Transitioning to WITE-2 Red Army?

[MarkShot]

Although I bought this game when it came out except for one non-intro scenario as the Axis, I haven't played much. Since when I found I liked it, I went and bought WITW. I have been playing WITW scenarios for about a year (both sides), but I still haven't tried a campaign.

So, I wanted to play some WITE-2. I watched SGD's most excellent tutorial series. Mainly, the air mechanics and organization is different.

So, I just jumped into Red Army Resurgent to get a feel for the Red Army. I've discover:

* Air Forces don't report to a senior air unit like OKL, but rather each Air Army reports into a Front (Army Group).

* Still working on Soviet AOG nomenclature.

* Instead of having Corps HQs, it seems there are Corps Rifle or Corps Armor.

* Where infantry divisions exist, they report into the Army HQ in an organic fashion.

I am reading through the WITE-2 manual to check if it says more about the rational and mechanics for the Red Army.

(1) The Corps HQ has a key mechanic in terms of processing die roles and handing out SUs. How do things work here with the lowest level of HQ being the Army HQ? Does Army HQ behave the same way as the Corps HQ vis-a-vis command and SUs? What about the die rolls? (For the Germans in the chain of command die sides were, I think, 10, 20, 40.)

(2) Why is the Red Army structured as such? Historic reasons or game play reasons? Meaning that a finer resolution of the Red Army would have resulted in too many units on the map?

(3) Given the 3 unit per hex stacking rule does the Corps Rifle and Corps Armor provide the Red Army with a huge advantage to mass force? (as I have been watching this group argue about play and historical balance since the game was released)

SGD became a father, I understand, and so, he never did a tutorial presentation for the USSR OOB.

Thank you to entertain my naïve questions!

[MarkShot]

Okay, I just read 37.5 Build New Unit Screen. Very interesting indeed.

What is the rational for allowing USSR player to build units as opposed to simply being assigned historically units as arrivals?

As arrivals seems to be the approach for WITW and WITE-2 Axis.

Thanks.

[MarkShot]

Ah, smile. Page 184 AOG Naming Conventions. That's good, I took German in school, but Russian, I haven't got a clue. Just flipping through this manual was why I bought 4 of GG's titles.

I was actually playing CK2/CK3 immediately before this (last week), and studying those titles. And I said to myself, this crazy. Why am I studying Paradox titles which are designed as about as tight as swiss cheese; when I could study a real beautiful work of art.

0i AOG name.jpg (1.58 MiB) Viewed 1475 times

[TallBlondJohn]

(1) The Corps HQ has a key mechanic in terms of processing die roles and handing out SUs. How do things work here with the lowest level of HQ being the Army HQ? Does Army HQ behave the same way as the Corps HQ vis-a-vis command and SUs? What about the die rolls? (For the Germans in the chain of command die sides were, I think, 10, 20, 40.)

(2) Why is the Red Army structured as such? Historic reasons or game play reasons? Meaning that a finer resolution of the Red Army would have resulted in too many units on the map?

(3) Given the 3 unit per hex stacking rule does the Corps Rifle and Corps Armor provide the Red Army with a huge advantage to mass force? (as I have been watching this group argue about play and historical balance since the game was released)

SGD became a father, I understand, and so, he never did a tutorial presentation for the USSR OOB.

Thank you to entertain my naïve questions!

Just my thoughts - SGD is great, shame he never finished his big play-through. Watching somebody get his butt kicked by the AI was... surreal.

(1)
Historically the Red Army started the Great Patriotic War with infantry and mech corps just like the Germans, but they fell apart completely in Barbarossa, not least because Stalin had shot all the commanders (WITE2 includes these HQs, WITE did not). So the Soviets disbanded the corps and just funneled command through the army HQs directly to the divisons. Thereafter Soviet armies are smaller than German, but have more Command Points than a German corps (I think there was an essay covering this in the WITE1 manual). Other than that use them as you would a German corps HQ, with SUs attached at army or unit level. The die rolls are the same (with different input data for morale leadership etc).

(2)
In 1942 the Red Army again started to build "corps". These new formations concentrated support units, communications and logistics at the HQ level for economy, with divisions (or brigades) having little independence. As a result they weren't as varied or flexible as German corps. Instead they were deliberately conceived as a way of economically rebuilding concentrated offensive power, trading off flexibility and tactical initiative for sheer brute force, perfect for a massive army with more firepower than experienced officers - this is the start of the steamroller. So in WITE and WITE2 corps units have a fixed ToE, operate on the map as units just like German divisions and and can draw on army SUs or use SUs directly attached to them. In WITE2, you can break down soviet corps but this was/is rare as the Soviets don't really need to once they are on offense. Note that Soviet divisions cannot break down - that inflexibility again.

(3)
As a result, by 1943-1944 the red army can cram 9 divisions onto assault hexes to bulldozer through almost any defence - as this is exactly what they did. The Germans would have loved to have been in the same position but the only case where they achieved such offensive density was Kursk, for about a week. The 3 hex stack limit is one of WITE's more dogmatic features, its gamey but works well in most cases (urban combat being the exception, which WITE2 addressed with city forts). The German's only hope is to engage the breakthroughs in mobile battle where well rested and equipped units operating in flexible corps HQs under good leaders can really cut up the Soviets in the open. But such opportunities will become rarer and rarer...

So to conclude, by design and following history the Red Army will build into an behemoth that can batter its way to Berlin at 3 units per hex, while a slowly evaporating Wehrmacht uses all its operational and tactical flexibilty and skill to try and stop them. IMO, WITE has a wonderful knack of reproducing historical practice in these two very different and evolving armies at the operational level very well, showing the basic soundness of the concepts used. Where there are balance issues (in a simulation this big there will always be something) the developers are committed to continuing to improve the game as they did with WITE for years.

[MarkShot]

Thank you John!

A very educational post melding game play and period history.

As a gamer you have to love the detail and modeling GG puts into these epic games. As a retire systems designer, you have to appreciate solid integration of so many complex systems which is rarely ever seen in games.

I know some people don't like dies, turns, and hexes (which once included myself; formerly actively working with Panther Games), but in the greatest abstraction a program or game is y=f(x) where X is the player, Y the result, and F the game. It really doesn't matter how F is achieved only that X and Y are well modeled and deliver believable historic results. Further, GGs statistical method and batch oriented steps make this game playable on mid-range PCs for 2023. An agent based physics simulation would have never managed this breadth and depth even on 2023's high end machine.

Yep, SDG was a natural teacher as he would do those videos unscripted. He had said he would cover play as the USSR, but alas ...

Thanks again!

[Mehring]

The roots are interesting but I don't have the energy. This link goes some way to explaining some Soviet problems resulting from those historical roots- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDslsMgnphI

[MarkShot]

Thanks!

[MarkShot]

Oh, TIK. I really like his stuff. I am not sure I agree with all his economics, but he does great presentations. I also like Mark Felton's WWII history. Thank, again.

[Mehring]

No, I don't agree with all of his arguements either, but I thought that one was more on than off the mark.

[fighterf4u]

TIK is very hit-or-miss. But as a general rule of thumb, his military history videos are much better than his politics/economics videos. The latter of which can be very "creative."

[MarkShot]

Thank you very much.

I watched that and the associated videos about the purge of the Red Army and everyone's mobilization. Truly fascinating analysis.

The associated video on Stalin's Purge so people don't have to look for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnWNnI6YlQQ

[Mehring]

I'm afraid I may be closer to fighterf4u's take on TIK's political and economic grasp.

[Saelon1]

Okay, I just read 37.5 Build New Unit Screen. Very interesting indeed.

What is the rational for allowing USSR player to build units as opposed to simply being assigned historically units as arrivals?

As arrivals seems to be the approach for WITW and WITE-2 Axis.

Thanks.

I can think of a few rationales for why the Soviets would be treated differently. For one, a lot of the Soviet units are created by merging smaller units together, for instance you would create cavalry and infantry corps by combining 3 rifle or cavalry divisions (or you could build them new into the reserve). As the Germans, you do have some units 'upgrade' into other units, e.g. their cavalry division that is rebuilt as a panzer division, but this is relatively infrequent, more often you are just getting new units. You could imagine over 1942 - 43 having all of the Soviet rifle divisions (not all at once, but gradually) being pulled back into the reserve and converted to rifle corps, but that would probably be frustrating and feel arbitrary that Rifle Divisions X, Y, and Z are pulled into the reserve to make a rifle corps even when those divisions are in Leningrad, Kursk, and Rostov respectively. Being able to organically take three rifle divisions in the same army and make them a rifle corps seems like it makes more sense.

Secondly, the Soviets had a lot of formations destroyed and rebuilt several times during the war, the way the Germans handle some units that got destroyed (e.g. the slovakian mobile brigade) is that it gets disbanded on a certain date. Would the Soviets have a historically destroyed unit get deleted on turn X, and rebuilt on turn X+1? If they rebuilt the 2nd Tank corps (as a random non-historical example) three times, would you get it added to your reserve on each time even if it wasn't destroyed?

Thirdly, and I suppose this is a matter of taste, the Soviets did some unusual things, such as forming some 40 artillery divisions and 8 (?) rocket launcher divisions, should the game force the Soviet player to disband many/most of their artillery regiments throughout the game so they can fill out the TOE of 40 artillery divisions (some 400 guns each)?

In addition to the comments above discussing gameplay, would one want to take on the burden of researching the Soviet military to such detail as to authentically represent, e.g., which tank brigades were used to form each tank corps, or to get right which rifle corps were formed using which rifle divisions (that in real life the rifle divisions could be transferred from one corps to another, so then what do you do?), and so on.

It might be fun if the Germans were allowed to use the same mechanic through a game rule (historical unit production vs full control but with very limited formation of new units).

[Joch1955]

What you see the Russian Army going through in 1941-43 is an Army with obsolescent doctrine, tactics, equipment with officers chosen for their political reliability and whose every move is watched over and second guessed by political commissars having to restructure itself into a modern force while being torn apart by arguably the best Army in the world at that time. So yes, the Russian Army changes drastically and rapidly during this period as it tries to come up with the right formula to beat the Germans. The game does a good job of reflecting this.

Now the Germans are in a different situation, their Army was already at the top of their game in 41, so there was no need to make any major changes and the basic unit structure from regiment to army group did not appreciably change in 41-45, so no real need to have specific rules dealing with German unit production.

[ncc1701e]

So to conclude, by design and following history the Red Army will build into an behemoth that can batter its way to Berlin at 3 units per hex, while a slowly evaporating Wehrmacht uses all its operational and tactical flexibilty and skill to try and stop them. IMO, WITE has a wonderful knack of reproducing historical practice in these two very different and evolving armies at the operational level very well, showing the basic soundness of the concepts used. Where there are balance issues (in a simulation this big there will always be something) the developers are committed to continuing to improve the game as they did with WITE for years.

Interesting post indeed. Thanks

[Teo41_ITA]

Would the Soviets have a historically destroyed unit get deleted on turn X, and rebuilt on turn X+1? If they rebuilt the 2nd Tank corps (as a random non-historical example) three times, would you get it added to your reserve on each time even if it wasn't destroyed?

In my historical OOB 1941-1945 mod I did precisely what you described, at least for the Soviet tank divisions and many artillery regiments, being disbanded in 1941 or reformed as Guards/heavy tank/SPG/SPAT brigades.