So this AAR is from my perspective as the Axis player. I have been a beta tester for the last two years and Keitherson reached out on Discord looking for someone from the beta team to play against. So I obliged. I have never played him before and most of my PBEM experience has been against Tyrone and as many who may of know of Tyrone, he is an amazing player. Oh, I did participated in a MP playtest with I think 6-8 of us and took AGS. But that is neither here nor there.
This wont be super fancy from my side, but I'll try to provide some content and screenshots as time allows and to the best of my abilities. I also told Keitherson that he is welcome to view and provide content. I'll be posting 2-4 turns behind our actual game and we both agreed not to share any strategic insides. Yet, I am also open to having this be a helpful aid if possible for new players. Using manual AD for the first turn I think you can get the most out of more so than the AI, but then for the most part I just use AI assist for the air war and tweak it to suit my needs.
A warning, I have a 4k monitor so my screenshots will be quite big, especially the map views. To this end I'll stitch together a large map of the general whole area zoomed out by three (with being zoomed in all the way being zoom level 1, from my perspective) and for the next level zoom in's I'll use the 'y' to just display the name of the formation and hide their other status and cv's.
A precursor, I am doing my best to give Keitherson a great gaming experience I am pretty sure he is even more experienced than I with regards to WitE 1; however, I am also not going to optimize every single move. I have some advantage of playing turn 1 of the CG more times then I care to count over the last 2 years. But I know there are some folks from the WitE scene that would out play me, and of course all my losses in play testing came at the hands of Tyrone, so I may just really suck at this game, lol.
General Overall plan
The overall plan for the air War on Turn 1 is to destroy as much of the VVS as possible. To achieve this I am not over optimizing things. In fact I am only creating 10 AD, 7 of which are GS the rest being GA on D1 only.
The overall plan for the Ground War on Turn 1 is to pocket as many Soviet units as possible while keeping my own losses down. Attempt to secure Riga, Minsk and isolate Lvov. Turn 2 will be the clean up of those pockets. Capture Lvov and be ready to strike the Land Bridge on turns 3-5. Also on Turn 2 to exploit as many holes as possible and to encircle as much as possible in the south. Turn 3 is to close off and destroy and remaining pockets. Reach or encircle Odessa and attempt to reach or encircle Kiev. Turn 4 goal is to capture Smolensk and Kiev and if I have not captured Odessa to take that as well. By turn 5 if all goes as planned strike east...Note since this is an ongoing AAR I don't want to reveal my strategic directions, they most likely will become apparent as we play though the game.
The 10 Air Directives Summary setup:
Turn 1 to follow.
