New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

would welcome comments on the scenario


SPANNOCCHI'S DREAM II - Thousand Needles**
Hungarian Advance vs Austrian Defend*

Burgendland, Austria, RSZ16*
October, 1985*
Turns:40**

Scenario Size: 140 x 160**


YOUR ORDERS:**
The Hungarians have crossed the border an hour ago and already your forward scouts report that that the reinforced Tank Regiment coming your way has lost unit phasing while struggling to deal with large amounts of obstacles. The Hungarians probably believe that as this a "Raumsicherungszone" (Delay Zone) and not a "Schluesselzone" (Key Zone) it will be lightly defended, and are attempting to "bull through", without a dedicated advanced guard besides the scouts. Your Landwehr battalion however is heavily fortified and well-prepared, and can call on some support from heavy fortress artillery positions and some Jagdpanzers from the Corps reconnaissance regiment. In the least, you should be able to give the Hungarians a bloody nose.**


BRIEFING NOTES**
In this scenario, the day is D+3 of the Third World War. The relative success of NATO Armies in Germany and Soviet victories in the Atlantic indicates that the War will not be a matter of days, as had been hoped. Correspondingly, the Warsaw Pact plan to invade Austria and threaten Southern Germany and Northern Italy was put into effect. Partial mobilisation of the Austrian Army went into effect on D-3, and although full mobilisation was put off for political reasons, at least all local defence forces (Landwehr) were activated. Nonetheless, on D+1, with the opening assault on NATO and following concise indications of an impeding attack, active forces and the Landwehr were deployed and put onto the highest state of alert. It was noted that, while The Soviet Forces were at full strength and deployed, the Hungarians were experiencing serious delays in their mobilisation process. Only the tank division was able to deploy within the minimum alert requirement WPHC had ordered. On D+3 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Austria.**


SCENARIO NOTES**

Gen. Spannocchi invented the concept of Raumverteidigung - Area Defence - by subdividing the entire country into mostly two types of zones: a delay zone and a defence zones. Although fielding only a small 40,000 man standing army, this force would be augmented by up 270,000 trained reserves within less then 48 hours - of these nearly 30,000 would deploy to fixed and local defence positions. The SZs (Key Defence Zones) were to be the operational areas for the mobile army formations - most of which were in mountainous or alpine areas and protected the Austrian Alpine heartland - with hundreds of heavily bunkered positions (called FAN = Feste Anlagen) providing everything from Anti-tank fire to artillery support. These would be backed my mechanised units that would destroy penetrations when they occurred. The RZs (dealay zones) were not officially defended - these were to be delaying zones aimed at slowing and channelling the enemy advance, and were areas where Jagdkampf - small unit hit-and-run warfare - was to be practiced. Each RZ was however defended by at least 1 battalion of Landwehr militia, who had their own fortified positions and which, like every possible route in Austria, was saturated with mines and obstacles (officially the most heavily fortified country besides Switzerland). The RZs were often equipped with multiple fortified defensive lines on the routes of advance, and the idea of "delay" was mostly the same as "destroy". The effort to force these zones was calculated to be immense, with stunning casualties resulting from the enemies need of keeping at least a minimum rate of advance in either to forestall full mobilisation or reinforcement from NATO. Indeed, the brilliance of the concept was that this alone was supposed to be a deterrence to a likely invader and prevent the invasion from happening in the first place - and as recent documents have shown, this too was successful.**

Emil Spannochi's concept of Raumverteidigung was was never forced to face a trial of arms. However the fortifications and the highly flexible local defence concept that utilised the Austrian countryside to the full was highly developed and the source of some considerable consternation in Warsaw Pact circles. The Hungarians in particular spent substantial resources in trying to prove that their army was in no shape to deal with it. Following an exercise in early 1980s, in which an entire Schluesselzone (Key Defence Zone) located in Upper Austria was reconstructed, an attack to defender ratio of 10:1 was worked out, leading the later Hungarian Defence minister to despair. Only substantial Russian threats were capable of getting the Hungarians acquiesce to upholding their part of the "Central TVD - South West Front" Operational Plan - the advance of Czech, Hungarian and Soviet Forces through Austria in North-West operational direction VIENNA-LINZ-MUNICH and South-West GRAZ-KLAGENFURT-BOZEN. The Hungarians consoled themselves that such a plan was unlikely to be put into effect.**

COMMENTS ON PLAY**
- a small "role-playing" element has been added to the game - try not to sacrifice the control post squad at the first defence line, it will cost you a lot of points.*
- use your fortress artillery wisely, even a couple of guns can wreck havoc on a tightly concentrated enemy.*
- anything less then a major victory should be considered a defeat**


DESIGN NOTES - SPOILER ALERT**
- the amount of obstacles (mines and tank blocks) was decreased compared to RL (mine fields tend to be larger, higher density, and wider)as the AI does not deal with them well. For the same reason more tank barriers are used them in mines, although the ratio in RL was the opposite.*
- where necessary, forested land was given a combo of impassable and swamp terrain as base, to attempt to accurately represent the RL hindrance they are all to all vehicle movement (despite what SPMBT says, tanks cannot and do not drive through any real forest)*
- the bunkers were heavily adapted to conform with their RL armament and performance expectations. If the bunkers in question seem immune to T-55 direct fire - they are not. But it does take a bit lot of work to get through a 1m+ of reinforced concrete.*
- The Hungarian and Austrian TO&Es have been adjusted.**


Although this scenario uses a much enlarged version of the GROSSPETERSDORF map provided in SPMBT and is accurate as far as the geography is concerned, the bunkers and dispositions are speculative and do not knowingly represent actual fortified locations presently active. However, other parts of Austria had dispositions that were very similar and faced similar threats with similar means.**

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

Two remarks (after viewing the Austrian set-up at start):

You've given fortresses C0 through E2 40 rounds sabot ammo for the 105 m68 gun. Unfortunately that gun has an APCR value of 0 so these rounds are useless.

You've widely dispersed the squads from the platoons effectively cutting many of them off from their command unit (and often with little chance of getting back in contact). That will severely limit their effectiveness. What makes it worse is that in some instances you deploy squads/teams from different platoons in relative close proximity. It would be far better to use units from the same platoon in the same sector.
In fact try to deploy the bulk of a platoons units within 5 hexes of the command unit.

Narwan

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

thanks for the comments

- i ended up chosing the 105m68 gun because that gun was the most historically accurate, as far as i can remember. i did not realise that the m68 cannot fire sabot - IIRC it can. also the fortress are able to kill t-55s pretty effectivly, i think using that ammo (can't imgaine heat would be doing but i'll check). as i cannot access the game at the moment, can you tell me what the fortress is using to kill tanks?

- some of the platoon distribution is unavoidable, as single squads did/do have "outlayer" tasks to perform that can be up to a 1km away from their platoon command - this is also RL SOP, platoons would assign individual squads to provide close protection for the FANs, say. in area defence assignments (around a town) it would be certainly better to do as you say, however i have not noticed that it makes that much a difference. is the command "bubble" really 5 - hexes , 250m? it appeared to me to be less and therefor I have them out of "verbal" contact. platoon defence of a small town is a standard exercise, and the platoon commander never to my experience has more contact then with the units in his immediete vincinity. granted young lts tend to run around quite a bit, but probablly not in a combat situation - especially the one modeled here which would depend a lot of sound-powered battlefield telephones with fixed CPs . also there is the other benefit that the towns tend to rout nicely when hit with a BN+ of heavy arty, as you might expect

i noticed that putting squads from two different platoons in close proximtiy to each other did not matter, the command squad also was able to rally the other squad without problems.

try playing it tell me how it feels.

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

If another platoons commander can rally your squads you're probably not playing with the realism preference 'command' at ON. Because it won't happen then and shouldn't.

I know that individual squads and teams can have outlying tasks beyond the 5 hex command radius. However the bulk of a platoon would be concentrated around a specific location where units can support each other. One or two (depending on the size of the platoon) could be further out but this usually would be in an advance position with fallback options towards the rest of the formation.

Trust me, there are a lot of advantages for units for being within command range of superior command units.

Narwan

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

I mixed up two guns btw, the 105 m68 Aust does have an APCR rating.

Narwan

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

I'm about halfway through, at turn 21 - the FANs have been very successful in blasting enemy tanks, one had 30+ kills before it got popped by a T55..., I think it's now mostly a case of mopping up infantry and the odd tank/APC..., I like it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

A tip or two for the future;
when you enlarge a map the grey borderline indicating the old size will remain, but you can if you want to get rid of it by placing new terrain ontop of it..., also watch out with placing bridges, there's a road crossing a stream in the southern part of the map where the road seems to run across the stream but there is no bridge - if you move the mousepointer over it you'll see that the game thinks this is a stream, not bridge or road...

One bunker display a North Vietnamese flag - if you buy units from other OOBs as captured they will be treated as any other unit in the original OOB, in this case the bunker would have had an Austrian flag and the rank and leader name would have been Austrian...

AI movement can be helped by the use of waypoints....

And as Narwan said, it is generally good to keep platoons etc together...

More scenarios! Keep up the good work! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

hi wulfir,

wow, that's quite a kill rate with the FANs - i never seemed to get more then 12 before they get popped - maybe i need to readjust the stats again (however those dinky 100mm guns on the t-55 really can't do that much against 1m protection, so..). in my tests about a BN worth of vehicles got through the second line and had to be taken out with the reserve compay- with difficulty. btw the HUNG reserves should only really start arriving at turn 17-19, so maybe they haven't hit your line yet http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif - wouldn't start the mopping to early.

what do you mean by "captured" units vs "allied"? i only know how to do the "allied" function.

thanks for your comments

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

Game Guide - "Purchase Screen" link - refer to the ALLIES item in the box.

Cheers
Andy

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

...and here's some trivia: FAN is actually a curse in Swedish, it means 'the devil' but is usually translated to d*mn. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Played it through, let me know if you want the save - there were still a lot of T55s, APCs and various 'versprengte truppenteile' at games end, though most were in a state of route. I did not try to regain the VH in Hahnersdorf..., figured I had killed enough stuff as it was and that there was bound to be a lot of pinned sections with still dangerous RPGs in the vicinity...

Buy screen - choose allied and you're presented with all the OOB flags, look down the left corner and there this button saying SET ALLIED - hit that button and it will change to SET CAPTURED... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

cheers andy, wulfir

wulfir, seems you had an easy game - FAN! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif. my tests were a lot harder, hope it was enjoyable nonetheless. did you end of using the recce company to the max?

i'm glad about the "versprengten truppenteile" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif), i dislike the ability to slaughter every single vehicle in the a regiment on the attack - much better that they route at 15% strength...

would be good to know if others also had such an easy time, might have to change it afterall...

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

Well, easy and easy - against a human opponet I would probably have been overrun. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I took losses mainly from enemy arty, and my infantry did not fare all that great vs the Hungarian infantry... hmm...

I split the reinforcing company in two, sent the company commander and two platoons to recapture BADERSDORF, and two platoons and the infantry (mot) to WELGERSDORF. Can't really say I used them to the max - also went a little sloppy during the last two turns and left the tankdestroyers stationary and suffred a few unneccessary losses.., the infantry platoon remained uncomitted throughout...

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

i tried using waypoints, impassible terrain to channel the hungararians, didn't seem to work so i let it go the way it should anyway - central attack gets reinforced, rather then reinforcing a sideshow.

i think your hyper active FAN spoiled the challenge, as i said normally they don't last that long. it was intended for at least a BN wourth of vehicles to get through the two lines - oh well http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif)

u mentioned also the poor performance of AUT infantry...this bothers me bit, since the newer units with the stg77 (steyer aug) should easily outshoot aks on the 100-300m range (i know both, and there is really no comparison). any easy and legal hints on how to improve their performance?

btw since you remarked on correct use of HQ units: i'm working on a another scenario i lifted right out my old "decision handbook" (bad translation) - displacing from one phase line to the other....under fire http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif.

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

Great to hear, we need more people making scenarios! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I don't think the challange was spoiled because I happened to have a FAN or two crewed by the likes of Willhelm Tell...:), note that I did not venture into the mass of burning tanks/APC in and around HAHNERSDORF to capture that VH after all...

Austrian infantry did OK overall, but it seemed that they came out short on a number of shootouts with the Hungarians. Keeping units near their leaders will probably better the Austrians performance...

If you like to, it's possible to aid the AI some by timing when artillery will land..., while deploying you can shift arty - it will increase the delay and you can decide what turn and where you want the rounds to land..., this way you can help the AI by for example by having the AI cover its initial advance with smoke...

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

I played about 12 turns but the main thing I do miss is indeed smoke. That would help the hungarians to no small degre. The AI won't be very smart in deciding when and where to use it so Wulfirs suggestion makes a lot of sense.

A number of hungarian units seemd to be 'stuck', trying to move forward towards VH's but unable to do so because of impassable terrain. Again, the AI isn't smart enough to move these around. What you might want to do is run the game with AI vs AI a number of times and see how the hungarians move and where units tend to get 'stuck'.

Did you consider adjusting this a scenario to be played from the hungarian side? Now there would be a challenge! That can be in addition to the current version, not instead of it.

Narwan

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

guys, this is crushing news :/, i'm starting to wonder if I uploaded the wrong scenario... (but good feedback, thanks)

i redid the scenario about a dozen times, and playtested the last version about 6 times over a month or two (limted time i have for this goes into the editing, not much of a player really). i'll have to download the version i posted over the weekend and see what's different.

a. i am very worried about the smoke both of you mentioned, that was the only thing the AI seemed to get dead right in my games. 5/6 times it correctly used smoke after the reccon id`d the bunker positions and covered them from round 6 onwards (main force arrives from turn 7 and continous to turn 16 with the second echalon IIRC). also in 2/6 games fighter bombers damaged or destroyed a FAN within the first 6 rounds, similar ratio went to the Hinds, also 2/6 games.

wulfir thank's for the tip on that, looks like i'll have to do it to make it work - pitty, thought the AI had it covered.

b.narwarn: yes AI movement was frustrating for me - especially as i also used (in earlier versions) waypoints which made seemed to make no difference. obviously having a sizeable force stuck in the woods is pointless - what could you suggest, given that the waypoints did not seem to help? also, i would like to prevent the second echalon infantry from dismounting at the first defensive line (by the time they arrive that is already take, and sometimes the second line is already breached) - any tips on how to do this?

c. i actually did a small "attacker" scenario, SPANNOCCHI'S DREAM I: VICTORY WITHOUT BATTLE, as a test (it's posted on wargamer), it's not terribly good but it is a challenge http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif. tell me what you think.

once i get this game sorted out I could re-jig it for an attacker side, but do you think it would be interesting for anyone to have to move an entire regiment? i find a bn already a little bit too much...

PS: guys just realised i don't have the most recent patch, do you think that could explain the differences? will give it ago over the weekend

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

I would. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

But that's not important, there's only one rule: create the scenario you yourself would like to play.

Replaying SPANNOCCHI'S DREAM II now as Sweden (I made it the first scen of a campaign and gave the human player battle points equal to the value of the Austrian troops).

Much harder now, I have stronger AA defences, but weaker artillery and weaker bunkers (armed with 75mm ATGs) and the Swedish Tank Destroyers don't quite have the range of the Austrian ones... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

gimme!gimme! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

Siddhi,

I just downloaded your scenario today and will try it later but I can give you some feedback on your first one - really good work, playable for both sides! And quite a surprise, too, that someone does such great scenarios with so many accurate details on a more unusual battle pairing.

Unfortunately, my own attempts in scenario design cannt compare to yours - I guess one problem is that I always start a way too-big project. I tried to keep the core force small, and this was wise, but I got a nice story in mind and that takes time... I am currently working on a fictional campaign involving Algeria vs. Libya, and I got 6 battles finished andworking so-la-la already (some of them being just skirmishes, though), which is far from the end, as my story goes on and I do not want to deliver an incomplete thing. I'll try to finish this thing to get some feedback, as it's my first attempt.

Re: New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI\'S DREAM II
 

Shan, thanks for your post! I'm afraid #1 is not quite as fancy as you say, but it certainly not easy to win (as WP).

I would welcome feedback on the second scenario, however I already know where I went wrong - the inclusion of the spotter aircraft at the start of the scenario leads to the AI getting its arty piority mixed up. i would like to change it however i have absolutely no time at the moment, hoping to do it soon.