Matrix Games Forums

It be kinda good to be able to employ the scorched earth policy that stalin employed in the early stages of barbarossa. being able to destroy your own factories, if you cant relocate em due to rail capacities cause you withdrew units. and destoying the resources would be cool, eliminating them altogether from that region. an example would be like the germans are in kiev and goin for kharkov. youve got an army in kharkov but its not big enough to repell the germans so you withdraw it to a position to counter attack. you use up all the available supply and rail capacity with the retreating units and cant move the factories. you dont want the germans to get them so you use scorched earth you destory them. eliminating the factory altogether (unable to be repaired by the germans). you dont have the factory either but you could build another factory say in the urals. if you beat the germans back you could relocate it late rback to kharkov so it d be closer to the front again. i guess it would have to cost something say 5 resource points. itd be cool to do it to the rails also. The russians did it to the caucasus oil fields in maikop and in grozny. destroying the resources would be weird though i guess it wouldnt be possible.

i think the game has already incorporated the scorched earth feature in the game as:

1) u can move ur factories to ural b4 barbarossa;
2) all resources, factories and railways are at second level damage when the region change hand.

but eliminating them altogether (unable to repair) is not too realistic. i cant imagine that u can completely destory, say a coal mine. yes u can damage the facilities and require the invaders to spend time and resources to repair. but u just kind completely destory those resources. as u can see, iraq also employed the scorched earth policy but those resources are now reparied.

imo, factories in the scale of WAW is really big, its not just a couple of buildings. and it also incl. the trained labor forces in the region and other infrastructures that support the "factories". so i agree that resources (ito supplies) are needed to repair the damages from the scorched earth policy (remember 10 supplies are really a lot of resources) but its difficult to really "totally destory" everything beyond repair.

AN

Actually the Axis and the Russians did not necessarily have to do much to make the railways initially useless to each other because they used different guages for the tracks. Thus German trains could not just steam on through. After the Germans had gone to the trouble of converting them to their guage then the Russians could not easily use them when they took them back again at least for a while that is why Lend Lease trucks were so important.

The main resource that it was possible to make seriously difficult to access was oil. The Russians poured concrete down the wells and as far as I know the Germans never managed to extract much useful quantity from the wells they did capture. At the beginning of WW2 it was anticipated that bombing raids on oilfields would have devastating consequences but in practice the effects proved less than feared.

BTW I agree that it should not be entirely possible to destroy factories - remember the Germans did make heavy use of slave labour to increase production in their own factories so this capturing effect to some extent mirrors that sort of impact.

Mike

As the Soviets you can move your factories to the Urals before war is declared?

I dragged this up to prove my point about the scorched earth i mentioned. reread my earlier post carefully i mentioned if you couldnt withdraw a factory due to rail capacities that you would be able to destroy it. i guess i was misleading when i mentioned oil as a resource oil was only one resource. but read this: Stalin was so paralyzed by fear of Hitler that there was not a word from him for a full 11 days after the German invasion on June 22. Finally on July 3, 1941 Stalin spoke on the radio and condemned the actions of "such fiends as Hitler and Ribbentrop" who had broken their pact of friendship. Stalin also announced a "scorched earth" policy for Ukraine: "In case of a forced retreat... all rolling stock must be evacuated, the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel. The collective farmers must drive off all their cattle and turn over their grain to the safe keeping of the state authorities for transportation to the rear. All valuable property, including non-ferrous metals, grain and fuel that cannot be withdrawn must be destroyed without fail. In areas occupied by the enemy, guerilla units....must set fire to forests, stores and transports."

The retreating Soviet officials, for example, shipped 6 million cattle from Ukraine east to Russia, 550 large factories, thousands of small factories and 300,000 tractors. The USSR also evacuated 3.5 million skilled workers from Ukraine to the Russian Republic. In the Battle for Ukraine Soviet sources say the partisans blew up nearly 5,000 enemy trains, blasted 607 railway bridges, 915 warehouses, and damaged over 1,500 tanks and armoured carriers.

As the Soviet authorities and army retreated from Ukraine in 1941, Stalin's scorched earth policy left a trail of destruction including the Dniprohes Dam on the Dnieper River, which was the largest hydro electric power dam in Europe, countless mines and major industrial factories, and Khreschchatik Street in the capital city of Kiev. On November 3, 1941 the famous architectural monument, the Dormition Cathedral in the Pecherska Lavra built 1073 in Kiev, was destroyed. Moscow tried to blame the Germans for destroying this superb example of medieval Ukrainian architecture but it was proven to be the work of a Soviet bomb squad which had mined it before their retreat and later set it off killing Germans

And as for converting the wide gauge russian track to the standard track the deutsche reichsbahn gesellschaft, the german railway by jan43, 22000 miles of the Soviet rail network were under German control and the majority of that had already been converted to standard gauge by the Germans. though the Germans were able to capture large quantities of Soviet rolling stock and railway construction materials, the captured items were for the most part crappy and old.

The retreating Soviet officials, for example, shipped 6 million cattle from Ukraine east to Russia, 550 large factories, thousands of small factories and 300,000 tractors. The USSR also evacuated 3.5 million skilled workers from Ukraine to the Russian Republic.

cool, u really done ur research!

but as i have mentioned in my previous tread, the "skilled workers" are also counted in the "factories" as such, "factories" cant be destoryed if its captured but can be "moved", together with the skilled workers, b4 the attack. in fact, RUS can move the "factories" in the turn when they notice the horde of panzers in the ger border.

imo, RP instead of FP is the bottleneck of RUS when the war begun. but of course, moving the factories away deny the ger's use of the facilities.

AN

i tried to move my factories in my game with big snig. its fall41 he hasnt launched barbarossa yet so the thing is theirs still troops in eastern poland and in kiev how can i move them with the troops being frozen. and why would i want to move my factories in rostov or moscow for example. germany wont be able to touch either untill the following turn after the initial invasion. but im not sure if your catching my drift about the scorched earth idea im explaining. like my previous thread germans r in kiev, i have forces in kharkov but not enough to fend off an attack i dont want to lose em or get em damaged thatll fill spots on my production table. i cant bring in reinforcements. so i withdraw all my troops using the rail capacity to its fullest and the supply i can alot to the retreat. my rail is unavailable and the factories are left for the germans seeing i cant relocate i could destroy it . the soviets moved 550 factories no small feat. i work in factory im a steel worker and trust me it wouldnt take long to dissassemble a factory and i know it would be easier to demo a factory or many factories. they did it in vegas to all the old casinos and hotels. google it buildings imploding on each other. anyways thats my point. as for resources it encompasses everything man takes from the land. destroy a resource- take a look at the news were desroying the planet as we speak so rendering an oil well useless well thats different but burning down timber forests poisoning water agricultural and rural land it could be done. but thats getting wierd anyways wanna have a game a51 sometime.

well, w/o looking at ur game file, i cant say much about ur game with big snig esp i dont know how big is the horde of panzers in romania and western poland and the horde of art + inf/mil combo in the RUS border.

however, what i can say is given its Fa41 now, and imo its unlikely for him to launch barbarossa in Wi42 turn (due to general winter defence bonus), the earliest barbarossa will be Sp42. so u still got a turn or two to prepare.

assuming u have built flaks and hordes of units in lengard, lengard is safe for the first round.
so that means u just have to move a max of 3 factories, kiev, kharkov and bessiour (?) now. iirc, u can move supplies and factories (but not combat units) in frozen regions. but imo, after Wi43 the bottleneck of GER is RP instead of FP (although FP in RUS can be used to compensate those destoryed by WA bombings in western europe), so big snig may not bother to repair the FP at all. but of course, it doesnt cost RUS for moving the factories, u are free to move them and consider whether to pay the supplies to repair them later.

i will be glad to fight u after im back from honeymoon in late sept [8D].

AN

I don't think you can move any factories in frozen areas of Russia. Is this correct?

You can't move the factories until you are at war with someone - which enables strat movement of units. However, once you are at war with either Germany or Japan - you can move units as well as factories into and out of frozen territories with strat movement.