AAR: "Enjoy the War."

[Zardoz]

some readers of my AAR asked for it and it is a real challenge , therefore ....

[Wiking]

I noticed in your thread you certainly seem to have an enthusiastic following (even if I cannot really tell what anyone is saying! I don't speak German sadly). I've toyed with buying a Fallschirmjäger company to airland on the other side of the river during a crossing but I suspect they'd just get massacred from landing right on top of enemy defences Maybe on a larger map at a lower point value I could get away with it though.

I've been away from the game for a few weeks now as school has been really intense. But I'm going to try and make some time for it tonight; I'm about halfway through the last battle in September 1941 around Kiev. I also found that list of Battle Location numbers in the game directory, which wlill be nice for customizing the maps. The random maps can be fun at times, but I like variety.

[Wiking]

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.

[Zardoz]

Sounds much more nasty or "challenging" than my battles.

Even the river crossing goes rather well despite the fact that Nebelwerfer killed some of my squads with friendly fire. The morale of the Russians is still very low and this seems to be the important fact at the moment.

I had a very similar night battle in a SP MBT campaign with a German second-line infantry ("Jäger") batallion. I got the impression that it is better to give up the battle than to fight and have the core units destroyed.

I think, other types of AAR have more enthusiats because for the reader a report about a battle between 2 humans is more exciting.

[Wiking]

Absolutely, its much better to throw the fight than to wreck your core forces. Not that you shouldn't try for the objectives, but if it means sacrificing your core veterans its just going to make things needlessly hard in the future. Of course, sometimes you can't avoid it...and I am even toying with deleting the third tank platoon out of my companies to represent operational and strategic losses. Its all a long way off though, so for now I'll stick with my TOE.

You're right about human vs human matches being more popular. The A.I puts up a good fight but after so many years we both know how to beat it, even against all odds. But I've always liked going at my own pace and doing things my own way, so I tend to edit my OOB a lot with MOBHACK. Most opponents wouldn't be too keen on that, so I'll stick with singleplayer for now.

[sigeena]

I've played quite a bit with IJA. I usually run an infantry battalion as my core force. Depending on the type of mission, I'll get to spend support points on Armor, Engineers and Recce if it's an Assault or AT guns if its a Defend.

It used to be far easier for the infantry to be successful in their close assaults on armor. And the standard IJA infantry has sufficient Morale to attempt close assaults.

The LC for Japan from 1937 will take you across at least 2 years of fighting Nat Chinese and Chinese Communists, before going against Soviets from '38 to '39. That's a pretty good time to fight against the Soviets, they do not have such heavy armor yet.

Then if you continue till '41, you'll have the opportunity to go into SouthEast Asia against British forces. By '42-'43, you'll be able to fight against USA, UK, Australia till end of the war. It's a very wide-ranging LC.

I've had my battalion rebuilt several times. Their equipment never did improve as the war got on, so it always got comparatively more challenging.

[Wiking]

I've had to put my IJA campaign on hold for the time being since I'm trying out Monty's DAS REICH mod for Steel Panthers MBT. I actually started mine in 1931 in Manchuria and found it a very refreshing change of pace. It is very infantry focused as you said, and I think it might take some getting used to to not see periodic upgrades for my infantry I did enjoy exploring a new order of battle and approaching the game from a fresh perspective, and I fully intend to return to Imperial Japan at some point to get my fill of infantry combat in the jungles of the pacific and asia.

But you're absolutely right, it does get very challenging as things go on. Primarily I think because of the artillery situation and less because of the armor: the Japanese infantry can handle most tanks if they use the terrain correctly, but the Allied infantry can be rough to deal with since Japanese infantry battalions have less or lower quality artillery than a lot of their European counterparts. In the battles I played I felt like I was relying much more on my machineguns and my snipers to fix the enemy so that I could overwhelm them with fire. Tanks (I only bought one company and broke it up amongst the battalion of infantry) were also useful for this but so painfully slow and undergunned that you couldn't expect them to handle everything on their own.

[Wiking]

So I have a chronic habit of restarting this time I cooked up a new OOB that's probably a little bit less insane than what I had before.

1x Battalion HQ

2x SS Panzergreandiere Kompanie starting with Horch Kfz. 70 Trucks
*1x Kompanie HQ
*3x SS PzG Zug (4 Rifle squads with 1 AT rifle)
*1x SS MG Zug (4 MG08 HMG)
*1x SS Pioniere Zug (4 squads)
*1x SS GrW Batterie (4 8cm tubes)
*1x SS Spaher Zug (3 squads of 6 men with Kfz 15 trucks)

2x SS Panzerkompanie
*I Kompanie with 12 PzKw 38(t) Ausf. A and 5 PzKw II Ausf. B
*II Kompanie with 12 PzKw 35(t) Ausf. A and 5 PzKw II Ausf. B

1x SS Artillerie Abteilung
*1 SS Observer
*3x 4 gun 10.5cm gun batterie

1x SS Korp level artillery
*3x 15cm batterie
*1x 21cm Batterie

1x SS Panzerspaeh kompanie
*6x SdKfz 231 8 Rad
*13x SdKfz 222 4 Rad

So this gives me integral artillery, infantry, engineering assets, armor and tons of recon. I also have a Kradschutzen company tagging along that I'll drop for an under-strength Tiger company later in 1943. Overall this is more of a "Kampfgruppe" than an on paper infantry battalion. Its very flexible and probably heavy on the artillery, but considering how much arty I have to receive from the Allies and Soviets I stopped feeling bad about that really quick. Its often essential for breaking massed infantry attacks.