Barbarossa PBEM campaing

[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.

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