How to Play Full Campaigns

[SuperIke]

I've been playing PzC since a few months now. I have restricted myself mostly to small or medium scenarios, of about 25 turns or less.

I have now decided to tackle the full campaign of Korsun 44. That's 240 turns, and there is plenty of Soviet units to move. I do find it a bit tedious at times to insure I have moved or act on each and every unit.

My questions to veterans of the series: is there any advice you can give in making the management of hundreds and hundreds of units a bit easier ?

So far, I have discovered 3 things:

A) For formations away from the front, I use AI orders. Saves me the hassle of moving every individual unit (I have noticed though that the AI seems to be moving them according to a specific march order since for a given division under AI orders, some units move and some others don't dueing a turn?)

B) In areas where I don't expect to be doing any kind of offensive operations for now, I just don't bother moving these units. I let them where they are.

C) Replays can be AWFULLY long to watch. After some tinkering around, I have decided to run them at F8 all the time. However, to insure I am not missing major events happening somewhere on the front, I do a few snapshots of the "hot" areas with Disrupted units highlighted so that I can do a "before" and "after" the enemy turn comparison if I notice weird situations when playing my turn. I can then see any enemy moves and look at how much my units become disrupted as a result of the enemy's actions.

Any other hint or way of making things easier and faster when playing campaigns ?

Thanks !

[Mr Grumpy]

As well as AI movement orders there is divisional movement, where you click in a hex containing a division's units and alt-rightclick to the hex where you want those units to go. They will go as far as it can go that turn, and all units in that division adjacent to it and chained up in sequential adjacent hexes will follow along.

The trick is to get the units in a chain, note when you click on the front unit hex you are just clicking on the hex not selecting the unit, if there is a unit halfway along the chain that moves slower than the rest it could create a break in the chain so you need to watch for that, also if the units don't reach the selected hex in one turn then you need to do this each time, some players use the "reachable hex's" feature to only ask the div to go as far as it can in a single move.

The best thing is to practise this system before you start a game proper, but it is a way of moving a whole div with just a couple of clicks!

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Replays there is not much you can do, i run the replay at F8 (fastest) when the results are in areas with just fire results and then slow it down when the vital parts are covered (sounds a bit rude :eek1: ).

It helps if your opponent moves his units from one end to the other as this makes replays easier to predict! :smoke:

[FLG]

To ensure I don't forget to move things I generally enter my orders in an ordered fashion. For example I will start at the top of the map and work down. Considering each formation as a whole, be they army, corp or division, when I come to them.

[gRaider2001]

Sorry for bumping a 9-year-old thread, but I was about to ask this same question. Does anybody else have any more tips on how they manage the grand campaigns? Also, does anybody have any tips on how to think at an operational level? Thanks!

[Aolain]

Sorry for bumping a 9-year-old thread, but I was about to ask this same question.  Does anybody else have any more tips on how they manage the grand campaigns?  Also, does anybody have any tips on how to think at an operational level?  Thanks!

As others have said, I move my divisions in an orderly manner.

Once that is done, I use the “n” key to cycle through all my units that have not moved or fired.  The “n” key is your friend!

As to operational thinking, (and I play almost exclusevly DF full campaigns) I never think about moving individual units—sometimes to my chagrin—but in terms of divisions and corps. Once you determine what you want a Corp to do, and I usually plan in game-day increments—I determine how to move my divisions to achieve the Corp mission for that day.

Also, in DF I have a general operational plan for how I plan to fight the campaign; for example as NATO do I intend to trade space for time, or fight a forward defense.