Alpha AAR - A year at the front with Field Marshal Noob

[karonagames]

End of November front line North:

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End of November front line South:

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Field Marshal Noob's First Winter Defence Plan:

1. Do not have salients that the enemy can attack. (See Lee's AAR)
2. Defend in depth.
3. Extra defenders in hexes that can be attacked from 3 sides - minimise the the number of hexes that can be attacked from 3 sides.
4. Provide every front line unit with tactical, operational and strategic reserves. If you have reserves you can win, with no reserves you can only lose.
5. The "reserve" button is your friend.
6. Do not put Axis Allies in the front line except in the worst emergency you can imagine.

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Start of turn 25 the First turn of Blizzard. 18th Army's defence line starts 30-120 miles east of the historical front line.

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Start of Turn 25. 4th Panzer Group has been re-christened 4th Panzer Army and is assigned the Toschock - Kalinin sector. Divisions in urban hexes suffer less blizzard damage, so the panzers are placed in these hexes wherever possible.

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Start of turn 25. As the strongest defence was in front of Moscow, this will turn into the strongest attack. I have switched the counter information to show defence strength to the right of the "=" sign. Some units achieved higher fortification levels than others during the 7 turns they were digging in. Every Motorised regiment in the second line has either a stug, jagdpanzer or pioneer battalion attached to help with the counter attacks from reserve.

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Start of turn 25: 4th Army's sector.

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Start of turn 25: 2nd Army and 6th Army

[Duck Doc]

BigAnorak, your play is very impressive. My understanding of the way things actually went leaves me the impression the Axis has too easy of a time not just because of the weakness of the AI but in part because of the "juiced" power of the German blitzkrieg. Reading through your AAR I cannot put my finger on what exactly it is but I have the feeling that resistance is overcome too easily & that it should take more time or effort to successfully perform kesselschlacht. The Germans were never able to prosecute such effective pushes simultaneously. You have been successful in the north, center & south. I am not trying to denigrate your play at all. Just an observation. What do you think?

[karonagames]

Start of turn 25: AGS fails to follow Field Marshal Noob's instructions and the Italians create a gap in the line.

[karonagames]

@Dale H. Thanks for the "compliment". AGN has taken Leningrad, but I did point out the AI problems there, I think I would still have got the city due to the extra resources I allocated. AGC did not get Moscow despite having an extra Panzer Group throw n at the city compared to historically available forces (I only got 1 hex in Take 1), and only at Tula is AGC ahead of the historical front line. AGS is way behind the historical front line at turn 25- 170 miles short of Rostov, which is where they were on December 6th. You are about to see how much ground the Axis lose during the winter with my best defensive efforts (and lose ground they will) If I was overcoming opposition too easily, then surely I should be ahead of the whole historical front line - at the moment I am ahead in about 1/3, level along 1/3 and behind on 1/3. I think GAIA has done a pretty good job overall.

[janh]

@Dale H.  Comment from personal impressions.  I think BigAnorak played with hindsight and performed the 41 campaign extremely well and with lower losses than historically.  The Germans also made many mistakes, like not having enough PzDivs up north, and withdrawing armor from HG Mitte to Kiev for the pocket battle there, and subsequent capture of Donbas up to Rostov.  BigAnorak has avoided such distractions, and avoided very bloody frontal engagements. 

AI might be a bit slow on armored counterstrikes, which I recall from literature happened regularly in 41 by small groups of the new T34 and KV tanks, and cost the germans men, initiative, material and required usually the 88mm or occassionally the 150 to intervene pointe-blanc.  I cannot gather from this AAR whether GAIA has performed such local counterattacks to disturb his advance.  Maybe they were in fact only a few dozens of those, but made it into the literature.

The question whether the pocket battles seems easy here or not, I think is skewed a bit due to the weekly turn time scale.  Historically a lot of the heavy fights in 1941 happened in a day, or a few, especially fighting to close pockets, or russian tries to break out.  Of course with a weekly turn, this evens out into "some averagely intense" attack, or defense.  If you had dayly turns, or two day turns, the heat would probably be spread very unevenly.

BigAnorak also ended up lucky in Leningrad, and did not extend his lines to Stalino or even Rostov, and managed to get the Crimea including Sevastopol.  All this serves to shorten and straighten out his lines substantially better than the Germans did historically manage.  I think especially this point is very valuable, and should not be underestimated.  He can now use the Finish in the battle line south, and for garrison duty, while he can avoid putting italian, hungarian and romanian units into the line south.  Plus he now dug in his well desgined front line for 7 weeks, so I would assume this is an almost perfect plan to win the 41' winter fights. 

Had the German done so, and not had such a broken front line with extremely exhausted, bled-down units, severe supply problems due to weather and distance from the rail depots, I would assume it would have been the Russian to bear the brunt of the losses in the Blizzard attacks.  I am curioius how this is modeled here and how BigAnorak will come out of this winter.  He should be in rather pretty good shape, much better than historically.

[karonagames]

With regard to Soviet counter- attacks, I can only make comparisons with my previous tests I have done and the changes to code that have occurred between tests. In my early tests I probably gave GAIA more opportunities to attack over-extended units. In this test I purposely did not over-extend thereby reducing her counter-attack options - as I noted with trying to keep units in division sized units when forming pockets.

In previous tests the SU had a lot more tanks - in one test I had an exposed flank south of Bryansk and GAIA hit me with 6 tank divisions with over 600 T34s - she brought my offensive to a complete standstill. In this test Pavel had completely re-vamped his production code, which resulted in the SU getting about 1/2 the T34s compared to my earlier tests.

Overall I would say that GAIA probably was more passive in this test than she had been in previous tests, but I would like to think much of this was because I didn't give her the opportunity to be more aggressive.

Janh has given an excellent appreciation of the campaign to date. Everything is swings and roundabouts - I definitely would not be able to put this defence together if I had not taken Leningrad, but in the south my line is about 12-15 hexes longer than if I had got to the Mius Line.

Please bear in mind this is an special situation designed to get me through the year, overcoming a serious bug, because we needed to look at a complete year of production, losses, OOB etc., so we could compare them to the historical "benchmark" for the summer 1942 campaign season.

With regard to pockets - all the testers felt that they were being eliminated too quickly, new code was issued after this test took place, but no one has had a situation arise in subsequent test games to be able to report if pockets are more resilient.

[karonagames]

Start of Turn 26: Disappointing start for AGN - they were digging in for longer than the rest of the army. Only 6 divisions held their ground - the rest retreated.

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Start of turn 26: 4th Panzer does a far better job. Here you can see one of my many noob mistakes. Previously impassable hexsides (Blue dashed line) become passable when the ice level reaches 10, so I have created a gap south of Kalinin.

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Start of turn 26: Mixed results in front of Moscow.

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Start of turn 26: An example of reserves helping the front line hold. The SS divisions were affected by one of the bugs, which gave them a higher morale penalty, which meant they didn't come from reserve as often as they should have done.

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Start of turn 26: 6th Army holds against fewer soviet attacks.

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Start of turn 26: 3 Infantry divisions arrive from the strategic reserve to take the place of the Axis allies in front of Dtown and Ztown.

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Excerpt from Commander's Report battle summary: The soviets made over 150 attacks and my defence held about 1/2 of them.