You are right AND wrong.ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
ORIGINAL: DBeves
Yes - well this was exactly my opinion. Some people have posted about chess like machinations of 'types' of defence. ie these are based on gaming the game rather than it actually - as you say - reflecting what happened historically. Basically - the germans dug in and via hitlers no retreat order fought the russians to a stalemate. They did this without getting destroyed and in a position to launch a major offensive in the south. Basically - if the game cannot simulate this - and in fact - the same strategy leads to a german army virtually destroyed - then it is in fact broken as a simutlation of the eastern front. I am not interested in analyzing the engine to such an extent I eventually find a (ahistorical) way of surviving winter. I should be able to do what the germans did and come out of it in much the same way - or at least not with an army that is an empty shell.
This is the legacy of German memorists at work. Before claiming ahistoricity, you should perhaps spend some time reading history.
Like this very fine (yet old) article by Allen F. Chew, "Fighting Russians In Winter: Three Case Studies":
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr= ... &q&f=false
Which google allows us to read for free.
Some extracts:
ORIGINAL: p.39
Because shelter was essential to survival, villages became the focal points of local battles during winter 1941-42, just as they had been in 1918-19. During the Soviet counteroffensive General Rendulic, commander of the 52nd Infantry Division, initially tried to conduct an orthodox defense which included holding open terrain. That, however, led to so many frostbite casualties that he had to restrict his lines to populated points and their immediate environs. When the Russians penetrated the gaps between German-held villages and fanned out laterally to threaten the roads leading to the rear of those villages, the Germans were forced to retreat again.
Sounds familiar?
There's however a point which it's unclear how it is accounted for:
ORIGINAL: p.40
Conducting defensive operations in open country around the turn of the year, 6 PzDiv was sustaining about 800 frostbite casualties a day. It had some five tons of explosives on hand, however, and on 3 January 1942 its engineers blasted enough craters to accomodate all of the combat elements. Covered with lumber and heated with open fires, each crater sheltered three to five men. New frostbite cases immediately fell from eight hundred to four a day. With minefields, antitank obstacles and paths trampled between and behind the craters, the position held out for ten days and was only abandoned when outflanked. Eventually, in order to free them from dependence on the engineers, the Germans trained both combat and service units to 100-gram cartridges for blasting shelters.
Blizzard penalties going down from January on, reflecting how the German Heer adapted to the circumstances, might account for this.
I could quote more passages, but I find terribly unfair to 2by3 developers statemens like the ones you - and many others - have been doing. WiTE is the most accurate depiction of Winter conditions I've ever seen. And that doesn't mean they got it completely right: they got it really really close to perfect!
right, the germans suffered, but wrong, they could hold in most places WITH the blizzard.
In the game they can´t hold, even if they are better supplied, better prepared, fortified and in better locations...
And this is wrong.
So if you speak about theblizzard, you need to agree, that the russians also lost partly 80% of their combat troops by frostbite. And here, they died.
So if the russian player need to loose all the men in summer 41, because this was historical true - and i can read you support only solutions that the russians need to loose exactly as historical, everything is fine
if not - well, that shows something.
In real life, the german troops could hold frontlines with a few troops in blizzard, cause the russians couldn´t fight either... they died in the open because most russian soldiers hat even less winter cloths... is this in the game?
