How to counter grinding tactics

[jasonbroomer]

To define what I mean by 'grinding' is to retreat the enemy to a hex where they can be hit again by armour. This can result is massive losses to the enemy. It appears to be an extremely effective strategy for the axis in the early war.

I don't profess to a strong Soviet player, however, I suspect some of the counters would involved:

a) Ensuring that only high moral/experienced (I am unsure which is more important) troops are placed in vulnerable spots.

b) Block retreat routes to ensure retreated units fall back more than one hex. This may involve triple stacking surrounding hexes. Spam HQs are very useful in this role

Feedback welcome!

[RedJohn]

I'm also interested in this. Anyone?

[ringhloth]

41, it's hard. The best way would be to retreat or rout far enough that you aren't in danger of a second battle. I am not going to get into herding here, since that's a different beast entirely, but that's the core of it. I guess that would mean triple stacking as much as you can in the front and second lines, unlike the spread out strategies of yore to reduce CPP.

The second best way is to never be in DA range of infantry. It's harder, and more costly, to do the initial attack with armor and then follow up with either the same or other armor. However, this means you're likely giving up good ground for no cost to the axis.

My two cents as a relatively inexperienced observer.

[Beethoven1]

There are some limited things you can do.

IF YOU ARE AXIS

There is a lot less you can do, because you simply do not have enough counters to be able to defend in depth in any significant way. This means that, at least in 1943-45, and also in first winter, Soviets can grind and there is really not much you can do to prevent it other than retreat. Axis are also extremely vulnerable to swarming by large numbers of Soviet counters in the late game for the same reason (lack of sufficient counters). Soviets can be like a swarm of ants with lots of low CV units devouring and pocketing strong Axis units ("ants eating a lion"), and there can simply be too many Soviet counters on too many hexes in order for Axis to have enough MP to counterattack them all (and because binary isolation is set each tun, all counterattacks have to be done in a single turn, or else your "lions" will be isolated and will surrender the next turn. So typically, some combination of grinding and swarming will lead to rapid Axis collapse in late game scenarios.

The main thing that helps is you can play with a modded scenario where you increase the national morale of both sides. This does 2 things.

1) It tends to cause final CVs to collapse to a lesser extent when you lose a battle, and decreases losses from follow up attacks to more reasonable levels. Here are some examples from a Stalingrad to Berlin game I have been playing with Stamb, which we modded so that Soviets and Axis both get plus 10 national morale across the board (and Romanians and Italians get +15).

Initial attack:

Follow up:

Initial attack:

Follow up:

The same sort of effects of less ridiculously lopsided losses apply when Soviets grind against Axis.

The losses from grinding are still substantial, and the loss ratio is still very favorable to the Axis grinder, but the results are a lot less extreme than in vanilla. In both of those follow up attacks, in vanilla there is a very high chance the defender would suffer close to 100% losses. In the 2nd of the 2 follow up attacks, the Soviet division did not even rout due to the higher morale. So the higher morale makes defenders more durable against grinding.


2) It means you can bring more units onto the map from theater boxes, so it actually allows Axis to have a minimal amount of defense in depth and reserves. Obviously, it is not possible to use regiments in any significant way, so the only way to get more counters and have some a reasonable number of reserves is to get them from theater boxes.


IF YOU ARE SOVIETS

There are still only limited things Soviets can do to defend against grinding, but they can at least do a bit more because they have more counters than Axis.

1) Only use a few of your air HQs for planes. The rest of them you should use as anti-herding counters. Set them on 50% max TOE and change their color to black so you can visually identify them.

2) Bring as many army/corps HQs which have bad leaders as you can to the map and change their color to black so you can visually identify them.

3) When you have depleted or routed units, do not necessarily refit them, especially if they have 0 men left (or as close as possible to 0). Instead, you can set them to 50% max TOE, and do NOT set them on refit. Make sure plenty of your OTHER divisions are on refit, so that your depleted units will NOT get any replacements and will stay depleted. Then assign them to one of your black colored army HQs so they will be colored black and you can visually identify them.

4) You can then use all the black colored counters for anti-herding.

5) Be careful to avoid counterattacks (in particular successful ones, unsuccessful ones are fine). The problem with counterattacks, if they are successful, is that they flip the hex you counterattack to your control. That means that in the subsequent turn, your units can be herded into those hexes which you just attacked. So in some circumstances it may be a bad idea to counterattack even if it is an easy win.

6) When defending, defend every single hex with at least something, even if it is bad terrain etc which you don't really want to defend. You have to do this, because if you do not, your units can be made to retreat onto that hex, and then a follow up attack can be done without a level 1 fort against 3 retreated units, which will inflict 100% losses and probably 30k losses or so.

7) Do NOT do small tactical retreats. The problem is if you retreat a few hexes here and there, that the hexes you retreat from will not automatically flip to enemy control. Instead, they remain under your control, and you can be herded into them by a skilled herder/grinder. So when you are retreating, for the most part you should either retreat with your entire line or not retreat at all. Only do strategic retreats, not tactical ones.

8) So ideally, where you do defend, you should defend every single hex in places where you do defend with triple stacks. You also need ideally to have at least 2 rows of triple stacks. That way, your first row of units will retreat behind your second row of units, rather then just retreating 1 hex and then falling victim to a follow up attack (and since you are defending every single hex, it is not possible for you to retreat towards the enemy, so you will have to retreat behind your first line of triple stacks). If you do not have enough units for that, you may need to e.g. defend with 2 rows of double stacks or with one row of triple stacks and a row of single stacks behind it. Either of those are way worse.

9) Since you do not have enough counters to have triple stacks (much less 2+ rows of triple stacks) across the entire map, it is basically mandatory that you abandon some parts of the map. In 1941, probably the most you can manage is to defend Leningrad and Moscow. In 1942, you will also have to defend Saratov, because it is a NSS. That may mean you need to abandon Leningrad in 1942 and just focus on only defending Moscow and Saratov with mega-blobs of triple stacks, and more or less abandon everywhere else on the map.




Here are some concrete examples. Here is an example from my game with Vet (I did not color all my anti-herding units black, but they are in the triple stacks generally with 0-1 cv).



The problem here is I wanted to defend the 2 swamp hexes with the 14=55 stack and the 15=61 stack. However, the problem is that if I just defended them normally, Vet would attack my 14=55 and 15=61 stacks, and they would retreat onto clear terrain around Yelnya, perhaps even without a level 1 fort. Then Vet would do follow up attacks on the retreated units, an they would take probably close to 100% losses. Those were both strong stacks with 40-50k men, so that would mean I could potentially take up to 100k losses just from those 2 stacks alone (nevermind all the other attacks across the rest of the front).

So I put these anti-herding stacks in place on the clear hexes, to prevent my good units from retreating there. Instead of retreating onto those hexes, this means that my strong units would likely retreat onto some of the hexes marked by the red arrows (depending on how exactly Vet attacked). Not all of those are perfectly ideal hexes to retreat onto, but at least in all those cases I would be retreating on top of some sort of other unit, which hopefully would build a level 1 fort to partly shield my retreated units. Also, in most cases they would retreat 2 hexes behind my line rather than 1 hex behind, which means that it would be harder for Vet to reach them (through the combat delay etc) to do a follow up attack. Of course, I would take higher retreat losses from retreating 2 hexes than 1 hex due to the way the game is programmed, but that is still way better than taking 100% losses on a follow up attack.

You do have to be very careful how you do this though, because you do NOT want your units to end up retreating to the west, especially onto clear hexes (for example, these red arrows):



In this case, I judged there was not a high risk of that, but it might have been possible depending on how Vet manipulated the ZOC.

There are 2 types of anti-herding stacks. In the first type, you have 3 counters that all have 0 CV (HQs or depleted/routed units). In the second type, you have 2 counters that have 0 CV and a 3rd counter which has a very low CV and very few men, which is a sacrificial suicide unit (ideally something like an airborne brigade, but in some cases you may also have to use cavalry, rifle brigades, or very low strength unready rifle divisions etc). In stacks with a suicide unit, the suicide unit is necessary so that the stack of HQs/depleted units does not displace when the attacker moves next to it. Also the suicide unit does have the bonus of creating a combat delay. You can use 0 CV stacks of 3 depleted/HQ units in some cases if you are far enough behind the line that you are quite sure you won't be displaced, but otherwise you need a suicide unit as well as the HQs/depleted ones.



Here's another example also from my game against Vet (a bit earlier), where I made prominent use of a suicide unit + HQ stack. From Vet's perspective:



Vet amusingly thought the purpose was to try to get some of my leaders killed to get free good leaders without having to spend AP. At this early stage in the game, I would not have minded that, but the primary purpose was anti-herding. Later on, once you already have your good leaders, I would have actively NOT wanted these bad leaders to be killed, because if they were replaced with decent leaders then I would subsequently have to risk decent leaders being killed. So really you want as many leaders who are as bad as possible. In some cases later in the game when you have extra AP, you might want to to spend AP in order to replace some decent leaders with bad leaders so that you can get more anti-herding HQs.

One thing you could potentially do is make a house rule that if leaders are randomly killed in a suicide HQ stack, then the attacker has to re-do the attack. Could be a good house rule IMO. Or you could also mod mod the game to add a few hundred air HQs for each side, all of which have only 1 man or 0 men in them, which both sides could then use for anti-herding stacks.

Anyway, from my perspective (also it is similar around Pskov):



I decided I had to occupy the red hex, because unfortunately Vet did not flip it during his previous turn. I did not want to own that hex, but I had no way to give it to him and no way to force him to flip it.

So the problem was that if I did not occupy it, he could herd my 14=37 stack to the southwest and then hit it with a follow up attack to inflict 100% losses. By occupying it, this meant that at least my units in he 14=37 stack would retreat onto the 1=3 and/or 3=7. That was not much better, but at least they had level 1 forts that way.

However, moving the cav in flipped the blue hex, so I also had to defend that with a similar stack of HQs and a suicide cav (although this was somewhat useful since it also provided a layer of combat delay for the 3=7 stack to sit behind).

I also set the black 1=1 hex (1 routed unit, a depleted unit, and an airborne brigade) on the black hex to prevent my 17=36 stack or my 4=32 stack from retreating onto that clear hex. Instead, the 17=36 stack would likely retreat along the red arrows. and the 4=32 stack would likely retreat north-east onto the swamp where the 1=2 green division was. But it did still depend on exactly how Vet set things up.

I also put a HQ with a not great leader on the green 10=10 hex so that there would be 2 counters there. That is because I wanted a max of 1 division to retreat onto that hex, so that from the 17=36 stack, at least some of them would retreat onto the other (swamp) hexes

However, you can clearly see I did not really have enough units here to do proper anti-herding here. For this reason, it is necessary that you abandon some parts of the map, especially as Soviets in early 1941. Otherwise you simply will not have enough counters on the map to be able to undertake anti-herding, and will take unsustainable losses from grinding. You will probably take unsustainable losses anyway, but at least a bit lower losses can be achieved. For this reason, it is likely unviable for Soviets to play Sudden Death against a skilled Axis player who is willing to grind (especially if they are also capable of pocketing under the right narrow circumstances), because it is simply not possible to defend areas such as Voronezh, Krasnodar, Tambov etc in 1942 due to lack of a large enough anti-herding counters. However, No Early End games may still be viable (but difficult) for the Soviet player.

These sorts of anti-herding tactics can help a bit to counter grinding. However, they only go so far (partly because there are just not really enough anti-herding units), and a skilled grinder such as Vet can still inflict extremely high losses even if you do these sorts of things. Also, the fact that you need to use suicide units along with many of the HQs and depleted units means that your suicide losses add up. And even though it is preferable to take e.g. 2k-4k losses from a routed airborne brigade or cav, that is still preferable to taking up to 30k losses from a grindy follow up attack.

[HardLuckYetAgain]

So we should not follow this example any longer? ;-P

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 2&t=379102

[Veterin]

Now that our game is over, i can post on the topic.

A lot of what Beethoven said works to some extent but i don't think you can ever stop moto/panzer follow up attacks on retreated units. Where you do have more influence to counter it is in how you position your defence to make it difficult to herd and make it expensive in MPs and supply for Panzers to follow up. "Grinding" is actually fairly fuel/ammo intensive and whilst losses appear light on the 99:1 CV routs, there are higher number of damaged AFV elements and in 41, a damaged AFV is equivalent to a destroyed as it wont refill your TOE until 42 due to supply.

The issue for Axis is in 42 though as amazing supply removes any constraint and the Axis war machine will plow through any Soviet defence turn after turn.

This is an example from our game where there was favourable terrain/fortifications you wanted to hold but it exposed your units to a low risk herding opportunity. There are a trade offs in any strategy but salients create more favourable herding opportunities.

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The unit i wanted to herd was the 16=52 so i needed to cut of retreat paths. First i attack directly north west to flip that hex. My recon showed me you already had a tripe stack north east so that also blocked of retreat paths in that direction. All i had to do in this example was to capture that hex directly east and your triple stack would retreat towards Durovo.

This hex is clear terrain, no fort and my panzers/moto can attack it spending little MPs and also ending the turn in friendly territory with the CPP bonus.

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You had some good ZOC on the way to clearing that hex so i cleared that first then got a moto unit in to flip that hex directly east of your strong stack. I was planning to regiment this moto unit, flip the hex i needed and then retreat but as there was a weak cav there, i was able to hasty attack to flip the hex and saved a lot of MPs in the process

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Before i made my displacement attack, i retreated my 5=5 moto unit further back. When an enemy unit retreats into enemy ZOC, there is an increased chance of routing and in this case, i didnt want them to rout. This is where herding becomes "expensive" as losses are fairly high on the Axis infantry (lots of damaged elements too!). A relatively low CV win is needed to retreat rather than rout but this increases losses on our infantry. Following the battle, it retreated to the only hex it could as all other options were negated.

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Follow up attack with overwhelming CV dominance and moto/panzer into Infantry often creates results like this.