Panzers vs The Bear: A WitE2 MP AAR (Soviet Perspective)

[GloriousRuse]

Well, there were two major plays the Germans could have made. They could have barged full speed ahead, looking to make quick work of Orel and other nearby cities like Voronzeh and Tula on PG2's axis while PG3 drove a line to Moscow that would have made for a very scary September and possibly a desperate November, though at the cost of ever increasing resistance making it a razor edge bet. Or they could take the safer option to try to pocket the Bryansk area forces and accept that the campaign as a whole would slow down, but that November would be a more measured affair. I bet on them doing the former, and they did the latter.

Can't say I'm happy to have 18 divisions in pockets, but on the other hand they exist to buy time and many of them have been reduced to half strength (or worse) shells by continuous fighting. So if they've been made into a forced sacrifice, let's make that sacrifice worthwhile. A pocket of that size will take two weeks to clean up if all goes well, so the time has come to make it a three week pocket and drain the panzers as best we can in the process. Initial plans to cut off PG3 entirely have to be abandoned when the forces inside the pocket cannot force their way past regiments, but we are still capable of routing a panzer division left alone at the extreme edge of PG3's reach, opening the pocket and allowing the extraction of several HQs and loads of artillery. The rest will have to die well when the Germans close it again.



Down south the weather is fine and the Germans are running on fumes. You can feel it in your bones, and more importantly, read it in the combat reports when only a handful of tanks out of a notional 150 actually end up firing. Counterattack forces are released and push back several German fast divisions, trashing their potential for next week and hopefully extending the battle for Stalino into late September or even the mud season.



As you might have noticed, after week 10 or so the tempo of the war starts to change. The Germans can still make explosive lunges, particularly after preparation, but the ceaseless linked offensives of the early days give way to gradual pressure punctuated by big moves and reorganization - or if the German player prefers, continued pressure with much lower potential per week. Either way its a welcome relief. There is still a big threat. You can still lose badly. But maybe, just maybe, you can hold on...

[MAS]

You're an awesome writer and should win the "Matrix Cross", or the "Grand Order of the Matrix" award, for your excellent AARs and analysis. Thanks much - I'm learning a lot here!

[GloriousRuse]

Thanks! Glad to hear it. If only my play merited the same...

T13

Up north, the surprising German pivot from last turn begins to grind forward and threatens an encirclement. At this point we've kept the land routes to the city open later than history, but that's not any sort of guarantee for Leningrad. There are still several ways it can fall, particularly if I lose more divisions this week. I don't know which way Bobo will ultimately move, but I know that my forces in a pocket won't help one way or another, so it's time to extract. Out we go, and maybe we can keep the land ways open for another two weeks if all goes well. Then it will all be shipping over Ladoga until the freeze...

Elsewhere. the Germans are back on the move. Only a little bit in the south where they are still recovering form the counterattacks, but as a corollary to the germans moving slower, I also have much less ground to give. Some hungarian armor is left tantalizingly open and is sent packing. Not As useful as breaking panzers, but every fast unit that can't be relied on later is a win.

More importantly, PG2 has exploded east even though the pocket is still being closed. It can't be undone completely, but it exposes a lot of units, especially the ones in regimental packets. The better part of two panzer divisions are routed and the Das Reich are cut off. The Germans may have have a good '41, but damned if it's going to be a cheap one...

[GloriousRuse]

T14

Not much to say that you haven't seen in the German AAR. Counterattacks break open the path to Kursk and the Stalino pocket, cut off a couple panzer divisions down south. A recent Beta update makes showing those battles hard (the old version reports don't show names), but suffice to say the lines are not much shifted. We are still on track to have Tula challenged (and likely lost), Leningrad down to lake only supply, a dangerous run near Moscow/Kalinin, and Stalino lost by October. The game now is about where this will all go in November, the last few weeks of tolerable campaign weather. Well, unless a few early blizzards come out of hihg pressure fronts from the east - you know, the same ones keeping the ground dry right now. Fingers crossed for karma.

But let's look at something else: Production. I've attached both the Soviet screen for this turn and the German screen from one of my other games at roughly the same point.





For those new, the production model is reasonably complex for a game that is not at it's core an economic simulator. Raw resources get shipped to industrial centers, where they are turned into intermediate products - tank or aircraft chassises of a certain model at the right plant, the generic Armaments, generic Supplies, Industry, trucks at truck plants, etc., and manpower gets shipped in from the various population centers under your control. All of those are subject to national modifiers representing the war effort (Germany takes a moment to scale up, the Russians are pretty committed from the start but start to run dry-er by the end of the war), as well as restrictions - the Germans might use captured Russian manpower in "Hiwi" support units, but they won't be driving Tigers. which in turn get welded together into elements. An element can be a rifle squad an IL-2 and anything in between. Those elements cost a set amount of Industry, Supplies, Armaments, Manpower, and an appropriate chassis. A T-34 for example needs a chassis (built at a T-34 plant for a certain industry cost), armaments for its guns (built at an arms plant), an initial fielding cost of supplies, and of course its crew comes out of manpower. And as a final catch, there are certain hard limits on things like artillery to represent historical production rates even if soecific plants for each 82mm mortar aren't modeled.

But those elements don't go straight to the front. They and returning damaged elements are put into a national pool of ready squads, tanks, aircraft, 152mm field pieces and so forth. Those then get drawn on based on need at the front. But not so fast...they still have to get there. These elements are assumed to be at a National Supply Source (the Ruhr, Berlin, Moscow, some near Ural cities and other similar other major centers) and then have to be shipped forward a Freight via the rail or port system, end up in a depot, and eventually get trucked (or horse'd if close enough) the last gap. Those replacement troops are competing with fuel, ammo, and supplies to get to the front and even then their arrival is subject to administrative quality checks for units not specifically designated to refit.

So you have to have the resources industrial and transport links to actually get the things and then the capacity to actually deliver them, and then units postured to actually receive them. By late '41 (or crossing out of Poland the other way in the late war), this chain can get long and tenuous. Especially if you're burning past your production rate to begin with.

Lets look at a few key items:

Manpower. In '41 and through part of '42, this is the effective limit on the Red Army. Even though I am routinely throwing more than 100k conscripts into the force weekly, you may also notice I am losing more than 100k conscripts weekly. Other than reserve formations mobilizing and units arriving from Siberia and Iran, the weekly manpower number vs weekly losses is a pretty good sign as to where the Red Army is going. Every town, every city, even the small ones, slowly chops into this number. Much like history, those losses won't be fatal to the State unless I lose so much of Russia I'm already dead, but they sure don't help.

Getting my happy peasants to the front is relatively easy - I'm being forced right back onto my industrial and population centers - is reasonably easy. Processing enough of them to keep up with the losses is less so. The Germans almost have the reverse of this problem - while their rate of replacements is low as Hitler promises the war will be over soon (it goes up in '42), their real issue is that those replacements have to travel over a shaky rail net, across Russia, and arrive at units that desperately need more fuel and ammo. In many cases a lost squad will stay lost until the owning unit takes an operational pause. That is the other reason you'll see the Germans fall into their historical pattern of lunge, peter out, and recover.

Artillery. Arming those 150k peasants and workers with anything heavier than mortars and machineguns is, thanks to my nascent artillery industry, a desperate affair. Yet another reason early war soviet formations have a rough time. I produce maybe 70x 122mm howitzers a week at the moment, and unlike WitE1 I can't magically decide I want more by converting arms points. You'll have probably guessed I'm losing more than 70x 122mm howitzers each week. Which means that even as my patriots march to the front, they are suffering from a historically accurate shortage of heavy weapons for now. Indeed, one of the biggest effects of saving or losing "regular army" units is that they usually have their full complement of guns, something your new formations absolutely won't.

The Germans are in similar straits. No one saw the war going long, and the artillery industry isn't in full gear yet. So long as they roll forward victorious, it can keep up, if only barely. Once units start retreating and batteries of guns get left behind, der Fuehrer's efforts to keep the civilian population happy are going to start leaving semi-permanent holes in the strength of units as the artillery industry just can't keep up.

Trucks Trucks are life. They carry supplies. You need them in depots to keep They are a pre-req for motorized units like panzers and tank corps actually having their full movement potential. HQ units almost all have a complement for their own movement and final stage logistics. THEY CARRY SUPPLIES. Right now, both sides are getting massive truck influxes. The soviets are basically mobilizing them off the economy. Unfortunately, the Germans are capturing lots of them off the soviets. But the day is coming when each side will be down to a couple thousand trucks a week - and then the relentless toll on these vehicles is going to start becoming a bigger and bigger issue. The trucks you lose in '41 will have real effects on '42.

Fuel The German fuel position is, for the first time ever in a WitX series, real. Suffice to say that while they can run amok now, it'll become painfully clear by the summer of '42 why they went for the oil fields. Assuming the war lasts that long...

[ranknfile]

This AAR is both very interesting and very informative. I am curious to see the continuation of it; for another nine days anyway!

[M60A3TTS]

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse
Artillery. Arming those 150k peasants and workers with anything heavier than mortars and machineguns is, thanks to my nascent artillery industry, a desperate affair. Yet another reason early war soviet formations have a rough time.

A lot of the Soviet artillery support units also start the war with experience in the 30's. Units at this experience level will have a hard time providing meaningful results.

Players will need to decide how much if any that they want to send to the reserves for additional training.

[GloriousRuse]

T15

I somehow lost my T15 files when transferring between a laptop to a desktop - I have 14 and 16 EoTs, but not 15, so this will be a pictureless update.

So. Sevastopol. Ouch. And after I went out of my way to break the naval isolation too...

This case mostly a result of play decisions: I simply couldn't get enough divisions in there fast enough to deal with the breakout into the Crimea. As you also may have noticed, I got sloppy in what was inside the city fort. The fortress itself is not a unit so much as a holding counter that allows you to stack units inside of it - and those units are still under the command of whichever HQ they originally belonged to. In this case, several different armies with the attendant combat penalties for different commands fighting side by side.

However, there are two other factors that have since been addressed and you will see in the final game. Here Sevastopol counts as a "Clear" hex, albeit one with extremely high initial fortification levels. After a review of the local terrain (its a bunch of north-south running ridges that shield the port), it has become a "Rough" hex. This effectively multiplies the base defensive value of units in the hex by three, and combined with up to five for levels means in your games it is quite likely you'll see defenders with 9x(!) their defensive value present. You are far less likely to see a coup main than what you see here.

The other is that the heavy guns present in the fortress were added to the OOB after this game began. Most Axis players are going to bring their siege artillery to a fight like this, but the big guns should help offset their effects in the early artillery duel, leading to more squads being in action at the range of SMGs and hand grenades; as a rule of thumb, that will favor the soviets and drive up losses amongst the attackers.

Elsewhere, the drive in the center is slowing down with the pocket, but the Germans have taken so much ground so early (alas, my efforts to stop them mostly got shoved aside) that even a slow drive can add up to problems. We have maybe two to three more weeks of good operations in the center and north before the mud season, and then maybe four weeks in November before the snow is too deep. At the ranges we're at now, two to three hexes a turn in those six or seven turns can become a very big deal.

The north reflects that as well, as we are now out of ground to give. From here it is all massive slugging battles in crap terrain where I hope for a hold...but failing that, I hope to reduce the battle to slow, sequential siegework that runs out the clock and leaves Germans freezing to death in northern swamps.

And to my great detriment, the same is now true of Rostov. Only the weather down south is milder...and mud season may never completely manifest. I don't have high hopes for Rostov.

[M60A3TTS]

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse

T15


Sevastopol. Ouch. And after I went out of my way to break the naval isolation too...

This case mostly a result of play decisions: I simply couldn't get enough divisions in there fast enough to deal with the breakout into the Crimea. As you also may have noticed, I got sloppy in what was inside the city fort. The fortress itself is not a unit so much as a holding counter that allows you to stack units inside of it - and those units are still under the command of whichever HQ they originally belonged to. In this case, several different armies with the attendant combat penalties for different commands fighting side by side.

Yeah, you don't want to get careless with this. Have an army or corps HQ standing by the fort city and switch your garrison units over to the HQ before assigning them to the fort unit. Once everyone is in, the HQ joins them in the hex. Just be aware in some cases the leader may die when the fort falls so be careful who you choose to command the garrison.

Players should also be aware that units inside a city fort do not add to the fortification value in the hex so just building a city fort where there is no fortified value will just be that much easier for your opponent to take down.

[Ynglaur_slith]

Wait, units assigned to a City Fort do not contribute their construction values to increasing / maintaining the fortification level?

[Joel Billings]

IIRC we had a bug at one time not too long ago where units in the city fort would not add to the fort level. I just ran a quick test and confirmed that units in city forts due add their construction values to building forts in the hex.

[Ynglaur_slith]

Thanks! This game is complex enough I'm sure the remaining defects will be amusing.

[ranknfile]

ORIGINAL: Ynglaur_slith

Thanks! This game is complex enough I'm sure the remaining defects will be amusing.

Complexities - such as revised logistics and air war management, the addition of command preparation points, combat delay, etc., etc., etc. and even more "etc." is what has me hyped for this game. I trust what flaws may exist will be minor and easily ignored.

[GloriousRuse]

So here we are, mud season on the horizon...what does that mean for WitE2?

Unlike WitE1 this is not a single momentous flip where the map suddenly becomes sticky mud on T17. Instead, the dominant weather for most of Russia turns into Heavy Rain, which is to say that unless a weather front rolls through an area the basic weather there will be Heavy Rain. That is not in any way a guarantee - fronts do come through - but it's a good indicator. On top of which, you may notice that the climate zone in southern Russia (Humid Warm) is much delayed on this, and has a shorter Heavy Rain period.



Heavy Rain in itself does not automatically lock down the map. The first week of it usually produces a mix of Light Mud and Heavy Mud; the latter is a mobility killer and makes all but the most lopsided attacks a bad idea, but the former is fightable for the Germans. So that first week of Heavy Rain still has some potential in it, though a second week will leave the Rodina a mire of muck and misery (aside from a handful of good roads.)

On top of which, the weather actually flips on the soviet half of the turn. So here in T16, it's just bog standard rain with a mix of light mud and even clear hexes. That means the Germans will have that for T17. A projected Heavy Rain period then means the Germans will get their last summer swings in on T18 (except for the south), and only finally by T19 and T20 can I really say "safe!" until the November freeze.

That said, November is also subject to fronts, and lies right on a meteorological fault line so to speak, so it's a bit of a grab bag on whether it'll be a murderous sunny chill, a mix of sleet and rain, blizzards or anything in between. A real hope for the best, plan for the worst situation. Anyhow...

Up north, the last bastions on the Neva fall. Now it's a matter of whether or not the Germans can effect an assault crossing (they almost certainly can at the tip there), and more importantly if they can fight out enough space after the crossing to make a dangerous November. Given the north traditionally has the worst weather, I am confident that we can hold until the mud and then funnel in reinforcements.



Kalinin and Tula are a bit more worrisome. Despite cutting off the lead panzer division, there's no getting around the fact that I just don't have the forces left to hold Tula, and the Germans have just enough time to take it before the real mud begins. Kalinin at least is in better condition. Being part of the immediate Moscow defense, it can absorb more forces and still help check any drive on the capital, which in turn means I think I can make this hold until Novemmber. If my weather luck in November is good, it may even end up being the counterweight to Tula in terms of VP.

Most importantly, PG3 heading to Kalinin means any November fight for Moscow will be starting to the west of the major swamp and forest lines, and will still have the Oka to absorb an initial shock from the south. Things may yet get dicey, but we've got a more than fighting chance to keep the spires of the Kremlin out of German field glasses.





Down south is the area of greatest concern. Mud season will come later, and a bad front might mean it never comes at all. Divisions pile into Rostov, but there's just so much time (and an inbound 11th Army) that it's pretty clear the weather won't be my savior. At least my beleaguered defenders routed some Romanians as a parting shot...

[GloriousRuse]

T17

Here comes the rain...



Which is useful, because the Germans are getting frisky with the seizure of Tula and also the assault crossing of the Neva. A bad week here could have had fatal consequences for the whole campaign.

Given what we talked about above, what is just as important is that the heavy rains will continue unabated across everything except the south next week as well. That is the real clincher that will ensure continuous heavy mud and seal the mud season into actuality.



Why is that important, really? Because as mentioned, one week of heavy rain still leaves "light mud" in various locations, and "light mud" will still give you opportunities to attack. And while I'm happy to knock about regiments and the odd division, the Germans can do a lot more with it...



I mentioned that Rostov is really at risk, right? So is poor surrounded Kursk.

[GloriousRuse]

T18

The first screenshots taken in the retail version of the game! Hurrah!

Rain, Rain, everywhere except Rostov where I could realllllly use some. In lieu of heavy mud, I put five divisions into the city. Part of me want to believe this will be an invincible bastion, but unlike Smolensk I won't have the benefit of exhausted German infantry needing a moment to catch it's breath. I am very wary of a coup main taking the city at cost, but the need to prevent a grand encirclement doesn't leave me many options...



May they be guardians of the motherland to the end.

Elsewhere, the mud signals a shift in the nature of the game. I get a chance to catch my breath and grow the Red Army, and the Germans finally get to try to piece together the heer.

More importantly, up until this point the game is largely tactical-operational. You might make a big decision or two, but it is a game of playing the hand you're dealt as well as you can. Bobo, as you may have noticed, has done that quite well. I...could have done better. You fight your fights and whoever fights them better is rewarded.

But as you cross October, the nature of the game changes. It becomes a true operational game; you're presented the outcome of the summer campaign and it is now very much a matter of deciding what you want to do and how you're going to resource that. For the first time the Red Army will start getting enough forces to make real decisions besides "don't lose Moscow".

And for the first time the German player starts picking what it is he wants to do rather than rushing fangs out hair on fire for the initial objectives. He also gets a moment to really rest his panzers (sigh).

As for where we're going - an assault on Rostov seems obvious. It's loss seems probable. Kalinin will hold through the mud and time out the bonus, but if they want it, it's theirs. Leningrad will turn on a fine line, namely what the Germans can accomplish in the three weeks or so before the snow piles up too deep.

The real question is whether or not November other than that will be spent fortifying a line for the winter or pushing on. Both have their advantages - even an offense that takes little ground can help provide one last cull of the Red Army, perhaps taking half a million men off the board before winter. Digging in both makes it harder to shift and makes surviving the blizzards away from immediate depots much more practical. We shall see...

[Ynglaur_slith]

Really good AAR so far. Thanks for writing it!

Where do you tend to use your support units? It seems like you don't add them to the city forts. Do the various motorcycle battalions, tank regiments, mortar battalions, etc. make a difference elsewhere?

[GloriousRuse]

That’s a great topic for the next mud turn, but generally speaking SUs for the Soviets are best used directly attached to the rifle divisions for direct combat units like tank BDEs, used to weight certain army level HQs for artillery ( production is so limited that trying to give every HQ SUs just means that nobody is rich in the early war, and that trying to put too many up front means gutting your divisions of artillery - mortars often become poor man’s arty), or in many cases as mobile replacement pools to bring tattered divisions back up to strength.

Generally, battalions are not worth the squeeze for the Soviets. A few hundred extra riflemen or a couple dozen light tanks are often better put into the force or formed into the regimental or brigade level SUs that can actually tip the scales. Engineer BNs for digging assistance might be the only exception, and even then there is some culling you can do

[GloriousRuse]

T19

I expected Rostov to fall. I didn't expect it to fall in one assault, I really didn't. I was hoping that this would be a battering series of assaults that drained a lot of readiness out of AGS and delayed their winter preparations. Besides the obnoxious VP effect, the new railyard, depot, and time to dig mean AGS will be sitting pretty when the snow comes. Since the south traditionally has the best weather anyhow, that's not great.

Elsewhere, the big news is building up forces. Most places this is a fairly straightforward business of refitting units on depots and selecting refit options in the strategic reserve. The latter is very valuable in that units there are prioritized for fill, do not take operational attrition, and regain experience and morale to a point. The down side is that units coming out the SR arrive 10 hexes back from the front at best, with 0 CPP, and often having failed enough checks that they arrive with limited MP until assigned to a command. So a unit coming out of the reserve needs roughly two weeks (including arrival) to get into some degree of fighting shape AND where you want them. More if you plan on using them for serious offensive operations.

Leningrad, however is different. Under siege, the peninsula is entirely being supplied by the port at Osinovets after the east shore ports ship supplies in.



The supply can be helped by an NKPS (it arrives in Leningrad, so its a natural assignment), but in real reinforcement means shipping units across the lake. Limited port capacity and ships means that I am caught between shipping in new divisions, shipping over brigades to be merged into weak units (one of the soviets better ways of refurbing a priority unit), and letting the lake shipping deliver what it needs.

Now, what I would have liked to do is keep about 24 divisions on the far side of the Neva, a nice six division fort in Leningrad and a double layer of three divisions per hex in the terrain, with the rear set to reserves. Wishes and fishes...because there is another way to kill Leningrad. If the Germans can fight east to the ports or their supplying rail lines, everything in the peninsula will choke to death and collapse. So those approaches need hefty defenses as well. The Germans are in a very dynamic position, capable of starting a three to four week campaign whenever the mud ends pushing in either direction. Had I been able to preserve the one crossing on the Neva, this would be much less dangerous, but now...

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse

.. shipping over brigades to be merged into weak units (one of the soviets better ways of refurbing a priority unit), ...

there is an alternative to this get the brigade into Stavka as a SU (other Fronts will work as well), transfer to Leningrad Front as a SU (here I'm assuming you do have LF in the city region?), to map, move to unit, merge. Takes 3 turns but it can be a lot easier than rail/sea and frees up a little bit of cross-lake capacity

[GaryD44]

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse

It was in the low 30s I think, and started in just the right place. As a whole the soviet mech and tank forces are far more dangerous than WitE1. Your BT-7s will still die hideously, but the Germans can’t just ignore the mobility. And when T-34s and KV-1s meet panzer IIIs you might see a lot more German individual tank losses even if the soviet division collapses.

You’ll see it later in the AAR, but WITE2 realizes that by mid summer the Soviets were counterattacking locally in many places, and this had real effects on the German operational pace. The capability of the TDs and mech to offer some nasty surprises is part of that. It’s a far more dynamic fight than just trying to redress the line every week.

This is great news. If the Soviet player has opportunities for counterattacking, it'll make for a very interesting game.