Several Moscow 42 Questions

[Strela]

I'm looking at the OOB in the editor at the moment, and I'm wondering why the German air units that become available in January are not listed as reinforcements, unlike their Soviet counterparts. Or: why are some scheduled reinforcements listed with their arrival dates whilst others are not?

Also: why are some units disbanded during the campaign according to the OOB editor, whilst they are not scheduled to be withdrawn?

Example: 162 Infanterie Division.

These might not be code issues, but it seems odd.

Moved from the Moscow '42 Files thread.

ComradeP. The German air is in the Air availability listing. It is the first entry. Much of the German air that supported Barbarossa (not surprisingly) had been moved to other theatres with the onset of winter.

As far as arrival dates where some are listed while other are not. This all came down to research. Many formations could have the date they entered combat determined down to the day. Trust me this is not as easy to find as it sounds. I had to crawl over a number of Russian and German websites to confirm when formations went into action. Other formations could not be narrowed down to the exact date. That said the Soviet records showed army listings every ten days so that then became the new guide for an arrival. Sorry - this was the best I could do.

As far as disband dates, this was much of a local commander decision vs a wholesale formation withdrawal. Commanders (usually Divisional) made the decision to disband a battalion due to losses and allocate the remnants as replacements to other units in the formation. The disband dates were used in two different ways in game. The first was that any officially disbanded formation was not used in any scenario that started after the disband date. Secondly, any unit that was disbanded during the campaign was setup at a lesser strength than its brethren to represent the fact it was understrength. For example, in the Grand Campaign the average German Infanterie battalion starts at 320 men (40%) while battalions that were disbanded started at 240 men (30%). With those decisions I did not want to 'force' players to remove units that were not historically. These units will be more brittle and in many cases are in sectors where they will take heavy losses (162 Infanterie is a good example) and the game will hopefully reflect their waning power due to in game losses.

Hope that clarifies your questions. The new notes function in the OB editor was great for a designer as I could put critical information in there that made it easier to remember why units had to be included / excluded in a scenario. That said I still had a massive spreadsheet that allowed me to build the whole campaign into a single OOB.

David