Staff EX 2017 - a second go by altipueri

[altipueri]

Ok, my impatience got the better of me and so rather than do some work at home I've done some play at home and spent half a day blowing stuff up again on the screen.

This time I thought I would try and get a bridge across the Schlitz in the north east.

This should be my position soon after the start:

[altipueri]

And this should be the position after about an hour:

[altipueri]

Well actually it was two hours. My how time flies. Unlike my Cobras.

[altipueri]

This was about half time:

[altipueri]

And this after 5 hours:

I'm being pushed in the centre. There were some very effective Hinds that caught me moving bunched up; and yet again I forgot to move my HQs even though they say "unspotted" they seem to attract fire.

[altipueri]

In the previous post you can see I got two crossings of the Schlitz - one north east the other south east.

I got some Bradleys over and started shooting up the HQ. Unfortunately:

[altipueri]

Well my blue blob of Bradleys in the south east is no more. They shot up the HQ but I forgot there would be 5 tanks as guard - you can see the blighters - and they shot the brave Bradleys.

Overall I got 52% which was 4% better than last time; I got two un-molested crossings of the Schlitz.

The Russians went below 30% about five minutes from the end.

My kill ratio was about 2:1 and it reminds me of killing cockroaches - there's always more of the blighters crawling out from somewhere.


At least I kept two Cobras alive. I had the two unarmed Kiowas alive until almost the end. You can see them over in the east in the second to last screen shot.

[altipueri]

Command Delay.

If you like the idea of command delay in wargames then one you should try is Campaigns On The Danube 1805-9.

As Napoleon you give orders to your corps commanders - but the orders will takes hours or even days to be received, and the messenger might have been intercepted so you don't know. Yet you have to arrange to get your five or six corps to the right place or nearly so.

If you like planning (as Mike shows with his AARs; and I don't, as you can see from my AAR above) you will be pleased to know that Napoleon did it two hundred years ago rolling around on the floor with maps and coloured pins:


In fact, now I've started I'll quote from Chapter 6 of Jomini's "The Art Of War":

"The emperor was his own chief staff officer. Provided with a pair of dividers opened to a distance by the scale of from seventeen to twenty miles (which made from twenty-two to twenty-five miles, taking into account the windings of the roads,) bending over and at sometimes stretched at full length upon his map, where the positions of his corps and the supposed positions of the enemy were marked by pins of different colors, he was able to give orders for extensive movements with a certainty and precision which were astonishing."

[StuccoFresco]

Your own HQ will eventually get "spotted" via radio traffic: the more orders you give the more likely is for the enemy to locate it and thus shell it.

How did you find the T-80 with ATGMs? Were you able to ambush them or did you engage in long-range duels?

There are a lot of red wrecks around Eisenbach: what happened here? Did you fire on the enemy with your Abrams from the other side of the river?

[altipueri]

Long range duels was where my Abrams did Ok. As you said, from across the river.

I had too many at one point and lost at least 4 in a single artillery pounding.


To those of you who know that equipment and instructions should be soldier proof, here was my take on bridge blowing and building:

Get a unit next to the bridge press the button and it will tell you which bridges can be blown. It should take 30 minutes.

So I decided to blow a bridge and a message pops up saying a bridge will be blown between 1105 and 1205.

Well that's over an hour away not 30 minutes I thought. Oh well.

It was only later when I put a bridge over the top right at 4205 of whatever that I realised 1105 was the hex reference not the time of bridge blowing !