NEW: Prokhorovka 5: The Historical Battle

[Crossroads]

Alan also shared his thoughts on creating the Prokhorovka scenario over the time, and on issues reported here, and on issues he's observed himself.

I'll start with his thoughts on Artillery on this scenario, in particular the Soviet artillery:

This subject has been hotly debated and I admit that the Russian artillery is too strong in this scenario. But while the Russian artillery is historically accurate, it is the game engine that is at fault. I have suggested to Battle Kat the following fix, the freezing of indirect fire units. This means that they can not fire on certain turns, then afterward they can freely fire. Another suggestion was variable ammunition percentages. In a long battle the supply situation can change dramatically. For the Russian artillery to be historically accurate in the scenario there would be no firing allowed at all for the first 20 turns. Then on Turns 21-23 all artillery would be able to fire with 100% ammunition. This would represent the fifteen minute artillery barrage that the Russians started their attack with. And finally from Turn 24 to the end of the game the Russian artillery would be able to fire with only 10% ammunition. Historically the Russians fired 90% of their artillery ammunition for the day in the opening barrage. For the rest of the day they had to make due with only 10% of the day's ammunition left so they had to be pretty picky on what indirect fire requests they were going to fulfill. This is why the Russian artillery fire was sporadic for the rest of the day.
 
   Another fact that is not generally known is that the Russian fifteen minute barrage was not all that effective. Many of the target areas could not be seen by Russian spotters and so a lot of firing was done by grid-coordinate. This produced a lot of scattering of impact areas. A lot of rounds impacted in areas where the Germans had nothing at all. In other cases the rounds landed in areas where there were only support units. While this did have an affect on the Germans long term combat capabilities, it did not really affect the German short term combat capabilities of that day. (Ironically, a lot of field kitchens were hit in all three SS divisions, more by chance then by design. This made a lot of Germans pissed at the fact that they would not be getting a hot meal for the next few days.) Of course there were also combat units that did get hit with a variety of results, but there were just not that many affected as the Russians had hoped. The point here is that the Russians be allowed to fire at units to which they did not have spotters for. Sure there will be a lot of scattering but then that is what happened in real life.
 
   I also firmly believe in the use of Headquarter units for the artillery. Of course for off-the-board artillery units I don't even bother giving them Headquarter units as they are not needed.

Artillery has indeed been commented here, and I've played the scenario on both sides as well. The above is great input as how, hopefully, the coming incarnations of the new Campaign Series engine, together with its Event Engine and Adaptive AI settings (the former being capable to drive the latter, dynamically), can alter things. 

I especially find it intriguing to be able to model artillery use in a manner Alan describes above: first, you don't have the assets at all, then you have them at their full power for a certain period, and then the logistics issues come to play. 

That needs to be used in consideration together with the historical situation at hand of course, and while this observation is true for a large battle depicting a full day of battle, it would hold true say to many Winter War scenarios, where Finns had powerful artillery assets available, but stocked very low.