Moscow '42 Released

[Compass Rose]

[raizer]

comrade dont read too much into that AAR. Keith and I are pretty good players but even good players can botch some moves when faced off against players that are good/better than you are. Id say Keith is a real good player but got jammed up on the wrong side of that river when faced with an enemy that had superior recon and mobility. When you get stuck on the wrong side of a river and get cut off and then assaulted you can lose a ton of troops. I think we lost 2 divisions down there and I lost 2-3 up in the top because I was totally out maneuvered/recon'd and surrounded. It was our errors that led to those loses not a faulty game mechanic. It was also our first game with kh43 and we did not even look at the german oob before we stepped off from our assembly areas.

[ComradeP]

Thanks for the welcome, Compass Rose.

raizer: Thanks for the insight in how/why the things I referred to happened, for starters.

I understand that operational decisions sealed the fate of the units, but I'm mostly wondering about overall losses from combat .

In Kharkov '43, the Soviets don't have anything near the kind of "room" for losses that they have in Moscow '42 presumably, but even if you would suffer just, say, a couple of percentage points of strength per day, it will mean that after a month or so you're running around with shells, whilst German units (though also low strength) can still occupy good defensive terrain and still have that advantage in quality over you. The Soviet player, on the other hand, lacks strong mobile units like Tank/Mechanized corps and will need to slowly outflank German positions/make defensive positions untenable to achieve a slow and methodical breakthrough if there's little to no "punch" left. If your crucial exploitation units, cavalry and ski units, become more or less platoon to company strength in a matter of days, that could be a problem.

Judging by my previous experience with wargames, balancing losses with replacement rates for longer scenarios can be very challenging as for lower quality units there seems to be a substantial risk of running them into the ground (which is what happened often enough to the Soviets, of course, but it tends to happen more quickly in many of the wargames I've played thus far).

[Liquid_Sky]

What I noticed in Normandy '44 with the German divisions that had 2% replacement level, that in 20 turns (two days) I could take any unit beat to within an inch of its life, and get it to around 70%. I would rotate units in and out of the line all the time, and withdraw from an offensive to replenish, while leaving dug in units in the front line (albeit bocage + trench = 90%)

With 1%, I would have to do some tests, but I am guessing 3-4 days to get back to fighting strength.

The trick is to leave some sort of defensive line intact/dug in, while you push ahead of it..then retreat behind and rest. Even better if you can get some bunkers up.

[Aditia Holdem]

Hi ComradeP,

I remember you from the WitE forums over at Matrix. Welcome here! ))

I have been playing PzC on and off for the better part of 10 years now, and just came back to the game after 2 years absence. Together with CMBB/CMAK it became my exclusive wargaming platform. It is just the most elegant scale/ruleset for wargamers I have come across, and ofcourse the scale suits my interests perfectly: this scale is IMHO the best possible for a merge of tactics and strategy. I would recommend to buy a title that suits your interests (personally I dislike titles that lack maneuver and are about reducing/holding a static defensive line), you wont be disappointed :) Also the Modern ones are also awesome, even if your main historical focus is WW2 ;)

The only other wargame I tried seriously was WiTE, which was a very enjoyable experience until I got frustrated with the bugs in the first year of release and the, what it seemed, inevitability of the course of the game.

About your questions:

- Keep in mind that a typical PzC game will last about 2 to 4 weeks for a FULL campaign. That's just 2 to 4 turns of WiTE. The game also focuses on active operations obviously ;)
- Losses, and recuperation of losses (and more importantly, fatigue), depend very much on the decisions both players make. For example, one of the most delicate decisions is being able to gauge whether or not keeping certain Bn's in contact is going to be beneficial to you, or just a waste of manpower and fatigue levels. Same thing with whether or not to move to contact in areas where you are not focusing efforts. A common mistake in PzC is exhausting divisions without getting any significant gains (because hey, you want your units to pew pew. Sometimes you should refrain from giving the shoot command :) ). Sometimes you need to have your divisions fight tooth and nail for a good reason (and these fights are awesome to manage), but having a standard practice of letting all your line units engage until they are spent is a good way of losing PzC games.

[ComradeP]

Thanks for the replies.

The replacement rate is per turn? I thought it was per day. That changes things. I'll buy Moscow '42 today.

A number of wargames with both smaller scale and larger scale scenarios tend to give the player hundreds (or in this case: thousands) of units, but have a loss rate that's too high for the longer campaign games. Or one side has more, but smaller combat units, so the opposing player has to use more units to achieve the effect (keeping defending units busy/in ZOC and being able to attack many of the on-map enemy units) that could normally be achieved with fewer units if the units were at the same scale (this also seems to be the case with the PzC series, as it seems the recommended strategy is using about 3-4 battalions, or about a regiment, to engage a German company). The latter isn't necessarily bad, as long as both players have enough units to cover the frontline.

[Outlaw Josey Wales]

Then again, concerning losses, it could be added as an optional rule but probably take some wrok to make it happen, would be to have a more or less replacement phase where one gets all their replacements in a pool and the player distributes the men, vehicles and equipment to the units he wishes to. With the Germans would have to be separate for Wehrmacht and SS units, the allies would have separate Army and para replacement pools etc etc. If that was an optional way to play a game with a replacement phase, I think it would be the way to go. Some units would get more replacements than others if that is the way the player wants to do it. The book I am currently reading is the Combat History of the 23rd Panzer Division and several times they had units out of the line gaining replacements, sometimes the entire groupd of reps going to one Bn or Rgt out of necessity and according to the readin, not really a drop in overall quality. Many times I have read others doing the same. Patton was big on prepping, resupplying and bringing units up to combat readiness right on the front lines. But one has to add that kind of system to the game. I know it may be alot of work, but it is at least worth a look and could be a huge improvement as an optional way to play the games. It would be big in the desert titles. When gaining replacements, they have their entire OOB to add them too.

[ComradeP]

It's enjoyable thus far, although the scale and some of the game mechanics take some getting used to.

At the moment, because the AI tends to just sit in place on objectives in the tutorial scenario (requiring me to kill every single defending soldier), I don't even come remotely close to the objectives on the western map edge.

One thing that, in particular, takes some getting used to is attacks from multiple hexsides seemingly not giving much, if any, benefit (the majority of the wargames I play do offer such benefits) and the fairly low stacking limit which doesn't seem to be adjusted when the attacks come from multiple hexsides. This makes putting numerical superiority (to nullify the Axis advantage in quality) to good use difficult and will make attacking full strength Axis battalions a major challenge. I think that will take by far the most "getting used to" : Soviets not necessarily being able to emply a significant numerical superiority to good effect and multiple hexside attacks seemingly being more or less the same as single hexsides ones.

I also currently tend to get stuck in "disrupted" loops, due to the low quality of the Soviets units and their less than stellar HQ's. The only way I'm currently dealing with Axis artillery fire is by using less important units to fire directly at the defender to draw in return fire. It feels gamey, but it will take some further understanding of the system before I figure out how to limit the chances of disruption when attacking with just 1 stack. D quality units in particular disrupt in droves, and as stacked units all have a chance to disrupt from return fire it seems, it's tricky to get an attack moving.

Back to learning the system.

[Aditia Holdem]

Artillery my friend. Artillery is, in my opinion, the single most important element in any successful attack against high quality units. And if you have local numerical superiority, and you REALLY need that hex this turn, you could do multiple assaults against a hex, hoping to disrupt the defenders in your earlier attacks. This will, likely, spend the early assaulters for a day though.