DC3 Barbarossa, Bart vs Jason, aftermath discussion thread

Started by JasonPratt, May 29, 2016, 09:13:30 PM

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JasonPratt

Yokai! -- wait, wrong language. Whatever "okay" means in Russian!

With Bart 30 days busy on other things (spring/summer/Stellaris/having a wife/having a life)  >:D , and with me having practically no idea how I'd survive another month in the game, we've decided to call an early end to our duel on DECISIVE CAMPAIGNS 3: BARBAROSSA, which we've been playing since very soon after initial release. Among other things, now I can safely uninstall the game for a Steam install!  :D

We can also now read each other's threads (beyond the point where we said we had to leave for security sake), and since commenting on our own and each other's past actions might be interesting, along with reader commentary, I've created a new thread for that joint commentary. To which I'd post a link, but it's here, ta daaaa!  ::) O:-)

It may take a little while before we start doing commentary, this still being Memorial Day weekend 2016, but readers are welcome to start any time.

Memorial Day (tomorrow) is usually about remembering fallen United States veterans -- at least when it's our Memorial Day, duh ;) -- but everyone has their own, and I think it's worth remembering that so many other people made such awful sacrifices in the worst possible situations for us to live in a world where, for example, our faces aren't being stomped by a boot forever. Or not a Nazi boot anyway; but the Russian people had to make do with what they had -- and they not only had to deal with the real-life Barbarossa, but had to do it, and everything afterward, under the heel of a tyrant who personally authorized as many deaths of as many Russians as Hitler. 20 million Russians dead to Hitler; 20 million dead to Stalin (before, during, and after the Great Patriotic War), and somehow the Russian people lurched through it into today, as shattered as they still may be.

But because they won, we all could win; even the Germans, eventually, since as a great movie recently put it, it's important to remember that the first country the Nazis conquered -- was their own.

I hope and pray we can all be friends and allies someday in a world at peace under the rule of true justice, true fair-togetherness between people, and war is only a chivalrous sport we play together for skill and honor sometimes. In big and small ways, all our veterans in all our wars have contributed, sometimes by losing, toward that undiscovered country.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Anyway, since my signature will someday move along from links to either side of the game, here they are archived for convenience in reading along with commenting:

Bart's side here: http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=15513.0

My side here: http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=15498.0
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Barthheart

Great write up Jason.  O0

I was up until 2 am reading it... very tired today at work.  :P

Great fun reading your ups and downs and how they meshed, or didn't, with mine. I really had no idea how your SuperPower worked... I though you were getting all these extra troops with it. Because it just seemed that they would come out of nowhere as I was trying to make headway.... just popping out of the damn soil in front of me.

The Marsh-mellow Pocket: All that was protecting the north face of that pocket was the 4th Army that had been on Blitzkrieg mode since the start of the war and were starting to get severely fatigued from no rest. If you had pushed north instead of continuing west to Breast you would have caused a great delay in my plans. But those poor bedraggled 4th Army troops held on to the pocket neck with every last bit of their strength... in fact you completely shatter one division there in your push to relieve the pocket.

Then further north when you tried to dash along the front separator line to cut off Army Group North... just as I was preparing to push 2nd and 3rd Panzer Groups East along the same line. Then I brought 4th PG down across the Front line, had to pay a bunch of PP to use a card to make that happen, to cut off your thrust. Those 3 turns are what setup my Super Pocket plan.... Moscow was never the plan. By then Hitler had ordered me to take Rostov, which he had changed from it being Leningrad... to which he eventually changed it back to Leningrad!

Running the Germans is difficult as you need to keep up the pressure and tempo all the while needing to rest and recoup your own troops. It's becomes a hard juggling act to know when to pause so the enemy won't just lurch forward and crush you at rest. The big Central Front Wall you built had me really worried... I needed to rest all my AGC troops and fixe tanks etc. and then more and more and MORE Russian troops starting showing up at the Orsha-Gormel line... I kept cringing every time I opened a turn expecting to see that wave come washing across the river.

Finland: I only received permission to cross the border on the last (surrender) turn. The German Div up there was under the same orders as the Finns... which I found out when they crossed the border up north trying to starve out the last 2 Div you had up there. Cost me 10PP for that mistake.
Then I did it again at Leningrad... seeing you move most of the garrison to Tallinn fight, I lunged across the border to try and take Leningrad like I did at Riga... only to fail and get nailed with more penalties. Read my log you'll see how low on PP's I was getting and still having to make all those decisions that require PPs or you get crappy results.

Kursk-Kharkov Line: Again I had a plan, once I was told to take Rostov, to swing 1st PG and 11th Army south and drive straight at Rostov. But first I had to get 17th Army, which had been held up fighting around Lvov, to get into place to guard the northern flank and get the Romanians to guard the southern flank. And also rest and refit 1st PG. And again the massive wall of conscripts sprouts from the very soil I need to take.  >:( :o
So I put a lot of hope in the that the action in the Central Front would draw off troops and attention while things were setup for the push to Rostov.... only to be told by the Corporal that Leningrad was again the prize....  :idiot2:

Again sorry I dragged this out so much. Time seemed get used up so fast and I needed to commit at least 1 hour to play the turn and then an hour or so to write it up. And now summer is here so most of my focus gets shift to outside and Honey Doo lists.

So thanks for the game. It was a lot of fun and I had no idea I was that close to collapsing your army.... to me it just seemed an endless supply of enemy on a vast endless plain....with mud and snow coming....

JasonPratt

More comments no doubt coming from me later -- I had to stop reading through your side of things last night early, before you had even made the first turn (still making initial strategy choices), so I'm waaaaaayyy behind in checking your side of things.

Re the swamp pocket and the massive Central wall (ultimately connected topics), the reason I didn't push north into your battered 4th Army, was first because to me they didn't look so battered, and second because I reaaalllly didn't want to be fighting against you in a swamp (that having been disastrous when I was on defense earlier and this time you'd be on defense), but third and mostly because I had no confidence that my two or three armies concentrated could deal with those scattered divisions.  :P :tickedoff: It's hard to overestimate just how timid and frustrated I got about trying a counterattack, although partly that was because I didn't get a better understanding of how stacks worked until fairly late in the game. As far as I was concerned, my best bet was just to create a safe corridor to hold back your ravening scattered horde of exhausted divisions ;) , while I ran troops back to Brest to screw over your central supply line. (I don't think I ever thought your goal was to take Moscow; even toward the end I decided I didn't really care if you took it, since odds weren't good that you had chosen it to begin with.)

Only then, and then only after a couple of weeks hurting from that loss, would I have felt safe trying to push the Vol Wall to roll over you in a Crimson Tide (yay college football!) But I made the mistake of not assigning tank divisions to run independently back west along the road, until it was too late.

Trying to use portions of the north side of the Central Wall to smash your North Theater supply line, though chancier in my estimation, turned out to be the beginning of the end as a fatal gamble: it opened too much of a hole for you to wrap north back up around my central defenders, and once you could cut off their supply, that was that. Note that even with all my strength up there -- and those were entirely regular army units, not conscripts -- I just lacked the pure strength to push even a few divisions far enough out of their way to trap your own encirclement out of supply for more than I think maybe one turn. Again, it's hard to overestimate just how utterly weak the Soviet forces are in this game; which is by design of course.

I could have survived the loss of my swamp road armies, probably, had I not opened up that northern hole; which in turn ended up cutting off supplies for the rescuers just when I was finally in range to get some help to the swamp road. I'm honestly surprised the swamp road divisions held on as long as they did: even at the end, when the north and central sections of the wall COMPLETELY VAPORIZED due to lack of supply (that hadn't happened yet when I decided on the surrender, but I knew it was coming in only another turn or two), I think I still had a handful of divisions alive on the swamp road.

It was an amazing game, and I'll probably have more to say later this week or next weekend once I take better stock of my game in hindsight and yours as revealed. Thanks muchly for the game!  O:-)
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Crossroads

I certainly enjoyed following each DAR, in parallel. Would need to read through them both again to have an intelligent comment here though. Kudos for both of you guys for writing them with the detail you did. Had a few laughs as well.  O0

Seems DC3 Barbarossa indeed managed in putting together a manageable sized Barbarossa game.   :)
Campaign Series Legion | CS: Vietnam 1948-1967 | CS: Middle East 1948-1985

CS: Vietnam DAR: LZ Albany as NVA (South Vietnam 11/17/65)  
CS: Middle East AARs: High Water Mark (Syria 10/12/73) Me vs Berto | Riptide (Libya 8/6/85) Me vs Berto | The Crossroads (West Bank 6/5/67)  Me vs Berto

Boardgame AARs: AH D-Day | MMP PanzerBlitz2 Carentan | OSS Putin's Northern War | GMT Next War: Poland | LnL Against the Odds DIY

JasonPratt

It is both manageable and as reasonably fun and challenging as stomping / being-stomped-as Russia During Barbarossa could feasibly be.

One of these days when I write up a proper AAR for my AAR (with knowledge now from Barth's side), I'm sure a main theme will be the need to resist any notion of trying to fight back.  :P The Soviet side absolutely must reconcile to a controlled implosion, and not a very controlled one at that.

Fighting back is what DC2 is for.  :knuppel2:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

I will add, while I'm here and thinking of it, that I was surprised how useless and kind of chintzy the game's own post-game analysis was. Bart mentions it upthread I think, but he doesn't quote from it, and for good reason.

The only thing I learned from it, which by the way also relates to a crucial game metric that the game isn't (or wasn't?) coded to properly show while we were playing, was how many enemy divisions I ended up destroying. I was pretty sure I had destroyed one; Bart confirmed that (on the road to relieve the swamp armies). The game said I had in fact destroyed 2 at some time.

But damned if it's going to tell me any more than that, other than they were in the Central Theater. And even then the pauce information it gives seems worse than useless.

QuoteGerman units killed

Northern Front 0 (0% of total)
Central Front 2 (100% of total)
Southern Front 0 (0% of total)

So, what does x% of total mean?? The normal expectation would be that killing Z units would be a fractional X% of the total. But there were God knows how many more German units on the Central Front than 2!!

ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

BanzaiCat

Quote from: Barthheart on May 30, 2016, 10:07:26 AM
The Marsh-mellow Pocket: All that was protecting the north face of that pocket was the 4th Army that had been on Blitzkrieg mode since the start of the war and were starting to get severely fatigued from no rest. If you had pushed north instead of continuing west to Breast


JasonPratt

Ha!! -- I didn't catch that the first (or second or third) time!

I still haven't done a fuller post-mortem. Note to self.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Barthheart

Quote from: JasonPratt on June 28, 2016, 08:07:35 AM
Ha!! -- I didn't catch that the first (or second or third) time!

I still haven't done a fuller post-mortem. Note to self.

Waiting..... :knuppel2: I need something to read during my many long waits at airports next week. :idiot2:

JasonPratt

ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

airboy

I enjoyed the AAR.  Read it all at once after it was finished.

FarAway Sooner

Badly belated, but well-done, gentlemen!  This has helped me on my decision about whether to take the plunge and buy this title or not!

JasonPratt

Learn from my mistakes. LEARN THEM!

...


.........


... oh. Wait, I haven't written my post-mortem yet.  #:-)
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Well. Well well. Well well well...

QuoteFatigue. It turns out that, while fatigue is only accumulated while slow Divisions are set to a Blitzkrieg posture (correct), it also only applies while in the Blitzkrieg posture (incorrect). If you switch to Sustained Offensive or Defensive postures your slouching, weary, soldaten suddenly spark up and look a lot more alert than they should. Fixed.

Essentially, the German player up until literally today, could totally and instantly eliminate all fatigue by switching a division off Blitzkrieg stance.

I shall conven^H^H^H^H^H^Hprovisionally consider this a contributing factor for my loss.  ^-^
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!