ORIGINAL: Josh
"...Not to bitch and moan but I think this will be one of my last Axis pbem games until some sort of better balance comes about for the Axis first winter. I'm not asking for supermen to spring out of the ground but I'm asking for infantry across the board that are not Romanian quality after a hard winters fight. There is no way I can make a historical counter attack after playing a historical type defense against Red's somewhat historical offensive... boo hoo for me...[:D][:'(] ..."
Well I agree, your units look pretty wasted, not much fun having div. around with 3-4-5 CV. Maybe things will change with the next couple of patches?
It could also be that Red is an extraordinairy good player, after all he's been playing wargames for the last fourty years or so. I thought he'd lost the game a few pages back, and look at the situation now.
Thanks Josh, but I'm not a particularly expert player even though I have been playing a long time and this was my first (and only) PBEM as the Soviets in ANY game. However, I do think that I know enough to be able to recognize when a WW2 war game isn't truly reflective of the general flow of history. Also, I'm not dumb enough to think that the game should actually be entirely 'historical' - though some have quoted me in that fashion.
As I posted in my AAR, I did set out from the start to play in a style that I thought reflected Soviet initial incompetence and to then gradually improve my tactics over time. However, there were MANY things I could have done better, even within those constraints.
The goal of this test (see my AAR) was to establish what would happen if the Axis pushed the Soviets to the gates of Moscow and inflicted huge losses in the process. I wanted to see whether the Soviets would be able to bounce back with a winter offensive along quasi-historical lines.
The end result appears to be that the Axis army is badly battered, although I can't say whether it is more badly battered than it should be, but it certainly feels that way from my side. My conclusions from this campaign are:
1. The Axis player probably would have reached the historical December '41 line if he had not diverted troops into the Crimea (a nice move that took me by surprise) and had not decided to prepare his winter defense early.
2. Nevertheless, I sense that the Soviet offensive capabilities would have been pretty much what they were in the game, even if the Axis had advanced further, and the Axis defense would have been that much weaker.
3. The blizzard affects both sides (I could barely advance after attacking) but the impact on the Axis is far greater. I felt that my ability to execute attacks all along the front, with rest periods, throughout the period Dec to Feb and then to continue these in the mud turns showed that my forces were overpowered.
4. My recent game against the AI in the Stalingrad scenario that was released in these forums a short time ago confirmed to me that there are some big issues - I took Stalingrad in 4 turns because as soon as the Axis units were cut off they just fell to pieces. IMO these issues really need to be addressed before WiTE 2 comes out.
5. Finally, I think that the fact that I have to play badly (whether deliberately or not) in order for the Axis player to get a quasi-historical '41 outcome indicates that if we are talking about a WW2 simulation then we need some major changes and not mere tweaks. For example, the no retreat orders on both sides came from Stalin and Hitler respectively. In the game, the player is acting as the senior military commander, not as the national leader, so why can't he be bound by these historical orders? This should at least be a game option, set at the start, for the front line Soviet armies to have very limited move capabilities for the first n turns. More is probably needed, but I will leave that to others to debate.
PBEM players should always be free to explore the historical what-ifs to their hearts content and I have absolutely no issue with that. However, players who want to play within some kind of historical context must also be supported.
That's my End-ex signal
