Totally Disgruntling the Vet. The Pro's v DV -DV welcome

[sillyflower]

everything bog standard

[sillyflower]

Been a while since I posted. DV has done well in the north, a bit slow in the south and slow progress in front of Moscow with his mobile forces under constant counterattack. He'd been mixing the up with inf when leaving them in the front line which helps a bit



the combat where he lost 70 AFVs is the last time he left 2 pz divs in the front line in clear terrain and he was exposed on 3 or 4 hexsides.

Russians do need a lot of troops in the area to do this every turn as I have been. Attackers need to able to retreat to safety and to refit periodically. I start with the principle that every unit not in front line but with MPs should be on reserve or refit. Need to be careful about refit though. Game seems to ignore max TOE settings and will happily fill up units set at 65% to 100% if it has spare troops. This is quite annoying as you need to ensure priority is given to decent units, not the rubbish.

Anyway, the most important thing that I'm making AGC quite cautious. DV's better at herding than I would like ( he is very good at it) so he nibbles off small pockets here and there but at the expense of relatively little eastward progress in the centre.

[sillyflower]

It has been ages since I posted on this but now we are in May '42 , I thought I would explain how the Pros play the 1st winter. As I will just be using the AAR retrospectively to explain why we did stuff (I'm sure DV's AAR tells the story well) He's now welcome to read this. Not really giving away any secrets as this is almost the Pros last WITE game. Not sure if we will reform for WITE 2 as Sean's new job (and time zone) makes it much harder for us to speak.

Key to a good winter is to put the effort into maxing both morale and TOE for intended offensive units. This takes Oct and Nov. Don't worry about units who won't be joining in - see 5 below. Cav divs should be bundled up so as to have 4 armies of 4 corps each built on 4 Dec. They should also be hidden from german recce and only moved to front in last snow turn. Put the ones with best experience together so you get some strong corps.

The main aims are
1 Kill as many Germans as possible, preferably by surrounding units. Cav corps on masse are best for this and both of us used a pair of cav armies(4 corps each) in tandem. I don't subscribe to the 'you must kill X divs or you are useless' theory because you can't kill any if G runs fast enough.
2 do as many successful attacks as we can. Apart from causing casualties, the aim is to have max reductions in Nazi morale form both being attacked and from retreating. Unsuccessful attacks should be avoided. They only help the enemy but improve the morale of your opponent.
3 Take good terrain to defend in '42.We decide our terrain objectives before staring the winter O and deploy accordingly in late November. Take good terrain to defend in '42.
4 Do NOT over extend. First that puts army at risk in March as G recover from winter pretty quickly - enough to attack effectively on first snow turn. so: don't go too far and don't worry about running east again in 2nd half of feb
5 Don't advance with whole army. The only material shortage Russian has from '42 on is trucks so don't march useless mouths ahead of the rail lines as you just waste thousands of valuable trucks for no benefit.
6 when attacking as Russian use everyone who can reach to get max morale and guards farming benefits.

Looking back over the winter, we were very happy with our offensive. 11 divs killed and a lot of divs given a serious kicking inc a lot of mobile ones. By the end of winter he had fewer than 1200 AFVs left. DV made a conscious decision not to run too much and as a result suffered very high attrition losses and we got a lot of attacks in. We didn't actually want to get any further in the south/middle - see points 4+5 above.

I enjoyed beating up very week Finns. Lots of guard divs created up there and more progress than I had hoped. I don't know why DV kept leaving me all these weak units to attack but maybe he has or will explain.

[sillyflower]

We are at the end of Sept and next turn will see the start of a massive programme of artillery divs.

DV has kept at it all summer with some success. Soviet army kept at just over 7.5M. However the Wehrmacht has taken a pasting esp. the panzers and he only has about 1600 functioning AFV. There have been some good furballs inc. the current one where Sean somehow broke the pocket again.
DV is very good at pocketing and herding. Hoever we have quite a lot of good inf xxx, 5 cav armies and 4 tank armies ( in ordinary HQs as tk army HQs only take 3 xxx) and we tend to throw the kitchen sink at his surrounding troops. We are strong enough to do that without him being able to pocket the couterattackers.

both sides have been pretty aggressive - any Germans in the open and in reach get leapt on. 2:1 using face value CVs is a pretty safe attack. CVs in combat screen still seem to bear no resemblance to reality. Looking at both DV's attacks and ours, hardly any show 2:1 in unmodified CV but the vast majority succeed.

[sillyflower]

It's fair to say we leap on anything that looks like a decent attack. Russian losses are pretty immaterial in terms of men and arms cost. Loss of units is no fun especially if they have lots of trucks. APs and trucks are the only shortages we are going to have, and men and arms have been in healthy surplus since March.
Current surplus of about 500K each of men and arms - so I don't know why arms factories still cant produce enough MGs, light mortars etc tho' it's much better than it used to be.
I've been more careful about buying tank xxx this game than vs Smokindave as we were short of trucks against him. I prefer cav armies anyway in many respects as they can often move further before doing deliberate attack and don't use many trucks. When they get their TOE boost early in '43 they get to a CV of 12-15 which is pretty much the same as tank xxx or perhaps better. I might buy 1 mech army for Sean tho' I don't like them much as they are not worth the trucks to have very many. Most of the killing will get done by inf xx + massed art divs. If he runs, massed cav will keep up with him without running out of petrol.
We are relatively far forward especially in the south ( DV never reached the Donbass cities) so the distance to Berlin is not a worry. What matters is crushing the Wehrmacht then the ground will follow.

[smokindave34]

I've learned to fear the Soviet cavalry corps. A tank corps or mech corps out in front is fairly easy prey for the panzers but the cavalry corps have always seemed to be a bit stiffer on defense. The fact that they can get two deliberate attacks per turn in even when moving in to poor terrain is a huge advantage.

[sillyflower]

Not being able to read DV's AAR (a delight postponed) I'm not sure what stats he's published so here are a couple



Re casualties for last Russian turn: high soviet tanks losses due to some unfortunate holds but almost all light tanks of which we get 250/turn.
G arty losses also very high especially as a lot of German inf xxs seem not to lose as many 105 and 150mm howitzers when retreating these days which makes me think DV has a shortage. This turn we displaced at least 8 HQs (mainly Pz xxx) and most retreated to very silly places so got displaced a 2nd time, and a lot of these displacements led to very heavy arty losses. DV can sometimes be a little careless where he puts his HQs and does need to teach them to retreat west rather that to the unoccupied town nearest other Russian units.

[sillyflower]

OOB speaks for itself.

[sillyflower]

duplicate - webpage playing silly whatsits tonight