Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Sat Jul 03, 2021 10:47 pm

This AAR is for another Grand campaign that Bread and I have started. He is playing Germany again, I am the Soviets!

We are playing with player theatre box control this game.

Here is German turn 1 in the north. The fascist invaders have seized Riga, Daugavpils, and Polotsk. And what is more, they are only about 30 kilometers from Vitebsk! [:(]

In comparison to the previous game, it looks like Bread is most likely not going as hard for Leningrad is in the previous game, because he has not crossed the Dvina more (for example, taking Riga but not driving further north from there with other divisions). And he is pushing more towards Vitebsk. This suggests that he may be planning to focus more on the center this game.

However, it is too early to make assumptions, and we will have to see how things develop over the first few turns.

In the center, a large Bialystok pocket has been formed with a good # of divisions stuck inside. Leading German Panzer divisions have also already crossed the Berezina river.

spoiler: it actually turned out that the pocket could be broken by an AT regiment and a security unit that could (barely) link up. However, in the interests of game balance, and after discussing with Bread, I decided I won't do that. The fact that I broke the Bialystok pocket in the previous game (albeit using temporary motorization in that game) is one of the things that disrupted the balance, and I would like this game to be a challenge. I do plan to break pockets in subsequent turns if it is possible, however (but not with temporary motorization). This is just a "turn 1 mulligan." The alternative was Germany could have re-done turn 1 while trying to make the pocket more secure, but that would just bring us back to basically the same place, and be a waste of time.

In the south, Germany formed a few small pockets and pushed deep into Soviet territory, seizing Proskurov. The southern front is not activated. The pockets, and the German thrust to Proskurov, seem fairly secure. While a handful of units in the spearhead could probably be cut off, that is about the extent of it. This seems like a fairly good balance of aggression and caution in securing pockets in the south. Also of note, it looks like there is at least one cavalry and at least one or two mobile divisions from Army Group Center helping out in the south:

In the air, Germany decided (as in the previous game) not to bother with bombing the German airfields, but instead to simply massacre the Soviet pilots in the air. 2100 Soviet pilots have been disposed of, compared to only 100 Axis pilots.

Although the personnel that historically decided the Luftwaffe's strategy (similarly to those who planned the Israeli Air Force's strategy decades later in the 6 day war) would have considered it to be insane to not bother to bomb the enemy aircraft sitting defenseless on the ground, this makes more sense in the mythical game world which we inhabit.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Mon Jul 26, 2021 5:19 pm

End of Soviet Turn 1 ---

Late on the evening of June 22, 1941, after Operation Barbarossa had been in progress for a day, Comrade Stalin was cowering in his dacha and was not responding to messages from the Red Army and VVS high command. But by this time, it was already apparent that the situation was grim and that a disaster was unfolding. Something simply had to be done, so General Zhukov called a quiet and informal meeting of STAVKA officers. Over the course of the day, it had become clear that the situation at the front was one of total chaos, with communications thrown into total disorder. Though STAVKA could issue orders, they were often not be received by commanders on the ground, and if they were received, were often so delayed that they were no longer relevant to the actual situation on the ground (if they were relevant in the first place).

When everyone was present, Zhukov began as follows:

"Comrades, we will begin with the air. We must complete the air phase of the turn before the ground phase can begin, and after that we cannot and will not reconsider the air war for the rest of the week."

Many of the officers looked at Zhukov in puzzlement and confusion at this statement and wondered a bit about his sanity, but given the stress and extreme circumstances of the day, let it slide.

Zhukov continued:

"All the level bombers in the Soviet Union shall be gathered under the auspices of General Gorbatsevich's Long Range Air Command. General Gorbatsevich: I have a simple and clear directive for you: Bomb early, bomb often. And in particular, bomb the German Panzer divisions. The time to use our bombers will be over the coming days while they penetrate deeply into our territory, before too many of the German fighters can be re-based to bases within Soviet territory; this way we can bomb them without being shot down by their fighters. In addition, in general the time to bomb is in the early turns, when the weather is clear. Within a few months, the weather will worsen and at that point, both we and the Germans will fly a lot less. If we don't use our bombers and get them shot down now, rather than later, we will enter winter with a huge stock of excess bombers just sitting there uselessly."

"Comrade General Gorbatsevich, I further direct you to bomb, speciifically, the units, and not to interdict them. You may be wondering, why not interdict them, surely this would slow down their pace of advance into our territory? Well, I conducted some tests earlier today and determined that by bombing Panzer divisions, we can interrupt many of the divisions' elements. If we bomb them sufficiently heavily, this can have an effect of reducing the German movement points on their Panzers by up to 16-17 movement points."

By this point, the looks of puzzlement and confusion lining the countenances of the officers were universal. Zhukov's behavior had simply become too much to fathom.

General Gorbatsevich sheepishly raised his hand and interjected, "I am sorry, Comrade General Zhukov, I don't understand what you mean at all. What are these 'movement points' you speak of?"

Zhukov brusquely responded, "Well, Comrade General Gorbatsevich, I have determined that reality is probably not quite what you think it is. You may find it hard to believe, but we live in a computer simulation... And... well, don't you concern yourself with that or with the details. Just listen to what I say and follow my orders."

General Gorbatsevich again interjected, "But, Comrade Zh..."

Zhukov cut him off before he could begin, and began to raise his voice. "Comrade General, you are wasting time while the Fascist invaders are annihilating our troops at the front, at a time when we must mount a coordinated and quick response. You will listen and follow my orders. If you do not, I will tell Comrade Stalin that you betrayed the Soviet Union and are responsible for the disasters presently unfolding. You don't want to find out what the consequences of that will be."

The expression on Gorbatsevich's face turned somber, and he quietly murmured, "Yes sir."

Zhukov: "Now, where were we. Ah, yes. You will bomb the German Panzer divisions, and shall not under any circumstances interdict them. Interdiction basically just reduces admin movement for the most part (if even that), and that will have much less of an effect than reducing German Panzer division movement points from, for example, 40 to 24. And moreover, interdiction would only hamper the movement of the Germans within territory that they already conquered, not without territory that we still hold, and the main thing we want to slow down are the leading Panzers, not the infantry behind them. Plus, if you get lucky when bombing the units, maybe your bombs will even destroy an AFV or two. Mostly, you will bomb the Panzers in this manner. However, you will also bomb the railyard in Minsk and the port in Riga to try to worsen German logistics slightly."

Thus began the Great Soviet Level Bomber Mass-Suicide of June 1941.

Over the course of the next week, Zhukov monitored the official STAVKA Air Execution Phase Summary closely. Many hundreds of level bombers flew tens of thousands of sorties over the course of the week, resulting in only minor direct damage to the German Panzer divisions:

In total, 838 Soviet planes and 704 pilots were lost in this first week of relentless bombing:

This brought total air losses, including the German air phase, to 2,800 pilots and 3,703 planes:

In total, the tens of thousands of Soviet bomber sorties had only killed barely more than a thousand German troops, destroyed 34 guns, and destroyed 15 AFVs. However, Zhukov rested secure in the knowledge that the German Mobile division MPs would be lower:

Zhukov looked at reports from individual battles and noted the German ground elements that had been disrupted by the bombing, secure in the knowledge that all this bombing would (or should) be lowering the German movement points significantly and should greatly diminish their capacity to continue forward the subsequent turn. For example, here was one single mission of 368 bombers launched against 1 leading German Panzer division. There were 8 other such missions against just that single division alone, in addition to all the others against the other Panzer divisions (and in some cases motorized divisions):

ut that was in the future. This was now, the STAVKA meeting was ongoing, and with the Air Phase dealt with, General Zhukov still had to coordinate the land phase. While the front was in chaos, fortunately communications with Soviet reserve troops was easier to manage, and coherent orders could be given and followed (though coordination was still difficult, given the nature of the surprise attack).

General Zhukov continued: "Now to the situation on the ground. Vitebsk and Smolensk are under direct threat, given the collapse at the front and the imminent fall of Minsk. Accordingly, we will send all of our best troops from across the Soviet Union to the Vitebsk-Smolensk sector and the Land Bridge between the Dniepr and Dvina rivers. And we shall do this immediately, right away."

A staff officer got up out of his chair, looked at Zhukov, picked up his papers, and appeared to be intending to leave the meeting. As he was doing this, he said, "Yes Sir! I will draft up the orders to send all the elite, high morale mountain divisions, our best Mechanized Corps, and the rest of our best trained and best equipped troops, and have it sent out without delay!"

Comrade General Zhukov motioned the officer to sit back down, and quickly replied, "No, no, no! You misunderstand! I will paraphrase the Capitalist Statue of Liberty:"

"Give me your tired, your poor, your NKVD border guards
Your huddled airborne brigades yearning to be thrown - without proper anti-tank equipment - directly in front of German Panzer divisions,
Send the small anti-tank brigades, preferably with as few guns and as few men as possible.
Send your unready, the homeless, beaten up tempest-tost routed divisions with only a few thousand unready routed men to the Land Bridge,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Here's a screenshot of the Land Bridge at the end of the Soviet turn, but before I re-assigned generals. This allows you to see where the troops came from, e.g. there are paratroopers and NKVD border guards railed up from the Southwestern front and from the Kharkov military district, etc. I would have also sent the paratroopers from the Southern Front etc, but unfortunately they were locked. As an example, an yellow-colored unready division that had been previously routed from the Northwestern front, with a CV of only 0.01 is selected:

There are also some higher quality divisions, in particular I put some better divisions on the front every-other-hex because there was a line of swamp and rough terrain there, so this could actually potentially stop some attacks with decent defensive CVs, and could not be bypassed without ZOC locking any divisions that tried to go right through the Land Bridge, and there are also some higher quality tank divisions etc behind the Dniepr and the like. But the mass of the Land Bridge defense wall is formed from low quality troops. Because, if you are going to rout, as basically almost anything is in the first turn or two, it is probably better that the units that do the routing be low strength and/or weak units, since those can lose fewer maximum men. But at the same time, they force a battle that drains German MPs if they attack them, and can create a combat delay.

In the Bialystok pocket, insofar as orders could be given (not much, given the non-existant communications), units were ordered to run to the east and try to block the rail line connecting Brest-Litovsk and Minsk:

In the north, such defenses as were practical were set up. It was not much, but it seemed that most likely Germany would be focusing primarily on Moscow and the center (not Leningrad), so the priority was on forming the Land Bridge defense. I wanted to try to defend the Baltics, at least to some degree, because I expected that Germany/Bread might not really focus on trying to take Pskov and go that direction to Leningrad, but he might still try to take the Baltics in order to capture the ports (and as many rail lines intact as possible) to help his logistics. In addition, there is a lot of swampy-foresty terrain there which is suitable for defense, if you can just get units there. In my previous games, I didn't defend the Baltics basically at all, which is another reason to defend there so as to not be too predictable. However, on turn 1, the most you can really get there is a light screening force:

In the south, I basically just ran away, the reason being that it is not really possible at this stage to defend on clear terrain, and in addition I was pretty sure the main German focus would be on Moscow. It was important to get as many troops into the center-north as quickly as possible, and that meant stripping the Southwest Front. Pretty much every division possible was either railed out to the north or transferred to reserves:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... nknown.png

Here is the Gomel area, since I didn't really show it in the previous screenshots:

And here is the south. In the part south of Proskurov, I also transferred to reserves and railed units out to escape, but I sent a good # of the railed out units to try and protect the southern front, and hopefully to be able to reduce how much of it would be encircled on the 2nd turn while it was frozen. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake, as we will see with the next turn, I don't think I really saved much of anything extra. Some of those NKVD border guards you can see on rails would have been useful further north against the main center German Panzer thrust (even if it may have taken them more than a single turn to get there in some cases).

Now, as far as transferring units to reserves goes... Where exactly was I transferring them? I did transfer some divisions to the National reserve, in particular high morale ones that I wanted to redeploy to the center-north. However, we are playing with Theatre Boxes on this time, so I also decided to transfer some extra divisions to both the Transcaucasus and the Far East. 3 mech and 3 tank divisions (all with relatively low morale) are headed to the Transcaucasus, and will arrive there on Turn 3:

And there are also 8 tank divisions which are being transferred to the Far East, set to arrive on Turn 5. These (and the Transcaucasus ones) are all low morale divisions from the southern part of the map (also includes some that were in the North Caucasus):

When they arrive, they will be traded out mostly for other non-mobile units. Part of the reason for doing this is to hopefully lose fewer battles with tank/mech divisions. If Germany beats an infantry division, it should capture fewer trucks than if it beats a tank division, which should both hurt German logistics later on, and also help mine. Many of these divisions may come back, however, but that will be later on when they have full morale, maybe for the Winter Offensive for example. In the meantime, we will be fighting with fewer tanks and more infantry (at least, more once replacement troops can be transferred back from the theatre boxes). It will take a while for them to transfer, but regardless, I would not particularly want to be fighting with these low morale mobile units until they started to recover higher morale in any case.

Basically this means I won't be defending the south too much. In an ideal world I would like to defend it more, but I think it is just not defensible in the early turns at all, and there is basically no possible way to avoid losing places like Kiev, Odessa, and Sevastopol early. That is partly because rivers seem to be a lot weaker defensively than forest/swamp/rough terrain, partly because of bugs with fortress cities that make Odessa/Sevastopol apparently not work as well as they are designed to do so, and partly because clear terrain in general is obviously the least defensible terrain.

So therefore, in effect my strategy is to try to slow down and stop the German advance in places where it is possible (the north and the center) as quickly as possible, and get entrenchments going there with a continuous and increasingly strong defensive line there. And then once Soviet troops are stronger, I will start defending more in the south. Defend where you can defend. Abandon where you can't defend, and the only thing in those areas (the south) that can stop the German advance within the first 10 turns or so are really the German logistics.

I used my turn 1 AP on making the Western Front an assault front and on building 3 depots in the center-north area. Unfortunately, the Western Front HQ was trapped in the Bialystok pocket during turn 1, which meant I could not assign new troops outside of the pocket to the Western Front. I had planned on making the Western Front an assault HQ. I think that if you are going to make fronts be an assault HQ with Soviets prior to winter at all, you should try to do it as early as possible, because then the troops fighting under that front will start gaining CPP more quickly from turn 1. The main disadvantage of Assault Fronts is you can't dig higher level defensive fortifications, but on the first turn or two that is not a drawback at all on the first turn or two, because you don't even have level 1 forts yet. So may as well start getting the benefit while it is a pure benefit.

Since the Western Front was trapped, I considered making a different front be the assault front instead (e.g. Northwest), but I am hoping that Pavlov will get killed by Stalin and replaced for free by a better front commander general soon.

Finally, here is a screenshot of the land bridge after I re-assigned generals. Many of the better troops near the front on the good defensive terrain (plus a few de-trained paratroopers) have Zhadov as a corps commander, and are under the Western Front:

Purkayev commands many of the other best troops (yellow northwestern front), since he is the best general I started with for free (not sure if you always start with him, or maybe it is randomized?), and has the 7th mech corps under him (4.0 skill corps command, not bad by Soviet turn 1 standards) commanding the best tank/mech divisions behind the Dniepr. Also you can see I cut off 3 divisions that were furthest forward. If you combine the effects of the bombing reducing MP plus them being cut off from supply, that should hopefully limit their MP significantly on Turn 2:

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Wed Jul 28, 2021 5:52 pm

Start of Turn 2 ---

In the north, Germany advanced into the Baltics and took Parnu with the 3rd Motorized division. These units brushed aside my few and weak screening forces. Presumably they have the objective of capturing Tallinn next. However, there was no sign of any attempt to really attack Pskov in any direct manner. It is possible the thrust forward visible in the bottom-left of the screenshot below could be directed ultimately towards flanking Pskov, but probably more likely it is directed mostly on the Moscow Axis at this point. Like I somewhat mentioned before, I am not totally surprised by this. Part of the reason for not being surprised is I was pretty sure Bread would not focus on pushing Leningrad again after the previous game. And secondly, I know that in another game against Capt_Zero, Bread focused on Moscow and didn't really try to take Pskov (but he did take the Baltics), so I was half expecting this might end up being similar.

In the Smolensk-Velikie Luki area, the main advance was clearly the main event. Germany advanced to within only 2 hexes from Velikie Luki; I didn't have that many troops in the area, and he found a relatively sparsely defended path through. The areas closer to Vitesbk were better defended. On the land bridge itself, the relatively strong (by Soviet Turn 1-2 standards) 46th Rifle Division under Zhadov in the swamp hex managed to hold against a first attack. It retreated to a 2nd attack (a retreat, not a rout!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Germany was not able to (or did not want to, this turn) advance too far into the Land Bridge defenses.

Part of the reason for this lack of progress directly on the land bridge may be the bombing reducing MPs (Bread later confirmed the low MP from the bombing), part may be that the leading division was cut off, and part may be simply that he wants to consolidate/preserve CPP for a turn 3 attack when all the mobile units have caught up, and some of the infantry is probably starting to get close:

In the southern part of the land bridge/Mogilev area, Germany also did not advance that far, with Zhadov's troops holding up relatively well:

Meanwhile in the Kiev area, well... it looks like Kiev's days are probably numbered. And it is not a big number either. And so is much of the rest of Ukraine's, with not a lot standing between the leading German Panzer divisions and... a lot of land....................

In the south, my attempts to protect the southern front troops in Northern Bessarabia seem to have been not hugely successful, but also not really a failure per se. The extra troops I put from the SW front did stop the German advance as I was basically expecting, but I don't think that much of anything extra from the southern front will actually be able to get out. Meanwhile, a couple of divisions in southern Bessarabia will end up being lost, as is unavoidable if the southern Front is locked on turn 1:

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Wed Jul 28, 2021 6:00 pm

End of turn 2 ---

In the air, the Great Mass Suicide of Soviet Level Bombers continued apace this week, with 773 total Soviet air losses, 583 of which were level bombers, and 600 pilots KIA. Large scale raids continued to be conducted on leading German Panzer and Motorized divisions, as well as Minsk, Riga, and - newly - the port in Parnu, since that was just captured. As before, the hope is that bombing German mobile units en masse will significantly reduce their MP by up to 15-17 or so. If this occurs, it will significantly limit the German ability to attack too deeply into Soviet territory in these crucial early turns of the game, and consequently make it less necessary for me to retreat too much before the German infantry arrives, thus slowing the Axis advance in the center and the north.

These raids continued to do little direct damage, but the MP cost will hopefully have its desired effect:

In the north, I cut off the Totenkopf division and the 3rd Motorized. This is obviously a risky move, but I want to defend Estonia, this game, and if I am going to do that, the time is now. I want to stop Germany from capturing too much free territory here before turn 3, so that they get fewer rail hexes converted for free, and consequently over the longer term that will slow down their logistics and rail repair progress somewhat.

Since there was no real attempt to go for Pskov on turn 2, it appears that he is not trying to take that quickly, and probably in general does not want to attack the north other than trying to get that free/easy supply from the Baltics. The risk is that German plans could change as a result of my move here.

But if so, that is (probably) fine with me, because if he wants to send more units either into the Baltic or towards Pskov, then they will be out of position for the assault on Smolensk and ultimately Moscow.

Obviously my defense in Pskov is essentially non-existent as a result. But if he does suddenly start trying to take it, I have all my reserves this turn being deployed in the north, spread between Estonia and Velikie Luki. In addition, next turn I get the Leningrad and Moscow militia divisions, so I should have plenty of troops to respond to anything in the north:

My strategic goal here is basically to try to lock down the north early on, by sending all my reserves here. There is plenty of good defensive terrain, and if he doesn't take it early, it will become much harder to take subsequently. It would be nice to begin a winter offensive with part of the Baltics still under my control, for example, and this would be bad for Germany later on. If I send troops here early, then I should not have to send as many later on. When the north is locked down, I will similarly try to lock down the center and stop the push on Moscow, and finally then I will start defending the south more.

In the Velikie Luki sector, I cut off a handful of Panzers with an airborne and security unit. I established a lot of defense in depth here to prevent a push on the northern flank of Vitebsk/Smolensk. The most open area for him to attack is to the north, but again, I am pretty sure that is not where he really wants to go, and just in case it is, I have plenty of reserves being deployed there next turn. So if he tries to snake north with a handful of Panzer divisions, I should be able to again cut them off. You may be wondering why one army is under STAVKA. The reason is that leaders seem to be cheaper to replace if armies are under STAVKA than if they are under a front. So I have this army temporarily under STAVKA for one turn in order to get Vasilevsky for less AP cost. Next turn I will switch this to the Western Front (assault front):

In the land bridge, I am taking the calculated risk of not retreating all that much. However, I do have quite a lot of depth here. The front units in this defense in depth are also basically all steaming piles of all the most useless and low-manpower units in the Red Army. They include NKVD border guards, Airborne brigades, Anti-tank brigades, and also a selection of the lowest manpower infantry divisions that I could find. For example, this division has only 2,383 men. So although it will presumably rout (or perhaps even shatter), its possible casualties will be capped at 2,383.

There are only a handful of good quality infantry divisions at the front, on the swamp/rough hexes every other hex. These have ZOC so that Germany will not be able to advance through the low quality units at the front without also fighting at least one of those, which will be tougher to dislodge. If Germany wants to go straight through the land bridge, in addition to pushing throw the low quality units, they will have to push at least one of those as well to avoid the ZOC.

Also I cut off 2 motorized divisions using an AT brigade and security unit here as well (in the northern part near Vitebsk).

I am counting on the combination of a decent # of units being cut off and all the bombing lowering MP to slow Germany down so that they can't push all the way through my defense in depth, or alternatively get a big encirclement. If Germany just encircles some of the units in the front of the depth, it will be no big deal, because those are mostly low quality trash units. But I do have better units further back.

Gomel area:

Kiev is defended by a single unready unit with less than 3000 men. Why defend it at all? Only because it seems like if it is defended, when it is captured the railyard etc is damaged more.

In the south, I am pulling back with such units as I have (not a lot) to the lower Dnieper and Dnepropetrovsk. Some units cannot escape from Bessarabia, but the rest were railed out and a few sent by sea from Odessa also. Here are units traveling in the sea around the Crimeea towards Dnepropetrovsk:

I am also starting to reinforce the south at least a bit, here is a mech division coming from Kuibyshev, and I have another mech + another tank division being deployed from reserve around Dnepropetrovsk.

In general, my plan for the south is to send my mech, tank, and cavalry reinforcements there to conduct a mobile defense, while I send all my infantry to the north-center until the north/center are stabilized. In the south, since I can't really actually hold anything, I will focus on cutting off snaking Panzer units and on counterattacking them with my own mobile units when they have outrun their logistics and are weak.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Wed Jul 28, 2021 7:09 pm

Start of Turn 3 ---

First of all, I got this little event about not having enough garrisons in the Transcaucasus:

Which is kind of unfortunate timing given that my 3 extra tank and mech divisions that I had transferred to the Transcaucasus just arrived! I am being ROBBED. ROBBED BY RNG. With those extra 3 divisions, fwiw, I have 110% ground combat value of the requirement there, FWIW:

In the north, the Leningrad milita divisions have arrived (also 6 other reinforcements I had sent to the map at the end of last turn visible near Lake Pskov-Tallinn):

In the north, things were interesting. After not having pushed towards Pskov at all last turn, this turn they pushed towards it. Probably because I had blocked Velikie Luki etc off pretty well. The Germans freed their two motorized divisions on the Baltic coast, as expected. But the Totenkopf division has only 2 offensive CV on each of its 3 regiments, thanks to the poor supply situation. Soft factor shown is fuel, which does not look too great for Germany:

If Pskov were actually going to be undefended, maybe this would make sense for Germany, but I think if they are going for Pskov/Nogorod, at this point they are slightly behind schedule, and because I have both the Leningrad and Moscow militia divisions this turn as well as the fact that I sent ALL my turn 2 reserves to the north last turn, I think that an attempt to pivot from what looked like an earlier focus on the center and push the north probably won't really work for them and I should be able to end up bogging them down in the swamps/forest if they keep trying to push north. Significant German time/MP/CPP will have been wasted driving around in an indirect direction towards Pskov. And turn 3 has passed, which should mean that any other rail hexes that Germany captures from this point on won't be automatically repaired. So they should not be getting too much extra free rail repair to help their logistics.

The other interesting and surprising thing is that Germany made no real attempt to push the center/land bridge in the Vitebsk area. They seem to be resting their Panzers and probably waiting for the infantry to catch up to make a big attack (Bread later explained that the reason for not smashing his way through my defense in depth was that it is not worth it using the Panzers as blunt instruments, because they will end up taking too many losses that are hard to replace). If they are having low MP on the Panzers, possibly they may not realize that part of it is not just because of supply, but because I was bombing them. But I will need to be careful here. I am holding here better than I should be at this stage of the game, the last thing I want to do is snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here by allowing for a big encirclement or breakthrough by the Panzers next turn, so I will probably withdraw a few hexes:

Germany was barely able to cross the Dnepr to the south of Gomel. I thought they would probably not have quite enough MP to do that, but I guess I underestimated the MP slightly. In retrospect, I should have put another division or two slightly further south. Kiev also fell - on turn 3!!! I think this is basically the earliest I have seen it fall in any AAR. This is not entirely unexpected, since it was not really defended. I just had one unready division with 2000 men in Kiev and the forts around it (with no units in the forts other than the forts themselves).

In the south, Germany continues to make rapid progress, not surprisingly due to my... light... defenses there.

Due to the fact that there were very few German attacks, I only took 100k losses this turn, which was mostly remaining clean up from the early game pockets. Despite the fact that in my previous game against Bread he routed a lot of divisions, and I broke the T1 Bialystok pocket (and other pockets by using temp motorization before we realized that was OP), my losses this game so far are actually slightly less than at the same point in that game.

In current game at start of turn 3, I have:

losses:

853,152 men
15,618 guns
5,163 AFV

isolated:

73,927 men
1,437 guns
0 AFV

In the previous game we played at the start of turn 3, I had:

losses:

men 885,113
guns 17,306
afv 5,247

isolated:

125,443 men
1,990 guns
0 afv

I am already starting to have some pretty beefy divisions. I have 3 different tank/mech divisions with CVs of 10 already, plus several infantry divisions with (offensive) CVs of 6. The 3 best tank/mech divisions are all together behind the Dnepr.

With the arrival of my tank/mech units in the Transcaucasus theatre box, now I can transfer the best units in the Red Army that have been wasting away in the Transcaucasus to the map. By which I mean the NKVD border guards, of course.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Wed Jul 28, 2021 7:19 pm

(discord comments):

Hardradi: So he should be able to charge all the way to Rostov. What about your long left flank? It could be a reverse Kiev, ie, 1st PG goes north.

Beethoven: I got turn 4 back and I can confirm that at least partially (at least with 1 division or so) that is already happening. It is not really unexpected that this would happen, although it is happening a bit faster than I thought it would. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, in some ways the main threat to Moscow (and certainly e.g. Bryansk) might even end up being from the south rather than from the west lol. That is a long ways off still though (I hope).

End of turn 3 ---

As you probably expect by this point, the great mass suicide of Soviet level bombers continued apace on turn 3, with bombing missions on the ports in Riga and Parnu, and the railyard in Minsk, as well as numerous ground attack missions against Panzer and motorized units (primarily in the north) with the goal of disrupting ground elements in the Panzer/Motorized divisions, and (in cases where there is sufficient bombing) lowering the Panzer/Motorized MP by up to ~15-17 in the process.

In the T3 air phase, another 590 level bombers were suicided. There was a new aspect to that, though. 293 of those losses were from air to air combat, because finally some Luftwaffe fighters showed up. That (in addition to the fact that at least eventually I will start running out of level bombers) means I will need to start being more careful and selective with when/where/how I bomb. Overall, at least so far the main objective of the "Bomb Early, Bomb Often" strategy seems to have been achieved, which was to help make it possible for me to conduct a fairly aggressive and forward defense in the North and center, while also avoiding any major Panzer breakthroughs or encirclements before the German infantry catches up. As a result, I have large amounts of good defensive terrain in the North and Center to fall back on in subsequent turns. Although obviously not so much in the south

Counting ground support losses of other planes, we lost 783 planes in total since the last turn:

In the north, I continued to contest Estonia fairly aggressively, but the German decision to push north to Pskov meant that I needed to abandon the inland portion of Latvia between Riga and Pskov, and pivot my troops to defend Pskov. Despite having so many troops in Estonia and despite having virtually zero divisions in the Pskov area at the end of last turn, I now also have a pretty good number of troops in Pskov area as well. That is thanks to my decision (which I think in retrospect was correct, despite the situation in the south) last turn to deploy ALL infantry reserves to the north, in addition to the arrival of the Leningrad Militia divisions. The green highlighted divisions are showing divisions that newly arrived this turn, so you can see from that that a huge number of the Pskov area divisions are the Leningrad militia and the T2 reserve deployments:

Another thing you may notice is that there are no tank divisions in Estonia, and only 1 mech division. That is not an accident. Whenever I need to move troops to the south-east, if I have a choice in the matter, I am trying to make it be tank and mech divisions that do that movement. The reason for that is, eventually, I want to have as many of my tank and mech divisions in the south as possible, to conduct a mobile defense there. Over time, gradually tank divisions that are in the north will move to the center. And tank divisions that are in the center will move to the south. I am also planning to deploy basically all cavalry divisions that I get in the future in the south. So when I do have more of a defense in the south, it will consist initially largely of cavalry to harass the Panzers and cut them off if they get too aggressive, and Tank and mech divisions to counterattack them whenever they advance too far ahead of their logistics and their CVs start to drop a bit. At least, that is my general plan.

In the Velikie Luki sector, I continued to have significant defense in depth, but since he abandoned a lot of territory to strike north to Pskov, I took the opportunity to flip back some hexes, and also to advance with some units in some places. I continued to prioritize the area between Vitebsk and Velikie Luki for defense in depth to make sure the northern flank of the Smolensk defense (where there is a lot of light forest, rather than heavy forest and swamp) would not be broken through. The part between Velikie Luki and Pskov had a weaker defense. You can also see that a decent # of the troops in Velikie Luki are newly arrived by the green highlighting (a good # of those are Moscow Militia railed in). This is one of the nice things about holding Velikie Luki on the previous turns, is it gives you a nice railyard where you can deposit some of the Moscow Militia on subsequent turns so that they have enough MP to both board and get off the trains in a single turn:

In the land bridge, I retreated, but only a few hexes in select areas in order to keep some room between my defense and the German infantry which was starting to arrive. I have a lot of defense in depth - 5 layers deep. In my experience, if you really want to be sure you can stop a German Panzer breakthrough, you need something like that much. 3 layers deep or so won't work, especially on clear terrain like in the land bridge area. The other nice thing about having a defense this deep in this area is that it should mean that in subsequent turns I can fall back a few hexes, and have some forts behind me that are also at least starting to be built. You can see that I also snuck in an AT brigade (which was unready and had only 2,602 men) behind the most forward German infantry divisions. This was not just to cut off the German infantry division from supply (which is nice, but by itself would not be that valuable), but to deny German admin movement in another hex or two in the part where they had advanced the most far forward towards Vitebsk/Smolensk. If they want to keep marching forward as fast as possible there, they will also need to rout it, or else the ZOC will block them. On the other hand, if they don't rout it and isolate it, it doesn't really matter to me, because it is only 2,602 men, and I am more than happy to sacrifice them:

I also have at least two layers deep and in some places 3 layers deep on my Dnepr defense, in addition to flipping back a few hexes, so that there is generally at least 2 or 3 hexes between my Dnepr defense and German controlled hexes. This should secure, at least for now, the southern flank of my Smolensk defense:

I just realized I wasn't showing battles in my screenshots, so here are some with the battles that show where I bombed and also where there were ground battles:

And, speaking of battles, here was the most important battle of the Soviet turn, Rokossovsky's counter-attack on the German Dnepr bridgehead south of Gomel. First, the enemy had been softened up in the air phase by a grand total of 7 different ground attack bombing raids with a total of 427 level bombers. Then, Rokossovsky was sent in with the 13th tank division, and two rifle divisions. The 13th tank division had 10 CV, 60 or so CPP, and almost 400 tanks in that single division. There was also more than 5 to 1 numerical superiority in terms of men, 9 to 1 numerical superiority in terms of guns, and almost 5 to 1 numerical superiority in the Red Army's favor, attacking just a single Panzer regiment. We also had bombers in ground support as well as fighters, while Germany only had a few fighters above the battle. The battle was also on clear terrain, which made a counterattack easier.

The result was that Germany lost double the men, almost 3 times as many guns, and equal AFVs to the Soviets in the face of Rokossovsky's counter-attack. Somewhat unusually, Germany also lost qualitatively better AFVs than the Soviets, with 15 Panzer IIIs lost and 6 Panzer IVs lost, whereas all the Soviet losses consisted of BT-2's, BT-7s, T-26s, and T-38s. Not a single T-34 or KV-1 tank was anywhere in sight.

For a turn 3 battle, this is really not bad at all. Not bad at all. Especially since it means that Germany still doesn't have either Tallinn, Pskov, Velikie Luki, Vitebsk, or Gomel (or even Mogilev) on turn 3, and is not across the Dnepr...

Well... at least they are not across the NORTHERN half of the Dnepr... Stalin ordered that propaganda reports to the people be limited to only discuss action in the north and center. There was a news blackout across the Soviet Union about anything in Ukraine. It was as though Ukraine did not exist.

And although I would rather not talk too much about the south... this is the situation there. I have some troops on the Dnepr. Not too many. There are some minor gaps here and there. I wasn't expecting my defense to be that impressive here, but it is a bit lighter than I expected it to be at the start of the game, partly because I underestimated the speed of the German advance a bit, but also partly because I underestimated how long it would take to evacuate Soviet units back to the Dnepr. I still have some units in the sea in the bottom-right corner which took a bit longer to evacuate from the Odessa area and make it back behind the Dnepr than I was expeccting.

I made one mistake here at the end of the turn, I forgot to move Malinovsky's rifle corps. Fortunately, this did not end up costing me his life and a good leader.

Also, you can see I started building some forts in the south. Some of these are in Crimea. By which I don't mean Sevastopol, since it is not possible to defend Sevastopol due to the bugs with fortress cities. Instead, I mean the exit from Crimea across the strait of Kerch to the Caucasus. I may well end up needing some forts there sooner rather than later.

I also built a depot at Tamanskaya here. It seems that you need to build a depot there, and also have some HQs (or units) or else the forts won't actually fill up with equipment/men.

Also, around Kharkov, something is starting to happen. Right now it is just one or two decent tank/mech divisions, and you can also see some less decent divisions to the north around Bryansk which are heading south. They are part of The Great Migration of Tanks.

In the future it will be more impressive. How much more so... well, that depends on how long it takes for the Germans to arrive, and whether they start running low on fuel etc...

jubjub · Post by **jubjub** » Wed Jul 28, 2021 8:31 pm

"Comrade General Gorbatsevich, I further direct you to bomb, speciifically, the units, and not to interdict them. You may be wondering, why not interdict them, surely this would slow down their pace of advance into our territory? Well, I conducted some tests earlier today and determined that by bombing Panzer divisions, we can interrupt many of the divisions' elements. If we bomb them sufficiently heavily, this can have an effect of reducing the German movement points on their Panzers by up to 16-17 movement points."

Wow. I just tested this out, and it seems quite strong and way better than flying interdiction. From my tests, IL-2's are the best, then long range bombers, then SB-2 and PE-2's. Obviously, at this stage, IL-2's aren't an option.

A 500 plane mission run 3x with long range bombers reduced MP by ~15. It seems the maximum reduction you can get is about -20 MP.

In total, the tens of thousands of Soviet bomber sorties had only killed barely more than a thousand German troops, destroyed 34 guns, and destroyed 15 AFVs. However, Zhukov rested secure in the knowledge that the German Mobile division MPs would be lower:

1000 casualties is nothing to be sneezed at. It's around 5% of the total German losses/turn at this point.

jubjub · Post by **jubjub** » Wed Jul 28, 2021 8:38 pm

And although I would rather not talk too much about the south... this is the situation there. I have some troops on the Dnepr. Not too many. There are some minor gaps here and there. I wasn't expecting my defense to be that impressive here, but it is a bit lighter than I expected it to be at the start of the game, partly because I underestimated the speed of the German advance a bit, but also partly because I underestimated how long it would take to evacuate Soviet units back to the Dnepr. I still have some units in the sea in the bottom-right corner which took a bit longer to evacuate from the Odessa area and make it back behind the Dnepr than I was expeccting.

bold strategy cotton. I was wondering how you got so many men to the center so fast. Hopefully your opponent isn't reading your AAR.

By which I don't mean Sevastopol, since it is not possible to defend Sevastopol due to the bugs with fortress cities.

The bugs relating to evacuating city forts have been fixed, and I've found the city fort combat to be pretty balanced. Not sure what bugs you are referring to.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:24 am

ORIGINAL: jubjub

Wow. I just tested this out, and it seems quite strong and way better than flying interdiction. From my tests, IL-2's are the best, then long range bombers, then SB-2 and PE-2's. Obviously, at this stage, IL-2's aren't an option.

Interesting. All I did for my test was to try out bombing Panzer and motorized divisions on a singleplayer turn 1 and compare all the various stats of the divisions in the cases where they were and were not bombed. I didn't test IL-2s (because those are not really deployed on turn 2), just used the planes that start off the game. Subsequently I have been using IL-2s also as I start gradually having more of them. I guess that makes them really good later in the game, and seems like even more reason to not just use them on ground support, but also ground attack.

ORIGINAL: jubjub

bold strategy cotton. I was wondering how you got so many men to the center so fast. Hopefully your opponent isn't reading your AAR.

The bugs relating to evacuating city forts have been fixed, and I've found the city fort combat to be pretty balanced. Not sure what bugs you are referring to.

We started the game prior to the beta patch (currently are on turn 9). We did subsequently upgrade to the beta patch, but I thought there was still an un-fixed bug where divisions in city forts count as isolated? The 1.00 beta did the following:

" • Units in City Forts were not able to receive ammo from a depot in their hex during defensive combat. Fixed. "

Which is an improvement, but I thought there was more that was bugged? If they are actually fully fixed and working then I would probably use them, or at least give them a try. Spoiler alert - I end up losing Smolensk on turn 9 (to a direct attack), if city forts do work then I probably could have held it a bit longer with one. And if city forts actually now make it possible for Sevastopol to hold until 1942, I would probably put units there to do that (if it were not already basically too late).

?

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:33 am

Start of Turn 4 ---

First of all, the best thing about this turn is the NKVD reinforcements are starting to arrive from the Theatre Boxes to the reserve. Next turn I can deploy these 3 bad boys onto the map. They will, of course, go wherever the Panzers are thickest in order to exert a ZOC and extract some MP and hopefully CPP from some Panzer divisions:

The even better news is the Far East Theatre Box is now at 103% ground strength. And that is BEFORE my 8 tank divisions arrive there. This means another 3 NKVD border guards units can be transferred from the Far East. The first of the Siberian reinforcements coming to save Moscow etc. Although unfortunately it takes quite a few turns for them to arrive [:(]

Germany advanced a little bit in Estonia, but not too much. They advanced mostly along the coast, which isn't that surprising because that is where I left my defense relatively weaker. The previous turn, the VVS had dropped tourism leaflets on the Totenkopf division, describing, in alluring detail, the wonderful bogs and mires you can experience in Estonia:

https://www.visitestonia.com/en/why-est ... nian-mires

The men of the Totenkopf division were enthralled, and ended the turn in a swamp hex. As far as I am concerned, sitting in a swamp hex along the Estonian Coast is not a bad place for the Totenkopf division to be. It's a long way from Moscow. Maybe they might like to stay there all game.

Accordingly, plans are already being drawn up to drop similar leaflets on German Panzer divisions in other parts of the front.

You can also see in green highlighting 3 more reserve divisions which were deployed to Estonia (and also 7 more around Lake Ilmen to help ensure that the north defense there is strong enough).

Another thing I notice is they dropped air resupply to Estonia, but not around Pskov. That might mean that they are having supply issues in Estonia, which may mean that my bombing there has been having an effect. And the fact that they are not resupplying by air around the Pskov push is another indication that Germany is not really trying to push Pskov/Leningrad per se.

In the Pskov area, Germany took up my invitation to rout some of the Airborne Brigades which I had put directly in front of their Panzers, but made no effort to plow through all the defense in depth towards Pskov. Instead they went for a small encirclement of 3 divisions in the hills between Pskov and Velikie-Luki. I was aware that this would be possible the previous turn, and although I would prefer to lose 0 divisions, this is hardly a bad outcome for this turn in this area. It seems like it is wasting early turns when the Panzers can/should be making big gains, and it gives me more time for my defenses in the north to solidify in the good defensive terrain. In simplistic terms, the 3 divisions lost are less than the 10 new reserve divisions that were deployed in the north. Germany also spent more Panzer/motorized MP in order to take back hexes near Velikie Luki that they had taken 2 turns ago and which I had then flipped back after the Panzers left. From the number of Panzer/motorized divisions, it also looks like a few divisions that were around Smolensk were probably diverted north the previous turn also:

(Bread subsequently said the main reason he did that encirclement of the 3 units was because one of them was a mountain division, to get rid of the mountain division. For the record, it was a mountain division, so it is a shame to lose it, but wasn't one of the ones that starts with higher than normal morale).

If these Panzers are not going for Pskov and Leningrad, what exactly are they trying to do? My guess is Bread is trying to outflank my Smolensk defense and get towards Moscow. My guess is when he saw my Smolensk defense on the first few turns, he wanted to try and go around it through the Velikie Luki area, but my defense there was also too much, so he was driven further north. The problem is, the terrain there is full of swamp and heavy forest, and if I just put units there I ought to be able to bog him down in the swamp and heavy forest. His only hope there would be if he can move fast enough in order to get through that heavy forest and swamp before I have units there, and break through to the light forest area closer to Rzhev. The other possibility is he may want to go north of that through Staraya Russa and Valdai, cut the Moscow-Leningrad railroad, and attack from that direction. But I foresaw that possibility at the end of last turn, which is why I deployed 4 reserve divisions (and in particular, 4 of the highest CV reserve infantry divisions that I had to deploy) right on top of Staraya Russa.

I suppose in theory, he could also be trying to go for Leningrad, but I think we saw how that movie goes in the last game. One way or another, he seems to be trying to outflank me from the north, but if I just keep deploying enough reserves in the north, I should be able to put a stop to that sooner or later. And then, as the defense is solidified, I can rotate troops gradually further south.

If he wants to outflank me, I think it is going to have to be from the south. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think so.

Only some infantry attacks on the land bridge:

In the Gomel sector, not surprisingly Germany crossed the Dnepr again. This time not just with one regiment, but now they have 2 Panzer divisions across. 10 CV mech division or no, I don't think Rokossovsky is going to kick that back. All in all, that seems like good news to me, the main thing I wanted to avoid was a larger crossing where he penetrated more deeply behind the river in a single turn. You can also see I deployed some of the reserve infantry in this area. Maybe I should actually have deployed a bit more in the north though, I did think about it...

The other thing you can see here is that Germany sent air supply here, which probably is an indication that this may be the main German effort and there might not be that much more than an infantry push directly on the Land Bridge/Smolensk itself. Probably the main attack will come from the South.

And in the south we can see that at least one German tank division snaked to the north. That is not really unexpected; if anything is surprising, it is that they didn't do so on a wider basis (e.g. 6 hexes). If they don't have divisions behind them, I can probably cut that one division at least off.

Germany is also only 1 hex from Dnepropetrovsk on turn 4, which historically fell on turn 10. I think I am probably not going to stick around there too long.

Actually probably the most interesting question around Dnepropetrovsk is whether I should retreat more to the east, or more to the north. [:D]

Maybe to the north, who knows.

I have a lot of reserves to deploy this turn. We will see how things look after I do troop movements, but my plan at this point is to deploy all the infantry YET AGAIN to the north and/or center. I will, however, deploy all the cavalry and the tanks/mech to the south. I was counting on this cavalry for my south defense. If Germany had advanced a little bit slower, that would have been good, to have more time to get the cavalry in place (underestimating how fast Germany would advance here a bit). However, Germany should sooner or later start having at least some logistical problems in the south. Here is the fuel soft factor, red on a Panzer division. And it has 10 CV, which, considering it has barely been in combat, is not that high, and also suggests at a certain point the logistics will make it easier for me to fight, or at least delay a bit.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:39 am

End of Turn 4 ---

I am really trying to roach out Estonia. I have two full armies there (and sent 6 more divisions from reserve which will arrive next turn!!!). This is one of the places where I am able to have more troops due to not having so many in the south. Defending Estonia this hard is somewhat of a risk, but it is a calculated one. Part of the reason I am wanting to defend here is the terrain making it possible to defend. Another aspect is, if we get to winter and I have still not been pushed back to the Narva, then Estonia could be another front for the Winter Offensive (and later on, making Germany commit more troops to it than just a small # holding the Narva). Another reason, though a smaller one because I try to not pay excessive attention to the VP system, is to try to hold Tallinn for long enough to get a few VPs from it. Another reason is to test if it is actually realistically possible to hold Tallinn until the historical date. If it can't be done given the number of troops I have sent here, it probably just can't really be done at all (at least not without fortress cities if/when they work).

My defense in the eastern part of Estonia is weak, but he probably does not have the MP to push far up there in a single turn.

Around Pskov I set up a large amount of defense in depth, trying primarily to block the path towards Lake Ilmen/Novgorod/Staraya Russa. Despite the large number of Panzers in the north, I am not really expecting a serious push for Leningrad. But if it comes, I can always pull back in Estonia and that should give me more than enough troops to put a stop to that. I don't think there are too many places the Panzers can go within a single turn. The least defended part is through the swamps between Ilmen and Velikie Luki, but even that is still defended enough that it should stop a fast advance there and give time to react. Plus there are more reserves coming.

I retreated a bit in the Velikie/Vitebsk sector. Reluctantly I am effectively giving up Vitebsk. I could try and not retreat for one more turn, but despite the fact that I am pretty sure most/all the Panzers are to the north or else in the Gomel area, it is not really worth the risk at this point. Basically I am trying to just retreat slowly and play conservatively, and hopefully over the next few turns my defense will start to really solidify and block further German advances.

I have fallen back entirely behind the Dnepr in the center, but I maintain at least 2-deep defenses behind it.

Chernigov was re-taken and one Panzer division cut off. I sent a lot of low quality units down to Gomel to start creating a lot of Defense in Depth to guard my southern flank. There are a lot of paratroopers/security units/AT brigades, and some of those I even railed in especially to put in front of the Panzers. The infantry in the most vulnerable hexes is also weak, so that it doesn't really matter if they get surrounded (or routed), none more so than the 2910 man strong division selected in the screenshot below.

It is pretty obvious what is going to happen here. Germany is going to push to the north and/or east. The trick will be to make sure as I get pushed north, I don't get encircled (or at least not many and/or good troops encircled) against the bank of the Dneper. And the other trick will be to keep up the flank defense as the Germans race to the east.

I also gathered the best tank/mech units and put them under Malinovsky as a Corps Commander, with Vatutin as the Army commander. Although Malinovsky is not the very best possible Corps Commander, he is free and it doesn't cost AP to have him, and this gives me an actual Corps level check that is pretty good in addition to the usual Army level leader checks. One tank division has 432 AFVs and a CV of 13! I love this division! More like this, please.

I had no real choice but to give up Dnepropetrovsk (and Zaporozhie), both of which will fall well earlier than historical. But at least some minimal actual defense is starting to appear, in the form of Rokossovsky's new Tank Army. This was placed under the Western Front, despite it being far away from the rest of the Western Front, because that is an assault front.

One minor success is a motorized division was cut off by some Cavalry. My defense of the Dnepr basin near Crimea has some gaps in it. It won't be long until I have to retreat to Crimea. Who knows, possibly even next turn.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:46 am

Start of Turn 5 ---

The 8 tank divisions that I sent to the Far East theatre box on turn 1 have finally arrived. This brings up the ground combat value in that theatre box to 105%, which means I can start transferring some infantry back to the map. Unfortunately it takes another 4 turns for them to transfer back from the Far East, so it will be a while until they actually arrive on the map.

The morale on the 8 tank divisions are 44, 50, 49, 50, 42, 49, 42, 44, so as the morale goes up and as they reinforce with equipment, the CVs should continue to go up, and progressively allow me to send back more infantry. I will send the tanks back as well, but that will come later, most likely no sooner than the Winter Offensive.

For now, the priority troops that I would like to send back from the Far East are infantry brigades/naval infantry brigades, and airborne brigades, since the 3 NKVD border guard units have already been sent and are due to arrive in the reserves on turn 8.

I also have my eyes set firmly on the Northern Front, where 13 of the best units in the Red Army, the NKVD border guards, are stuck. As soon as possible, I would like to get those units on the map and send them directly in front of the German Panzer spearheads, where the action is thickest and the ZOC/combat delays most important. I can't send them yet, because I didn't send any divisions to the Northern Front earlier. The only reason I did not do that is because you actually have combat in the Northern Front and take losses. Moreover, until the Axis gets to the Svir river, there will be high combat intensity there. So I want as few troops as possible in Finland until then. But as soon as Finland reaches the Svir and stops advancing, I will send proper divisions to Finland if need be to free up the NKVD Border Guards.

Now to the nefarious Germans. The most disappointing thing about this turn by far was the loss of Tallinn, despite the fact that I had way more troops than the Soviets historically had to defend Estonia (2 slightly over-strength armies, with another 6 divisions you can see arriving from reserves this turn), and also despite the fact that the German commitment to Estonia was pretty light, especially given how much I had there (just 2 motorized divisions and some infantry that had barely reached the front yet).

Even so, and also despite me sacrificing huge numbers of level bombers in the Great Level Bomber Mass Suicide to bomb the ports as well as repeatedly bombing the 2 German Motorized divisions, and despite Tallinn itself being garrisoned by a fully equipped 50 morale division with 4-5 CV and 262 defensive combat value, and also despite Berzarin being the Soviet commander (with a 4.7 rating, he either the best or one of the best Army commanders the Soviets start with - obviously he is not as good as a Tolbukhin or a Rokossovsky, but it would be unreasonable to expect a better commander this early in the game in Estonia), and also despite their being light rain and light mud, despite all this, Tallinn fell on Turn 5. Historically, Tallinn held out until Turn 10, so it fell twice as fast as historically.

Ideally I would like to cut off Tallinn, naval interdict it to isolate the defenders, and siege it for a turn or two to keep the Totenkopf and 3rd Motorized divisions there. I am not sure if that is really possible or wise though, mainly because of supply. My troops there already didn't have good supply, and with the loss of Riga that will get much worse if I stick around (I had built a depot in Narva previously, IIRC 2 turns ago, and set that on level 3 with Tallinn on level 4, this didn't seem to help much).

It is true that I could have had a stronger defense on the coast, but if I had, I would have risked encirclement/destruction of many or possibly even all of my troops in Estonia. I was counting on Germany not having enough MP to get to Tallinn in a single turn like that, or if they did so, to at least not have enough MP (and supply and CPP) to launch a successful deliberate attack.

It is also worth noting that on Turn 1, Germany didn't advance any farther along the coast than to Riga itself, whereas it is possible for Germany to advance an extra 5-6 hexes or so beyond that on Turn 1, so if they had done that, Estonia would have been even less defensible. So insofar as my defense of Estonia was a test to see if it was possible or wise to defend it (this was partly, though definitely not entirely the only purpose), the conclusion seems pretty clear:

No (at least not without working city forts).

Well, lesson learned.

You can also see that I had deployed a lot of my reserves in the north (certainly not the south!). 6 divisions in Estonia, another 6 between Lake Peipus and Lake Ilmen, another 5 around Valdai, and 4 in the Kalinin Forest (actually there are another 2 just to the south deployed in the woods behind Velikie Luki). Another thing worth noticing is that Germany flew recon missions in the Staraya Russa area, but not directly around Pskov (or to the north of it), which suggests my suspicions that Germany might have wanted to attack through Valdai towards Moscow might have been correct.

But instead, in the face of my strong defenses in this area, Germany seems to have backed down, and either all or quite a few of the Panzers now seem to be back near Vitebsk (and on the southern side of the Dvina. So it looks like my northern flank is probably secured (most likely for the rest of the game), but now the assault on Smolensk will soon begin.

I may have overcommitted to the defense of the north, but in my opinion it is worth doing that and totally shutting down the north early on. If you don't, and if Germany pushes the north quickly, then ultimately you have to commit more to the north, or else have some or all of the rail lines to Leningrad cut (a real pain to deal with later), and/or letting Leningrad get cut off (similarly a real pain later), and possibly even losing Leningrad (not good, because if you lose it, you are probably not taking it back for a longggg time).

Now I can probably start rotating troops to the south (by which I mostly mean not the south, but the center). Some of the reserves deployed in the north will probably get railed to Smolensk and/or Bryansk. But if Germany had attacked rather than pulled the Panzers back to Smolensk, I would probably have needed those troops to stop the German advance in its tracks like I wanted to.

If there is a reward to locking down the north, it will probably come in winter. Now (hopefully) I will be able to attack in winter in the north without having to plow through excessive amounts of Heavy Forest and Swamp, but instead will hopefully be able to push German defenders on clear and light forest terrain.

In the center, Germany did recon around the light forest to the north of Vitebsk, and might have wanted to push through there if it had been more weakly defended to threaten the northern flank of Smolensk. But I made sure to put strong divisions defending there in depth (e.g. that 8=19 infantry division) to shut down that possibility. So now, it seems pretty clear that the attack on Smolensk will have to either come head on, plowing through a lot of defenders and starting to attrition the Wehrmacht, or else from the south. Germany took Vitebsk (defended only by an airborne brigade) and got a small 1-hex bridgehead across the Dneper by Orsha. It being turn 5 and it having appeared at the start of the game that the main German effort would probably be towards Smolensk-Moscow, I will take that happily.

Germany was much more active in the Gomel area. My low quality NKVD/airborne/AT brigade units were all swept aside, but they accomplished exactly what I wanted them to do. They got in front of the Panzers, and stopped Germany from being able to make any sort of big breakthrough (especially to the north) or else encircle any good quality troops. The 20th NKVD detachment, which had not even gotten off their trains, managed to only retreat rather than shatter. Salute to them for a job well done. I will probably try to rail down many of the airborne and NKVD units around Pskov for similar duties next turn. These units are truly the most valuable combat formations in the Red Army.

The infantry/cavalry that had temporarily retaken Chernigov were routed away, but they likewise achieved their purpose of helping prevent any further breakthrough. With the deployment of reserves (especially cavalry), I now have the makings of some sort of defense. It is not going to hold anything, but will get in front of the Panzers and delay the German push to the north - hopefully enough so that there is no serious threat to Moscow from the south later on.

In the south, Germany advanced almost to Kharkov, but didn't advance as much towards Stalino. I probably would have rather that they advanced towards Stalino, mainly because of Kharkov's level 9 railyard. I would rather not lost Kharkov quite as quickly, but I don't think it is realistically possible to hold as long as the historical date against a Germany that wants to take it even with more of a defense in the south.

Nothing much happening yet in the far south on the road to Sevastopol, but that will change quickly:

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 2:18 am

Some interesting discord discussion with Goodbyebluesky about the whether or not this "southern strategy" was/is a good idea. This was discussed from the perspective of turn 5. Thanks to Goodbyebluesky for the good insights and constructive criticism. It helped me learn and made me think about what I was doing.

Goodbyebluesky: I dont get why you are not at all defending the south
Goodbyebluesky: his logistical tail is ENDLESS. Every rifle round he spents even on miniscule combat he can not really regain till it catches up
Goodbyebluesky: now you are giving major cities away for free
Goodbyebluesky: and on turn 10 or 12 he is gonna be so strong here

Beethoven: @Goodbyebluesky Hmm, the way I had been thinking about it was that you need a certain amount of supply each turn and supply gets worse the further he goes. However, I wasn't really thinking in terms of "if he gets into combat, he needs more supply because you use more supply while fighting than when not fighting" But I suppose that is true and makes sense to some degree. It should also partly be a matter of needing a certain amount of supply each turn though. I am not sure which is the dominant factor in how much supply units need, do you know for a fact it is based more on the amount of combat they get into as opposed to needing a certain amount each turn?

There are some other factors also though.

1) First of all, I do think the amount of troops I had early on in the north/center early on is what I needed if I wanted to be able to maintain a defensive line without allowing either Panzer breakthroughs or large scale encirclements.

Here is tyronec's AAR:

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=5012486

Here is this from turn 4 of his AAR:

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/upfi ... 737939.jpg

Soviets had a 3-deep defense around Smolensk, and Germany busted right through it and quite a ways beyond. That is also with only a single Panzer Group, not 2 of them. So if you want to really defend in a sustainable way, you need more than just a 3 lines deep defense, especially if you are against multiple concentrated Panzer Groups. Soviets need at least 4 lines deep of defense, and realistically more like 5 on any clear/light forest type terrain. That may sound excessive, and indeed it actually kind of is. But that is basically what you need if you don't want a mass encirclement or else a huge breakthrough. You can get by with less depth in some places, but only if there are heavy forest/swamp (e.g. around Leningrad).

And here is another example Bread sent to me from a game against you! He had this defense on turn 4:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... 736/79.PNG

And then on turn 5 you did this:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... 752/83.PNG

And also did this as well in the south:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... 396/84.PNG

I see at least 2 tank/mech divisions each in both the north and the south pockets. IDK how many trucks those divisions had in them, but if they had their full complements of trucks that could be up to ~4000 trucks (plus a bit extra for all the infantry) which then Germany would capture. If you want to talk about German logistics, that is one thing I would think helps German logistics. Whereas in this game, Germany has captured hardly any trucks except for the turn 1 pockets.

Here is another set of screenshots Bread sent from a game against you (I think the same game, but not sure?). On turn 11 it was like this:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... 08/178.PNG

And then on turn 12 like this:

He didn't have 3 lines of depth around Kaluga, but look at not just the encirclement but how far the breakthrough went, in 1 turn.

Whatever else we may say, I have avoided those sorts of fates, at least so far. The flip side of losing so much grond so fast in the south is it looks like Germany will go no bonus VPs from either Pskov or Smolensk (and maybe Tallinn could have been similar under slightly better circumstances). Leningrad seems to be not only secure, but also the double rail will probably not get cut unless I allow it to. I am skeptical that Germany will take Rzhev and Kalinin at all, much less at their historical dates (still plenty of time for that to be wrong though). To a lesser degree the same might be true of Moscow, except there is potentially more a danger to that from the south as well.

2) I underestimated (not a huge amount, but a bit) how fast he would advance in the south. I read other AARs, and even when Kiev was not defended, it was only lost on turn 4, not 3, for example. For example, HLYA had a game where he did not defend at all anywhere (not even in the south), and he only lost Kiev on turn 4. He also did not defend Smolensk, Gomel, or Pskov and lost those quickly.

I had planned to (as I have been doing) deploy all the cavalry and tank/mech reserves in the south and also whenever there was an opportunity shift my tank and mech divisions that start in the north/center progressively to the south/east. But given the speed of the advance, the turn 4 reserves (the first cavalry you get) are only now appearing on the map at the start of the SOVIET turn, so they were not even on the map when Bread made his turn 5 moves.

Here is HLYA's AAR:

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.a ... age=7&key=

He lost Pskov, Tallinn, Velikie Luki all on Turn 3 also (without a fight). And he lost Smolensk and Gomel, in addition to Kiev on turn 4 without a fight in any of those. And he lost Odessa on turn 3 or 4, not sure which (wasn't defended, so just a matter of how long it took his opponent to move in)

3) I overestimated how quickly I could get troops back from theatre boxes. I haven't played with theatre boxes before, and as mentioned in the AAR I sent 6 tank/mech divisions to the Transcaucasus and 8 tank divisions to the Far East on turn 1. But I couldn't send replacement units back at the same time, you have to wait until they arrive, which is 2 / 4 turns respectively before you can tell it to send other divisions back, and then it is another 2 / 4 turns until the replacement units can then arrive back on the map.

4) I probably was basing too much on my experience in the first game. In the first game, Bread routed a lot of units on turn 1 and encircled less. In addition, I broke the pockets with temporary motorization etc. As a result, I had a lot of extra unit counters last game which I don't this game. If I had all those units, it would be easier to have enough for a screening defense in the south while still having adequate depth in the north/center. But if Germany pockets as many turn 1 units as it can, then the choice is either to defend everywhere with inadequate depth and risk a large German breakthrough/pocket around e.g. Smolensk, or to defend in some areas with adequate depth but not defend other areas.

Also, in the previous game Bread had a bad opening in the south in particular last game which both unlocked the southern front and didn't either advance far or encircle much. That may also have contributed to my guess/estimate as to how much time I had to get troops in place in the south. In particular, troops from the southernn front took loner to get back to Dnepropetrovsk than I was expecting, which made it not really viable to put up a defense there. I realized that on turn 3 or so, at which point, since it was inviable anyway, that made it an easy call not to put T3 reserves there.

5) What could I have done differently? Obviously I could have sent fewer troops to the north/center, but then I would have done worse there. Beyond that, I could have tried to fight with the tanks that I sent to the Transcaucasus/Far East. But these were mostly low morale/experience and would have been of minimal use in combat except as having a ZOC. They also have vehicles... and so when they lose battles/rout, you lose vehicles, and Germany captures them, which helps their logistics. You definitely don't want to risk them getting encircled for that reason.

Probably the main thing I could have done differently other than that was to simply not defend Estonia and abandon it. But in that case, I would have been abandoning that in order to not abandon e.g. Dnepropetrovsk. That might have been the better call, but it would not mean that I was abandoning less land per se, just different land (e.g. abandon Estonia rather than eastern Ukraine).

I could also have tried to defend with maybe 5 infantry divisions or so. E.g. 1 division in Kiev, one division 5 hexes away, another 5 away from that. But I don't see much benefit to defending without having a minmial amount of troop density. Germany could just go around them and encircle them without even necessarily having to directly fight them with Panzer divisions (just leave them isolated for infantry to clean up), so if you don't have basic density I don't think that even slows down the German Panzers.

(Note from the perspective of turn 9) --- during turn 5 I didn't realize that a good number of the towns in the south around the Don Basin etc actually have 3-4 population. I thought that all towns pretty much just had 1-2 population. So one thing I didn't realize is that I was losing a bit more manpower in the south than I thought I was, that is one factor that makes the land in the south a bit relatively more valuable that I was not then considering.

Goodbyebluesky: The South is pretty much where the game is decided. If he has to he can simply Infantry grind his way to Pskov and you already lost Talinn. Smolensk breaks no matter what the point is just if it breaks earlier or later but it will break if you let the germans build up. He is just hesitant about losses but he could very likely smash the center if he wanted or not. The examples you posted there were both examples that lead to losses but that was because the flanks were insufficently anchored and partly overcommitment but you arent comitting even the absolute minimum and Panzers go fast when you dont even give them anything to block them. You are losing both manpower and Railyards at gigantic rate and the way this is going he might even be able to reach Voronezsh and cut the North/South railways

Goodbyebluesky: its after all my opinion though and maybe you are right. Bread just constantly retreating after all also paid off for him

Yes, he can take Pskov, but at this point the bonus VPs for taking it early have ticked down (and also for Smolensk have almost ticked down).

I agree, he can (and will) smash the center defense sooner or later when he wants, and I am definitely not expecting to PERMANANTLY hold Smolensk, just to delay it being taken for another turn or 2 (which is all I need for the VPs for taking it early to tick down). But the question is if he gets a large encirclement in the process and/or if he totally breaks through the lines.

The examples you posted there were both examples that lead to losses but that was because the flanks were insufficently anchored and partly overcommitment.

I would say that is exactly the key point. You have to have enough depth anchoring the flanks. That is why I wanted to have enough depth in the area between Velikie Luki and Vitebsk (particularly the light forest path towards the north of Smolensk), and particularly on the turns when the Panzers were nearby. Yes, he could have e.g. taken Velikie Luki last turn (turn 5 for him) if he wanted to, but in the process he should have accrued enough combat delay that he would not be able to make it much further. That would then mean I could re-form the line in depth on the following turn.

The screenshot from tyronec's AAR is a bit hard to see because he made a bunch into one image, so here is the part from that I was referring to:

Soviets were trying to defend in depth there (you can see by the combat delays), but they didn't have enough depth to stop that breakthrough (by just a single Panzer group, not even 2) that got ~6 hexes into their rear behind troops that were defending.

I am not under any illusions that I am going to permanently hold at Smolensk or anything like that, I am going to get pushed back if he wants to push me back (in particular now as the infantry catches up). I just want to get pushed back gradually and maintain a line like in good order, not to get pushed back suddenly like that by ~6-8-10 hexes in a single turn in a way that totally busts my line and makes it difficult to reform a coherent defense the next turn.

One possible analogous situation this game would or could have been the following on the northern flank of Vitebsk/Smolensk:

The blue line path, for example, is all light forest/clear terrain, so there is not much slowing that possible line of advance down except combat delay. If anything, my defense there may have been slightly too weak to really stop a breakthrough there from busting into the area behind my lines where he could have advanced a few hexes without running into additional troops.

The red line does have some heavy forest, so it would have been a bit harder, but there is only like 1-2 heavy forest hexes on that path up until the red line ends. There are just 2-3 more beyond that, and then you are almost at Rzhev and there is lot of light forest/clear terrain around there towards Moscow.

If I had a lot fewer divisions defending there (didn't have that depth on the northern flank of Smolensk), he could get there within 1-2 turns I would think, given that he seems to have up to 2 PzGs in the screenshot next to Velikie Luki.

He could have done similarly in the north if I didn't have a 5-6 deep defense in the clear/light forest area of the Pskov valley (and if he wanted to drive on the northern flank of Moscow via another route such as Valdai --> Kalinin, could have gotten pretty far anyway. But not far enough that I could not have then re-formed a strong and deep line the next turn, and then I think he would have ended up getting bogged down in the terrain because I had enough troops there for him to get bogged down, rather than to be able to drive through undefended hexes.

but you arent comitting even the absolute minimum and Panzers go fast when you dont even give them anything to block them. You are losing both manpower and Railyards at gigantic rate and the way this is going he might even be able to reach Voronezsh and cut the North/South railways

Well, I am certainly not happy to be losing manpower and railyards in the south, that is for sure, but it is a trade-off between that and the possibility that he e.g. gets to Rzhev in 1-2 turns as discussed above.

As for the manpower though, I don't think the effect is that big.

I don't have WW2 statistics, so just gonna guesstimate from this for our purposes that the entirety of Ukraine was about 20% of the Soviet population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph ... viet_Union

You are going to lose probably half of that in the first 2-3 turns regardless of what you do, so what are we actually talking about here? At most, maybe something like losing 10% of the Soviet population maybe 5 turns sooner at most than I otherwise would? If Soviets get 100-120k manpower per turn, that would come out to about 5 infantry divisions. I would be losing well more than that in encirclements/routs. It is also not even that much in total manpower I don't think, because there is a tradeoff where I am holding some manpower in the north longer, so that partly offsets it.

Another thing is some of the manpower gets evacuated. I did test (only after Kiev falls) in single player, and fwiw it looks like a bit more manpower gets evacuated if there is a battle in a city than if there is not. I tested on Odessa, so specifically, if you have e.g. 10 or so population, and are defending a city with 2000 men, on average the manpower lost by losing ~ 2000 defenders will pay back in evacuated manpower within ~30-40 turns according to my test.

I did have a small sacrificial units in Kiev and Odessa for that purpose, but missed a couple like Cherkasy. But I started trying to make sure I have at least something in each city with up to ~10 manpower or so. After I tested that after turn 3, I didn't have quite enough units to cover all the major cities, so for that reason I built forts in Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhie on turn 4 for example at 40% TOE and left them there. That is enough to force a battle, so that more manpower will get evacuated on average.

I am more concerned about losing the railyards, particularly the Dnepropetrovsk (level 6) and Kharkov ones (level 9). I agree that is bad, I wanted and expected to have more defense there than I have. But at least it only actually helps when the rail repair catches up, and the rail repair will be running well behind the front by this point. In the meantime, the further he advances, the more trucks it will cost him.

Goodbyebluesky: you are talking about stopping the extra VP from taking Smolensk/Pskov early but are losing a ton of cities in the south waaaay before they did historical. Doesnt make sense delaying 2 cities when you could even deny some of the cities in the south completely that you are not going to lose for certain.
[6:32 AM] Goodbyebluesky: Its your game but I personally think its just a bad play what you are doing there in the south. Its entirely unnecessary in my opinion.

How long do various southern cities hold in your opinion if they are reasonably defended, but if Germany knows what they are doing @Goodbyebluesky ?

My impression is/was that most/all of them would basically always fall earlier than historical as long as Germany knows what they are doing, even if you make a serious attempt to defend in the south. Especially if Germany sends a few extra mobile divisions from AGC (like they did in this game).

Also, taking the further away cities is sort of a double edged sword for Germany. For example, Voronezh would probably usually not fall in 1941, but that seems possible in this game. But since Voronezh actually fell in '42, if Germany takes it in '41 but then I take it back during the winter offensive, then I get bonus VP for re-taking it earlier than historical. So in terms of the VP, as far as I can see it only makes sense for Germany to take a city like Voronezh if they are sure that they can hold it through winter. If not, then it actually ends up helping the Soviet VP rather than the Germans.

But the VP system is not the best system IMO (partly because of those quirks), fortunately there is a non-VP based campaign now.

Stalino and Kharkov for example are both T18 historical falls. So Germany gets the same bonus VP if they capture it anything T15 or before, which I would think is going to be essentially always the case against a good Germany player. Am I wrong about that?

In my previous game against Bread, he did that easily, despite having a bad turn 1 opening where he both unlocked the southern front and also didn't encircle basically anything in the south on T1, and didn't send extra Panzers south. And then I sent all the T4 reserves to the south also, but still did it pretty easily with plenty of time to spare. I could have delayed him more here and there by sacrificing some units, but it wasn't even CLOSE

Some other discord comments from Hardradi -

Hardradi (GMT+8): I was going to say he will be at Rostov by Turn 8 but the ground is already muddy at T5. I estimate his supplies will hit the wall just east of Stalino like it did in my game (DoSWF). Maybe sooner if the weather continues to be bad. That light mud is like having basic air interdiction in a hex. 1MP penalty

He could be in Stalingrad by Turn 17 if you do not stop him.

Beethoven: I would think if he tries to go as far as Stalingrad that should kill his trucks and be a bad place to try to defend in winter. But by that point I should also be able to have troops defending there. I should start having some troops over the next few turns.

There is no rain forecast for next week, fwiw, so that will probably help his supply/movement slightly the turn after next. But since weather updates on the Soviet turn, he will have a bit of light mud to drive through on Axis T6.

(Sploier alert - as of turn 9, Bread (Axis) is a few hexes away from Stalino and will almost certainly take it on either turn 10 or else 11. Here's a zoomed out map of the overall front (with units turned off for counterintelligence purposes) on turn 9:

So how is this "southern strategy" working out? Is Goodbyebluesky right in his points and criticisms? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. It's interesting to think about.

Here's some more food for thought, here is a fast-forward preview of the OOBs on turn 9. Soviets have already got 3.65 million men in the field, a 5.3 million man Red Army in total, and 12,000 AFVs total (although only about half of those AFVs are on the map so far):

Of course, we have also lost a lot of land. Mostly in the south... not so much in the north and center, wherethe Narva bridgehead in Estonia still holds, where Pskov still holds, the Velikaya river has barely been breached, the front is several hexes in front of Velikie Luki, Smolensk has only just fallen, and we are still holding Bryansk.

On the other hand... we're already sparring over Kursk, Stalino and Sevastopol are imminently doomed, and there is a non-zero chance that Germany could reach Stalingrad in 1941. At least, if they want to have to defend it in winter...............

Anyone else have any thoughts on the overall strategy from this point in the game? Does it seem like a horrible mistake, a great idea, or something in between?

We will see the turns that lead up to that point (and beyond) in future posts.

jubjub · Post by **jubjub** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 3:30 am

Soviets had a 3-deep defense around Smolensk, and Germany busted right through it and quite a ways beyond. That is also with only a single Panzer Group, not 2 of them. So if you want to really defend in a sustainable way, you need more than just a 3 lines deep defense, especially if you are against multiple concentrated Panzer Groups. Soviets need at least 4 lines deep of defense, and realistically more like 5 on any clear/light forest type terrain. That may sound excessive, and indeed it actually kind of is. But that is basically what you need if you don't want a mass encirclement or else a huge breakthrough. You can get by with less depth in some places, but only if there are heavy forest/swamp (e.g. around Leningrad).

While we’re on the topic… the ‘3 deep’ line strategy is extremely inefficient. There’s honestly so much wrong with this strategy it’s really hard to know where to start.

First, all three ranks sit within deliberate attack range of infantry, so it’s super easy to blow away the line with minimal delay.

Second, this strategy ironically both stretches your line thin, while also clumping your men up nicely for pockets.

The result is that they can easily blow a 3x3 hole in the weakest part of your line, and proceed to maneuver deep in your rear.

It’s not a defense in depth strategy at all, it ignores terrain, and I wish people would stop doing it. You can see the disastrous results in the AAR’s you referenced. With a good defense in depth strategy, you can prevent panzers from penetrating deep into your rear and be ready to counterattack them while only using half the divisions.

Q-Ball · Post by **Q-Ball** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 2:03 pm

I am playing a game vs. Seminole that is developing somewhat the same, I don't know if it's an intentional "Southern Strategy" or not.

Certainly, he committed to stopping me in AGN, which worked; I am stalled just past Pskov on T-10 which is pretty bad!

In the South, however, I am now encountering most screening forces as we have Kharkov surrounded and right up on the Donbas

A key difference is that I've focused on destroying the Red Army, the OOB was 2.7 mil for the last turn I sent and over 1.5 mil Comrades are POWs. The lack of forces in south may be less of a strategy and more Seminole just out of units

Seminole · Post by **Seminole** » Thu Jul 29, 2021 10:38 pm

ORIGINAL: Q-Ball

I am playing a game vs. Seminole that is developing somewhat the same, I don't know if it's an intentional "Southern Strategy" or not.
Certainly, he committed to stopping me in AGN, which worked; I am stalled just past Pskov on T-10 which is pretty bad!
In the South, however, I am now encountering most screening forces as we have Kharkov surrounded and right up on the Donbas
A key difference is that I've focused on destroying the Red Army, the OOB was 2.7 mil for the last turn I sent and over 1.5 mil Comrades are POWs. The lack of forces in south may be less of a strategy and more Seminole just out of units

Whereas here the south was evacuated, in our game Southwest Front suffered the Lvov pocket and then continued to engage in counter attacks cutting LOC to some mech forces each turn. Problem is there are always more gassing up right behind them and after you attack a unit once or twice in the open terrain it is trashed and worse has only 8mp to escape the next turn.

My first campaign as either side, so no idea where/when the supply tether kicks in. As I mentioned in our game, the more optimal, but probably less fun, Soviet response in the south is to run while you still can with what you can. This AARs evac via the reserve box is an extreme example, as even with your repeated southern pockets I’m not fielding as bare bones a force as demonstrated here.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:02 am

End of Turn 5 ---

As usual, there was more bombing. However, I dialed it down a bit because there is light rain this turn. Nevertheless, the VVS is proud to have lost 556 planes this turn (251 of which were during the Soviet air phase. Germany also lost a lot of planes, mostly operational losses from flying in the rain.

I also did naval interdiction missions for the first time in Tallinn, and cut off the 2 German Motorized divisions in Tallinn. They should be isolated next turn. However, I reluctantly withdrew to a defensible line in Estonia. Before I decide what I do next with the troops in Estonia, I want to see what Germany does next turn, in particular if he keeps Totenkopf there and uses it to try to push towards the Narva, or else takes it elsewhere. It is unlikely that there will be a significant renewed push (other than infantry) towards Pskov/Lake Ilmen/Leningrad, but if there is and I need more troops, I can always pull some out of Estonia and shorten my line there. That is a nice insurance policy to have.

Since Germany pulled back their tanks around Pskov, they also left a significant amount of land empty because their infantry had not all caught up yet. So I walked forward a bit and took back that land, including the same exact hills I got 3 divisions encircled on 2 turns ago. I am using pretty much the same troop deployment that got encircled, in part intentionally. Maybe Germany might like to waste another 2 turns driving back up with the Panzers and encircling 3 divisions there again, taking back the exact same ground that they took 2 turns ago, and then driving back to Vitebsk. If so, that would be ok with me.

Also I am stacking up my troops more around Pskov, with less defense in depth. If they are not going to push with Panzers there, then I don't need depth so much, and can defend further forward more safely. On the other hand, if German Panzers do show up again, I will be back with 4-5 layers deep defense in depth before you know it. If Totenkopf leaves Estonia and I suspect it might show up at Pskov, then I may adjust my deployment to be a bit more careful there also (if so, I might also pull some of the troops from Estonia to Pskov, since I have more there than I really need).

You may recall that the previous turn I had a lot of low quality troops such as NKVD border guards and Airborne brigades near Pskov (i.e. the most useful units in the Red Army). And now if you look at the screenshot of Pskov above, you can see that while there are a few of them still there, a lot of them are gone. So what happened to them? Well, their job is to fight Panzers. So they are going where the Panzers are, since the Panzers left. Here are 4 specially selected units on their way towards the south-center to go fight Panzers (2 very understrength infantry divisions and 2 airborne brigades). There are others that are further on already in Kharkov and Smolensk etc as well.

The 2nd Naval Airborne Brigade (selected in this screenshot) was also airlifted from Pskov to the Smolensk area. And notice the 3 NKVD border guards-on-rails in the Land Bridge.

I retreated a bit in the Land Bridge, but not too much. Hopefully I have enough depth here. In the next German turn, there will be this light rain/light mud, so I think for this turn the risk is probably not too much. But sooner or later an attack will come. The subsequent turn clear weather is forecast. If Germany rests the Smolensk-area Panzers this week, then a strong attack will probably come with rested high CPP Panzers in clear weather on Turn 7. I will need to be careful about that, if so.

If Germany does attack with Panzers this turn, they can probably bust up my defenses south of Smolensk in particular. But should hopefully not have enough MP to make it far beyond my line (partly due to the light mud etc):

Along the Dnieper, I didn't pull back near Orsha where Germany has a small bridgehead, but I did fall back further south where Germany had not yet crossed. That may not make sense at first, so let me explain why. The reason is because I didn't want the German Panzers that are behind Vitebsk to be able to cross the Dnieper and then run free on the other side without having to plow through a lot of troops and get lots of combat delay to slow them down. If I didn't make a large defense in depth right behind the small bridgehead, then they could cross the river with admin movement and then have a good # of MP left to break through wherever they push. But hopefully with things how they are, ZOC will also make it cost more MP for any subsequent follow-up troops across the bridgehead.

Still, I will retreat from this northern part of the Dnieper as well next week (even if, and in some ways especially if) Germany doesn't do significant attacks in this sector this coming turn).

Whereas further to the south, it is all swamps on the eastern side of the Dnieper, so if Germany wants to cross there, without admin movement, it should take a significant amount of MP. So I doubt the Germans will cross their Panzers there into swamps without admin movement. It is also necessary to gradually retreat in the Mogilev-Gomel sector due to the advance of Panzers in the south around Gomel.

And speaking of the Gomel area, Vatutin's Assault Army did its first significant counterattack against a fairly weak German Panzer division (6 CV) which was sitting on clear terrain and seemed to be overextended enough to have logistical problems/low CPP/etc. We attacked with about 4-5x as much CV, and also 4-5x as much of men, guns, and AFV.

We lost about twice as many men and AFV, but Germany nevertheless lost 57 AFV, which is one of the first significant losses we have inflicted on a Panzer division. That included 36 Panzer IIIs and 6 Panzer IVs, so those were not all junky obsolete Panzer I/II/38(t)s/etc. We also didn't lose any T-34's or KV-1s (none were in the divisions that attacked), so all our AFV losses were T-26s and BT-7s. That makes the AFV losses quite a good trade for Soviets at this point in the game.

To make this attack successful, however, we did not just attack on the ground by itself, we also prepared the ground by bombing. Before making the attack, 738 Soviet bombers participated in 14 ground attack missions bombing the 3rd Panzer Division (including IL-2s) to soften them up.

In Kharkov, where the previous turn there was essentially no defense, I tried to cobble together a defensive force that could at least get in front of the Panzer spearhead and delay things for a turn or so. This is a mix of high quality and low quality units. On the one hand, there are a bunch of cavalry, paratroopers, a smattering of AT brigades, and even one Mountain Infantry Brigade. Many of the low quality troops had been railed down from Pskov/Velikie Luki/etc and places where there was no longer as imminent of a Panzer threat. On the other hand, there is Rokossvsky's Tank Assault Army, which had been starting to form in Kharkov in the previous 2 or so turns. The Totenkopf division was cut off by cavalry.

Rokossovsky's Tank Army was not quite as ready as I ideally would have liked, but it was ready enough to be able to counterattack the 16th Panzer Division, which IIRC had only 4 CV and was just a few hexes from Kharkov. In Rokossovsky's attack, 176 Soviet AFVs were lost, but so were 74 German Panzers. Like Vatutin's attack, this one was also prepared by bombing.

Similarly to the other battle, Germany lost some relatively good quality tanks. 46 Panzer IIIs and 10 Panzer IVs. Of the 1,049 Soviet AFVs that participated in the battle, only 10 were T-34's and 28 were KV-1s. Of those 3 each of the T-34s/KV-1s were lost. So basically all the Soviet losses were obsolete tanks.

One annoying thing is it is impossible to move the Kharkov Military District HQ. It is not even inside the city of Kharkov for protection, but it has 0 MP. It is supposed to disband on turn 7...

I guess the game must be assuming that the Germans won't be at Kharkov before turn 7.

Perhaps the game should re-assess the situation

The Kharkov T-34's factories were also ordered to manually evacuate (if you do that, they arrive with 33% damage rather than 100%, although AFAIK they still have the same delay). I should have similarly evacuated the industry form Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk manually, but I didn't think of it.

But the cost of putting up some sort of basic defense of Kharkov was that all I have in front of Stalino is a thin cavalry screen. Stalino itself is garrisoned by only a fort, without any accompanying division.

And lest you get the wrong idea about those infantry divisions railed into Voroshilovgrad and Rostov, those are both depleted divisions with morale in the low 30s. In other words, the perfect divisions to fight Panzers.

You can also see in that screenshot that Dnepropetrovsk was liberated by the 9th Cavalry division! It had been left undefended, so the 9th walked in. When they walked in and liberated the city, by the way, that evacuated more population, so it means we will have (slightly) more manpower for the rest of the game. The actual extra quantity of manpower we should get from this, if my calculations are correct, is about 100 men of additional manpower per turn (with the 1941-42 manpower multipliers).

So if you get a chance to liberate a decently sized city like this, it is probably a good idea, if for no other reason than to get that extra manpower.

Meanwhile, here is the mighty Crimea defense (it is even less than before because the cavalry was sent to help with the Stalino cavalry screen). We started bombing Odessa from Crimea to hopefully hurt the Axis logistics a bit in the south.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:45 am

Start of Turn 6 ---

Most important thing is apparently... The liberation of Dnepropetrovsk last turn by my cavalry, after it had been left unoccupied... got me 6 VP for taking back the city earlier than historical (lol):

Probably the 2nd most important thing is that the ground value in the Northern Front Theatre box has risen high enough so that a handful of the NKVD Border Guards from the Northern Front can gradually start getting transferred to the main front, for the duty of fighting the Panzer Spearhead right where the going is the most dangerous and suicidal:

And the NKVD Border Guards that I transferred from the Transcaucausus have arrived on the map. They will be thrown directly in front of the Panzers around Kharkov/Chernigov/etc. The 3 NKVD units that were transferred from the Far East start arriving soon also.

This was quite a quiet turn overall, with only a small number of attacks. Germany seems to be waiting for the light mud. Probably not a good sign at all for next turn, because that means CPP and MP will be high on the Panzers. I am going to need to be very careful here.

As a result of there not being that many battles, relative to what there could have been, we are already up to 3.4 million Soviets on the map, and more than 5 million in total:

Ever since the first two turns, Soviet losses have been averaging less than 100k, which is quite good for the TOE/morale/etc of my divisions. So the Red Army is in relatively quite good shape. But that obviously has a cost (namely, the south):

I have got so many men that even the Archangelsk Military District received 1,380 replacements. It's Raining Men! Hallelujah! - It's Raining Men! Amen!:

Without that many battles happening and not taking too many losses early, I am starting to get some very nice beefy divisions. Like this 17 (!!!) CV tank division. It is also (fittingly) named the 17th Tank Division, part of Vatutin's Assault Army:

And the 199th Rifle Division (Tolbukhin's Assault Army, guarding the Northern Flank of Smolensk) has 14 CV:

Northern/Center front battles, not too much movement except for expanding the bridgehead over the Dnieper a bit with infantry attacks:

In the Gomel sector, Germany broke through my weak infantry/cavalry defense on the right flank, but didn't have the MP to go all that far. I was planning to retreat a bit here anyway, and will do so, putting more cavalry/airborne/NKVD right in front of the German Panzer spearheads:

And in the Kharkov area, there were just a handful of battles against the various weak cavalry/AT/airborne/etc forces that I placed in front which had cut off Das Reich and were screening the defense. Because I don't really have much in the way of real quality here (mostly just weak divisions to be sacrificed to the Panzers), I will have to be careful here. Kharkov will probably fall next turn if Germany wants it to; if not, it will probably end up being encircled.

The Odessa Cavalry Division appeared. But not in Odesssa. If the new patch fixed the problems with Fortress Cities not working (note this was referring to 1.03 patch), maybe I could have tried to defend Odessa if we had started the game a bit later with the new patch (?):

Looking at the front overall, once I retreat a bit (as planned) from the Dnieper bridgehead area and from the area in the south close to Gomel towards Bryansk, that will straighten out my line a bit and make it easier to have more depth. I also needed to reteat gradually from around Gomel because there is not good supply there after losing Gomel (lack of railyards/depots). After retreating a bit, I will also then have almost continuous lines reaching as far south as Kharkov. Then I will just need to get something more than a cavalry screen in place in the Don Basin area extending to Stalino/Rostov in the next few turns (of course, by that point, Stalino itself may well/probably will be lost).

One other thing - at the end of last turn, when I liberated Dnepropetrovsk with cavalry, we saw a German infantry division right next to it.

It is 1004 kilometers from Przemysl to Dnepropetrovsk. If the war started on June 22 and it was then July 20, that means (with maybe a bit of slight variation depending on where exactly that particular division started) that infantry division marched around 30 kilometers per day. Seems pretty fast for a non-motorized division where the soldiers are actually walking, even if they are not fighting. Sure, you could keep up that speed for a short period of time... but for a month, non-stop?

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dneprop ... 838623!3e2

Is it realistic for them to be able to march that far, that fast? Even given that they were not actually fighting? I don't know - I'm just asking questions.

Because of there not being that many battles (from a combination of my retreat in the south and also there not being that many battles even where I have not been retreating, in the north/center), I have so much manpower that even the divisions that I wanted to use as sacrificial divisions are filling up with manpower. I was railing this division to the south for example because it had only 4000 men. And now it has 9000. This is actually a bad thing, because now it uses more rail capacity to send it on, and it is less useful to throw sacrificially in front of Panzer divisions

Same story with this in Voroshilovgrad, which had been depleted and now has 4000 men.

There have been so few battles that Pavlov has STILL not been executed by Stalin yet. I had been hoping that Stalin would replace him with a good leader for free, which is why I made the Western Front be an Assault Front on Turn 1. We need the Western Front to start losing some more battles for that to happen. [:(]

Discord discussion:

Goodbyebluesky: Pavlov is not that bad of a leader. Admin 6 is certainly not bad for Russians and there could be worse promoted into that spot

Beethoven: But you are neglecting the fact that he:

"betrayed the interests of the Motherland, violated the oath of office and damaged the combat power of the Red Army that are crimes under Articles 58-1b, 58-11 RSFSR Criminal Code. Pavlov, the commander of the Western Front, during the outbreak of hostilities with the German forces against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, showed cowardice, failure of power, mismanagement, allowed the collapse of command and control, surrender of weapons to the enemy without fighting, willful abandonment of military positions by the Red Army, the most disorganized defense of the country and enabled the enemy to break through the front of the Red Army."

Beethoven: Maybe if he had been a better leader he would not have conspired with the Germans and there would have never been a Bialystok pocket, hmm? You didn't think of that, did you? Hmm? No, you didn't.

Beethoven1 · Post by **Beethoven1** » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:57 am

End of Turn 6 ---

A little bit of retreat in Estonia, but hardly any. I am waiting until next turn to see, first of all, whether the supply is any better (enough that I can stay there with enough troops to put up a decent fight). Secondly, I am also waiting to see what the German motorized units will do. Will they push at all, or will they drive away to a different more open part of the map? I am a bit worried that Totenkopf could blow through my troops here, even though there are quite a lot of them. The risk of that at least for this turn should be fairly low though because the German infantry is not quite caught up.

Around Pskov, Germany left large gaps in their lines, and I had several 35 MP tanks that could take advantage of that, explore the area, flip back some hexes and also (temporarily) cut off a few infantry divisions. A couple of the infantry divisions may be in danger, but this seems definitely worth it to slow down the German advance. I figure this may effectively cost Germany a turn (maybe even more) in this area. It is also a reminder to Germany that maybe sometimes they need to break down into regiments. And then if they do that, hopefully I can also give them some reminders that if they do that, they will get attacked with huge numerical superiority and lose some battles that way.

This also gives my troops some extra time to construct forts on the Sorot river and in other places. On that note, this turn we got all the construction units you get finally into armies, and I concentrated construction units in the north and center (most non-assault armies in the north and center have up to 9 construction battalions to hopefully help dig in quickly). If Germany wants to advance in the north before mud and then winter sets in, the time to do so is rapidly ticking down. I would like for them to conquer as little of the good defensive terrain (swamp, rough, heavy forest) as possible, so that I can in turn push them back on easier-to-push terrain like light forest during winter.

I was comfortable being aggressive in the north because I wouldn't mind if the Panzers want to come up, waste more time and encircle a few divisions, and then find themselves facing lots of Soviet troops in good defensive terrain, and then move to the south again (by which time mud will be nearing).

My position in Velikie Luki is definitely stronger than in the average game, but not super-strong compared to some other places (e.g. Smolensk). If Germany attacks there with Panzers it is possible they could take it. So I am slightly worried about that. But if so, it is probably better in the long run for me that they do that than that they attack towards Smolensk.

On the land bridge itself, I hardly retreated. But I have 5 lines of depth, and in one or two places even 6, and some fairly strong divisions defending. It is also clear that Germany has a lot of mobile units on the land bridge. I am expecting a big attack next turn. Hopefully I do actually have enough depth to stop a full-fledged breakthrough, at least directly on Smolensk itself. If I don't, then it probably is not possible. Because it is pretty hard to have more troops there than I do.

I did retreat a bit more south of Smolensk, however. This had the benefit of straightening my lines, which also helped with setting up a large amount of depth in my defenses both around Smolensk and in the Gomel/Bryansk/Chernigov sector:

In the Gomel sector, Vatutin made a counterattack against a very weak (1 CV) German Panzer regiment (with assistance from bombing and the usual overwhelming numerical superiority, more than 10 to 1 in this case). This cleared it out of the way and enabled the 4th Panzer division to be surrounded:

Vatutin then attacked the 4th Panzer with 100k+ men, 1000+ guns, and nearly 1000 AFVS, and routed it (it routed only because it had nowhere to retreat). This also had fairly low combat value, though not as low as the regiment (8 CV). Vatutin's attack included the 17 CV Soviet 17th Tank Division, and some other tank/mech units with 100 CPP, as well as a lot of infantry in support.

This cost Germany 400 vehicles! Also, 42 AFVs, including 23 Panzer III and 4 Panzer IVs. Routing German motorized and Panzer units is very very good to do because Germany will lose way more vehicles in a rout than in a retreat, so any time you have an opportunity to do that, try to do it if at all possible.

In the Kharkov area, the LAH Motorized Brigade was also counterattacked (by Rokossovsky). The LAH had only 2 CV after fighting 5-6 battles the previous German turn, so it could be attacked, with, as usual, overwhelming numbers:

Overall, there is something sort of starting to resemble a front line reaching as far south as Kharkov now:

But the price of setting up some sort of defense around Kharkov is that the defenses remain very thin everywhere south of that:

I will pretty surely have to retreat to Crimea next turn, this is not exactly a defense that we can expect will hold for long...

HardLuckYetAgain · Post by **HardLuckYetAgain** » Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:46 pm

This cost Germany 400 vehicles! Also, 42 AFVs, including 23 Panzer III and 4 Panzer IVs. Routing German motorized and Panzer units is very very good to do because Germany will lose way more vehicles in a rout than in a retreat, so any time you have an opportunity to do that, try to do it if at all possible.

Germany should rarely be putting himself(The Fatherland) in a position to have this happen. German players need to rethink how they advance in WITE2. Personally I would welcome the strat you are doing here as a Soviet if I was playing Germany against you. You bring all the meat to the table so I don't have to chase it across the map hoping for a dinner.

Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy

RE: Bread (Axis) vs Beethoven (SOV) Game #2: The Southern Strategy