HASL for SB AoTR - Stalingrad

[Marc Bellizzi]

Ok, I think people are going to like this one. I've decided to release my next Stalingrad Project since we have a long weekend coming up this week (4th of July and all).

Last month I finished part of the Stalingrad series I've been working on over the years, by completing the battles for the Southern Sector of the city, south of the Tsaritsa Gorge - the area around the Grain Elevator.

For the next phase I wanted to cover the Central City battles. I was not happy with the map as it was, especially the scale. 40m per hex is just a bit too big for squad level fights in my opinion. I've always enjoyed Advanced Squad Leaders' scale of 20m/hex and the fact you can battle it out for individual buildings.

So I asked Dave 'Blackie' Blackburn if he would mind helping me with a special project (Dave does the maps for almost all of HPS' titles). He had a bit of free time & agreed and together we managed to work up a close copy to the Historical Squad Leader "Valor of The Guards" which covers the battles for the central city in detail.

Even though technically the scale of ASL is 20m per hex, I decided against changing any of the SB parameters (ranges, etc) because in close urban combat you rarely engage at long range and I didn't want to change the feel of the game mechanics themselves.

So what we have is a highly detailed battlefield of downtown Stalingrad; so far I've made a few scenarios and I have been very pleased with how they play.

For those of you know know the ASL system, for this map, I consider 'village' terrain to represent 'wood' buildings as found in ASL; SB 'town' terrain represents ASL 1 story stone/brick buildings and SB 'city' terrain represents multi story (2+ stories) high rises. Industrial is no change. I also included 2 new types of terrain; "Debris" and 'Ruined' terrain, both of which exist on HASL maps. I substituted Debris for SB 'broken' terrain and 'ruined' terrain replaces SB 'rough' terrain. (neither broken or ruined are on the map, so this was a perfect substitution). I also enclosed a modified 2DTerrain100 graphic file for players to use which clearly show the new terrain types. (You can see below a comparison between the ASL map and our version, to include the new terrain types.) All terrain effects are explained in the enclosed text document for players to read. All locations, streets and reference points have been labeled in the game.

There are 3 new scenarios, to include an accurate version of "Pavlov's House", as well as the entire OOB for the time frame from 15 Sep42 to January 1943. The map is faily good sized and there is a lot of room for new battles if players with to try their hand at design. Also, there are over 20 ASL scenarios available for the Valor of the Guards game, so players can get inspiration from that angle as well.

It is available for Advance of the Reich right now and you can download it here.

https://www.box.com/s/ef9f2028ccc68812ecab

I hope to make more scenarios and release another version for RV later. If anyone is interested in helping build scenarios, please drop me a line at "marcbellizzi-at-socasinc-dot-com" - I have a lot of the ASL scenarios in hand, I just need to get them made and a helping hand would be great.

Please post or write me personally if you have any problems with this download. Be sure and back up your graphics files so you can go back to seeing normal broken and rough terrain outside of Stalingrad.