Panzer Battles 2 - The Official Teaser Thread

[Strela]

As the scenario description notes:

This multi-day campaign will require players to carefully husband their forces as no replacements will be received. Fresh forces will arrive regularly, but will have to go to the position of most need.

Serious early losses for critical units, or in one sector of the front could cause issues in such a situation, but as long as both sides receive fresh forces it should be OK. I'm more worried about what vehicle and gun losses will be like in a scenario like this than about losing units, provided units arrive at a steady pace.

You can easily burn through most of the combat power of a division each day with constant combat in this system, but there doesn't seem to be much of a secondary and tertiary line in this scenario aside from scattered bunkers so it's not the ugly battle of attrition that the corps-sized Kursk scenarios are. The initial German opposition is "supposed" to die, which makes it less of a problem if they can't fall back, unlike with the Soviets in some Kursk scenarios where the same units that take the initial beating have to move and hold the defensive lines behind them.

Hi All,

Thanks for the commentary on Bluecoat. This is probably the most 'experimental' of all the scenarios that will be included in the game. It began life as a test to see if we could join days together and understand what would work, vs what wouldn't.

We have decided to include it in game as much for a very interesting situation as to get the wider community trying it and providing feedback.

It does play well, but as mentioned you will see some pretty extreme situations. Many of the iterations we have done have been to give the Germans a little more backbone at least for the first day. The British are overwhelming for the first couple of days. The actual battle pitted over 700 British tanks vs 150 German vehicles, while the Allied infantry is also more numerous. The 326th Infanterie Division has to try and delay and kill as many British as possible. The bocage in this area is particularly bad and the fight for the roads will typify the combat.

What starts to turn the fight is that the British have to go a long way south to get the key victory hexes. This ultimately spreads them out and gives the German reinforcements arriving on the east map edge a chance to attack into the Allied flanks. The German arrival has 'protection' and any Allied units that try to block the German arrival will become broken themselves.

The test scenario I'm currently playing against Dogsoldier has just seen the Panzer companies from 21st Panzer arrive supported by Tigers from the 503rd Abt. They are managing to use the ridge line to pick off British tanks in the valleys below at ranges of 8 hexes or even more in a few cases. His infantry are climbing the hills and with little German infantry present will ultimately force the panzers back. It's hard for both sides - as the German, I regularly despair when I see the torrents of Allied troops, but I know they have to go a long way and cross a lot of rivers.

Here are the losses from our current test at turn 37. Note the number of Allied vehicles destroyed;



The Allies look overwhelming at the current point in the test, but the arriving German's are slowly starting to blunt the Allied advance.

So please view this monster scenario as something we're trying to see how it plays out. We have done a lot of testing but it will be all of you reporting your experiences that will allow us to improve the current version and tailor larger scenarios for future games.

One final word on replacements. We picked this operation deliberately. There was real supply challenges due to terrain etc in this battle. Most units fought without receiving replacement vehicles or having much chance to rest and recover. By the end of five days the battles petered out because of exhaustion or the need to pull back and maintain/replace. Players in this scenario have the same challenges as their real world counterparts. Both sides will have moments of complete despair (can I say German for days 1 & 2?) but it is a surprisingly well paced scenario.

Talking about recovery, the PDT file for this scenario sets the number of day turns as 28 (06:00 to 19:30) with two night turns of 5 hours each (20:00 & 01:00). The standard PDT has day/dusk turns right up to 23:00 and hourly night turns for a total of 42 turns. So a big difference, but justified by the practice of both sides to pull back and laager each evening.

The only thing we wish we had for this release was the 'timed' victory points where a side gets points per turn. This would reward players for holding locations longer than historically and add a new dimension.

If we get that feature in the future we will probably retrofit it into a scenario like this.

David