Of Course Not, The Entire Game Is An Anti-German Design [8D] - Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (Soviet)

[RedJohn]

Shoutout to the das reich for losing 10% of it's trucks for a supply grab. I do follow Carl's gospel, but supply priority 4 is absolutely ruinous early on and so I have reduced it to 2 for the entire Wermacht. Perhaps I'll increase it when the railhead is closer.

[Stamb]

ORIGINAL: jubjub

Ya, Joel Billings said that the numbers are what he expects for leader kills. I am totally ok with that. But for killing of good leaders for the Soviets up front the first few turns, I call it "Bullshit" in my own opinion. You have to play to "save" good leaders with the Soviets now. It is a perfect strategy for Germany to pursue & I am sure it will be going forward. I know I will the next time I take up Germany. As for the Soviets you might as well "relocate" your HQ's out of the pocket & try to save them. BUT you have to relocate them during the Air phase, if you do it in the Ground phase they love to relocate back towards the enemy!!!!!! A few of mine did!

I'm still not convinced that the 15% rate is being applied to HQ's that displaced out of a pocket earlier in the turn. I have had too many occasions where the same HQ's keep losing leaders at a very high rate after they've been displaced from a pocket.

Does anyone have a save they are using to test this stuff?

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=5106708
I think they are using saves that RedJohn provided.

[Stamb]

I was also wondering how Axis can use priority 4 for a units? I use 2 for all of the units, or 3 if Leningrad is taken and there are good stockpiles near by. Exception is OKH with 4 for refitting SU.

[Beethoven1]

Other than units that were still left in the Bialystok pocket, I lost less than 100,000 men this last turn.

I have a bunch of planes still in reserve, and decided to send them to theater boxes rather than outright disband them. I don't think this will contribute anything due to the caps to how much planes can contribute to the ground TB values, but it should make damn well sure we never fall under the caps.

It is raining across basically the entire front:



Due to the fact that we have too many ML-20 heavy artillery pieces in the pool (due to disbanding artillery), no more of them were produced this turn. I requested that more T-34s be produced instead, but my minions refused and have decided they will be idle and simply not produce anything if we are not going to use artillery.



^ note the absence of ML-20s produced. [:o]



Zhukov was dismissed due to him being DIRECTLY IN CHARGE OF THE ENTIRE ARMY AND THUS PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL LOSSES. Next, one would think that Timoshenko will end up with the same fate. At some point when I run out of useful things to spend AP on, I will put Grigory Kulik in charge of STAVKA if Stalin has not already done so for me. Or, if I am losing really badly, I will maybe try bringing back Zhukov.

My air commands as well as the low morale tank divisions etc etc have arrived in the Transcaucasus, so I have already begun pulling out mountaineer divisions to send them to the map.

[Beethoven1]

Bread seems to think it is amusing to ENCIRCLE rather than ROUT my NKVD border guard unit I left in Kishinev.



He has also murdered 40 leaders with his drone strikes, including some very good ones like Vasilevsky. I am really glad that I am not using leaders so that I don't have to care about my game being messed up by Vasilevsky's targeted assassination.



A bunch of HQs displaced into the swamps. All I want to do is disband them, but can't because they are within 8 hexes of an enemy (and most don't have MP to get away unless I rail them out I think). So maybe we can get some additional leaders killed.

[Beethoven1]

I have the greatest unit ever (in Gomel currently).

A MOTORIZED NKVD border guard unit.



Yes, it is a border guard unit, not one of those NKVD motorized divisions. Apparently this routed from the central pocket or something. Anyway, as far as I am concerned this is the best unit I have. It has very few men and is extremely expendable, but yet it is motorized and so it can have a lot of movement points. If the game let me pay 8 AP to build more of these, I would totally spend all my AP on that. But alas, it does not. [:o]

The game spoiling all my fun [:(]


As a side note, currently one of my biggest problems is probably not having the transport planes. A lot of my newly arrived units have relatively low supply initially, which normally you can top off with transport planes. So disbanding those hurts fairly substantially at least for the first 2-3 turns until supply stabilizes. This is also because a lot of units receive manpower reinforcements for part of their freight rather than supply.

[DeletedUser1769703214]

The leader deaths are so nice!!!! Germany can really do a number on the Soviets leadership for sure. Thanks for showing but to "me" this is beyond absurd.

[Beethoven1]

Army Group North has encountered some difficulties, thanks to the hordes of expendable units railed up from the south. It is really nice to have all these extra NKVD border guards, airborne divisions, and anti-tank brigades around:



So has Army Group Center, despite a fairly cautious advance on the land bridge. It is 12th and 7th Panzer division here. You could say it is his fault for getting cut off, "he should have spaced out his units rather than doubling up." But if he did that, he would run the risk of getting attacked and losing a lot of Panzers, since I have many high CV and high TOE units around here, including 2 tank divisions which already have 14 CV and a mech division with 10 CV. And those are not even quite at 100% CPP yet. The tanks are in the 70s and the mech is in the 40s. So he was sort of damned if he does, damned if he doesn't here:



Meanwhile further to the south (but still AGC), I could cut him off, but it is probably not really worth it, because the only unit that has the MP to do it is my 66 morale NKVD motorized division, not a unit I would really like to sacrifice. In any case, his supply and MP should not be particularly good for those units next turn due to the ZOC from the infantry and how overextended they are through a lot of bad terrain. Plus the rain.

[RedJohn]

10 Units isolated this turn - very frustrating. Masses of useless NKVD and other units can completely cut supply, and my only counter is mass regimenting which leaves me vulnerable to counterattack. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Still, Kiev, Nikolaev, and Talinn all fall this turn. Supply is also still looking good.

Infantry are also now reaching the front. This is where I hope to begin grinding, and is where the handicap of not being able to use armies should really prove terrible here. But I could be wrong, we'll see. Soviet casualties rise to 1.17 million, vs 43,000 axis. 142 AFVs have been lost so far, vs 6,700 soviet. There have been no more potential pockets.

[Stamb]

Huge problem is binary CPP system which means that you still lose 50% CPP even if you attack some weak units.
Looking at Smolensk - I imagine how all of this CPP disappear. Some might say - split division into regiments, attack with regiment, combine them again, save CPP. But if there will be not enough fire power in a regiment + some reserve activation - as a result hold or pretty big combat delay.

[Beethoven1]

ORIGINAL: Stamb

Huge problem is binary CPP system which means that you still lose 50% CPP even if you attack some weak units.
Looking at Smolensk - I imagine how all of this CPP disappear. Some might say - split division into regiments, attack with regiment, combine them again, save CPP. But if there will be not enough fire power in a regiment + some reserve activation - as a result hold or pretty big combat delay.

Yep. If you try to attack my 0.1 CV NKVD border guard unit with a hasty attack from a regiment, don't be surprised when my 10 CV high morale mountaineer suddenly shows up in a reserve activation, and then there is a HOLD. And since then you have to attack the hex again, the hold causes additional combat delay, so now you can't advance through the hex the NKVD border guard was blocking.

[Beethoven1]

Soviet Turn 4

I took 175k losses (138k of which were non-isolated, the rest were still turn 1 pockets being cleaned up).

Bread tried doing some interdiction in the north. This had absolutely 0 impact on the movement costs of my units in clear terrain. It costs 1 MP to move in clear terrain normally, and also costs 1 MP when there is interdiction.



It is counterintuitive that interdiction is basically non-effective in clear terrain, but can have some effect in swamp/heavy forest. You would think that interdiction would be most effective in clear terrain, because there is nowhere particularly to hide from the bombers. But it is the opposite. So if interdiction is supposed to be actually useful for reducing enemy MP, IMO it needs to be buffed, in particular in clear terrain.

The other problem with interdiction is that for it to have an impact on enemy movement, you pretty much need every single hex to be interdicted successfully in a box of multiple hexes that you interdict. If you don't interdict all hexes, then there will usually be a path through which enemy units can travel to avoid the interdiction and only go through non-interdicted hexes. In this case, Bread's interdiction was pretty successful. However, if I had not disbanded my air force and randomly intercepted some of his bombing missions, then when he was bombing those hexes it would have been more likely to be unsuccessful. And you only need a couple of non-interdicted hexes to spoil the whole effect.

[Stamb]

Same experience with interdiction from a partisans. I do not care about it. At all. I just care about green triangle (or some other figure) in that Theater box.

[RedJohn]

Partisan interdiction I believe is mostly impacting the SMP cost of supply movement, as opposed to actual unit movement. Maybe at ridiculous levels it would.

[Stamb]

From a manual.

[Stamb]

But at least something working into Axis favor

[Beethoven1]

Soviet Turn 4

Tallinn fell, despite being defended by 3 strong divisions, it was not enough. Not 100% sure if it was worth sacrificing those, but maybe. The positive side is that I think quite a bit of free rail repair was avoided. However, that was at least as much because of all the other units there:



Just consolidation around Pskov, really not much more he could do with all the units I had snaking behind his lines:



He advanced into the empty areas near Smolensk:



I was hugging his units here across the river. Since he had only advanced on a thin slice, I was hoping the ZOC would hurt his supply because of trucks having to use extra MP to deliver supplies in the difficult terrain. I was also hoping that this might drain away enough MP that he would not be able to have MP to both attack across the river and then subsequently move across it. But alas, he got across.

So I might have been better off defending only behind the river, because I took a pretty large number of losses in these battles. On the other hand, his bridgehead is very small still.

On a positive note, after he got across he scouted my 66 morale NKVD motorized division, so that got a win. I had that on reserve, was hoping it would join any attack across the river to try to help hold it.



Kiev has fallen. It was heroically defended by the MOSCOW (not Kiev) militia. I had a handful of units behind the river to try to increase the MP cost of crossing it with ZOC.



Similarly down here, a couple units behind the river to block hex conversion/crossing with ZOC. I had some NKVD to defend the ports so that the ports would get slightly more damaged. But other than that extremely minimalistic defense, the area was abandoned.

[Beethoven1]

Also it is worth noting, despite me defending Tallinn with 3 divisions with about 100 combined defensive CV, and also despite me defending in the Baltics much more tenaciously with a lot more units than would usually be possible for Soviets, Axis gets +6 bonus VP for early capture. The only places where the VP system really rewards Soviets for defending early on are Pskov and Smolensk. So at least if you are playing for VP, why bother defending anywhere else? Just defend Pskov and Smolensk.

[Beethoven1]

Soviet Turn 4

Soviets gain 6 bonus VP from re-capturing Kiev earlier than historical!!! Victory is at hand, we are driving the invader back in the south!!!!!!







Bread is doing the math to determine how many VP he will need to get a sudden death victory. If he gets just 6 short or something and these Kiev bonus VP end up being the difference, we can maybe call it an "honorable mention sudden death victory" or something.

[Stamb]

lol
A good way of fixing it - no VP bonus for Soviets until initiative switch. Right now it is a stupid situation where Axis do not take cities as they can lose this cities and VP cuz of a winter/bug with an urban combat.