The thank you morvael mild blizzard AAR-Toidi welcome

[rmonical]

T64/65 With the fall of Moscow Toidi wins with 262 victory points!

[rmonical]

Toidi played a very good game - especially in 1942. He has been very helpful to me throughout - a true gentleman. I also suspect he has been very frustrated with many of my rookie mistakes in letting the game end early. This game is a huge investment of time and it ends with the Soviets still having a lot of fight.

[rmonical]

I think Toidi nicely explains the '42 mistakes here - these are piled on the '41 mistakes.

That was a short turn. I attacked Tambov and Ivanovo, I think, which got me to 262 VP. The game announced Axis victory - I could not do much but save and exit.

I am not sure whether the 260 VP victory is intended or was just a byproduct of me not having the expansion.

The first thing to say is thank you so much for playing.

Below is my view of our game - in case you are interested in seeing my perspective of things.

I think that you made a major mistake in '42 by not concentrating your best troops around my armour and not counter-attacking all the time. With 6 rifle corps you can move any stack. That is the way to use them, in my opinion, not to 'stabilise front'.

My strategy for '42 was obvious - to get Moscow. However, you were too strong there initially, so I was thinning your army till I could make a move. I was convinced that you will concentrate all your forces around Moscow as losing Moscow gets you very close to automatic lose during check in '43. After you lost Moscow, I was very surprised by you moving back - that would be a good strategy if not for victory points. Otherwise, you would not get the terrain back in early '43 to get Moscow back. At least you should not lose all those towns east to Moscow - that made your situation untenable as you would not be able to take them back early '43.

As you noticed I did not want to go south - I calculated VP and manpower there and decided that it makes no strategic sense. You could keep there some infantry brigades and let me farm morale for my infantry. That was all I would be doing. I was shocked you sent some of your better troops there - I was expecting them sitting close to the Oka river and counter-attacking anything that dares to cross. Also, terrain around Moscow is highly defensible - a corps in swamps is very tough thing to move...

Finally, you wasted much of your troops in the far north. There is nothing to defend there, so there was no need for you to put a stiff defense there. You are happy to retreat there as long as it is not endangering Moscow. And Finns cannot really attack - if they move forward they lose morale each turn *and* they have no manpower for replacements.

As for interesting facts, I was running zero armaments for Germany for quite some time. Possibly a reason for that was having so many Hiwis; also I got more manpower by my aggressive disbanding of anything not on the front - even disbanded army group centre which was a mistake. Still, the manpower was low (less than 10k), so it was almost even.

Also zero armaments and zero manpower was the fate of Romania - again for a long time. The Finns had plenty arm, but no manpower. Italians was running low on both (but still in plus), Hungarians have much manpower and armaments, which was the reason for moving Hungarian forward and moving Romanians back... Slovaks were all right too.

I had no tanks whatsoever, which is why I was relying more and more on motorized divisions. My best motorized had 97 morale and 10+ cv. Tank divisions were 40-50 tanks on average and weak...

My infantry pulled out for blizzard mostly kept their high morale (i.e. 90+) which meant that they have cv of 10. On the other hand, some infantry was as low as 67 morale and 2cv strength due to be around 50% TOE. They were so low as I was directing my replacements to my best units - that is mobile ones and the high morale infantry, plus the units attacking around Moscow. South was drained for manpower, which is why your attacking there was quite successful.

Once again, thanks for playing! If you have any questions or any comments, I am more than happy to listen.

[loki100]

thanks for putting this together.

Its probably the first report of 1942 with the mild winter rules in place and it really supports the view that the change to the winter rules really changes the dynamics for 1942, to something much closer than was possible in reality.

Looks like Toldi took a very methodical approach to eating up the Red Army bit by bit (SigUp is doing something similar to me), till you reach the stage where a lunge for something critical becomes feasible.

[Bozo_the_Clown]

This and DV's AAR show that the reduced blizzard works as intended. Axis players don't have to go for the kill in 41 anymore. They can preserve their troops during blizzard and try to hold a strategically favorable position. Then they can go for the kill in 42 by concentration troops in one location. It makes for a much more interesting game and I really hope this will slow down the game in 41 somewhat. Some adjustments to logistics might still be required.