SP-MBT Scenario : "Battle In East Ukraine"
Hi everyone, my name is Mr. Bill 5000 and I am new here (although I am a long-time Steel Panthers player, going right back to the first editions of the original SP back in the '90s).
I have designed the appended scenario (for slot # 286 in your "Scenarios" list), which depicts a hypothetical Meeting Encounter between Russian and Ukrainian forces in March 2014 (OK, there's snow on the ground... you can easily update the map to make it greener!). I have included fairly extensive instructions in the scenario notes, but here are a few additional tips :
(1.) The scenario has a LOT of units milling about at times. Make sure to save your battle to disk every so often, as I have seen SP-MBT occasionally crash in the middle of a turn managed by the AI.
(2.) Do not expect all units to work exactly as they would out of the Russian and Ukrainian OOB's! The scenario assumes that both forces were called upon to fight with little advance notice, using whatever units were locally available... and some tanks and aircraft had to be loaded out with whatever weapons happened to be at the base depot! :-)
(3.) Pay careful attention to your roster and in particular your reinforcements. You will need to plan around when and how you can best bring these into battle.
(4.) Do not over-commit your airpower (this applies to both sides) too early in the battle, as you will likely lose aircraft to enemy AD if you strike too deeply into the enemy's rear (this is more true of Ukrainian air attacks than it is of Russian ones), and you may need a couple of precision stand-off attacks to neutralize enemy break-throughs later.
(5.) Watch those flanks! And especially watch that wide open area on the north of the battlefield, in the center. Playing tests showed this to be the "Field of Death", where advancing your tanks (depending on type and frontal armor), EVEN ONE (1) hex further forward, could literally be the difference between life and death (e.g., "you can survive a hit from a shell with 55 APCR, if you have 56 frontal armor, at a range of 2000 meters... but at a range of 1950 meters...") (well, you get the idea, don't you?)
(6.) Pay attention to your tanks' capabilities... not all T-55AMP2Bs and T-62MVs are created equal! And yes, contrary to popular opinion, a T-90 very definitely CAN be killed by a lowly T-55... although not frontally...
(7.) The game definitely CAN be won by both players, but with equal luck and players of equal skill, the Russians are more likely to win a marginal victory than the Ukrainians. Repeated AI-vs-AI playtesting showed both sides ending up with a net score in the 11500 range, which I think proves that this is a well-balanced scenario.
(8.) Finally... watch out for Igor Kravchuk! In one play test, this guy (I kid you not), knocked out a T-90... with a hand grenade(!) (Honest, folks... I'm NOT making this up... my wife witnessed it happening, and couldn't understand why her husband had collapsed into utter hysterics.)
I hope you like the scenario... comments and suggestions for improvement, would be appreciated.
Sincerely
Mr. Bill 5000
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