Finally pushed past Kiev and well into October now. Had an extremely nasty Delay night battle in the rain with no moon! (visibility 1!) That was an ugly one, T-34's popping up everywhere and no real way to stop them except desperation. I had kept all the Pioniers in reserve around each grouping of objectives, and counter-attacked hard as soon as any flags flipped. More losses than I wanted though.
We re-fit our lost StuG's with Ausf E's, which really are not much of a change except some AP shot and LMG mounts for our Mg34's. Cest la vie.
I'm pretty beat up, as you would expect. III. Panzerkompanie is reporting just a handful of operational tanks out of a total of 17. Every Schutzenkompanie has taken losses and eroded their "elite" status quite a bit. We're missing a lot of our anti-tank teams due to attrition, and snipers are in short supply. Artillery thankfully has been untouched, and unlike the historical Germans I am unlikely to lose much of it in the winter battles of 1941.
I have to admit, that I am tempted to delete some of those formations to make it "more fair" later on. At full strength artillery I can probably count on beating almost any attack without massive losses. So maybe in late 1942 we'll trim that down and see how it goes.
