First of all: I am not a fanboy of any side, and I don't get money from the DCCB publishers. I just see I have way more fun with this product (and pbem) than I had with WitE. Here we have a better supply system and players units don't get their combat value artificially diminished/augmented during certain periods (in WitE axis units are turned into ants during winter while soviets run on fake steroids until getting artificially weakened again after certain dates). Trappenjagd here allowes for a fair struggle for both sides.
ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
Another thing I wanted to mention: I was surprised by the high morale of the Sov units in this game, often it was higher than my German units, although morale was certainly all over the map, I think the lowest I saw was 7, and the highest 100. Overall I would have expected Sov morale to be lower.
Morale seems to be gained in combat by killing enemy soldiers. Don't allow your opponent easy victories, don't drive your troops too hard, deal him bloody defeats, and your units will have no morale problem. And your corps/army commanders have several cards to improve morale in units where it suffered, as have some army/front commanders. Get rid of what you saw in WitE, where morale was a restricting factor for experience, imho the system here is more fairly balanced.
ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
ORIGINAL: Reconvet
Experience levels for reinforcement nonguard soviet units is 30, german panzer units arrive with 45 iirc.
That's not too much of a difference, really. From the manual:
MANUAL:
A unit with 100% experience will fight 4 times as well in battle as unit with 0% experience.
That basically means that a freshly recruited Soviet Rifle divisions is considered to fight as well just slightly worse than a German panzer division. As anybody familiar with the WitE forums knows, I'm far from being a 'German fanboy', but this is just not right (from my point of view).
Believe me, you WILL feel this 15% difference in experience. Once you play with it for some time and get a better feeling when to attack and move with different readiness levels, you will see that one german infantry division has the combat strength of two to three soviet rifle divisions.
ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
ORIGINAL: ReconvetExperience does have its value in DCCB. But in this game I've learned the hard way to first look at readiness, supply stocks and integrity before I send/expose units to battle. I'd bet your GD had attacked before they were mauled, maybe several turns in a row, which caused its readiness to be lower than 70% and had used up its supply stock to lower than 0.5. Units with integrity lower than 50% run a high risk to break if taking further heavy losses in battle. In DCCB you really have to give your units some rest once in a while, or your losses will get catastrophic real quick.
You lose your bet. GD was my exploitation unit, it had just pushed away a weak Soviet infantry regiment.
I hadn't really looked at readiness/integrity values, but I'd be surprised that they were so low as to determine such a catastrophic bad performance. On the other hand, I wonder how you can 'rest' units, when you need basically to stack up full divisions if you want a change to have chance to hold hexes against those massive counterattacks, and avoid encirclement at the same time.
Then my second suspicion would be that your GD had moved before attacking and then moved on after the fight into the conquered hex. First of all moving eats up both readiness AND supply. So you already got weakened into the fight, exhausted your unit further with fighting, used up more ammo while fighting, and ended up significantly weakened in the new hex (no ammo or very low ammo is very bad also on defense...). I learned not to move/attack with units if possible when their readiness is lower than 85%, and let their supply stacks get over 1 (better 1.5) before moving/attacking with them.
In DCCB readiness diferences between attackers/defenders/counterattackers are a huge factor when it comes to determine battle results and losses. One strategy you could use is occupying a newly conquered hex with a unit which didn't participate in the battle and/or let your occupiers end up with improved entrenchment via playing an entrench card of a corps/army commander and/or playing a higher level card to enhance defensive strenght.
ORIGINAL: Reconvet]
In my pbem with Bonners I successfully started to counterattack his german units (including his panzer divisions) after they had taken one or two hexes. I used rested troops I was able to mass in a second line, and if those counterattacks included a higher number of tanks I frequently was able to break several tired german regiments. My AAR is lagging hopelessly behind, but I'll post a screenshot of such an attack:
ORIGINAL: Bletchley_Geek
That's a quite, ehm, unsettling combat result. You just wiped out two Panzer Divisions - inflicting on them 2/3 losses... from what for all practical purposes was a frontal assault (you attacked from several hexsides, but it's not like the Germans couldn't just pull out seeing that avalanche coming their way). It also seems that you were able to bring to bear a full Soviet Army (3 Rifle Divisions, 1 Tank Corps, 1 Cavalry Corps plus assorted support units) into one single hex. That's a bit out of whack.
Your tank losses are surprisingly low, for this period, as well. Looks like a battle out of early 1945 rather than late 1942.
It really was an extraordinary combat result. I'd have to check but both of his panzer divisions there had participated in two or even three attacks. As mentionned: Guessing relative readiness differences before you attack is very important in DCCB, and enemy units with very low readiness and not yet dug in on open fields are a prime target to exploit with your rested tanks. As for retreating facing such an attack: If you are too tired and your vehicles are out of diesel it's very hard to run away...
As for my attacking units: Most counters are regiments, so I had about 2 divisions worth of infantry (cavalry division is about equal to a strong rifle regiment), 1 tank corps, two tank brigades and an AT unit. Most of these already went into the battle with integrity around 50%. So I didn't have what I'd call full army strenght for this attack.
Low tank losses: If defending units are out of ammo, have no prepared defensive positions and go into the fight near their breaking point, then the battle can turn into a rout real quick. This overrun capability is something I really enjoy here and terribly missed in WitE. This battle result was an extreme example for sure, but I wouldn't call it out of whack. Both sides can get such battle results when the other side is not planning ahead sufficiently in what condition and position he leaves his troops at the end of his turn.
The biggest threat for mankind is ignorance.
