Failure of the Will - GR (allies), loki (axis)

[GloriousRuse]

While screens might not come for a touch until Loki decides how he wants to present this phase, Time permitting I’ll post a bit of analysis tomorrow.

As for dispatches from the front:

July 21st. Kursk on the Seine continues to the south of Paris. A twice panzers were encircled, twice vicious counter attacks broke them out, and twice exposed divisions from those attacks got hammered in turn. Both sides number of ready tanks is plummeting, but little forward progress has been made. Still a few German heavy divisions unaccounted for.

1st Canadian Army, having landed near Calais, rapidly expanded outwards to seize Ostend and Bruges against light resistance, but now more and more forces are conversing on them. One shameful US division routes for reasons I don’t quite understand...slow progress made towards Kortrjik and Ghent as layers of German infantry interpose themselves.

The southern drive continues at pace, pushing hard for the Belfort gap and rails feeding the Paris line while a German covering force tries to slow them down. A collection of German infantry regiments are left behind as speed bumps while and are marched off to POW camps while 1st FJ, 9th Panzer, Schmalz and 16th PzG makes a stand near Lyon, supported by some infantry. Every week seems like the verge of breakout before the Germans rush to cover the new holes. The city itself is nearly surrounded while fast divisions stream north.

[John B.]

Thanks!

[GloriousRuse]

No turn from Loki today, likely on account of him being a productive member of society. So, in that tradition...analysis.

On The Road to Ruin: Casualties

One of the distinct variables in Loki's inland battle strategy is how it plays out in casualties for both sides. The post landing battles are traditionally brutal, crushing the allied VP score while also battering the Germans who - per conventional wisdom at least - will never again have the high water mark strength they do in the summer of '44. In many ways the relative outcome decides a great deal about how the rest of the game will go (yes, this is true of every major phase, but you get my point) as it will determine how much ground the allies will need to take, how many casualties they can take doing it, and how much of the elite heart of the Heer will be around to oppose them. While each player would love to be clever and win through a genius move, a lot of times it comes down to bloody attrition to set the next stage.

As opposed to a slugging battle off the beaches, we've instead begun a titanic armor fight south of Paris, where the Allies have less immediate air power and need a moment to get the supply network caught up.

So far, how has the bleeding gone and what does that say? This goes up to the start of T57 - the end of July - which is where I felt the Heer really started to give way when I was on the German side. It is also, conveniently, the turn I sent Loki most recently.

Both of us landed on the T46-47 turn flip (20 May). The starting losses were different largely due to outcomes in Italy and the early air war. That said, the Loire fight is much bigger than the breakout fights in Picardy - both sides only have scratch forces in Italy in the current game, while everything is in high tempo operations in France. How much did it cost to get where we are by T57?

The Breakout Fight:

For all intents an purposes, this was a pretty good example of the conventional sequence of events in France from landing until late July.

Start Position
-------
Weighing in from their corners, the overall strength on D-Day for both sides started as this:

Axis / Allies:

Men: 2.86M / 3.52M
Ready AFVs: 3,315 / 11,963
Ready Aircraft: 3,694 / 13,377


Already, they had lost the following, including the Italian surrender and the starting losses for the allies:

Axis / Allies

Men: 328k / 241k
AFVs: 1,297 / 4,197
Pilots: 4,401 / 11,840
Aircraft: 7,332 / 12,294
Casualty VPs: -283

-----

Well, 20 weeks later the situation looked radically different. though I didn't have the wit to realize it yet, the German army was reaching it's breaking point and the allied materiel advantage was growing. Within a few weeks I would be fleeing for Lille, leaving behind a deal more infantry than I would have liked. And frankly, had Loki not been gracious, a couple panzer divsions.

By now, the tale of the tape told differently.

Axis / Allies

Ready Men: 2.87M / 3.73M
Ready AFVs: 3,213 / 11,172
Ready Aircraft: 4,257 / 12,644.

And yet, despite the Heer looking like it had actually grown, it was all getting ready to come tumbling down. What those numbers don't show is that they stayed that high because reinforcements are flowing in for both sides throughout this phase. The relative wear on units came from a combination of soft factors and the all too countable losses:

Axis (Change) / Allies (Change)

Men Lost: 463k (135k) / 368k (127k)
AFVs: 2,715 (1,418) / 8,193 (3,792)
Pilots: 4,915 (514) / 15,164 (3,324)
Aircraft: 8,430 (1,098) / 15,164 (2,870)
Casualty VPs: -443 (a change of -160)

Ouch. That's a lot of dying all around. The Germans lost enough men and tanks to fit about 9 divisions of the good stuff. In that time, the Germans should have produced about 812 AFVs to ship west. Or in other words, there is effectively 4 panzer divisions worth of armor delta by now - even if the supply network always got the right tanks to the right place right when they were needed. (Hint: this doesn't happen).

They also lost a trickle of pilots and aircraft, but nothing too outlandish. This largely because after a few runs at the shipping lanes I ceded French airspace. The allies in turn bled quite bit, but expected to...and built up another 200k men of advantage.

And forum character limits mean we'll see the alternative in the next post!

[GloriousRuse]

The Inland Battle

This was a radically different approach to the French problem, so it is worth a quick overview:

Loki barely contested the Normandy landings on, leading to a relatively inexpensive set of opening weeks. In the air, he launched a massive effort against the shipping lanes. While I was cautiously expanding outwards, he used that time to dig a prohibitively expensive (to take) line on the Seine. and shift the bulk of his armor south of Paris. there it waited to attack the inevitable allied attempt to flank the city where the river narrows to a manageable size - looking, presumably for either an opportunity to flank the allied line or at least fight it where the allied supply and air advantages were lessened. He really didn't commit to that attack until the start of July, but then things got ultra violent, including the commitment of a lot of the LW. I, in turn, didn't want to venture much further south in case he actually broke my line (and he still might). As infantry held the west bank of the Seine, we went steel on steel as the weight of the allied armored forces met the panzers in a titanic battle...

As possible confusing factors to the true damage to the Heer, this meant several ports were taken earlier than normal - inflating losses with trash units that have no bearing on the readiness of the field army.

Anyhow, here is the starting tale of the tape. Notice how much better he preserved the Heer in Italy. 100k of men.

-----
Axis / Allies - notes

Ready Men: 2.95M / 3.54M - the extra German 100k men are a direct result of avoiding real destruction in the Italian campaign. Worse, all of the FJs made it out intact.
Ready AFVs: 3,390 /11,511 - you may notice this is close to the breakout scenario despite the 100k man difference - several German heavy formations were singled out for annihilation attacks in the Italian campaign, and a lot of the strat air war in '44 has been hitting AFVs)
Ready Aircraft: 3,164 / 14,132 - this is in a large part due to the landings shooting down 300+ aircraft on the way in. The actual start strengths were pretty equal.

-----
And here is how badly each side had been hurt:

Axis / Allies

Men: 238k / 208k - a lot less for everybody, yet fairly equal starting forces with the first scenario. Presumably this means more German and British manpower is in the kitty.
AFVs: 1,358 / 3,842 - Pretty close for all relevant discussion.
Pilots: 7,005 / 10,492 - Pilots are pretty irrelevant for the allies, but the big naval campaigns near Italy took their toll on the Axis. This isn't breaking point, but it's heading down that road.
Aircraft: 9,506 / 10,999 - Not a hugely relevant category as allied supplies are effectively limitless and the Germans are dictated by pilots, but the one item of note is that this reflects losing a lot more of the level bomber force early.
Casualty VPs: -244

-----

So, where are we today? What is left standing besides burnt out hulks?

----
Axis / Allies

Ready Men: 2.8M / 3.68M - Both sides have had accelerated manpower loss, though again, this is partially deceiving because of ports falling. On the other hand, several of those ports had divisions in them, so it's hard to say if the Heer is any worse off in men.

Ready AFVs: 2,853 / 8,553 - Wow. Steel on steel has not been kind to the allies (also, my aggressive reconnaissance methods have been mauled). That said, as we'll see in losses a lot of this represents damaged tanks. Condensing the major fighting into a few weeks, constant operations, and a long supply chain mean repairs have not been quite as smooth at they could be - in this way the battle location and tempo has been favorable to Loki. The same applies to the Germans, but less so due to nearby depots. It is still approaching the point where any committed panzer division is looking unhappy. This is also slightly deceiving as a comparison to the earlier, because I (and presumably most players) had a few hundred tanks in Italy.

Ready Aircraft: 1,726 / 11,592 - If the allied tank force has been burning at both ends, the LW has been put in front of a blow torch. Barely above half it's starting strength, and that counts those fighters still safely tucked in Germany. A surprising number have died in GS missions shielding the panzers. They've never achieved air superiority, but the sacrifice has bought key moments of air parity.

----

And, of course, the butcher's bill

Axis (Change) / Allies (Change)

Men: 474k (236k) / 303k (95k) - On the German side, the early loss of the ports and their garrisons causes a lot of scary looking loss inflation. More to the point, it has been very all or nothing. While the majority of the heer has sat safely behind the Seine, the divisions that have been lost have been lost entire in ports or pockets down south. Roughly 5 divisions of basic infantry. In a strategic sense, less good, but in a sense of "will the Heer break?" despite the numbers their core infantry in France is intact.

On the allied side, this is letting the WA trade steel to save lives. Which is a very Allied thing to do. The question will come on if that affects follow on operations when the armor is battered, and if Paris will fall quickly enough. At the '44 mark, Paris is worth about 3,000 losses a turn.

AFVs: 2,628 (1,270) / 8,174 (4,332) - The allies have lost about 550 more tanks than in the breakout, the Germans about 140 less. Hence the conclusion the OOB drops are mostly damaged AFVs awaiting repair casing ready differences of 2,600 and 600 AFVs. Of course, this has been lost in three weeks, not ten. And the fight goes on. I guess in a surprise to no one, Shermans dueling panthers in the open isn't a great exchange rate. Still, this means the Germans have about 1x more division of stuff in the inventory after accounting for production.

Pilots: 9,819 (2,814) / 14,663 (4,171)

Aircraft: 13,383 (3,877) / 15,572 (4,573) - Well, its a rough time to be a pilot. Unprecedented allied pilot losses as FBs fly into flak, and as the LW comes to contest the tactical skies. But they can largely be replace unless they're Belgian. The German pilots (and a few die hard Italians) are fast approaching the cliff; too many high experience pilots are falling out of the sky (about 350 have been replaced) for the LW to match this commitment, or anything near it, ever again. Of note, those viciously high aircraft losses are also killing a lot the precious German bombers. Compared to the breakout scenario, the skies will be a lot more free once we get moving.

Casualty VP: -345 (-101 Change) - This is a direct result of more burning tanks and less slaughtered squads. The question is if 59 VPs given to the allies is worth the operational benefit of essentially being able to plan your withdrawal or make one last great gamble to win to the game.

------

And one last section...

[GloriousRuse]

Will the Heer Break?

Unfortunately, the Heer is a bit away from post landing breakage. Between losing less AFVs, retaining solid frontline infantry, and having more divisions in France it is unlikely that we will seed the cascading breakout that usually sends the Germans reeling to the low countries. Given the damaged panzers will repair somewhat quickly, this likely means that the Heer will be in better than normal shape as they withdraw. Or they'll launch a massive counterattack at the moment of weakness, striving for ultimate victory in a last great gamble...because they have the forces to do that. I mean, it SEEMS unlikely, but you never know.

Will Loki be Able to Dictate His Move in France?

Almost certainly yes. The allied armor will be exhausted when he withdraws, or he can choose to fight longer without fear of collapse, or he can go on the offensive for a spell. The last one is an all or nothing gamble, but well executed and a bit lucky might snag some major allied casualties. Or watch the panzerwaffe die horribly. That's the gambling part.

Was it Worth It?

You would have to ask Loki. But, generally, this approach ceded ~110 VPs between early cities and casualties (or closer to 70 if you only count gains in North France rather than the theaters stripped to enable it). The question will be if those VPs can be bought back by delaying Paris, delaying entry to Germany later, or the ability to inflict more losses later with a rather intact Heer that isn't on it's heels all the way back to the Rhine.

[loki100]

very little to say.

2 main problems, I've lost a lot of key battles that I didn't expect to. Some are down to GR managing his assets very well, others due to having got used to the WiTE2 game engine. That in turn cost me a key pillar in my defensive set up. I'd forgotten that single brigade attacks against well defended forts have the effect of stripping out most of the ammunition, add on accompany this with all the available TF and you disrupt almost everything. So a second attack with a normal commitment clears the port with minimal losses.

Its a bit akin to the BC by day issue, I think this is a bit gamey, but its also a very good use of the game engine and your available tools. Critically this dismantled 3 fairly strong port defenses along the Med.

idea was to rely on enough ports holding to force the allies to: (a) divert a lot to dealing with them; (b) expand while a lot of their army was locked into the coast and with poor supply; or at least (c) make them very cautious about expansion.

In any of these situations, the Pzrs well concentrated would get a reasonable number of routs. Without that constraint I may as well have not started this approach.

Also stripped down the Reich of fighters and put them almost all into GS missions.

All I have left is knowing that GR must lack rail cap.

[John B.]

Thanks for all of the updates. It sounds never wracking!!

[GloriousRuse]

Hopefully we’ll soon reach a point where screens are viable again. Both for the AAR, and because somewhat selfishly that means I can stop piling shermans into the meat grinder on the Seine.

[GloriousRuse]

Well, we stepped into Paris on the 5th of August. The Hermans are falling back to the next line as the battles for the gateways to Germany loom on the horizon. Interlude time.

An Allied Interlude – The Battle of France (T46-T58)

North France is a bit of an odd cookie.

On one hand, it’s the big show. By far the most iconic part of the popular history of the war in the west, a gigantic increase in forces available to both sides, months of planning and preparation, and that elusive feeling that everything you did in Italy is about to pale before the action to come. There is general sense that this is the high water mark battle of the game.

And then there’s the other hand. When I first started reading the AARs, I figured this was THE battleground to win or lose in. But I was lead astray – the only player who seemed to win in France as the Germans was one who was later banned for cheating and attempting to interfere with some servers. And one time Loki got the No Beachhead points, though he and his opponent had decided they were worth 100, not 1000, for that game. For the rest, it was a prelude to the late game that varied by 1-3 turns of the same basic schema and some VP differences. Loki spent last game kicking me into touch and disabusing me of the notion that France was the big one strategically in case I’d failed to pick up on the theme.

Yet you always wonder, “but what if I did it BETTER?.” Still, it seems that largely the point of France is to get to Germany (or stop/slow that), not to look for decisive victory in it’s own right unless the stars align.

The Enemy - January:

Planning for France starts by January for the allies. Double stacked divisions take a hot minute to prep, and that means getting at least 4x TFs and 8x divisions to English ports by the end of the month if you want them ready to push off the beaches the moment they land.

In January, I still did not think I’d be north of the Appenines until late April or early May, and possibly not at all if Loki stayed dug in. If I was, I figured Loki would still fight. So I assumed 4-7x elite divisions of his 23x or so would be left in Italy, with another army’s worth of infantry.

Probably 2x corps of infantry in SE France, with some of the good stuff in each garrison city taking another 2x elite formations – though presumably they’d rail north as soon as I landed. Likewise SW France.
Finally, the need to guard against a second landing would leave a sheen of second rate regiments in the low countries and anywhere I didn’t land.

Which meant I could expect to square off with two infantry armies and about 16x elite divisions within two weeks of landing.

The LW had been burning its bombers brightly, but they would rebuild to a plateau before D-Day, and after my tricks last game I figured I would see them come out the first good weather week in May. What I didn’t account for was just how much the LW’s tactical bomber strength was left, and Loki’s plan to send most of the LW fighters to France.

Loki had been talking about maybe doing a non-traditional defense, but I figured he would still commit the bulk of his forces to a narrow battle somewhere, though perhaps a little bit further back than normal. I knew that there was a lot of combat power in the German army, but maybe not enough to cover two additional fronts. I also knew that Loki is better than me at set-pieces and didn't want to get locked in one. From there, planning.

The Plan – January

As a broad stroke, I decided that if the whole purpose of France was to get to Germany, then the best way to fight France was geography agnostic. Surely, the fastest way to Germany would be wherever there were no Germans. Given the abundance of Germans, that would mean drawing them one way and then going another.
To that end, I decided on the Normandy landing zones for the initial invasions. The hedgerows would allow a smaller force to remain defensively viable, and even in a failure state it would be difficult to stop an expansion west across the Cotentin unless Loki gambled heavily. Plus it can be serviced by nearly every English airbase.

US 1st and British 2nd armies would land in their historical pattern, using reinforcements building in England and what I had mentally tagged as 1st wave withdrawals from Italy that I would need out of that theater by early March to be ready as exploitation forces for a mid-may landing. Given their long lead times, I felt comfortable prepping them in smaller ports, leaving the larger ones open for new TFs that arrive in February. Their purpose would be two-fold; to draw the German army far enough west that landings in Calais would have two weeks to secure initial expansion, and expose the elite divisions to a grinding battle far from German factories. Territorial gains beyond Cotentin and Cherbourg could wait until the Germans turned around to handle Calais. The only big thing was that it had to look real.

1st Canadian army (reinforced), with it’s excellent assault formations, was tagged to launch a follow on invasion four weeks after the initial landings. They were given major ports and the February arrival TFs to allow them to stay on timeline. That much time should help ensure everything truly scary had been shifted west, and give the German elite formations time to burn out some of their panzers. It would have been three, but by three weeks the allied air forces are looking a little peaked from the mass effort needed to cover the initial invasions. Better to go in with a solid air plan. Their immediate goals would be to secure Bruges and Ostend, and then begin threatening the Lille/Brussels/Amsterdam corridor in order to cause the German army to turn away from Normandy.

Finally, Patton’s third army was an initially reinforced armored corps, meant to be shipped in to whichever beach sector had a successful breakout. The intent was he would be reinforced by a massive drawdown in Italy in late April, ready for commitment by June. His role was to be the finisher, either exploding out of a successful Calais to grab important objectives before the Germans could reposition, or to push past a successful Normandy to drive the pursuit of the displacing Germans.

The Enemy - March

That all changed when Loki abandoned Italy. All of a sudden he had enough elite forces and infantry to cover two significant fronts in France. Worse, he had enough forces to go make his own plan and not neatly follow the script. I was looking at either one point facing the entire Heer – even a well defended beachhead might crack - or having my two fronts each muffled without enough power to break through on either.

The Plan Changes - March

Patton no doubt threw a fit, but I decided the best way to play a gambit was to take it. I canceled my planned April drawdown of an oversized army, and decided to turn those 12 divisions west instead. The French assignments remained the same, only with a much weakened 3rd Army.

Instead, Italy was divided into operations Hannibal and Lowlander, a major thrust along the southern coast of France aimed at Nice, Toulon, and Marseilles, accompanied by marching two corps over the maritime Alps to arrive near Lyon. Rail builds were diverted to ensure the ability to support Hannibal’s non-traditional approach route. The idea was that even if the Germans held well along the coast, 2+ corps of infantry coming out of the mountains would force the Rhone valley up to Lyon anyhow. I had enough time to march the mountains regardless, so I could guarantee fighting near Lyon by July. The rail lines leading up tat direction might even allow rapid motorization and pinning the Germans to the coast if I was lucky.

In turn, I accepted that while I would get ten hexes, it would probably be south France that turned the Germans out of the north.

The Outcome

I’ll plot this out over a few major posts to come given we’ve abandoned our stealthy phase. Loki might not chip in (his panzers have disappeared again), but I’ll try to capture some of the German common themes.

[GloriousRuse]

The Unopposed Landing – And The Beginning of Worries (May to June 3rd)

While I was ecstatic to see this on May 20th (T47), it also immediately made me worry deeply about where the rest of the Heer was going. Loki had been hinting at trying out a bold new plan, and I was very aware that he might actually have enough power to create overmatch on a given front.



Even after aerial recon and rapid ground expansion into the open space, there was no real indicator of what the Germans were up to. 1st Canadian and Patton’s third waited anxiously in their ports.



Not that Patton was leaving Bristol anytime soon, courtesy of the surprise LW run on the Bristol channel:



On top of which, the initial stages of Hannibal and Lowlander couldn’t see anything either.



If that wasn’t odd enough, this pattern continued until June 3rd, with a handful of local units largely trying to screen my advance but not contest it, while the Med seemed dedicated to a port defense delaying strategy. And then our recon started to pick up a line on the Seine, with large clusters of unidentified units near Paris. This, combined with heavy rail traffic, pointed to the panzers being deployed to the south side if the city. At that point I made two decisions:

1) That I wasn’t going to have the length of line to hold the Loire if it became a battle near south Paris, so I needed Patton in. The goal would be to bring his forces forward behind the main line of advance so as not to give away the plan. Then either use him to lap around the Orleans area forests, or commit into the fight if needed.

2) Launch a planned Dragoon landing from back when I thought it’d still be a fight in Italy. The troops coming in weren’t necessary, but if the panzers were going to Paris, I wanted an open beach to feed Lowlander so it could keep running on half gas up the Rhone valley even if Toulun and Marseilles caused delays.

Here's the shot from when we finally saw the Germans:



Unopposed Dragoon links in with lead elements of Lowlander to ensure supplies can make it forward without waiting for rails or ports:

[John B.]

Wow, look at all those German units on the Seine!

[GloriousRuse]

A Wary June

With it clear that Loki was deploying his armor en masse neat the Loire plains, I had no desire to advance into them until 3rd army was up and an initial layer of supply depots was put in. My line was running to single divisions with no backing in most places. I feared that if I advanced to his holding positions on the south Seine, not only would he slam units back painfully, he would take the opportunity to cut off and destroy divisions. Besides the VP cost, losing the critical edge in unit numbers would probably see my flank rolled up. Better if he charged across the Loire and then had to withdraw back to his defenses or risk the same with his panzers.

After one abortive and costly attack trying to cross the Seine up north, I settled down into an uneasy sitzkrieg with a 40 mile no-mans land of open terrain between the two side’s armor while the infantry stared at each other from their side of the Seine.

And unlike the historical allies, I could wait; the thrust coming up the Rhone valley was crunching north, and even if we never fought near Paris, he would have to leave eventually. In terms of VP/political masters, between North Italy and several cities in NW France I had no pressure to advance early and in terms of a drive on Berlin – well, I was already on the outskirts of Paris by June. My port taking corps could keep taking ports regardless of our eastward progress. Likewise, I did not need to launch the Calais landings early; no sense in sending in one army if his panzers could turn their full might on it and defeat it in detail. So we waited while 3rd army drove south and the Rhone valley campaign progressed.

Then, on 24 June, Loki began to commit. He sent a sally across no man’s land in the north, confirming my read that his panzers were massed south of Paris, and causing an aerial redployment scramble as he signaled the unexepectedly heavy commitment of the LW:



In the south, it looks like he attacked from the march as he deployed his covering force, though at least without air cover. I like to think he didn't see the troops from Hannibal and was just picking on an exposed brigade:



The Loire wasn’t quite ready to engage - you can see Patton is just arriving - but fortunately enough forces had been passed through the alps and raced past Marseilles using off the beach supplies to threaten a large scale envelopment.



And then the fighting really started...

[GloriousRuse]

July: The Month of Decision

Loki must have been encouraged by the results of his first raid to the west, or maybe he just thought he was running out of time in the Rhone, because July 1st saw a front wide offensive. Several attacks north of Paris failed to cross the Seine – I assume they were initiated to draw off airpower, and if so they mostly succeeded – before a heavy panzer force committed to crossing the gap for a major attack. Some fortunate reserve reactions and cautious positioning at the end of June mean only one position gave way from the main line:



Not pictured is that two of my cavalry groups were routed out of the woods near Orleans by another two panzer divisions. Still, the attack alone cost the Germans over 300x AFVs.


To get an idea of how much that is, you may recall during our last game Loki (accurately) called about 50 in one week a pretty good cull of the panzers. This really helps highlight the great challenge of the panzerwaffe – it can win, and it is the one tool that can really go on the offensive for the Germans. Massed, it will do some scary things. Either crushing battles or maybe even a breakthrough, but on the offense it must deal a killing blow before the edge comes off the scalpel.

Anyhow, this triggered a brute force counterattack aim at the now exposed German armor and panzergrenadiers.



As well as signaling the conditions for commitment of 1st Canadian Army to the Calais area landings.



The tank battles drew a German response, exposing 26th panzer to an encirclement.



Loki countered to free the 26th, but this exposed an SS panzer division and they were encircled next.



Another counterattack freed them, but we were now virtually on the banks of the southern river and the panzers were starting to run down. The threat of catastrophic breakthrough was gone and we could play up the gut attacks without worrying about a deep punching German counter – which meant the repair depots could be brought up a few miles behind the front for rapid refit. Through the end of July, tank formations simply smashed each other and were smashed in turn. The Germans ran out first.

Or maybe they didn’t, and the southern thrusts convinced Loki it was time to withdraw. I wish I could say there was some genius to the July phase of the Rhone valley, but it came down to force ratios. Any allied unit can become a motorized unit and a major mobility threat very quickly if you don’t mind robbing the logistics of someone else; and you don’t need the logistics unless you have a coherent front – a tank division at half theoretical strength and speed goes further into empty ground than one at full speed and strength goes through Germans. I had many more units than Loki and no coherent front, so I swarmed around his lines until most of his southern forces were pocketed. Not the most tactically artful, but it worked.





And so, on the 5th of August, the Heer began a withdrawal towards new positions in the low countries and the Ardennes-Moselle line.



A few thoughts to follow, but this brings us to within a month of where the game currently is.

[GloriousRuse]

Lessons

Go Where He Isn't: Despite the drama of the battles on the plains, neither side was making much headway. I suspect Loki could have kept swapping tanks through mid-August at the least without the line really moving. You would have to ask him, but if I had to guess, he began is displacement with a combination of the Rhone valley breakthrough and force densities getting low enough that I could start swinging 3rd army around Orleans while 1st Canadian threatened to move towards Antwerp if left unchecked. Regardless, what won Paris almost certainly was not the fighting near Paris. The reality is that the Germans can only cover so much ground well, and even allied units at the end of their tether can go farther, faster, and cheaper than allied units going in head on. More importantly, they present a real threat to the hard points in both the potential for encirclement and the potential to race towards important logistical and political objectives.

At the strategic level, it's worth noting that from Paris it is 490 miles (49 hex rows) east to Berlin, and 210 miles (21 hex rows) east to the Ruhr. Unless you bomb your way to victory - supposedly somewhat harder in the new version, and always leaves a bad taste - the goal is crossing those miles quickly and cheaply. Or, for the Germans, making it slow and expensive. This is particularly true in France - after the beachhead breakout and the first major port, there is virtually no key terrain. The rail lines are comparatively plentiful and the defensive terrain, aside from Seine-Paris line, is not really capable of canalizing or holding up movement on the cheap. And ultimately, you are going to take France unless things go hideously wrong. So there is no reason to fight your way into resistance other than to wear down the elites and hold the Germans in place.

Once Your Start Punching, Don't Stop Loki told me that in a way, the ultimate goal of the Germans is to turn a fight into WWI and the allies is the make sure that doesn't happen. When the Germans have time to rest, set their feet, align their depots, and dig...well, you get late war WWI. Once you pay the price to break them out of that, either with legs or blood, it is worth paying out the next week's price to keep the fight going. The Germans cannot keep up with the materiel loss rates of a continuous fight on the move, and as their edge goes down, so do your losses and your delays. It is better to leave 2,000 tanks unrepaired for two weeks than it is to let off the panzers once they start to fade, or to let the German's reform a line without giving up maximum ground.

On Ports I was looking for a way to put into practice the means the WA used to take Le Havre rather than Brest when I fiddled with the "regiment of artillery spotters" concept. The problem is that while it does replicate the effect of simply pummeling an isolated port into submission, it does it a-historically quickly. In contrast, German port fortresses with divisions are virtually immune to isolation, which means that not taking advantage of an air attack or bombardment this week means it didn't really happen. Both represent a historical inaccuracy. We know that taking ports from the march was expensive (Cherbourg, Brest), we also know that given a week or two of leading bombardments that looked more WWI than WWII, the ports fell cheaply and in a few days when line forces went in even if the defenders possessed the technical means to stage a Stalingrad. (Le Havre, Marseilles). So I am not sure how to replicate that in system. After seizing Nice, Touloun, and Cherbourg with this method, Loki raised the valid point that this might be causing a-historic outcomes or causing unintended engine consequences.

That lead me to a series of tests on old files. What it comes down to is that one division ports can generally be taken by lining up 120k men or so and attacking en masse. Even with a level 5 fortification, the allies simply have enough firepower to disrupt a division on the coast into nothingness if they really want to. The results are varied. One run, Toulon fell for 598 losses to a mass attack versus the 1300 it cost using the regiment of artillery spotters method, though doing so required using two more divisions that would otherwise have six additional MP that turn. In contrast, Cherbourg fell to a fairly small mass attack - four divisions - for about the same cost in losses and committed forces that the "regiment of artillery spotters" method cost. So at the single division defense ports, it is a fairly typical resource allocation decision set that costs a few MPs but does not necessarily have vast consequences at the higher levels.

I stopped using the technique in game before hitting the 2x division defense ports at Marseilles and Brest in case it turned out to be an exploit or a-historically gamey. And here it would seem to have a dramatic difference when I compared test results to in game results. Using regimental prep, Marseilles fell for about 1,300 casualties in one turn and opposed to closer to 4,000 over two turns it took me in game.

I would suggest that this be a discussion you have with your opponent pre-game; right now either port defenses are a-historically effective at sustained defense without the historical allied answer - blow the hell out of it well ahead of the assault, not just a H-Hour bombardment unavailable. Or taking well held ones with a rapid assault can be made a-historically cheap with the regiment of artillery spotters . There is a nominal difference in single division defenses, but a very noticeable one for two division defenses (probably because the second division adds enough elements that it is really hard to bomb them into disruption). How you want to house rule it with your opponent is up to you, as neither answer is all that satisfying.

[GloriousRuse]

Loki may be taking an extended hiatus from regular posts, so I will try to keep updates going for roughly every month of game time - albeit, probably without Loki's level of mechanical insight.

[John B.]

Loki will be missed. But, perhaps like Bill Watterson at the end of Calvin and Hobbes he has simply said everything that he wanted to say. Thanks for keeping the updates going!

[EddyBear81]

Clearly I will miss his posts. I would have loved to see the strategic and operational thinking behind the bold moves that we can only imagine.

What was his goal(s) ?

Did he succeed at some of them ? Did he fail miserably and in this case is the "port-defense" issues played a great role and why ?

Is there hope of a protracted campaign in 1945 ?

What happened to U-530 ? [;)]

[loki100]

To summarise I had a two tier idea. First I stuffed the ports, both Med and NW Europe with the goal of slowing resupply and/or diverting a fair bit of allied effort. Second I wanted to keep the Pzrs together and hopefully at the end of the Allies supply tether.

Now as above, the brigade + TF routine made a mess of the delay bit. I may as well have just left FZ behind. Now I'd actually forgotten all about this option as it really doesn't work in WiTE2 and I've spent most of the last 5-6 years testing that. While there are simiiarities to WiTW, there is a lot that is very different.

I had little expectation that GR would make a mistake but clearly the hope was not just to hit over-exposed Allied units but maybe get some destroyed in pockets. Now given the VP situation, GR could take his time, it might be an interesting strategy to try in a more even game.

So I did a fair bit of damage, created a decent line on the Seine as a shield but it was all frontal stuff, so on balance, a conventional approach of contesting the beachheads would have paid off.

Worth confessing, I've been nursing the fall out from a bad mistake really all late 43 onwards. I'm not that experienced with the Germans (esp not the long term feedback routines) so I was very pleased with myself for rustling up so many powerful Pzr/PzrGr formations for Italy. The problem is they are truck heavy already and need to operate in an environment where you are already consuming trucks (assuming as GR did, the Allied player pays suitable attention to railyards with a side order of rail move interdiction). So as Pzr formations returned from the east, there were too few trucks for them. If he'd bothered to hit my truck production I would have been in an even worse mess.

So I went on a disband campaign, some painless like getting rid of the reserve pzr division with its Char B1s, some painful like a number of the mot/pzr brigades. But I still have a cluster of Pzr divisions with mobility <15.

Chuck that on top of the other issues and the one thing I couldn't do was the type of running battle in central France were I might have done the sort of damage I needed - about 50% of my notionally mobile force is defensive only.

[Scona]

The last series of posts really underlined the difference of this game with WiTE; namely the smaller number of units available to each side. The area between the Seine and Loire rivers would be roughly the same length as Army Group Center on the east front, but each side fields maybe one half to two thirds the number of divisions as that formation. This makes it more crucial to manage operations on a unit by unit basis as it is easy for an unfortunate retreat or rout by one division to open the potential encirclement of a corps.

On another note the strategy of the Germans leaving Northern Italy is shown to have both positive and negative outcomes. The Germans will gain a strong defensive line based on the Tyrolean Alps, but the Allies will be able to flank march to the west to burst into southern France along the length of the Rhone valley.

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Scona

The last series of posts really underlined the difference of this game with WiTE; namely the smaller number of units available to each side. The area between the Seine and Loire rivers would be roughly the same length as Army Group Center on the east front, but each side fields maybe one half to two thirds the number of divisions as that formation. This makes it more crucial to manage operations on a unit by unit basis as it is easy for an unfortunate retreat or rout by one division to open the potential encirclement of a corps.

On another note the strategy of the Germans leaving Northern Italy is shown to have both positive and negative outcomes. The Germans will gain a strong defensive line based on the Tyrolean Alps, but the Allies will be able to flank march to the west to burst into southern France along the length of the Rhone valley.

aye agree with both of these points - but I'll confess it wasn't really a 'strategy' to retreat in Italy, just I had the choice of shoring up the front by diverting a lot of stuff or making the best of a bad job and stripping it down. The gamble was that the freed up units could do more good in N France before the allies inevitably pushed in force up the Rhone corridor.