Giant freaking traffic jam

[thedoctorking]

I'm playing both sides of a 41-45 CG. It's New Year's, 1942. I have a giant traffic jam on the Soviet side of the line. There are so many Soviet units that there isn't any room to put them all on the front. The Germans are giving ground steadily and are about to lose Smolensk. In the south, they've already had to give up Dnepropetrovsk and will probably soon lose Nikolaev.

I'm new to the game. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Obviously, the German attack didn't go as planned. They got to the outskirts of Moscow all right, couldn't get in, and have been scrambling to avoid being cut off in their salient ever since. They do have Leningrad, but are stuck on the Volkhov in the north.

For a taste of how things are going, here is a screen shot of my central front from the USSR pov:

[lowsugar]

Yes its something wrong. Game is pro german now:-)

[tyronec]

Am not that experienced at the mid game but I think the flow is something like this:
'41 is all Axis blitzkreig and blizzard counter attack.
'42. If Axis are doing OK they can continue the invasion. If they are doing badly they cannot really make much of an attack but the Soviets don't have good enough units to make a good attack, so there can be something of a passive stalemate.
'43 onwards. Soviet army gradually gets bigger with more corps/artillery/better tanks and morale swings in their favor.

[morvael]

You're probably not using the strengths of the Germans or have trouble with supplying advancing troops. Maybe you play the Germans as the Soviets which is a mistake. They need to move fast and encircle a lot to have a chance at achieving success.

[thedoctorking]

I think my German offensive was not well done. I decided to strike for Moscow with the two Army Group Center tank armies. I alternated turns doing a HQBU for one and attacking with the other, pushing a long snake of tanks down the "dry road to Moscow". I did a number of small encirclements but didn't get any really large pockets. Also, it seemed like I was perennially out from under my air support and the Russian bombers were attacking my armor with impunity. If I slowed down to let the flyboys catch up, then I was slowing down. Another thing I did as the Russians was surround armored spearheads whenever I could. On several occasions, those racing tanks ahead of my main infantry force ground to an unscheduled halt for lack of fuel because they were isolated. Russian counterattacks against isolated armored units were rarely successful but also the German tank strength declined as we advanced. Ultimately, the "Reserve Front" trenches in front of Moscow pretty much stopped us (though we did manage to capture the "West Moscow" hex). By this point, ominous masses of Russian troops on both flanks of the salient counter-attacked, and then a turn or two later the blizzard started and I was forced to withdraw. Now, my Germans are 15 hexes to the west about to lose Smolensk.

I did have the Russians evacuate the Moscow factories, so they will lose some production while they reset out in the Urals. But there are huge numbers of Russians, enough to have armies deployed along the summer main line of resistance from Rostov to Moscow digging trenches and still attack everywhere along the front. I'm playing on to see if I can get an offensive going in the summer of 1942, but it doesn't look good for the Aryan volk and their lebensraum.

[thedoctorking]

I started over with a much more aggressive German strategy of seeking encirclements at all times. I'll report back in a month or so for further perspective. [&o]

[Nuklearius]

How can you play both sides in the same game? Would be very immersion breaking for me since naturally you hope for that one encirclement to complete or your troops to escape. Play Soviets vs German AI, it is super easy and good for learning, believe me, in my last games I isolated the Germans in Estonia by February 1942 while playing on normal.


Traffic jam is preprogrammed and wanted by the game. Otherwise the Soviets would be to strong in the 1941 counteroffense. The solution are Rifle Corps (which are simply 3 divisions as a single unit), but these only become available in mid 1942.

The solution before June 1942 is to station your armies so that every army faces only 2 Hexes of the front, put the rest of your units directly behind and in reserve.

Usually you will have 2-3 Surplus armies you can't really fit in anywhere, Just keep those further back and on refit. Rail them to the front when the Germans breached and thinned your frontline. Also do not use any Tank or Rifle Brigades when you are not in desperate need of filling the line somewhere, they are a waste of space/equipment/vehicles. I put all of them on 20% TOE and kept them around Moscow until I could merge them into Rifle Divisions/Rifle-Corps/Tank-Corps.

[thedoctorking]

Interesting idea to set the TOE deliberately low. I let them fill up and used them in the line, but in less active sectors. I noticed that in March 1942, you can combine two brigades into a division.

Playing both sides is preferable to playing against the AI, since at least you get a sensible opponent. The AI is terrible. Playing my first game as the USSR, the Germans didn't even take Leningrad or cross the Dnepr in the south. I finally took over as the Germans too for the snow turns and at least got Kiev and Leningrad. But the Russians were set to crush me. I started over playing both sides from the beginning and got up through January, 1942, only to decide that my German offensive had been fumbled. I'm trying again.

Mostly, my goal is to learn about the game from both perspectives. I'm playing a multi-player game as a Russian front commander and finding the Germans very aggressive. I wonder what will happen to them? My aggressive Germans in my new game are running very high fatigue levels even though I'm resting each armored corps one turn in three (for an HQBU). We have killed a good number of Russian divisions, though.

[tyronec]

As you say the Soviet AI is poor.
The Axis one is OK and if you adjust the difficulty settings you can get a good game, not the same as a human opponent but worth playing.

[thedoctorking]

I found the Axis AI out of the box to be pretty impotent. They got basically nowhere in Barbarossa. How would you adjust it to make it better?