Strassen-Bau battallion

[Der Kuenstler]

These Strassen-Bau or road construction battalions are present in the Stalingrad campaign I am playing vs. AI - I was unable to find any useful information about them online. They seem to always have "D" morale. Anybody know what to use them for and what their historical background and purpose was?

Also - some Generals were historically evacuated from the pocket by air - is there a way to do that in this game?

Thanks!

[Der Kuenstler]

Three more questions - in Stalingrad the info window looks like this:



In other hexes it says rubble 50% - what does this figure mean? I read already that rubble has no effect on combat so what is the percentage for?

Also, in some stacks the figure for the number of men in the haxe is followed by an X like this:



What does that mean?

And thirdly, some of the hexes in the city show more than 1300 men in them. One hex has 1584, one has 1314. The parameter data says 1300 man limit. I don't get how this can be?

[Ricky B]

I will answer what I can!

Strassen-Bau - for game purposes, use them to dig in, help fill out the line (poorly). I assume historically they kept roads clear and movable, as their primary duty.

As there aren't counters for individual generals, there isn't any flying out of Stalingrad. It would require flying an entire HQ out, and there isn't any reason to add that to the game as it really didn't happen in bulk like that, I would think.

Rubble and the 30/50% are different items. Any town/village/city etc hex can be rubbled, so that is all the rubble note means is the hex was reduced to rubble. The percentage is based on the underlying hex terrain - cities are probably the 50%, and a village the 30%.

For the X, I had to read the manual! It means this: If the letter X follows this number, then the number of men, or equivalent, in the hex exceeds the Road Movement stacking limitation.

Stacking limit - there are two ways to exceed the stacking limit, that I know of. First, if the scenario designer adds units over the limit at some point, and then the allowance is dropped. This almost definitely happened in Stalingrad as the original stacking was likely 1600 like most of the games, and then may have been cut. No idea about your case though. The other situation is if you have a group of units that stack and are within the limit, but are weak, then as they recover strength, they can exceed the limit. That could easily happen to get the numbers up to 1314, for example.

Rick

[Mr Grumpy]

Yes if there is an "x" any units moving through that hex will use the base terrain in the hex rather than the road to determine the amount of movement points the unit will use assuming of course the unit was in travel mode and attempting to use the road.

Very important in difficult terrain where over stacking the hex will effectively form a roadblock preventing other units getting forward and less important when the terrain is open as the desert scenarios or the steppes of Russia.

[Der Kuenstler]

All that helped - thanks, guys!