Artillery Divison HQs

[Schmart]

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

Schmart, problem is that Front command capacity in this game is terribly restrictive.

Take a look at how badly overloaded some of the late war Fronts get in the 44 scenario. 1. Ukrainian in particular. (The armies are also mostly overloaded, some of them by a huge amount.)

So you can stuff these Fronts as much as you want and put together a historical organization...and make the Front commander a non entity in the process.

If someone ever puts together a Vistula-Oder scenario 1. Belorussian and 1. Ukrainian will probably be even more severely overloaded in CP. Ditto a Berlin 45 scenario. (They each had around 10 armies assigned, as I recall.)

As a result, the natural solution here is to concentrate maneuver elements in Fronts and take all the firepower support out of them except for whatever spare change is left after maxing out your corps count within the armies and fronts.

I fully agree. Even some earlier war Front commands had way more attached than can be safely done in the game (Western Front comes to mind). But it is a failure of the game system that historical circumstances can't be replicated. I think the Russians should be given 2-3 Fronts (or Front commanders) that can have some form of special rating or capability to be able to hold a much larger number of units (in order to be able to replicate some of those historical circumstances), than the roughly arbitrary limits established.

[CowboyRonin]

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

If you want to keep artillery under tight control, an alternate organization method would be as follows: create armies with 3 corps and 3 artillery divisions. These are essentially single hex armies (3 corps up front, 3 division supporting immediately in their rear.)

I like this particular organization for Shock armies. This makes them very good at smashing a single, tough hex; IMO, this should be the specialty of Shock armies. Those are fixed in allocation (1-4 you get in the first Blizzard, 5 later), so they're not major line-holders. I had not thought of using the Airborne corps HQs as artillery containers; that is a good idea to handle others that you want to have around.

[Seminole]

I fully agree. Even some earlier war Front commands had way more attached than can be safely done in the game (Western Front comes to mind). But it is a failure of the game system that historical circumstances can't be replicated.

They can be replicated (the CP limit isn't a hard ceiling), there are simply penalties associated. Is it not possible that Western Front was swamped with responsibilities?

I like this particular organization for Shock armies. This makes them very good at smashing a single, tough hex

With the rules as they are now for Shock Armies I think they're best focused on mobile units to maximize their MP.