The Competition & Teaser Thread

[ComradeP]

On large parts of the area I'm talking about, it's sadly pretty much right next to the road, which confuses things.

One of the things I dislike when reading books about certain battles is that there's often a lot of detail on the prologue, the battle and its climactic engagements and the aftermath or epilogue, but the part of the prologue leading to the climax tends to be far more detailed than the part of the climax leading to the aftermath.

In the books on Kursk I've checked in the last few days, there's a lot of detail up to the final stages of the battle near Prokhorovka (not just the well known battle, but also Operation Roland and the small scale encirclement southeast of Prokhorovka), and then the Germans magically warp back to their starting line and the story moves on to the Mius and Rumyantsev.

The level of detail moves from "W battalion of X regiment of Y division attacked here at time Z" to remove an enemy described in the same detail to "two sides met, people got hurt".

In order to find information (and for precise unit strengths) on the less well known parts of a battle, you're often forced to read unit histories. That's where the fact that I'm only 26 is a handicap as a lot of the good unit histories were published in the 60's and 70's and are out of print. I also don't have the means to plan a prolonged trip to a military archive in the US, Germany or Russia to, for example, check some Lage Ost maps that are not available online or finding out what strength a certain German or Soviet formation had.

If you know where to look, OOB's, information on commanders and general descriptions of what an Allied or German unit did during the war can be found with relative ease. It's the more obscure information that really requires you to dive into some detailed literature.

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The second screenshot of the series of scenario screenshots is also somewhat puzzling. I'd assume it shows elements from III Panzer Korps as they're attacking east. It could also be a battlegroup of GD attacking across the Pena north of Verkhopenye.

In game terms it seems some units attached to a certain formation for the duration of the battle are considered to be organic, like the Guards Heavy Tank Regiment for 18th Tank Corps (in the OOB/TOE's I've seen, a Tank Corps didn't organically have an independent Tank Regiment, not to mention a heavy one). The Guards Mortar unit that's organic also doesn't match the early to late 1943 OOB where the regular Tank Corps loses the 8 Katyusha's it was allowed to have from mid 1942 until they are allowed to have 16 in late 1943, at least in WitE (I'd have to check the rest)

I guess it's similar to how the US used its Tank Destroyer battalions as temporary semi-organic components for a certain part of a campaign (for example). This was not yet the case in PzC Moscow '42, but it makes sense to do it this way when a formation would otherwise have no nearby higher HQ.

Anyway, the Tigers in the screenshot don't belong to the same formation as the motorized units, whilst as far as I know the 503rd Schwere Panzer battalion was split between the three Panzer divisions of III Panzer Korps, similar to the SS divisions and GD having a Tiger company. As companies are not HQ's, it has to be a battalion HQ, which further complicates things unless it's a staff of the 503rd (or they're not Tigers also a possibility).