Matrix Games Forums

I'm just starting turn 3 in my first PBEM game and i opened the game and saw all these brown blotches on the screen. at first i couldnt figure out what it was so i re-started the game, they were still there. then it occurred to me...mud. talk about a good way to stall an invasion. i assume this is WAD but it does seem like rather extreme weather for 7/3/41. any thoughts on this???

Did you play with Random Weather on? If you play with historical weather, the mud won't come so soon.

OH that would total suck as the Germans [:(]

yeah, i just played the turn out, it really sucked.  some of my armor units couldnt move more than 3 hexes.  what a disaster.  yes, we are playing with random weather, but i still think this is extreme for july, i must have had the worst luck on that weather roll.  oh well, onward to Moscow... 

Thanks for posting about random weather having Mud in July... It means I'll never use random weather in my games. Ridiculous.

ORIGINAL: Gandalf

Thanks for posting about random weather having Mud in July... It means I'll never use random weather in my games. Ridiculous.

That's the whole point. It's random. It gives both players something new to consider.

ORIGINAL: bwheatley

ORIGINAL: Gandalf

Thanks for posting about random weather having Mud in July... It means I'll never use random weather in my games. Ridiculous.

That's the whole point. It's random. It gives both players something new to consider.

I realize it's random, but Mud over the entire Soviet theatre in July is not a realistic outcome. Maybe early Fall rains, but July... nada.

I am not so sure there would be enough rain to cause the weeks long mud problems the Germans suffered due to the yearly fall rains. Also, as the German commander, I would cancel the invasion date to wait on good weather. So I think if you have random weather on, it should never be mud on the first turn. I doubt the Germans would have launched the attack and given away their tactical surprise if the weather forcast was for a week of rain making roads were bad enough to rate a "mud turn".

In other words, maybe in a patch the programers can fix this, so there is no chance of mud on the first turn if random weather is on.

To be fair, the random weather rules do rule out Mud in June 1941 and only one turn of Mud between 19 June and 30 September in all other years, but even a full week of Mud in the middle of summer seems too much to be real over any one of the weather zones. At most it would have been localized.

I agree.

Well, in Glatz latest book: Barbarossa Derailed there is a passage when in early July Hoth's 3rd Panzer Group is seriously hampered in their advance for Polotsk & Vitbesk by thunderstorms which lasted for about a week and turned the roads into mud, reducing his advance to a crawl.

It did happen historically [;)]

I am reading the same book, and that is a local area, muddy conditions prevade across the entire front, so my point still is, on the first turn if there were to be weather that bad across the entire front then attack would have been delayed to let the weather pass, so bottomline there should never be mud on the very first turn.

benway said the mud came on turn 3, so technically it didn't happen on the first turn. [:D] [;)]

Good point, I over looked that, sorry. So I guess there is no problem, mud on turn three. I like the idea of random weather, maybe the first winter would not be so bad...as long as the first turn was/is clear I see no issues if the players chose random.

It would be good if the game allowed for 1 random set of storms with localised mud over, say, a 10 hex area during July '41 to represent the historical reality, but without creating a completely a-historical 'mud along the whole front' outcome...

ORIGINAL: Zemke_4

Good point, I over looked that, sorry. So I guess there is no problem, mud on turn three. I like the idea of random weather, maybe the first winter would not be so bad...as long as the first turn was/is clear I see no issues if the players chose random.

I think it's in the manual that the first turn in June 1941 is never mud.
There are alos limitations on how many times you can get mud during a certain period etc...
It's under Weather int he manual.

Actually this is a common misconception (weather was good during the summer of 41). Not only PG3 had issues. AGS had absolute fits between the weather and the Russian resistance in July. A couple of books I have speak of "heavy thunderstorms", etc seriously delaying AGS units advancing towards Kiev because the ground was so muddy.

Something else of interest is a lot of people look at the Balkans campaign as seriously delaying the start of Barbarossa, which it did. However, the weather that spring was wet later than normal and from a weather standpoint of view, the campaign could not have started much earlier than it did if you wanted good ground conditions across most of the front. If the Germans had tried to start earlier, they would have encountered tougher ground conditions.