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golden delicious wrote: Sun Mar 27, 2022 3:18 pm It's possible I'll play more of this, but the AAR is now caught up and so as mentioned above I'll organise my thoughts here.

First off, this is an unlikely scenario for me for a couple of reasons:
1) I'm not particularly fond of playing the PO, which even with the best design tends to be very bad at the game, especially on a large map with low unit density
2) I'm not really a fan of the "whole East Front at 10km/hex" genre. The sheer size of the map and the number of units make it extremely difficult to play optimally without dedicating your whole life to it and making substantial offline notes (which I have not done)

So it's worth bearing these points in mind when reading my thoughts as I am admittedly biased on this topic. Neither of these is altered by the experience of playing the scenario. It's also worth noting that I played the outdated version that came with the release of TOAW IV although I don't think the scenario has fundamentally changed in the interim.

Let's start with the good things:
1) I'm no East Front expert but the map and the OOB feel broadly right. Russia is very big and there aren't enough Germans to go around. Axis minors, as in most scenarios, feel like they're too effective and the Rumanians in particular are able to play a large independent role. Of course the Soviets have been in no position to do much harm to them at any point in the scenario so this might be the reason

2) The supply and weather effects are the best I've seen for an East Front scenario. I was really blindsided by the severity of the mud effects, which I think is a good thing, but they hit the Germans in their mobility not in their fighting power, so the second time, when I was ready, I was able to make some limited use of the mud phase. In general, it really does feel like a bad idea to get caught off your supply net. Units can go charging ahead, but if they're too active while "overextended" their strength rapidly deteriorates
3) The 1941 campaign in particular really benefits from the Soviet PO. No human opponent could possibly come close to repeating the colossal failures of the Red Army in the initial campaign, but here the PO willingly submits it to the sort of abuse which just isn't fun for a player on the receiving end of it.
4) 1 and 3 go together to really give a sense of the paradox of Barbarossa: the Germans kept on brilliantly thrashing the Soviets and Russia kept on going, with more and more armies emerging out of the mist and always more and more space to fall back on. Add in 2 and when you finally get where you're going you realise the railhead is thirty hexes back and your handful of panzer divisions at the spearhead are actually in a bit of trouble.

I got that feeling reading your AAR. The real struggle of advancing versus consolidating.

Things I would change:
1) The Soviet PO is just too passive. Yes, it should be incompetent, yes it should let itself fall into traps and get annihilated, but the one thing the Red Army was not in 1941 was passive: it counterattacked at every level and across the board throughout the whole campaign. In particular, if one looks at the experience of AGC in this match, there was no Soviet activity anything close to the scale of the Yelnya counteroffensive. This gave me the freedom I needed to send my exhausted panzertruppen on a further romp through the gaps in the Soviet line, and the PO declined to do anything about it. There must be scope to set the Soviet PO to a more aggressive strategic bias at least from late August- that's the point at which I really started to race ahead of my historical counterparts
2) The event engine applies a series of severe force level effects throughout the scenario. While I think in principle these are sound, the way they're applied makes the gameplay highly unnatural. One turn I'm riding high and wide with a shock bonus and plenty of supply- but the briefing tells me next turn this situation will be reversed so I pull back in anticipation of the storm to come. It would be better if these effects were i) applied gradually and ii) had some degree of variability. This would serve to make the transitions between the phases of the scenario more natural, and create more scope for the Axis player to be caught with his pants down, as indeed happened in the real campaign.
3) If anything, the logistical constraints on the German player are not severe enough. I would be inclined to cut supply radius still further, while at the same time perhaps raising the force supply level so that units which do make it back to the railhead can resupply quite quickly. The large number of forward supply points available (particularly in 1941) also feel wrong to me. Why does the capture of Kharkov transform AGS's supply situation?
4) I suspect unit proficiencies are too high across the board. Almost every German unit starts at 80% proficiency, some even higher. Should a pre-war regular division like 30. Briesen be rated 80%? That's reasonable. Should a 4th Wave reserve division which had been on quiet fronts for the two years since its formation? What about a security battalion? A 15th Wave division formed of overage reservists six weeks before the start of the scenario? All these units get the same gold star 80% proficiency rating in the scenario, and tend to only go up from there (by turn 102 I have several divisions at 100% proficiency, which apart from anything else makes them immune from desertion effects).

Graymane wrote: Mon Mar 28, 2022 2:37 pm What hex size do you prefer? Do you prefer TOAW for this or another game like WITE?

I dislike the whole divisional structure thing with only 2 counters per formation (HQ and DIV) even though you can split the div into 3 regimental size elements. It just doesn't feel right.

I enjoy the immersive aspects of assigning missions to Armies/Corps/Divisions together and having them operate together but that is a real chore to accomplish in TOAW.

Very enjoyable reading this AAR. You have a real knack for it.

2) I find that my play is always better when I write an AAR, and at this point I always keep an AAR when playing PBEM even if I have no intention of publishing it. The key thing about an AAR is it stops you from just shunting units around and forces you to ask "what's happening and what am I going to do about it?" so that you can record that in the AAR.

StuccoFresco wrote: Mon Mar 28, 2022 4:25 pm 100% agree: with a written AAR I can comb through my earlier turns to remind myself what I was trying to accomplish instead of re-assessing the strategy every turn.

As the player you are trying to align hundreds of units to a single overall plan and it tends to simply not happen

The Soviet PO is just too passive.

sPzAbt653 wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 5:33 am Thanks for this AAR and all the great follow ups. I'd especially like to reply to the above, because this is what I love about the larger scenarios. Instead of managing a single overall plan, I will break the map into several Operational Areas. This makes it like playing several smaller scenarios at one time, instead of one huge unmanageable one. I keep an OOB on a .txt doc, I've seen others use Excel, any way this makes it easier to keep track of what is going on.

Some players like the different units colors but in my mind that restriction isn't historical. Some would rather have larger formations for ease of play, but that would restrict flexibility. We have more than a few scenario options for Eastern Front scale and scope.

sPzAbt653 wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 5:46 am True, but maybe not fair. Elmer needs Odds to justify his attacks, and with his propensity to move all of his units their entire Movement Allowance every turn, and to not quit until all rounds are expended, leaves his units in such poor condition that he can never get the Odds that he needs to start attacking.

I should say that I did the Soviet PO for the early versions of D21, and initially it was set up as historical - to attack, no defense, no retreat. However, he could never establish a front line and would constantly evaporate his units in pointless attacks. Maybe historical, but not much of a game.

Graymane wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:02 pm My comments on divisions and only 2 counters is more of a C&C comment. I would have like to have something like corp-level. Where if I click a counter, everything in the corp lights up. I realize the game limitations preventing that and keeping lower level HQs.