AAR: "Enjoy the War."

[Wiking]

You know, with my Japanese campaign I'm suspecting I'll appreciate night assaults and advances much more than I do as the Germans. The way I play the game is almost totally different.

I have a lot more concern for the sectors of responsibility with my infantry battalion in the IJA campaign. For the fast moving Germans, those lines are more flexible. Since I can shift a StuG platoon North or South to assist as needed, and often times we end up dogpiling in the enemy's backfield by the end of the battle. With the Japanese, I have to make much more careful advances and carefully allocate resources because even my tanks and cavalry are not terribly fast. A night advance could work quite a bit better as it means I don't have to worry about dropping smoke as much with my long artillery call times.

Also means I can mitigate enemy automatic weapons and get right in and on top of them

[Zardoz]

Yeah .... with Japanes that might work BANZAI !!!

But I have some doubts that it works if my rather green German infantry moves right into a Maxim MG or a PPsh-Squad

[Wiking]

Yeah, the morale bonuses for the SS are about the only real reason to use them. They're not much better than regular Grenadiers besides that. Still, if your scouts can find the enemy first you can isolate and destroy them in detail. The big issue with fighting Soviets is always that overlapping fire they get, which is less of a problem at night. I'll have to check back into your AAR when you update it next

[Zardoz]

Oh, battle No. 3 was easy.

I dispersed a StuG battery among the infantry and that saved the day. The infantry resp. the scouts identified the russians and the StuG put them in retreat and rout-modus very easily.

In 1941 infantry alone cannot really defend against tanks at a distance of 2 or more hexes. I rumbled 2 times into russian tanks in the night and lost 2 StuGs but losses were very low.

Now I have a river crossing ...

[Wiking]

Yeah, my own infantry have to "hide with pride" in the woods or rough terrain even when they have tellermines or grenade bundles. I use smoke grenades liberally to break line of sight and get on the reverse of a slope so that when the tanks chase them, I can assault them more easily.

Good luck with the river crossing! It's my least favorite mission in this game!

[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.