Stalingrad to Berlin Scenario Overload

[hfarrish]

Currently doing this scenario against SmokinDave and was just curious about a design decision - the Soviets are horribly, horribly overloaded from a command CP perspective (for example, Western Front is 248:81 or something like that). Is this WAD (ie we are going to have the HQs as is regardless of consequences) or just a shortcut? I am just curious because long term it is a major impediment to the red army gaining traction.

[RedLancer]

Both sides OOBs are as close to historical as I could find in my research as are their starting positions. I did make some small changes at Stalingrad to allow the AI to work better, Leningrad because of space and the Rzhev salient to allow a faster creation of Rifle Corps but all units stayed in the original hierarchy. In the case of the Western Front they didn't make too much traction in reality.

I think people might get used to creating their own 'perfect' Soviet Army by end 42 if always starting with the GC41. This is why I created StoB - it skips much of the Barbarossa, blizzard and Blue factors.

[Walloc]

Problem as John points out is that for the 41 CG balance reason u put in a limit of first 24 then 18 as CP and 81, rising over time at front. There isnt any particular historical reasons for these numbers. As Flav has point out many times when u look at historical OOBs and compare to the WiTE system either they would have had worked on per system very bad command decisions which they indeed did at times. On the other hand some of the most succesfull russian operation involves what historically would be heavy overloads, so its more a question of in RL things floated more. U set up the armies/front as they fit the operations/commanders, not some system.

Problem is in games(espcially involving coding) its easier to have systems/rules and u can also balance stuff with that, making solutions showing the more complexities of real life is all the harder. So when u press the game system not that im faulting the system in this case nor John in his creation of the historical scenario. The 2 things just dont fit each other.

The same issues hits the german side too in different ways in different scenarios.

Lets us / John know ur thots on how it pans out over time could be usefull.

Rasmus

[Flaviusx]

It just gets worse and worse as you get into the later war scenarios and campaigns, alas. Anybody trying to put together a historical order of battle will find out that these simply do not match up with the command limits shown in game. Reconciling these two is more or less impossible. This is beyond the ability of any scenario designer to resolve. They can only present to you how things were actually organized.

And I believe this problem also exists for the Germans in this campaign, not only the Soviets. They too have a number of overloaded commands.

You can cheese this, btw. Just delete the severely overloaded Front commands and run the armies directly from STAVKA. This is obviously not as good as shrinking down the Front to its game regulated size, but the cost of doing this is prohibitive in terms of APs. You won't ever be able to get the job done on the existing budget.

So just nuke Western Front.

In the 1944 campaign, you can do the same with 1. Belorussian and 1. Ukrainian Fronts, although in both those cases you'll still be left with a number of badly overloaded armies. But these can be fixed.

This is disgusting, but there you go.

[Blubel]

It is the same for the Germans in this scenario by the way, so both players are equally handicaped.

[loki100]

the fundamental problem is in how to model what the Soviets believed constituted a 'front'. Key, I think, esp after 1943 was a single axis of attack.

So Koniev's 1 Ukrainian was split at the time of the Lvov/Caucasus battles in Aug-Sept 1944 principally as there were two separate operations. Erickson is clear that the decision to concentrate so much into the 1 Bielorussian and 1 Ukrainian in late 1944 was that both had a single axis of advance and objective (Berlin), 2 Bielorussian was expected to clear the Baltic coast and 3rd was caught up on the Konigsberg battles.

You could argue that adding a concept of 'staff officer points' or somesuch would help, ie these added to the commanders ability allowed command of a larger number of armies, but that way lies a lot of cheese as the Soviets never allow any but the best to command a front.

The in-game modelling works good enough off a 1941 start but does fall apart with the later scenarios. Maybe one solution is to give each side in those a one-off mound of APs that need to be spent before the end of the first turn?

[RedLancer]

The problem with giving extra APs is you can never second guess how someone is going to spend them.  In StoB you will notice that the Germans in the Demjansk Salient are almost all set to static (as are a number of other areas).  You have to make a choice about using your APs to reactivate those units allowing them to withdraw instead of reconfiguring your OOB.  For the Soviets there is plenty of scope to use APs to create Tank & Rifle Corps as the OOB probably has way more Divs than a player would create providing another hard decision.  Where possible in my scenarios I like to make players make difficult choices and the starting turns of StoB provides plenty of those I hope.  

[hfarrish]

Thanks Red - just was curious what the thinking was there. Given the system it is what it is, no easy choices there.

[fbs]

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx
It just gets worse and worse as you get into the later war scenarios and campaigns, alas. Anybody trying to put together a historical order of battle will find out that these simply do not match up with the command limits shown in game.

But perhaps the Soviet OOB was overburdened in real life, so the failed checks reflect the Soviet's lack of command finesse?

I mean, how many commanders in history could move 300 divisions around as swiftly as one moves 3 divisions? The game allows unlimited tactical ability (as it's played from a single commander with a God's-eye perspective and full information), and some failed checks may not be such a unhistorical thing for the Soviet player.

[SigUp]

I doubt the Soviets would have overloaded the critical 1st Belorussian Front in June 1944 by 134, if they really had big troubles commanding such big formations. Anyway, this isn't a Soviet problem only. In the 1942 scenario Army Group South is overloaded by 165 (!).

[hfarrish]

ORIGINAL: SigUp

I doubt the Soviets would have overloaded the critical 1st Belorussian Front in June 1944 by 134, if they really had big troubles commanding such big formations. Anyway, this isn't a Soviet problem only. In the 1942 scenario Army Group South is overloaded by 165 (!).

Of course, the problem is dramatically exacerbated for the Soviet b/c of the need to build units. Even in winter of '42 the army is not particularly strong...just that the German army is weaker. Lot of 1 and 2 CV rifle divisions floating around.

[pompack]

I really don't find the overloads to be a serious problem in creating a balanced force

So Western Front starts out really, really overloaded. If you want to do nothing else, you can fix it in two turns by shifting divisions to STAVKA and then to the army/front of your choice and by deleting brigades (you also really, really need manpower rather quickly). Now I would not recommend doing it that quickly, but by spreading it over the first ten weeks you can easily get Western Front and the others within command limits. In the mean time, the overload acts as a brake on operations which seems to be needed anyway.

Now moving corps around is certainly expensive but is not needed to get a balanced, if not optimum Soviet force.

Also some people would object that they want to use every point to create new units and convert to tank and rifle corps. The problem I found is that the shortage of trucks is even worse than the shortage of points and every tank or mech corps created just makes the truck problem worse. When I played Stalingrad to Berlin I had intended to just leave Western Front overloaded but I quickly found that I was running out of manpower using two divisions and a brigade to create rifle corps. So while waiting for the manpower to build up I used to points to shift forces around. Then when I used three division to build the rifle corps, all it took was one additional point to convert a Western Front division and then use that with two local divisions to create a rifle corps. (and note that it is a bit cheesy but if you run in that direction you can stack a Western Front division with two local divisions and tell when the conversion will produce a rifle corps assigned to the local army WITHOUT using any addition points to shift command relationships)