Matrix Games Forums

Much has been written about German preparations to survive the 1941 blizzards and Soviet attacks.

What are players experiences of best Soviet tactics during the blizzards? What are their best stacks - combined arms or infantry doing the initial assault and armour and cavalry pushing forward?
Attack everywhere or only where you have good odds?
What about the use of airpower as according to the manual German planes may not launch?

How best to launch a devastating blizzard offensive?

All advice welcome.

Matthew Buttsworth Zhukov fan

I can confirm few German planes launching during the blizzards, I am losing tons of transports here since their assigned fighters will not (or just rarely and very few then) get up to protect them.

Soviet planes shouldn't be flying much in the blizzard either.

Cavalry corps! High CV and high mobility.  You can also attach support directily to the units.
You can start forming them in Dec 41.

Some of my ideas on this are a WIP yet. The Typhoon scenario is a great one to play around with for both sides to get some experience with the weather changes, etc.
 
Certainly conserve your cav divisions to turn into cav corps. They offer some really good punch and good mobility in the snow.
 
Tank brigades are fairly weak, but I think it is important to use them, especially when you are sure of victory. The reason this is important is to build their skill and get them victories. Guards tank brigades = guards tank corps later.
 
One thing about the winter offensive is that while you will "win" a fair number of battles, your casualties are something to keep an eye on. A Soviet player pushing attacks and formations hard will find the formations bled white by the end of winter.
 
I think most Soviets just look at doing what Stalin did and that is launching mass attacks across the board. I think the Soviets are perhaps better off attacking in depth. By this I mean you get going on a section of the German line with two lines of troops and they just leapfrog each other, attacking every other turn. This will hopefully mean that you are attacking the same German units over and over and that your troops get to rest every other turn.

One more tip.  I found that the easiet place to surround the running Germans (AI) is in the north. It may be a good idea to put more troops there during the winter offensive. The coastal hexes will help you surround them quickly as opposed to the land mass in central and southern fronts.  It's quite hard to surround German units since bulk of Russian units don't have much MP.

I agree with one exception, if your losses have been low then attack hard. I am doing that in one game where I had over 6 million troops at the start of the winter, and I am just blowing the Germans away now, and i still have over 6.5 million troops. It depends on how bad you got hurt in the summer.

Its Oct in my game and I am already preparing by digging in and straightening lines. Reorganizing using less supply so I have stocks, fortified zones, defencive ares. Its a GC so I look at the long term. If I am careful I can go back over to the attack early in 42. I have though stopped in with an eye to having a good jump off poiny for launching my attacks in 42.