Soviet Turn 3
This turn was a real doozy...
Around Demyansk, mostly I was just trying to cycle as many troops as possible south to deal with the German attack towards the double rail line. However, I did this one attack because I had troops there that I couldn't really move, and thought it might succeed due to the clear terrain. And if it did succeed, it would be a big problem for Germany in combination with what you can see coming up from Velikie Luki.
And this is what was coming from Velikie Luki. I attacked a couple German regiments, and both routed. In general it seems like regiments and any sort of weak unit routs a LOT more easily in this new patch than in the old one. German regiments could not really hold anything before against serious attack, and now they REALLY can't. Almost every time I attacked a German regiment, they routed. So the changes to the ground combat system don't necessarily seem to help Germany as much as I thought they would. I advanced a little bit and cut one of the rails to Pskov through empty territory with no German troops. To the south of V.L., I did two attacks on German Panzers that had just attacked me the previous turn and so they were relatively weak as a result.
I was a bit worried about the AFV losses from attacking Panzers using my own tanks, but they were actually very good. I think this might be another manifestation of the ground combat in the new patch being bad for weak units, this Panzer division had only 44 cv against 216 attacking CV:
The Germans in this one were somewhat stronger, and AFV losses were a bit less favorable (but still the losses here are pretty good for me):
I did interdiction missions with 75 planes bombing on all of these hexes here (with IL-2s doing all or basically all of the interdiction bombing). But only about half of the hexes actually got the red start indicator of actually being interdicted.
I was hoping that by doing interdiction I could make the German supply worse by increasing the MP for the supply trucks, but this seems pretty pointless. Since whether interdiction works or not is random for each hex, if you have to interdict more than a few hexes, there will probably be a path of un-interdicted hexes that supply can travel through, so interdiction will (I assume) end up having little impact. I assume supply trucks can just follow these paths to the leading units, going through the hexes that were not interdicted succesfully:
If that is the case, then it seems almost pointless to do interdiction like this, because by random chance there should basically always be some sort of un-interdicted path. Either that or I am doing something wrong. But I thought 75 IL-2s should do the trick (75 of them did in fact bomb each of those hexes).
Now a word about the ground. I was fairly lucky with the timing of the German attack here, because the previous turn I was railing in a Guards rifle Corps and also a lot of Airborne units to V.L, but they did not have enough MP to unload from their trains at the end of the turn (because I think the V.L. rail had not finished repairing yet), so they were still on the train at the start of this turn. That meant they could just take the train back up and plop down in front of the German spearhead:
The 22=85 Guards Rifle Corps (black circle) did exactly that, and plopped down right smack in front of the key part of the spearhead. I also put the airborne units in various places, you can see some of them circled in red, but they are also mixed in behind the other stacks. In another turn or two each of these should also turn into a Guards Airborne Division.
The blue circled units are additional Guards Rifle Corps I railed in this turn in response (not yet off the trains, so hopefully they won't get attacked).
There was also one hex (highlighted yellow) where the ONLY unit that could reach was an artillery division. So... I guess Germany is going to destroy some artillery next turn....
I think the amount of troops I was able to get here should be able to stop this attack, at minimum I doubt they can go straight through the Guards Rifle Corps. The vulnerable points where they might be able to do something are probably the 6=33 hex, or maybe they can do something by attacking to the north or to the south. But going north/south is further to get to the double rail, so hopefully this should be enough.
My plan for the center area from ~Orel to Voronezh was not to attack until 1943, because then I get another assault front, and by then all the HQs should be unlocked so I could organize things properly then finally with less effort. But due to the German attack on the VL salient, I figured that I needed to put some pressure on other parts of the map, to try to help persuade them to call off that attack.
So I attacked here against weak units (regiments). Note that I am not doing anything special, I didn't even attach tanks to the attacking divisions, and am not attacking with assault fronts for most of these attacks (because I don't have enough assault front capacity yet, part of why I was planning to wait until 1943). But even without tanks attached etc, routs of German regiments seem extremely common, it definitely feels like a lot more than the previous patch:
This one against two regiments was actually a retreat. But then I follow-up attacked them, the two attacks in hexes behind were both routs on both of them.
It seems like the routing is mostly a regiment thing. Regiments will everywhere and always rout. But divisions are seemingly a lot harder to attack and can hold. This division did hold. Although then I attacked it again, and it retreated:
Here is another one following that general pattern. Of these 5 hexes I attacked (without assault fronts), only one held, this one. But then I attacked it again and it routed. 3 of the 4 other hexes where I attacked regiments also routed:
From the German perspective, apparently the units I was attacking in this area were locked. Although the ones I attack apparently get unlocked, but other units don't, so Germany can't really respond. All the frozen units really do seem like a problem with the scenario design, because situations often seem to arise in the first few turns when one side attacks somewhere that there was not historically an attack, and then the other side cannot respond in a sensible way because their units are locked...
Now to Stalingrad. First, a reminder of what it was like at the start of the turn. This mech for example had 39 MP, a lot of the other ones were similar, generally in the 30-40 range except for ones that had just routed which were lower:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... nknown.png
The supply on that was coming from 17 and 14 hexes away, which is 49 MP or 37 MP from those two depots. I had supply priority 4 on (for the entire Red Army), but these and other units generally seemed to be more or less getting supply.
Here's the logistics report, with some of the armies in the Stalingrad area highlighted in yellow. All were getting more supply than they need, despite being fairly far from their depots in bad weather:
And here's what happened given that:
In the circled area, I was trying to herd units into a pocket, but they routed instead. Everywhere else here was attacks against either Italians or Romanians. All of these were routs, except the Italian mountaineers did not rout... not at first... First they retreated... then they also routed when attacked a second time... So yeah, everything did rout, although it took them more than one try to rout.
I started attacking the Stalingrad pocket, the reason being:
a) I still was not sure if some sort of relief effort was coming, and although my troops had advanced a long way, they were mostly very weak and SURELY sooner or later the supply should hit me, right?
b) For that same supply reason, presumably I can't advance THAT much further without getting more depots online, and that requires connecting the rail through Stalingrad, which requires eliminating the pocket.
This attack on level 4 forts took 3 tries, but the third one was the charm:
An isolated Panzer division was forced to surrender. I ZOC-locked this division starting in turn 1, so it never really had much chance to move or do anything. The other surrenders further to the right were Romanians, don't mind them.
Over here another Panzer and Motorized division (plus an infantry regiment) are isolated:
Apparently these had been railed in, but were overrun before they could even get off their trains:
And over here yet another Panzer and Motorized division are isolated. The previous turn the motorized division had tried to rescue the Panzer division which had been isolated then. The Motorized division did link back up with the Panzer division, but then I herded the motorized division back into the pocket as well this turn:
And here's the Caucasus. Just Germany trying to retreat here. some of the regiments of the Wiking division had been ZOC locked, I think that is the one circled. It only just now escaped ZOC-lock, and we are already close to Rostov before it could escape and start to really retreat:
So I think to keep this game viable and balanced we will probably need to let 6th Army out of Stalingrad, at least as long as Germany doesn't actually manage to cut the rail to Velikie Luki (which would be a massive disaster which would probably offset Stalingrad).
From what I can tell, the problem here is not just Stalingrad being encircled, the problem is basically that on the one hand Soviets can ZOC lock the small number of German tanks that start in the area of Stalingrad starting on turn 1, and if Soviets do that, it is very hard for Germany to break them out, because the only troops anywhere near other than those few Panzer divisions are Romanians and some Italians who will rout every single time Soviets attack them in this patch. Whereas before, Romanians could at least get an OCCASIONAL hold, they are seeming to not get basically any now, and also basically never even retreating, everything is just a rout.
