Pieter - your view here is interesting. I don't know if it is modelled in the game, but the Russians in these early days used their armour pretty recklessly on occasions, in kind of motorised cavalry charges, and used their medium and heavy tanks piecemeal. Even the 37mm PAK (nick named the 'door knocker') had great success against the light tanks (T26) that were thrown at them. And the German ID's have a dozen 50mm PAKs too. I know Helpless will get cross but there was an 'attack doctrine' (or perhaps 'culture' would be a better word for it) in the Red Army, it seems, and very poorly executed it was too, especially in the North and Central sectors. Attacks going without enough prep or assembly time, poor co-ordination and without supporting arms. We know what happens when tanks take on infantry without close infantry support. Just look at the 'kill' stats for early Barbarossa - at Raseiniai, really close to the border battles in my game, the Russians lost over 250 tanks in 4 days. Very close simulation IMO.
The majority of Soviet tank losses came from running into AT units or the Luftwaffe. Losses in direct combat with German armour were less common, aside from mobility kills that could not be recovered.
The problem with 1 week turns, and combat linked to to MP's is that a single battle is all a unit fights during a week, which would also mean the unit is focussed on that battle. However, as the battles rely on an MP system, the battle is not treated as lasting a week, but is just a battle costing a certain amount of MP's.
As such, see-saw battles and counterattacks are all abstracted. In the cases you mention, and in the vast majority of cases where the Soviets lost hundreds of tanks in the early days of Barbarossa, they were attacking gung-ho towards the German lines without much of a plan, aside from instructions to (re)capture a certain location. In such a situation, German AT screens and Luftwaffe ground attack aircraft decimated Soviet tank units.
However, in the case of the battle we're discussing, the Germans were attacking without means to quickly close the gap between the infantry and AT units and the Soviet tanks and would thus, due to lack of Luftwaffe support (I'm guessing most of the artillery involved would either be the AT guns or 75mm/105mm artillery). The Germans liked to bait enemy tank forces into a tank trap, but that would require holding a position to establish such a trap. In this case, the Germans are quite literally walking towards an enemy tank force that can see them coming from miles away, which is why I am of the opinion that the Soviet tank losses were way too high. The combat results assume the Soviets either obliged to fight the Germans on their terms or swarmed towards the Germans as soon as they could be seen. In the latter case, it would still take time to set up AT screens and the clear terrain would not offer much protection.
