Correcting 1941 game balance

[s2tanker]

I still find that, between two equally matched players - or simply an experienced Red Army player - it remains impossible for the German army to achieve historical 1941 results.

Of course, this is because the Soviet player has the foresight to know what's coming and to know the capabilities of the Wehrmacht.

There may be easy fixes within the current coding of the game. Here are three suggestions:

1) Allow for a manual industry evacuation and make the production penalty for overrun factories more severe - this, of course, forces the Soviet player to have a true tradeoff between delaying the German advance and potentially risking encirclement.

2) Reduce morale in hard hit units for the first month or so, then climbing up with the fall mud.

3) Make the poor leader penalty higher, especially for movement and morale checks. The Red Army before the winter should only be capable of very modest or regionally limited counter attacks.

[HardLuckYetAgain]

I still find that, between two equally matched players - or simply an experienced Red Army player - it remains impossible for the German army to achieve historical 1941 results.

Of course, this is because the Soviet player has the foresight to know what's coming and to know the capabilities of the Wehrmacht.

There may be easy fixes within the current coding of the game. Here are three suggestions:

1) Allow for a manual industry evacuation and make the production penalty for overrun factories more severe - this, of course, forces the Soviet player to have a true tradeoff between delaying the German advance and potentially risking encirclement.

2) Reduce morale in hard hit units for the first month or so, then climbing up with the fall mud.

3) Make the poor leader penalty higher, especially for movement and morale checks. The Red Army before the winter should only be capable of very modest or regionally limited counter attacks.

I like the industry evacuation Right now Soviets just retreat and retreat just staying out of range. You can force them to fight at Leningrad and Moscow but bring the right amount of Germans to get the job done.

The Soviets are using their ability to save CP an smash Germans when the Germans are at the lowest. When making that contact the Germans have to be ready is what I have found. Having said that I am playing Chaos45 who is experienced and have pretty much come to historical results so far turn 12.

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[chaos45]

Historical 1941 results for Germans is actually IMO pretty easy provided the German player does a decent opening.

Many of the more recent game starts I have seen have had mainly horrible German opening turns which then results in the Soviet player having about 20-30 divisions more than a good German opening would allow for.

Allowing the Soviet player to keep that many more divisions and often among the best starting divisions since these are typically the southern divisions means the German player defacto loses the game T1.

If you want to play Germans have to do an almost flawless T1 assault if you succeed in that you havea chance, if you mess it up and allow the soviets a free extra front you most likely will get slowed and then stopped.

[s2tanker]

Well, again, massively ahistorical for such a detailed wargame.

In the south, the Germans only pocketed the 6th and 12th Armies around Uman by 2 August. Prior to that, the Red Army conducted vigorous tank attacks northeast of Lvov, these holding up the German advance for a few days.

The Germans didn't close the pocket on the Southwest Front until the first week of September.

Color me as bordering on uninterested in a simulation that... can't simulate.

[K62_]

Are you suggesting that the Germans are either too weak or too strong in 1941? If you mean the latter, I tend to agree. While the game is certainly complex, it provides the German player with a wide range of tools that, when properly understood and used, can be very effective. A German advance that uses good logistics, good recon, thorough understanding of movement costs, good SU management and effective air support can be incredibly challenging for the Soviets to counter in 1941.

However, I’ve noticed many Axis players jump straight into GC41 too soon after completing the tutorial. In my experience, this often leads people to get stuck. I believe that players who take the time to familiarize themselves with the game's mechanics by playing the smaller scenarios, carefully studying the manual, and even playing Soviets for a while, get a much deeper understanding of the tools at the Axis player’s disposal and how to use them effectively.

[chaos45]

A good German T1 opening IMO makes/means the Germans are a bit to strong compared to historical.

German players can easily grind/pocket 100k+ Soviets per week almost all of 1941 leaving the Soviet OOB fairly weak going into winter to where most likely the winter offensive will be hampered by German fortifications/terrain and to weak of an OOB to effectively counterattack.

That said a weak German opening does almost the opposite and means the Soviets get/keep enough men from the borders that that can actually counterattack early on and make the German advance much more contested.

So its a very fine line. Overall tho in 1941 Germans are probably abit overtuned/to strong if the German player understands the game.

[s2tanker]

"The German army captured 3.35 million Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in 1941, which was higher than the Red Army's reported number of missing by up to one million."

There are five months from invasion to November, at 100K per week (turn), that's about 2.1 million Red Army POWs. Right in line with Soviet estimates of their missing.

Yet, the dozens of games I've played, from beta testing on, suggests that a good Soviet player simply does two things: keep Leningrad and retreat everywhere else, confident in the fact that, no matter what industry is overrun, it will all come back eventually.

[s2tanker]

Another tweak to experiment with might be to reduce the turn length from 7 days to 5, correspondingly reducing the movement points by 2/7th. This might somewhat reduce the IGYG artificiality of the gameplay.

[s2tanker]

And, regarding the observation, now made twice, about the importance of the first turn in the game for the Germans - that's my point. A game dependent on having an ahistorical first turn to even attempt to reach a historical 1941 campaign has a serious flaw - insofar as a game that is modeling history and historical capabilities.

[HardLuckYetAgain]

I can get historical results "without" doing a Lvov pocket as Germany. ( I have some AARs showing it) will even not do any bombing first turn and still get to German map locations they did. So going back to your original statement in first post stating the following;

I still find that, between two equally matched players - or simply an experienced Red Army player - it remains impossible for the German army to achieve historical 1941 results.

My question is why is that the case? Is it the game? The player? Too much freedom of unit movement? ETC ETC ETC. I have my answer and I personally play the game as a game. I just am not going to fight the specter of historical realty. The second a counter is moved it is not historical no matter how you spin it. But I enjoy the game for what it is, a game and a damn good game at that with great support from the developers.

[DocHawkeye]

Fact to me seems to be that the Germans were significantly “aided” by none other than Stalin and the frustrating incompetence of his leadership and micromanagement during the first season of the war backed up by the NKVD’s ruthless scapegoating of battlefield commanders for political reasons, regardless of the sensibility of their decisions. I’ve considered running a modded game file “freezing” more units in cities and towns which are obviously indefensible to just force the player to factor in Stalin’s intransigence during 1941 and his inflexibility costing the Red Army millions of lives which went on much longer than the first week of the war. Otherwise, it’s too easy to be rational and just make logical decisions with the Red Army which wasn’t the truth of 1941. Having competent commanders shot while putting Budyonny back in charge, ordering completely dismembered Divisions to fight on instead of reorganizing them, ignoring obvious warnings about the Kiev pocket, forcing the VVS to expend thousands of worthless planes and untrained pilots uselessly, are all things that happened under Stalin’s leadership but you as the player will never actually allow to happen because you know better than to play the game like that. The game doesn’t incentivize you to do a bad job in 1941 beyond the bad command checks of the first few turns-a really rough mechanical conceit I think that is easily sidelined.

After playing the Soviet Union I definitely think from now on I will be disabling hex delays at least because of how harshly they penalize the Panzer Divisions when they should be absolutely tearing Red Army lines to ribbons all the time. It’s just too easy to contain PD’s and frustrate an advance with hex delays by just chucking anything in front of them. Mobs of riflemen and pitchforks they would quite literally ignore. The knock on effect of this is the ease with which breakthroughs are observed and reacted to. It takes weeks for mechanized units to create encirclements, it’d happen in days. Inside the effective reaction time of “the 1941 OODA loop”. The way the game is now nobody ever just lets an encirclement happen. The Panzers were the “hack” of war in 1941 because they were sealing Armies away from their C2 links before anyone had the chance to react. You wouldn’t know that from vanilla WitE2.

[Von Manstein777]

The original post contains SPOT ON observations! The current imbalances are so pro-Soviet that they ruin the gameplay between equally matched opponents. BUT, I think these observations get to the heart of the matter for an elegant fix that restores play balance and historical realism. I agree that a key problem is that the game system needs to establish a tradeoff that keeps the Soviet Army from fleeing to the hinterland. Also, the Soviet Army "recovers" way too quickly (it's years before they are able to work in coordination and in depth. Even more importantly IMO, the designers need to revise the whole 1941 Winter Rules so that the SOVIETS are historically impacted too! Currently, its as if only the Germans are affected by the conditions and the gamey outcomes are unworthy of what should be the Eastern Front's greatest game. The Soviets also suffer from an army that is incapable of In Depth/Coordinated Operations at this point in the war (the game rules need to handicap the Soviets abilities to match their historical limitations).

[Von Manstein777]

I think the following areas need revision to restore historical accuracy to the system:

1. Soviets shouldn't be prevented from fleeing in 1941 BUT game system needs some tradeoff for this behavior. I think paying a real price for the lost factory withdrawals, as mentioned above, is the way to handle this. [1941 Soviet Flight]
2. 1941 Winter Rules need serious overhaul. The German is too crippled by the "special" rules and the Soviets are not hampered enough. For instance, the actual 4th Pz Army was able to cut off a major Soviet incursion in front of Moscow and trap large Soviet forces DURING THIS VERY WINTER, Cholm was able to hold out... Currently, in the game the German's offensive power goes to basically ZERO, especially for PZ and Mot divisions. This is clearly overkill and results in game outcomes that were impossible for the Soviets to achieve in 1941.
3. Soviets need a "Commissar" system that affects their combat command that gradually decreases during the war. Each Soviet Commander's Commissar steps in and provides oversight on every battle. In general, the Commissars will mostly impact offensive operations by impacting Attacks (80/20 negatively) representing the lack of clear authority and second-guessing. In general, they will not affect Defense (suggest a 60/40 positive impact on defense). This would represent the height of the effect in 1941 and would decrease yearly, disappearing completely in 1944. [Commissar System 1941-1944]
4. Soviet offensive logistical capacity (rail repair and transport availability ) needs to be revised down for 1941 and 1942. Game really misses how much Soviet successes in "Deep Battle" later in the war were the result of all the US support materials (60,000 locomotives, trucks, jeeps et. al.) that took years to arrive, build up and make an impact. [Reduce Soviet Offensive Logistic Improvement Capacity 1941-1942]
5. Isolated units with good morale should have a better chance of surviving more than one turn in isolation. Currently, the historical pockets that existed for both sides in the war AFTER THE SUMMER OF 1941 can't be replicated because the isolated units die too quickly. This should be strongly tied to morale (both unit and commander) [Pocket perseverance]
I believe these 5 improvements would be all it takes to restore historical accuracy and balance back to the game

[56ajax]

1. To prevent the Soviets fleeing consider making the Soviet Army stronger so that they can stand in the field of battle. Also consider giving them 100 CPP as they currently start the game with zero and have no major offensive capacity until T5 at the earliest. Anyway 1941 is about encirclement rather than combat so perhaps dial down Axis movement capability. But then if the choice is between losing an Army and a factory instead of just a factory I chose the later.

2. Winter rules need serious overhaul. You can say that aagain. Currently the Axis can stay on the offensive in Dec ember 41, destroying any possibility of a Soviet counter offensive.

3. I would love a Commissar system if they could remove incompetent commanders. It currently costs 10-15 admin points to remove them, more than half the weekly allocation.

4. Dont have a problem with scaling it down for 1941 as the Soviets would have to be bonkers to go on the offensive in 1941. Still the Soviets never run out of supplies so perhaps some merit in this, but not too much as the Sovs wont be able to do their historical winter counter offensive.

5. Seems like another pro axis mod as the Axis has higher morale.

(you may have gathered that I consider the current state of the game as being pro Axis)