The Red Army Is (Not) Overpowered - A tongue in cheek aar

[ImperatorAugustus]

Or just make it to where you can only enter or leave the reserve from an NSS

[HardLuckYetAgain]

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist

The "run in the south, rail to the North strategy" has been useful since WitE1. Most of the strongest Soviet players used this strategy and there is strong theoretical support for it.

Yes, have to say everything that was old is new again in WITE2 as EwaldvonKleist said. Love seeing it play out again though .

[s2tanker]

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist

The "run in the south, rail to the North strategy" has been useful since WitE1. Most of the strongest Soviet players used this strategy and there is strong theoretical support for it.

I'd be fine with "running in the south" - the thing is, he didn't run, he magicked everything into national reserve in the South. Running would have been alright - at least I could have maintained contact with some of his forces and caused losses.

[AlbertN]

I believe even if it is just running most of the stuff gets away due to administrative movement. Where 1 hex costs 1, vs 1 hex costs 3 (or 2 with road AND mighty morale) the Soviets just have way more mobility than Germans.

It can surely help to shrink the T1 SMP of Soviets so they can rail less around.
It can surely help to make Transfer to Reserve something checked at the start of the turn and not after moving away from the front.

But in the end of the day via admin movement a lot of things the Soviets have just weasel away. Maybe Panzers catch up with something but that's it.

[RedJohn]

Turn 33. We experience some nasty counterattacks during the axis turn, especially at Smolensk.

We continue to fail at taking the hexes east of Smolensk. We are pushing from the north, at least.

[RedJohn]

Holds are very painful.

[RedJohn]

Kursk is isolated. Likely will not hold.

[RedJohn]

Our rifle divisions arrive. They begin manning rivers. May or may not move them up.

[s2tanker]

Bravo.

[ToxicThug11]

ORIGINAL: EwaldvonKleist

The "run in the south, rail to the North strategy" has been useful since WitE1. Most of the strongest Soviet players used this strategy and there is strong theoretical support for it.

The main difference being of course that the Soviets had a cost to railing divisions in WITE1.
In WITE2, you can teleport divisions from the reserve and have them be 100% safe.

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: AlbertN

...

But in the end of the day via admin movement a lot of things the Soviets have just weasel away. Maybe Panzers catch up with something but that's it.

you do know you have a tool to deny admin moves?

[Stamb]

can you bomb whole front areas? multiple zones with 5x5 hexes or similar? is it enough to get at least 1 interdiction to prevent admin movement? In AARs we see that Soviets typically bomb only river crossing, not clear terrain hexes.

[loki100]

admin movement is denied with any interdiction > 0, so a broad area with not too much commitment will do the job.

the Soviet river crossing strategy is designed to generate a net MP cost so needs relatively high levels of commitment to a few hexes

I tested this in an otherwise pretty disastrous game that ended in Sept 41. But I started trying to work out where my spearheads would be, and set up boxes around them, my opponent reported it didn't stop him moving to contact (to attack) but the net loss of MP meant he couldn't pull back so was vulnerable in turn. Given the game was pointless it was a good place to use a few turns of exploring ideas and that one I'd do constantly from now on - could well make quite a difference in the Ukraine in particular

[carlkay58]

It can also slow down the Soviet runaway defense in the south - unless they send everything to the Reserves.

[xhoel]

ORIGINAL: Beethoven1


It would be better, ideally, if the game incentivized the Soviets to behave in a historical/reasonable fashion by giving them somewhat more of a reason to defend the south (as well as some ability to do so without getting blown away in the first few turns more than historical, and ending up losing Kiev/Odessa/ etc substantially earlier than historical even if they put in their best effort to defend it reasonably).

Drawing on my own experience with modding HOI4 for multiplayer, I found that giving players incentives is the key to game balance. In any game, players who are attempting to win will respond to a greater or lesser degree to incentives that help them to win.

Fully agree with this. I think the key thing here is that the Soviets lack the incentive to defend the south properly. The best way to incentivize them to do so would be to make it easier to defend in open terrain.

I would propose the fortification rules are tweaked so that clear hexes can build up to fort level 2 and not just fort level 1 when there is no enemy nearby, but of course with a certain hex distance. Say if enemy forces are 5 hexes away, you can start building forts higher than 1 but capped at 2. This would also make sure that the Soviets dont run too fast as they have to stay within the hex range (whatever that is) to gain this advantage.

This would make defending clear terrain easier and would allow for more defense in depth that is not cut through like butter immediately. At the same time it would reflect that it is easier to fortify a field than a forested area.

This could also be combined with a special start of the game rule that prohibits moves to the Reserve for the first 4 turns or so to reflect the chaos of the first few weeks of combat and the impossibility of moving large quantities of men and material all at once. If that is too harsh, then you can just set a cap of units that can move to the reserve per turn.

[Gunnulf]

Also I feel like there would be better incentive in the south if the VP levels were tweaked a little. While of course the rationale for setting the bonuses points on historical capture dates is a natural place to start then clearly at least in the south clearly many of them are very much based on almost impossible timeframes. I would be tempted to take data from the multiple AARs that now exist to reset the VPs for cities such as Kiev, Odessa and maybe even Talinn to give some incentive to try to hold on longer.

[RedJohn]

So with that pocket it looks like my opponent has resigned. I do not blame him one bit. I can only apologise for instituting a rather absurd strategy against him, but we've talked and he knows my stance on things.

Ultimately I hope this aar has proved at least somewhat how powerful the strategy is. Whether its freely teleporting units to the reserve or railing them northwards, the end result benefits the Soviets heavily. But I've talked at length about the benefits. I currently have another game going which I started at the same time against someone random where I did the exact same thing,as well as breaking the centre pocket turn 1. The combined result has been its now turn 13 or something and smolensk holds, pskov holds, and he's pushing the flanks of stalino. I have a 3.8m oob. Beyond the panzer attacks I will not document the game (mostly due to my breaking of the centre pocket, which is a completely different matter to the abandon strategy. Breaking that pocket ruins the German game, there is zero room for debate on that issue)

Anyway I hope you enjoyed the AAR. As the title indicates it was tongue in cheek, any future AARs do will be a bit more serious. Many thanks to my opponent, you did about as well as you could be expected to.

[Stamb]

Thanks for this AAR RedJohn! I hope devs take a look into it.

[Nikel]

If possible, I also would like to know the opinion of the developers on the exploits presented in this AAR.


Thanks in advance.

[Nikel]

And a quote from excellent book by Chris Bellamy, Absolute War, that comes very handy. Bold is mine.

In short, in Ukraine resistance was the strongest because they wanted to buy time to evacuate factories and workers. So how can you evacuate your army and military equipment and at the same time your workers and factories? Please fix this.

And thanks to RedJohn, his opponent and all the posters in this thread, very interesting discussion [:)]



Key decisions

While the security agencies moved on the streets with an incongruous mixture of efficiency on the one hand, and near-paranoia on the other, key decisions were being made deep in the Kremlin which, even at this early stage, would shape the outcome of the war. On 24 June a ‘Soviet’ — a Council — for Evacuation was set up. In the wake of the Red Army’s withdrawal it would ‘decide the most important strategic and war-economic task — rebasing powerful human and material resources from the threatened regions to the east, to the rear of the country’.

The overall operation was placed under the direction of Nikolay Voznesenskiy (1903–50), the head of the State Planning Commission, or Gosplan. The Evacuation Soviet reported to him, as a working group. Its president was N. M. Shvernik, with Aleksey Kosygin and M. G. Pervukhin as his deputies, and Anastas Mikoyan, Lazar Kaganovich and M. Z. Saburov as other members. During the next six months 2,593 industrial enterprises were evacuated, 1,523 of them classified as ‘major’, of which 1,360 were armaments related. Some 226 were moved to the Volga area, 667 to the Urals, 244 to western Siberia, 78 to eastern Siberia and 308 to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. With them went between 30 and 40 per cent of the workers, engineers and technicians. Stalin had made what was probably his most crucial decision early.

In the Leningrad area, where the German advance was very swift, only 92 plants were ‘re-based’ before the city was isolated. The best results were achieved, predictably, in Ukraine, where the Soviet resistance was strongest. The impressive numbers must be matched against the chaos. When the trains arrived carrying plant, machinery and fewer than half of the staff (starving, after perhaps a week or ten days on the railways — assuming they had escaped German bombing), they were pitched out into fields or clearings or, if lucky, into unheated wooden buildings. By November, the ground was starting to freeze so hard that it became impossible to dig foundations for new buildings. Nevertheless, confused and imperfect though it was, with fragments of factories and a small, exhausted proportion of the workforce arriving in the wrong order in the dead of night, the achievement is still astonishing. Some 1.5 million railway wagons carried enough of Soviet industry eastwards to begin to rebuild a war industry and economy which would outproduce the Germans and compensate for the stupendous losses suffered. After two days of war, Stalin had focused on that inner truth. The hard definition of intellect. Priorities.