Kharkov '43 campaign game

[raizer]

this game is all about the primary roads-nothing more,nothing less...without them the russian tank brigades will get too far in front-they cant push any line until the grunts get up to do the hard work AND protect the flanks of the armor, along with the arty. The cav is a good back up but,it too needs the foot soldiers to get to the line and push. The cav and the armor are not enough. We tried doing it without the infantry and we lost big; I lost myself 5 full tank brigades, and 2 full motorized brigades, then as a result of that gap, I lost an entire infantry division. All this due to arkan being able to find the armored and motorized brigades, encircle them in total, destroy them before the 1 hex per turn infantry could catch up.

Arkan's "road to kharkov", the gap to the SE of kharkov that he speaks of was open ground and undefended for a reason; only the roads count, which is why the open ground was left undefended and the primary's over the Donnets, still 15-20 turns away, were defended with bunkers containing LAH, GD, and Das Reich. The needed sov inf, the guys who will root you out of your bunkers and protect the flanks of the armor, and maintain a line that prevents the more mobile germans from sneaking through and performing isolation moves against the mobile soviets, only move 1 hex a turn over arkan's "road to kharkov" ; 40+ turns away.

Arkan you should try playing the soviets, maybe you could do better-I know when we first started this GC you mistakenly thought you were to be a soviet player and chose to not play, but when you were told that you were mistaken, and would be german, you wanted back in.

This GC is a hard nut to crack...we were smoked as the russians-could be bad luck, bad play on our part and great play on the germans part. I think the GC needs more testing. Supply levels, arty set up nullified, alt. indirect fire resolution- and no vst. We will see. The map is awesome as is VMs artwork and Jison's map mod...great potential. But that's all it is-potential. We opted out after 50 turns of a scenario that was played for the first time-there will be others that will do the same. We can try different optional rules and make some changes to make this scenario a keeper-right now I think its unbalanced in the germans favor.

And I repeat-Its about the primary roads and the soviet infantry getting to into contact with the germans; without either of these, its a brutal slog of constantly swiping at a force with superior mobility and supply and morale, while the plodding along at 1 hex per turn