Icarus Mod v6.6 - 1916 - Entente playtest AAR (vs mdsmall)

[moon1]

Turns 37-42 (June-July 1917)

- Well, it happened. Tsar abdicated, Lenin has arrived and Russia is on the clock. But so is Germany - Turnip winter and tightening blockade send their NM in a downward spiral. Will the CP be able to force Russia out of the war before German people will call out for peace?





Germans, pinned between the Entente forces and the Dutch border, tried to slowly retreat out of looming cauldron. But it didn't work out in the end - after a pincer attack one of the retreating corps is fully surrounded and without supply.



Now Germans hold only Liege and Luxembourg out of all of their 1914 conquests. This does present a new challenge - the frontline shrunk a lot and their forces are dug in (and of course Germany has Trenches 5 already). How do you solve such a problem? I might have an idea...



Fighting in the Balkans is mostly inconclusive, I can't even destroy at least of the defending corps. But at least it keeps my opponent occupied and prevents any offensive actions of his own. I definetly should bring another artillery piece here.



The position of Brusilov in Estonia looks dangerous, so I launch a diversionary attack from Pskov with the help of newly arrived British expeditionary corps (an HQ is arriving late though). Their presence not only reinforces the battered Russian army but also provides 2000 NM boost, as well as 100 points per turn for Kerensky's goverment. Entente does not abandon its allies in the time of need!



But in Belarus Germans just do not budge, even after I put Yudenich here. But I do not give up, we must continue to pressure them.



Austrians are pushing in Galicia but very slowly. My hopes is that Romania will join soon and distract them. Almost of Entente's diplomacy chits are invested there.



My hopes for a swift victory in the Middle East have vanished, once I saw how many troops are there. It looks like I have to prepare myself for a long grinding fighting. At least I got an Ottoman HQ, retreating through the Syrian desert. The rest of the forces (or really what's little left of them) managed to reach their supply lines and dug in.

[moon1]

Turns 43-44 (July 1917)

So here is my plan - just reverse Schlieffen the Germans. I know that most of the Dutch army spawns in Holland with only one detachment in Maastricht. My cavalry is not in position but British infantry should be able to reach Cologne anyway. However, if he has infantry reserves there, my plan will be screwed and I can't fly a recon there either... Anyway, I gamble. The UK issues an ultimatum to the Dutch government, demanding the passage of their troops and moves in without waiting for an answer.

I am lucky - there are no German troops there, so I roll in the rest of the invasion forces, including tanks. A little misplay on my part and a couple of bad rolls - and both Mackensen HQ and German heavy artillery barely survive the onslaught. British take Cologne and Maastricht, French destroy one Dutch corps in Rotterdam, Royal Navy shells Hague and its port. The US loses 10% of mobilization but it doesn't matter, France and Britain are commited to finish this war on their own.



My diversion attack had done the trick - Germany shifts its artillery towards Pskov. Russians and British fall back immediately. Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Finland subs are lurking, chipping away bit by bit parts from the Baltic Fleet.



Finally, advance in Belarus. Russians are in the outskirts of Minsk. The attack on the city is still impossible, though.



I am falling back further from Galicia and destroy one Austrian corps in a counterattack.



Italians actually have managed to do something since the fall of Trento. I take... one mountain hex. Well, I also destroy one Austrian corps in the process. At the same time they are pushing from Isonzo towards Udine, clapping one of the Italians there.



After this turn, Germany is down to 19% NM, which means that their income will be reduced - another novelty brought by this version of the mod, showing the struggles of keeping a nation together in face of faultering morale. We'll see how long they will last...

[moon1]

Turns 45-50 (August-September 1917)

The game has reached its deciding point. A little spoiler - this will be the last report. But it ended quite unexpectedly!

As August rolled in, Austria-Hungary has suddenly started to collapse. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia have declared their independence, evicting all foreign troops from their soil, including the Kaiser's army and Romania joined the war (they were about to do it anyway, though). Was it due to some bugs in the coding or people's patience reaching the breaking point? Who knows!




Anyway, we've decided to continue just to see what will happen and, hopefully, catch more bugs along the way. That's what playtesting is for, after all. German troops, escaping the looming cauldron, abandoned Liege and Aachen and tried to establish their defences on the other side of the Rhein. But Anglo-French allied army was quickly following in their footsteps. Mackensen HQ got whacked by galloping British cavalry, German defences near Arnhem were destroyed and the Dutch army was cornered in Holland.



Since Germans rushed most of their troops to defend the Fatherland, Russia finally caught a breathing moment, which it quite needed: mutinies were rocking the Russian army for three turns in a row already. With frontline in Galicia shortened to just a fex hexes, both Estonian and Belarussian fronts got reinforced. German navy entered the Gulf of Finland in force, desperately trying to destroy the Baltic Fleet and shock Russia enough to bring it out of the war.



The new army group of Romanians and Russians was forming in the south to invade Bulgaria from their backyard. However, this was not meant to happen - after the Entente recaptured abandoned Uskub and liberated Serbia, the glitched event fired again and established the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Afterwards Bulgaria immediately withdrew from the war, no questions asked.



Meanwhile Turkish defences in Palestine were looking really strong, surviving my attack.



The Western front was collapsing. Germans pulled out of Alsace and Lorraine, trying to hault the advancing invaders. British army rolled over the Dutch and captured Hague, France has captured Mulhouse and in the North Sea German subs made the last attempt to lift the blockade.



And yet still the days of the Second Reich were numbered, on 50th turn their NM reached 0. In September 1917 the revolution broke out across German cities, Kaiser was overthrown and the German High Command asked for immediate peace talks. The war was finally over.




So, this is the end of my AAR. Kudos to mdsmall for playing till the end! It was very fun, both the game itself and the scenario as a whole, despite the glitched AH collapse event. I am quite happy that we've managed to spot it before the official release. I do think that there are several adjustments to the balance which could be made but it would be up to him decide, which and how to implement, so I leave the final word for him.


That's it, thank you for reading!

[mdsmall]

Hi - My sincere thanks to Moon1 for agreeing to play-test this pre-release version of Icarus 6.6 with me, and for writing this very entertaining and informative AAR. The game itself was gripping and very hard fought. Let me comment first on the game, then briefly on this version of the mod.

The Central Powers start the 1916 campaign in a seemingly strong position: Russia has been pushed back to Lithuania and all of Poland has been captured; Serbia has just been defeated and Montenegro is about to fall; the Ottomans have defeated the ill-conceived Gallipoli adventure and the British are surrounded in Kut-al-Amara. But they do not have a decisive superiority in corps on any front in the war.

So, the Central Powers have to decide at the beginning whether to: a) finish off the remaining Entente forces around Salonika and in Albania; b) push hard in the West, capture the last Belgian capital and then array the forces needed to take Verdun; or c) do everything to knock Russia out of the war as quickly as possible. I opted for c) on the theory that I could use the Bulgarians and a few Ottomans to keep the small front remaining in the Balkans in a stalemate and that I could fight the British and French to a stand-still in the West, while counting on my superior generals and experienced German corps in the East to take out the Russians.

The opening turns went well, especially after I captured Ypres in the West and earned a nice bonus of about 180 MPPs in plunder and inflicted 2000 NM loss on both the British and French. But I soon found that the numerical superiority in corps in the West of the British and French, plus an equal number of heavy artillery (four on each side), meant that I was slowly losing the battle of attrition and had to start carefully shortening my lines to leave as few hexes as possible exposed to an attack from three sides. By the early 1917, it was evident that even counter-attacking against exposed Entente corps that had just captured hexes would cost me more losses than I could afford to replace, so I shifted to a purely defensive posture in the West and counted on my heavy artillery firing defensive fire at Artillery Weapons 2 to help reduce my losses. By the summer of 1917, I could see that comparing the experience levels of my German corps in the West versus the British and French corps facing me that the Germans initial advantage in terms of experience had gone and almost all of my units were newly deployed replacements with zero experience, versus two armies with still many veteran corps facing me. I had to give up Ypres and then by spring 1917, Brussels and then Antwerp were captured, pushing me out of almost all of Belgium. The loss of Brussels cost me 2000 NM which the Germans could not afford at that point in the game.

In the southern Balkans, I did manage to keep the Entente at bay, but it grew increasing harder over time, especially by the summer of 1917 when the British had recaptured most of Belgium and were able to send extra units to this front. While the French could not completely kill my entrenched Bulgarian corps and push through to retake Uskub or threaten Sofia, the damage they were doing to the Bulgarians was costly to replace. The severe build limits on the Bulgarians meant I could not deploy additional corps there without sending a German or Austro-Hungarian general to command them, which I could ill afford. The only relief came from the Ottoman general Sanders (on loan from the German Army), plus one corps, one detachment and an artillery unit, which I kept on the European side of the Bosphorus from the start of the war.

Austria-Hungary was, of course, fighting a two-front war. I managed to hold off the Italians relatively easily, after making the mistake of not moving my a general fast enough from newly defeated Serbia to the Trento front - thus enabling the Italians to capture that important NM objective early. After a bit of dithering about whether to counter-attack against the Italians, I decided to concentrate all of my new Austro-Hungarian corps against Russia. Eventually by the spring of 1917, I was able to turn the tide along the Galicia/Ukraine front and started killing more Russian corps than the I was losing to his attacks (it turns out this co-incided with his decision to redeploy Brusilov to defend Estonia).

The Ottomans had a topsy-turvy war. (If I may toot my own horn, the whole Ottoman theatre is vastly more interesting in the Icarus mod than in the regular game). I could not reinforce Medina and the Hejaz railroad fast enought to prevent the Arab partisans from surrounding and capturing Medina, thus allowing the Arabs to bring in Faisal and start building some regular forces. The Russians staged a massive cavalry thrust from Persia Azerbaijan into northern Mesopotamia and captured Mosul. This collapsed my whole defensive position around Baghdad fron the north, before the new railway to Baghdad could become operations. Meanwhile Yudenich abetted by three Russian mountain divisions and one (sometimes two) artillery units battered away in eastern Anatolia and captured both Erzurum and Trabzon. But, by late in the game, the Russians ran out of HQs and units to sustain their push against the Ottomans and I managed to stabilize a front around Antep in southern Anatolia and around Jerusalem, thus holding at bay the British in the Sinai plus the advancing Arab armies from the south. Given how poorly the Ottomans usually do, this counted as a win in my mind.

Thus the war was decided in the East, where the question really boiled down whether the Germans could drive Russian morale down fast enough to push Russia out of the war, before their national morale losses due to attrition losses in the West became unsustainable. I knew that once Russia sued for peace at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans would gain an essential bonus of 150 MPPs per turn and could redeploy all of their experience generals and corps from the East to the West for the final battle. But once German national morale dropped below Russia's around June 1917, the writing was on the wall. With the national morale boost for Russia that came from Romania joining the Entente and then the British intervention to prop up the Kerensky government, I could not kill enough Russian corps to drive Russia into the arms of the Bolsheviks before the Germans own position in the West became untenable.

In the end, my opponent's reverse Schlieffen Plan, invading through the Netherlands, caused my Western Front to collapse. The bizzare glitch of Austria-Hungary breaking up into five new states when its national morale was still 34% did not in fact change the equation very much. If this had not happened, I reckon that Germany would have hit 0% in national morale by December 1917 and would still have been fighting on three fronts.

Finally a word about the blockade and the strategic naval war. This was a silent contributor to Germany's steadily declining national morale, along with the punishing NM losses due to the "turnip winter" of 1916/17 (which cost Germany 4000 NM over ten turns). I chose to keep my submarines back in German ports and delayed the launch of unrestrictred naval warfare agains the UK until I could reach level 3 in Advanced Subs. Unfortunately, that did not happen until late July 1917, by which time it was all over for Germany.

As the mod designer, I was quite pleased how this latest version of Icarus (Version 6.6) worked out in this first play-test. The innovation I particularly wanted to test was eliminating the cumulative NM losses and gains every turn rom captured enemy resources. This kept Russia an effective fighting force throughout the game though the prospects of a Russian collapse always seemed just a couple more turns of combat away. It meant that Germany could not rest on a large NM buffer from captured resources and ignore the Entente blockade . The match did not run long enough to see what would have happened if Russia had withdrawn from the war around the time the USA joine it. I would regard this version of the mod as a success if that happens.

Lots of smaller innovations in the mod worked well in this play-test. The Arab Revolt was powerful, but not over-powering against the Ottomans. Russia succesfully invaded Persia. The Mesopotamian front was exciting (even if it turned out to be a debacle for the Ottomans). The Entente sent a small intervention force to Russia after the Czar fell to good effect. The extensive use of heavy artillery made the Western front feel very different from the Eastern front. We both were able to benefit from late-game tech advances: he built tank corps for both France and Britain; while I built one ground-attack bomber which I was starting to use in Russia and had just deployed my first two Stormtrooper corps.

In discussions with Moon1 and with Shri, we have concluded that the 1916 campaign is at present a bit too balanced against the Central Powers. (I would note that my play-tests of earlier versions of the mod against Old Crow suggested it was too balanced in favour of the CP). I will be looking at a range of options to enable Germany to keep in the fight longer and to make the Entente build-up proceed more slowly, with the ultimate goal of extending the campaign into 1918. Stay tuned!

Michael

[shri]

//The bizzare glitch of Austria-Hungary breaking up into five new states when its national morale was still 34% did not in fact change the equation very much.//

This is not a glitch, it is quite historical though it comes out as a glitch.
This is what i keep repeating on all forums and e-mails, that AH even at ~70% NM is unstable and needs to be above 35% always to avoid the collapse. It happened to me twice. Once from either side. I won both my games but that is just being lucky as both my opponents failed due to the surprise shock, not due to bad game play.

AH collapses anytime NM drops below 35%, it splits into 4 or 5 parts, Austria neutral, Czechia, Poland and Hungary pro entente and soon joining Entente. Transylvania and Illyria going to Romania and Italy and Bosnia to Serbs etc.

This is also why i asked for the 1914 game to re-instate the "CARE FOR REFUGEES" event to boost NM. Austria has to do everything possible to keep NM above 50%, if this means they take those juicy capitals of Balkans, so be it, if that means a convoy from Germany, so be it.

AH hits 0 at 35, other countries like Russia or Ottomans hit it as 25, France at 20, Germany at 10.

This is what ultimately weakens Germany in game far more than the blockade. Being shackled to a corpse.

[mdsmall]

This is what ultimately weakens Germany in game far more than the blockade. Being shackled to a corpse.

Perhaps Germany should have thought about that before issuing a "blank cheque" in July 1914 in support of their ally!

Actually, in this play-test the collapse of Austria-Hungary really was a bug, not a feature: I accidentally linked the code for "Austro-Hungarian surrender" to a routine morale check at 35%. Austria-Hungary was in fact 10% higher than Germany in its national morale when it happened. Now that I have corrected it, it won't happen again - I promise.

More generally, I find in whatever version of SC WW1 I am playing that Austria-Hungary generally does better than historically. It is no doubt due to the fact that they face second-tier enemies and their only serious opponent - Russia - is fighting Germany and the Ottomans as well. I think they only get into trouble if Germany does a full-on Schlieffen Plan and keeps only a defensive screen in East Prussia.

I could certainly re-instate the DE for "supporting refugees" into the 1914 campaign for the Icarus mod. I removed it a) because the Austro-Hungarian state chose not to support them and b) because I found Austria-Hungary had unrealistically high national morale levels going into 1915 and 1916. More data from more games would be useful on this point.

[shri]

This is what ultimately weakens Germany in game far more than the blockade. Being shackled to a corpse.

Perhaps Germany should have thought about that before issuing a "blank cheque" in July 1914 in support of their ally!

Definetely.

There is an apocryphal story of the General staff touring AH in 1908 and discussing who among their 2 allies has the worst army- AH or Italy, some young upstart mentions the prospective Romanians, to which everyone laughs. There exist 3-4 versions of this, but no documentation in archives.

Anyway, i doubt they were totally unaware.

Anyway, if that is a Glitch, then AH shouldn't collapse at the 35% morale trigger and perhaps can continue to fight till it reached 20-25% NM, gaining 3-5 additional turns.

[OldCrowBalthazor]

Such a killer AAR man. That's a ton of work.
Also I appreciate that mdsmall is getting the mod played out as it works out the kinks of his monumental effort.
Cheers

[moon1]

Such a killer AAR man. That's a ton of work.
Also I appreciate that mdsmall is getting the mod played out as it works out the kinks of his monumental effort.
Cheers

Thanks!
Yes, his baby is turning out to be quite good. Probably the best mod I've played in all of SC series.