Another March to the East

[carlkay58]

T01 AGN LVI Mot Corps:

The 8th PD captures Riga, clears the rest of the northern bank of the Daugava River and sends the 3rd MD to penetrate further into Latvia.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGC XXXIX Mot Corps:

This corps starts to form the eastern edge of the Bialystok Pocket capturing Minsk while doing so.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGC LVII Mot Corps:

This corps heads northeast and finishes the AGN pocket to the east while protecting the double rail.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGC XXXXVII Mot Corps:

This finishes sealing the eastern edge of the Bialystok Pocket.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGC XXIV Mot Corps:

This corps defeats the Soviet Airborne Corps to the south east of Minsk and pushes it back.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGN Final:

I finish with repairing the rail lines and moving the HQs to better locations. 18th Army HQ is now in Riga along with all 10 of the RAD Labor units to repair rails in the Baltics. 4th PG HQ is in Daugavpils. 16th Army HQ is still in pre-war territory. The red circle represents the AT Regt and NKVD Sec Regt that escaped the pockets. All other units are now pocketed, the majority of them are Routed. The yellow circle is the one unit that is not totally locked down and may cause problems. I launch air transported supplies to Daugavapils. I know I have the AI Air Assist on, but I am still able to direct the air supply if I wish with no effect or penalty to the AI Assist side.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGC Final:

3rd PG HQ is now in Vilnius while the other HQs are still in pre-war borders. The red circles are all units that routed from beyond the pocket, the southern ones from the depot just to the west while the northern ones were from battles at Minsk and the defeat of the Airborne Corps. The yellow circle represents units that are not locked down and may cause trouble but I don't think they can bust any pockets or free themselves. I fly supplies into Minsk.

[carlkay58]

T01 AGS Final:

Very small penetration here. But the Soviets were ready for us unlike to the north. All HQs are still in pre-war territory but the pockets should be mostly okay. The units in the pockets will not be escaping.

[carlkay58]

T01 Files:

[tm1]

Thank you a very much, a well laid out plan of the opening moves.

I have the AI assist for the Luftwaffe but I think will follow your path and adjust its operations I seem to be losing more planes than I want to.

Your pocket in Belorussia is very well done, myself I do cut off most all the troops there I also isolate Brest litovsk but take the city on turn two hope to get the maximum number of prisoners.

regards

[MishaTX]

Another AAR! Capital!

I tried out your new Recon doctrine, however, and I found that with the Recon set to run on only one day and with a 25% Mission Act Pct, my Recon turned out to be almost worthless. It didn't discover anything, so the few(er) planes I lost were basically thrown away. I do agree very much, though, that it doesn't make much sense to ask for escorts. They'll just eat up their air miles for nothing and thus be worthless for the rest of the week.

I ran a number of tests with varying settings and found that your Air Doctrine left me with maybe a handful of units identified in each directive (to the point of not being better than no Recon at all), my original settings (three days of the week, no escorts and full Miss Act Pct) left me with a lot more (to the point of being useful), but much heavier losses, obviously. Toned it down to two days a week and got just about the same amount of info, but with about 30% lower losses. Obviously, this depends upon how many air directives you set up and how large of an area you use for each, I like to use about 3-5 hexes so I don't go crazy setting up 60 of them, but it worked fine. And with your suggestion of higher altitude it brought my losses down fantastically. Almost all of my losses were due to ops, almost no flak at all!

Now, if we could only get a feature to set up in our Air Doctrine that Ground Support is not to be flown at all if no escorts are available, I'd be in hog heaven. Pretty much every single case where I've found my losses to be ridiculous in a turn it's been when I forgot to turn GS off. Or maybe a map overlay telling us where escorts can reach so we know whether to turn GS on or off? I can dream, can't I? [;)]

Edit: Just ran another test with my 100%, no escort setting, but only on day 1 this time and found that the level of information was pretty much the same, but the losses were even further down to about 50 planes for the whole week! I may just go with this one forever.

[carlkay58]

It has been a while since I ran intensive tests on the Recon Directive. I found those numbers worked well for WitW and I just kept them as they seemed to work okay. I have noticed that a few versions ago my intel seemed to decrease some so maybe 100% is a better setting. My tests did show almost no difference with the number of days increasing but a more up-to-date picture after strategic bombing so in WitW my Strategic Recon directives had D1 and D7. It is also possible that Western Allied recon is better than the Axis or Soviet recon. But WitW had high attrition (non-operational) on recon aircraft and it was difficult to replenish the airframes so I had to fly less aircraft. The newer WitE2 production has definitely increased the amount of recon aircraft available to replace lost ones - although at a cost of other forms of the airframes. I will change my Air Doctrine at the end of Turn 2 to 100% and see how it works.

[carlkay58]

T02 OOB:

I will be posting as I go through the turn. This gives you an idea of how I approach each turn and the steps I take. The first step is looking at the OOB. The OOB lets me know roughly where I stand as a quick snapshot. Looking at this turn's OOB tells me some things. The first thing that sticks out is that the Soviet VVS has only 2317 aircraft on the map, 237 in reserve, but a total of 14,507. Now I know the other Theaters have some aircraft in them, but I also know that it is not over 14K of them. So the Soviets have shifted a lot of their aircraft from the map to the reserves and they will not arrive until their next turn. So they can't return to the map until turn 4 at the earliest. The reserves are fairly low (8K men) so there will not be a massive reinforcements reaching the map from the reserves.

[carlkay58]

T02 Ground Losses:

My target is to keep the Soviets under 3M men for as long as possible. To do this, I need to cause about 200K losses per turn. Turn 2 will be inflated because of pocket reductions but that will also give me a cushion for future down turns as the Soviets run away as fast as possible in some parts of the map.

[carlkay58]

T02 Air Losses:

This is all about how the Axis Air AI is doing against the Soviet Air AI. But it helps keep things in perspective and lets me know the tempo of the air war.

[carlkay58]

T02 Production:

There are several important things to look at here. The obvious is the size of the manpower pools for each nationality. A little less obvious is the 'in Units' section in the lower right. This tells you how much of each supply type you have in the units versus the need in parenthesis. This is the best indicator of how your supply net is truly working. As you can see it is great but this is only turn 2 and many units are still overstocked with supplies from before the war. Next is the 'Vehicles in' indicators. The vehicles in Units are already short, in Pool is above 10K so that is good, and 8K are already in Repair. That last number will only grow for the Axis in 41. The Axis have penalties on repairing vehicles until Mar-42.

[carlkay58]

T02 Commander Reports:

The first is the Unit screen. I turn all Refit/Reserve to NONE. I then check for all non-isolated, non-frozen, non-arrived units on the map and support that are eligible for transfer to see what their status is. Any that are DEPLETED or UNREADY are checked to see if I wish them to go to the Reserves.

The second one is the Air/AOG tab as I am using the AI Air Assist. I will change the stances for the Transport AOGs from the default FLEXIBLE to HOLD. Flexible is just too erratic for my OCD to appreciate.

The third common stop is the Battle tab. Here I look at any Soviet attacks. I note that they bombed Bydgoszcz so I will check that out. Note that I clicked the Air tab as this is an air battle and I want to see the results. It looks as though the Air Directive was created but nothing flew from the Soviet side.

[carlkay58]

T02 Freight:

This information is in the Logistics Phase Report. The Freight section gives a quick summary of how the supplies are being sent out. The big thing right off the top is the total Sup Need vs Sup Rec - which is currently +12K! Things are great when the supply net is good and the mileage is low to the depots. This also allows me to remember that I set Supply Priority by army. Panzer Armies are at 4 at this time and all infantry armies are set to 2. Some people set the Axis Allies down to 1, but they absorb so little supplies that it is easier to keep them at 2. Later in the year I will play around with the Priorities a bit more if I have to (and the Axis will ALWAYS have to).

[carlkay58]

T02 Truck Data:

There is general truck data in the Production screen but another area of good interest for trucks is in the Logistics Phase Report at the end of the Freight section. Here I can see how many Unit Trucks were used (the more used the lower the unit MP), the trucks lost in freight, and how many Soviet Trucks I have captured. I am already almost 1K ahead in trucks which is good. I really need as many Soviet trucks as I can get because you NEVER have enough trucks.

[carlkay58]

T02 Supply Net North:

This is best looked at early in the turn especially before you start moving the ground units. I trace each line back to the depots and make sure that any depot sending supplies to the combat units has a priority of 4. If it only sends to rear units (such as airbases and HQs) I will set the priority to 3.

As the starting turn for supply it is no surprise that it is all coming from pre war depots. You can also see what the AI Air Assist has done with the AOGs. The Kolufts for 18th Army and 4 PG along with the fighter coverage has been moved forward by the AI in AGN. Surprisingly close to how I would have done it manually.