Spring Awakening Axis AAR - historical campaign (settled for a Draw turn 93)

[ComradeP]

That turned out to be a frustrating day, which highlighted a number of the shortcomings of PzC.

All attacks in the north failed to capture the intended objectives and were eventually called off. Continuing with the offensives would play into Soviet strengths of only needing to hold a narrow frontline and letting artillery and tank stacks weaken my units.

The offensive against Bulgarian and Yugoslav forces continues to be a success. Soviet reinforcements are likely to arrive soon now that the offensives in the north have stopped.

A Draw is off the menu.

By far the easiest way to prevent the capture of an objective is to move an enormous stack into the hex. All units need to be Disrupted before the stack can be pushed out of the hex. That would be less of an issue if loss distribution would primarily target non-Disrupted units. Unfortunately, that's not the case. As soon as I saw large stacks, I knew success wasn't going to happen.

Another weak point in PzC and Panzer Battles, is the modelling of gun and vehicle combat. Casualties from such combat are very low, there are no short and violent armoured clashes (noting that "short" in game terms is still 2 hours for most turns). As casualties are solely determined by a roll of the dice based on the losses in Men (each vehicle/gun is 10 Men, a loss of 7 Men would lead to a 70% chance to lose a gun or vehicle), results vary greatly. With alt assault now being a default rule, we end up with a situation where a tank platoon can easily bump a Disrupted infantry battalion out of its hex, but 60 B quality Panthers will maybe knock out 5 enemy tanks with each volley and often less. This is a problem for the Germans, because they're often outnumbered in armoured battles and rely on quality.

Not being able to capture Enying was particularly frustrating. The forces in the area should normally have been more than adequate to brush aside the ~200 Men Rifle battalions and capture the town, possibly after isolating the stack in the hex.

Turn 74, 12:00 March 13th 1945, Soft conditions.
Turn 80, 04:00 March 14th 1945, Normal conditions.





My opponent made good use of the mud turns to reinforce the Nagyberény and Szabadhidbeg objectives. There's a lot of artillery in the area and a big stack in Nagyberény. Though capturing one of the objectives might still be possible, I think my forces would be bled white whilst doing so.

Soviet counterbattery fire also knocked out about 10 heavy artillery guns, which have very low Defence values.

The formations in the area will move towards their starting positions. The withdrawal was mostly orderly. I took care to make sure the bridge engineer unit north-east of Ádánd would be out of enemy LOS, to make sure it wouldn't get wiped out by artillery fire.

Several artillery battalions were knocked out, as Guards Airborne units on the ridge could spot them in T-mode. I'm still not entirely sure how the sequence leading to that came to pass. I switched one artillery unit to T-mode and checked how far it could move after making sure the road stacking limit wasn't violated. It could move 1 hex. Next turn, it could move 2. I guess the stacking limit in the destination hex would be violated by the move or I had selected another unit by accident as well. A mistake on my end, I should've checked every hex along the route. That added to the frustration of the day. I think some 39 or so 105mm howitzers were lost due to that. Not much of a problem, but an unnecessary loss.

Aside from some skirmishing, I don't expect much action on my side in this area until the end of the game. Should a Soviet counterattack be launched, I'll slowly fall back.



I'm not sure if my preparatory barrage tipped my opponent off, or if 18th Tank Corps was in the area for this eventuality. The attack quickly ran into stacks of T-34-85's which can't be dealt with in an efficient manner. On the dusk turn, my Panther stack knocked out 3 vehicles and the return fire knocked out 6 Panthers. You really need to be able to land hard blows against superior tank numbers with each volley, and that's not possible in PzC. The 60 or so Panthers also only managed to knock out 1 ISU with each volley earlier on. This is why I haven't played Panzer Battles in recent years, armoured battles just don't work very well.

There's not a lot of good Soviet artillery in the area, but my units don't have the staying power to take 100-150 or so losses from T-34 stacks each turn.





As this was just one of those days, the Rifle battalions opposing "Hohenstaufen" didn't become Disrupted after losing 100 or more Men from single assaults. My opponent moved the SU-100's that were further north towards the bridgehead and started to inflict moderate losses from 2 hexes away. The attack wasn't going anywhere, "Hohenstaufen" moved back across the canal.

I'll move them towards Nagybajom, in case the Soviets launch a late game counterattack.

The Isolated Guards also stubbornly hold on, but must be in pretty poor shape by now.




"Das Reich" and "Reichsführer SS" are moving south. The northern part of the pocket, around Labod, has almost been cleared.

The Gebirgsjaeger have made good progress moving east. I expect that there are  - or will very soon be - Soviet units at the rail line, though.




The offensive in the area is going well, the Bulgarian pocket has been split into smaller pockets and most Bulgarian units are dead. The 104. Jaeger Division moved across two canals before Yugoslav reinforcements could get there and overran a Soviet heavy artillery unit. The bridge are all light, so I can't use them to move "Hitlerjugend" or "Das Reich" to the other side. With Normal conditions, it should be possible to move off-road and build a bridge at the point where another canal goes north, between the "Hitlerjugend" and 104. Jaeger Division bridgeheads.