JTS East Prussia '14 Released

[Mr Grumpy]

I'm really curious what penalties are imposed on the Russians, I guess I'll find that in the designer notes.

My biggest fear with campaign-sized scenarios is that as you are the commander and HQ's don't directly influence non-quality values for units, historically poor commanders won't have as much of an impact on the battle as they did historically. Likewise, poor initial deployments are compensated by having plenty of turns to move units around in. 206 turns is fairly tight, however.

In theory, it seems unlikely that a player will fight as poorly as the historical Russian forces during their initial invasion of East Prussia, as he knows where all of his units are and he can make everyone cooperate.

The simplified logistics and command system, which imposes no limits on how many units can be concentrated in a single area or units under a certain HQ also favours very efficient unit control. In a long scenario, the penalty of units being placed far away from eachother can be nullified over time if you have the time to move them. Of all the Panzer/First World War Campaigns battles titles thus far, this is probably the title where poor C&C from one side dictated the outcome to a significant extent.

I'll probably buy it after the summer.

Edit: As usual, the designer notes are well written. The way the game forces penalties on the Russians also sounds good. I'm looking forward to testing the Fragile Morale rule, as players tend to direct (for the period) serious amounts of violence at single units during a breakthrough, which could cause units to break (and thus often shatter if you can cut off retreat routes) more easily than might be intended. Still, the OOB isn't huge and you don't have numerous units to spare, so this might be more of a problem for Galicia or the 1915 and 1916 campaigns on the Eastern Front than East Prussia.

I am glad you read the designer notes as the game does address the issues you raise, when you first look at the Russian forces with their effective MG/FG units and a majority of units at C quality you might be forgiven for thinking it would be an impossible steam roller to stop, but scratch under the surface and you will find a lack of heavy arty, poor cavalry, low supply and by far the worst aspect are the minimal command ranges, often only 1 hex for brigade HQ's, now unlike PzC if you are outside the command range you take a drop in morale and are very likely to go low ammo, this makes advancing with the Russians a real art as your HQ can only support a small proportion of your horde!
Think you can fix this with taking advantage of the generous stacking values to crowd around the HQ? Think again, ranged
FG/ MG fire and arty barrages (the Germans are very well equipped with medium/heavy arty) and you have the recipe for massive losses before you can come to blows with the German line!

Playing the Russians well will be a real achievement in this title, the Germans may be less numerous and on face value not have advantages in morale and weaponry, but the Russians C&C is rotten to the core.