Barbarossa PBEM campaing

[Von Bismarck]

Hello fellow commanders!!

With the inspiration from Klanx's E.T two crazy guys decided to create a huge new project.
BARBAROSSA PBEM CAMPAING

This project was born in the last months of last year and demanded a lot of dicussions, researches and experimentations to figure how it could be presented to you all.
The main idea as the title suggests is to recreate the invasion of Soviet Union by the axis forces at June 41.
The campaing will cover the entire period from June till Typhoon operation against Moscow in december 41, at first glance.
It will be played with SPWWW2 ver 3.5.
There will be two tourney masters, one who will act as the OKH and will coordinate the axis players and the other depicting the STAVKA for the soviet players.
the guys in charge of both positions will be :

Von Bismarck - OKH
Jadpanther - STAVKA

GAME CONCEPTS:

For this campaing players will fight with historical units that took part in the battle.
All divisions with their historical designations and quite historical OOBs are included from SS to Guards, Rumanian,Hungarian, Slovakian..
All divisions will be represent by its regimental equivalent which means that real war time figures were dived by 3.
An Infantry division i.e will be deployed on the field as an infantry regiment and a tank or Pz div as one Pz reg with his attached mech infantry units.
There will be two types of MAPS: Strategical and tactical.
For the strategic map we decided to use the HoI (Heart of Iron) game which means that the campaing will be developed around its provinces as showed by the images below :







For this campaing, casualties will play a major role since replacments for both men and material will follow the concept from EUROPA SCORCHED EARTH for industrial capacity and manpower.
All background work regarding production, types of units and replacments will be done by both OKH and STAVKA which means the players will have only to fight themselves at the field

For such task, a set of ww2 maps are being done depicting as quite close as possible real regions of the provinces which means that you will be able to the baltic coast through Brest - Litovsk, the pripet marshes till the black sea coast!

For further details those who are interested in join this campaing may just drop a mail to Jadpanther for the russian side or to me for the axis one.

Cheers!

VB

[Epoletov [SPR].]

There is an offer from Edward.
To add experience to the won armies.

[Von Bismarck]

Hi Tovarisch Polkovnik!

We would like to know his ideas about it.

Feel free to send us his or everyone else ideas.

Cheers

VB

[Thexder]

This sounds interesting!:happy:
I suggest you guys publish your plans here so that others can comment them in detail. There's lots of things that can go wrong with the idea oyu have. But it could also be a beginning of something REALLY great!:bow:

A couple of questions/suggestions:
-How many rounds there will be? If the campaign is based on the maps shown above, it takes many rounds to reach Moscow.
-How will the campaign winner be calculated? I guess the first battles are very uneven and there's different maps etc. for every pair. (my suggestion: some kind of formula that takes into account the player's ELO number).
-I suggest that the battles should be relatively smallish in order for the campaign to proceed in good order.

I'd like to hear more:cool:


,
Thexder

[jadpanther]

The timeline is 2 weeks of fighting per round. There are 8 provinces between the boarder and Moscow. This gives the German team a chance to get to moscow before snow falls. If they win every battle going forward(not much room for error). I have been play testing the time period the last few months and the germans certainly do have alot of experience and techincal advantages........but the russians have some of their own also. This is a project we plan to develope more as we go. So far our testing has shown that this can work with only limited involvement from the players, unless off course they want to participate more. All the "bookwork" of recording the losses will be done by the game masters. We only need combat commanders to fight the battles.

It's all just for fun and bragging right's........figured to stir things up a bit. So if your a hardcore eastern front enthusiast this is the place to be......lol

Jad

[seabolt]

Ah, Hearts of Iron. Sometimes when you stare into the wargame geek abyss, the geek abyss stares right back into you ...

For this campaing players will fight with historical units that took part in the battle.

That works for round 1, and only assuming that you and Jadpanther don't want to have a little fun yourselves and tweak the historical lineups.

What happens in round 2 when one of the round 1 battles goes waaaaay off historical? Let's say a savvy Soviet player gets lucky and annihilates Guderian's spearhead in round 1, A0 unit included. Those panzers should be missing in round 2, barring a few urgent replacements. Who determines what the penalty to the Germans is? What if Leningrad falls immediately? More panzers and fuel pour into the endgame. Who determines how many or what this means?

It will be very awkward to stage historical battles by rounds 5+, when the campaign (most likely) has veered way off the historical.

An alternate format would be for each of you to prepare an extensive list of the units that took part in Barbarrosa---and when they joined the fight. Then work out some reasonable rules for replacement rates with special provisions for the fall of key cities/cutting of key routes.

Then each of you recruits his own commanders. In each round, each of you negotiates with his commanders en masse as to who is going to get what units for which jobs, as well as who's going to get replacements. You don't have to match the historical gameplan at all, other than the ultimate goal being Moscow.

If a commander loses his A0 unit in a battle, bam!, that player's out of the tourney.

You and Jadpanther would be rather active participants in this format, so you'd need a "referee" to adjudicate things during the development work on each round. I've written quite a bit of content on Barbarossa, so might be able to play that role if you're interested.

-- 30 --

[seabolt]

Also, the nearly identical Hearts of Iron II map can be found in an interactive scaling format (very handy) here.

-- 30 --

[Walrus]

Hi Guys
Well...this looks very ambitious indeed.
I would be happy to be a commander if it gets up and running.
I do not mind which side I play, so fit me in where you need me.

Some of the posts here have made excellent points.

I agree that keeping the battles smaller will help move things forward...and also that a referee might come in handy.

Will be following this thread with interest.

Good on you chaps for putting in the time and effort to get this idea running.
Good luck on getting it all the way through to the last battle.

Cheers
Walrus

[jadpanther]

Seabolt,

You are absolutely correct. After the intial round nothing will be historically based. We have a replacement system setup to repair damaged divisions but the players need not worry about that. This will be more of an alternate history. The players and overall commanders(me) will have hindsight to try and win the proper way. I'm sure Von Bismark will try directly for Moscow and I will probably try not to loose so many of my armies defending the frontier, but we will see what happens, it's just to have some fun and try some different gaming styles.

Jad

[jadpanther]

Seabolt,

Thanks for the link on the map.

Jad