the result of a turn 1.
don't know if it's good or bad. Panzers pushed far behind the soviet units and made a screen. Southern sector seems much more dificult and I ran out of mobile units as several motorised divisions appear to be frozen.
I still have some units to move especially those railway engineers. Don't have a clue yet how they work.
My first opinion, well looks like money well spent Looks like i'll need some serious manual readin and ai bashing before i start thinking about getting spanked in pbem

I've some HQ or airfields around, and I do not know what the effect will be. I have possibly messed up everything

[Arstavidios]

And the southern sector

[ComradeP]

The pockets south of Riga might be opened to the northwest. Ventspils is a port, so the units will be back in supply in theory. It has become more or less common practice amongst testers to drive a motorized division up to Ventspils to take it on turn 1. I always use Totenkopf as it isn't attached to a corps HQ and has good combat power.

The pocket next to the border in the AGC area is fine. All of the units near Minsk are in supply.

The pocket in the south can be broken and might end with all your mobile units being isolated.

[Arstavidios]

So a little more:
I tried to divide some divisions but all I could get was a merge button? No divide button.
So maybe i'm missing something.

As for the units. Moving is fairly easy. However the whole stack is selected and more often than not when I just want to move a single division I'm moving the whole stack .
Also when you select a stack you see the detail by right clicking on the units in the display on the right of the screen whereas I have a tendency to right click the unit on the map itself.....

[ComradeP]

The "b" key both merges and divides units, provided the unit is the only unit in the hex (as a split up division has 3 regiments/brigades and thus fills the hex to counter capacity). Keep in mind that regiments use different rules for entering hostile terrain, so most of the time regiments won't be able to travel as far as when they would still be combined into their division.

You can deselect units from a stack in the unit panel to the right.

[Helpless]

I tried to divide some divisions but all I could get was a merge button?

Merge button on the unit detail screen is used to merge units of the same type (ex. Inf Divisions). To break/merge subunits you should use 'b' key.

[Arstavidios]

Thanks for the advice.
this is a totally noob First german turn.
Just played the tutorial so far, so I may make plenty of silly moves, and have plenty of silly questions.

Advice and comments from experienced players are most welcome.[&o]

I've moved the rest of my troops, mainly AGC and I also found how to use the rail repair units.
don't know which lines are better so I took three of them more or less at random and started from there.

For the initial airfield bombings, i let the Ai do its stuff. I did not change the doctrine so it may not be brilliant compared to what a good player might achieve. playing on normal difficulty level.

[Arstavidios]

So i ran the soviet turn.
Here's the losses screen

So losses are quite high.
A few attacks did not go very well in the south and most losses were suffere there. Still a good number of soviet units are now pocketed.

[Arstavidios]

air losses:
I left the Ai on its own; Did not change anything. So results seem to be not too bad.

[Arstavidios]

And the units destroyed

[ComradeP]

You seem to have suffered only about 6000 losses during turn 1, the rest being attrition, so that's a pretty good result I'd say.

[Arstavidios]

Don't know whether or not it's good, but it's fun.
basic movement and combat system is quite easy to grasp.
Completing the turn took several hours though.

So it seems fairly easy to get the panzers on the march after playing just the tutorial.
Results look quite good, although I'm playing against the ai on normal level, which helps
An experienced human opponent would certainly add plenty of miseries.

Mastering the finer aspects of combat, logistics, air operation..... will help, but I guess it's no big deal in the first few turns with the Germans where it's more a matter of Panzer pushing.

The situation in the North:
looks like the AI has retrated from Riga anft Kaunas which was isolated but not taken.

[Arstavidios]

So here come AGC

[Arstavidios]

And in the South

[Bradd]

Thanks for posting the AAR!

[hgilmer3]

Is this the full campaign?  

[british exil]

ORIGINAL: Arstavidios

Arstavidios, I notice you have a few single HQ's, one on the river bank of the Daugava, the ajoining hexes are in soviet control and one in the south of your screen shot (ss) All it needs is a Soviet unit to move to or even rout to one of these hexes and your HQ will retreat hexes towards your rear, which means you'll be losing your HQ support for your advancing units.
On the first turn this might not be so bad as your advancing units are still in supply but after a few turns you'll be hurting bad because you'll be out of supply due to your HQ being so far behind.

Try to place a fighting unit in the same hex as your HQ or leave the HQ a few hexes behind the frontline. A HQ has no real fighting power and will always move, just like a lone air unit.

There maybe no enemy units in that sector, you might have even used recon to check that out. But in the AGS sector where the frontline is a bit tighter you might want to remember that.

Have fun playing.

Mat

[Arstavidios]

Hi, thanks for the comments.
Everything is useful.
As I said, This is an attempt at the campaign after playing the tutorial., so most probably plenty of silly things which would certainly mean plenty of trouble if faced by an experienced player, while the AI would certainly won't make use of many of these opportunities.

[Arstavidios]

Situaion in the North after the soviet turn 2
I've pushed the Panzer Groups as far as possible into soviet territorry while avoiding combat when possible in order to trap whatever I could. As a result I reached the outskirts of Pskov. A few isolated units remain but most have been cleared. Totenkopf was isolated by a mix of retreating soviet units and arriving reinforcements but otherwise my screen of mobile units seems in good condition.

I thought about doing some air ressuply at the end of turn 2 but forgot about that and hit the end turn. I've got a screen of mobile units all along the front bypassing and isolating quite a few soviet units. However I'm not sure how well this would work in pbem as it would leave the line open to concentrated soviet counter attacks .

However, by the second turn this may not be that much of a risk as such counter attacks could lead to large groups of soviet forces being cut off.

I would be interested to know how the testers would face such an advance with the soviets. Or how they would have done with the Germans.

Yet after two turns of campaign I feel quite comfortable with the land system, even though I still miss many of the subtleties. As for logistics I don't know yet how things work, but keeping forces reasonably deployed with HQs properly deployed with their corps armies and army groups should take care of most things, and some extra manual reading won't hurt either



Then the Panzers will outrun the railheads somehow in the early turns whatever happens.

[Arstavidios]

In the centre Minsk is Bypassed.
Most soviet units have been cleared.