New Scenario: SPANNOCCHI'S DREAM II

[Siddhi]

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.**

[narwan]

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

[Siddhi]

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.

[narwan]

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

[narwan]

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

Narwan

[wulfir]

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.

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!

[Siddhi]

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 - 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

[Mobhack]

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

Cheers
Andy

[wulfir]

Siddhi said:
wow, that's quite a kill rate with the FANs...

...and here's some trivia: FAN is actually a curse in Swedish, it means 'the devil' but is usually translated to d*mn.

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...

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

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...

[Siddhi]

cheers andy, wulfir

wulfir, seems you had an easy game - FAN! . 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" ), 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...