Matrix Games Forums

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.