DC3 Barbarossa, Bart vs Jason, aftermath discussion thread

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

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besilarius

Clearly time for a re-do.
Just to keep it fair, why not switch sides?
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Barthheart

Quote from: JasonPratt on March 09, 2017, 04:15:10 PM
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.  ^-^

Well... that's kind of interesting.... except that the only time I switch out of Blitzkrieg mode was when I also set the army to rest mode which eliminates the fatigue anyway.  :-"

AND you still haven't written that post-mortem.....   ;)

Barthheart

Quote from: besilarius on March 09, 2017, 06:25:31 PM
Clearly time for a re-do.
Just to keep it fair, why not switch sides?

With summer approaching my PC gaming times drops a lot so maybe in the fall we could try again.
A lot has changed since we played the game it will be like learning it all over again....  :hide:

JasonPratt

I really wouldn't mind swinging with the Soviets again. While I haven't written up the notes yet (soon?) I've thought over my key problems several times, some of which were simply not understanding better how the system works.
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

#19
Let us now consider the post-mortem of my demise. I shall be avoiding at least one factor since its adjustment might be crucial to a forthcoming rematch with Bartheart this August-ish.


-1.) The Germans instantly lost all fatigue once they ever switched over from Blitzkrieg stance. Barth says he only ever did this when he was stopping to rest anyway, but of course this would have meant that he didn't have to rest quite as long. I don't really think this had a bearing on my loss though, considering other factors, and also considering that most of the time when he stopped it was for reorganization purposes which would have given him the equivalent time to rest -- no doubt including times he re-org'd out of Blitz stance. I'm including it as a completionist, but I'm consequently putting it at negative one on the list.


0.) To quote my joke from Turn 0 Round TURN One:
Quote from: http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=15498.msg405463#msg405463Consequently, if I lose, I shall blame this "Vance" person. This is only reasonable.

Barth just outplayed me. Not something I can fix or improve in my game, so while I'm including it for completion I'm putting it as zero on the list.


1.) I think my single most fundamental and repeated mistake, as I've mentioned before, was trying to fight back. The Soviets must be resigned to a controlled implosion, with the further understanding that due to activation problems there cannot be much control to the implosion. Those activation problems obviously hamper attempts at attacks, too; but so many other things hamper attacks that even when I occasionally didn't have activation problems I shouldn't have been trying to counter-attack.

Relatedly, I shouldn't have been trying to even counter-blitz maneuver, even if (as on the swamp road, or the thrust across front boundaries between central and north) I didn't have any intention of attacking. Not as long as I was having activation problems, and not unless I could keep a defensive supply corridor intact for the thrust. Intact against the massive German attack advantages, remember!

Basically, trying to be awesome before Case Blue gets all of Russia killed. And Case Blue is another game.


2.) Somewhat related to Factor One, and jockeying hard for the position of strongest downfall factor: I absolutely failed to understand the stacking rules. Not until around (what turned out to be) the final 1/3 of the game. As terribly underpowered as the Soviet military already is except in terms of sheer number, the temptation to bunch up in sheer numbers to play to our only major strength must be avoided. While it does give a stack more hitpoints, so to speak, it also reduces our armor and gives the enemy more chances to hit, so to speak. I consistently and persistently failed to appreciate this factor, giving Barth an-even-more-much-easier time than he would have had otherwise.

That this failure might also be historical verisimilitude does not make me feel better about it.


3.) This is one of the secret factors I'm holding back to adjust for the next match someday. (Also, I'm not sure yet how best to adjust it.)


These could be considered strategic factors, in that they applied across the game and across the map.


Operational errors next, roughly in chronological order. I won't be always going into details since I don't want to give away too many things I could do differently next time.




4.) Look up toward Riga (the red dot about center map, top, on the Baltic coast), and then northwest of that. Those divisions are deployed to resist a naval invasion that was never, ever going to happen. I did the right thing by trying to pull them off the coast, but it I did it the wrong way(s). Ultimately, and combined with another serious error in trying to resist harder at the points of contact, led to me taking a foolish risk that Barth's ultra-mechanized army wouldn't have a single mechanized division in range to seize Riga for one turn. And he seized Riga that turn. Much of the collapse of the main North Front line revolves around my mistakes here. Starting with the move represented by this snapshot:




5.) The first screenshot (refer back up-post) also happens to show the opening disposition of nearly the whole Center Front, too (after Barth's opening Turn -- I couldn't actually do much on my opening Turn, due to game design). Find the Front HQ slightly north of the far-right map side, then trace the main double-rail line southwest to my divisions along the rail system. I rushed those divisions into meeting the Germans, and got them progressively annihilated.

The dilemma is a cruel one (which of course is the game, and the challenge, for a Soviet player during Barbarossa). Soviet troops are like paper people this early in the war, with hideous defensive debuffs to boot, and with their only buffs being on the attack. But a 20% attack bonus to paper people makes them cardboard people!

You can see them again, for reference, at the top of this next snapshot, which is mostly dedicated to considering opening mistakes in the north of South Front.




My basic mistake here was trying to rush troops who can't rush anywhere, up to defend against much stronger troops while I'm still suffering crippling defensive maluses, and then trying to overcome these problems by clustering into superstacks, which only made pocket attempts easier plus opening me up to defensive superstack weaknesses (see Strategic Mistake 3). Not much more to say really, other than that I don't think I should have devoted my scant political points to activating a main garrison at Lvov.




6.) Here at the bottom of South Front, I made the crucial but understandable mistake that I should be able to hold out against Romanians and Luftwaffe infantry divisions at least! -- who were crossing a river no less! So I wasn't trying to withdraw my troops, I was abandoning my defense of Odessa behind another river as fast as I could (not very fast due to activation problems) in order to strengthen the line to hold.

Also, in a baffling underestimation of the competency of the map/scenario designers, I wasted time testing to see if I could cross the mountains behind the enemy line. I'll have much better uses for those troops much more quickly next time.

That said, with all the problems here, this sector held its basic shape the longest, partly because after all I was only fighting baby Nazis here, and partly because I didn't have the wherewithal to make the same mistakes to the same extent as elsewhere.


I didn't make serious operational errors in the North and Center for a while, other than super-stacking my central divisions too much while pulling them back (but at least I was trying to pull them back). So the next big error comes in the South again:



7.) Keeping in mind, in my defense, my movement activations sucked, I still should have been taking what small moves I could to shift over toward Odessa. The Romanians(!) were about to cross the river south of me here (!!). Which he accomplished the next turn through mud by the way (!!!). With infantry (!!!!). Through at least one of my zones of control (!!!!!). You can see why I thought I had one more turn, and I'm not convinced there wasn't a bug involved since Bart doesn't seem to have used any special Germany button powers at any time including here. But I still should have been moving the defensive line into and around Odessa sooner, as far as I could move anything (which was at least a little -- and sufficient to put something there I think.)

I guess while I'm at it:

8.) Trying to pull my divisions back into the mountains while also crossing a river, would have been highly difficult even with perfect activations. And highly retarded under the circumstances.


My next major operational blunder, which was connected to the strategic mistake of (1) trying to counter-blitz; and (2) trying to counter-attack, can be illustrated here:



Well, that doesn't look too bad, right? Sure, not this turn. But I should never have been that far forward of the Polotsk / Vitebsk river line. Or forward of that line at all. I should have been bothered that I didn't have a river between Vitebsk and Orsha to hide behind. Instead I'm spreading out my defensive line (though at least I'm barely superstacking now), which will soon create a rip on my right flank (map left) when I try to surge for his North Front supply line again (NO, BAD SOVIETS, NO COUNTER-BLITZING), and that rip will be what Barth eventually drives through and around to pocket my whole Soviet Wall.

I am not exaggerating when I say I lost the game with the evaporation of that wall; which I fatally exposed; starting on this turn; exactly here with this move. I might have lost the game anyway, but this exact move is a major contender for how I did lose the game. It wasn't a move I had to make or face loss more quickly. I made the move right down the throat of my major strategic mistakes.

Even if I hadn't ripped open a hole lunging for his supply soon afterward, I still should not have been counter-attacking past the river line there.


Speaking of counter-blitzing:



9.) While in theory setting up a counterthrust opportunity operation back across the Pripayet swamp road was a fair idea (arguably my best in this game), I can see major operational errors here. Superstacks. My few armored divs aren't pushed forward enough yet. The HQs supporting them aren't pushed forward enough yet. Their supply line back to Gomel is one thousand percent vulnerable, and the only way I had to close it in time was to pull my swamp road forces back (which I'll try too late). The 40th and 57th Infantry divisions actually got off the dang road into the swamp! (Where they helped a lot, but still.)

You could also put it this way: my operational error here started a few turns previously when I opportunistically plopped my new Army HQs too far forward along the swamp road. What eventually kills the counter-thrust (which could have won me the game) is the severing of the road. If I couldn't keep the thrust supplied, I shouldn't have risked it. Sure, I was desperately hoping he had simply ignored the road, but that was stupid of me.

And no, moving that new Army Superstack northwest of Gomel wouldn't have better been put to keeping the swamp road open: I was about to have my central wall's left flank turned by some panzers and mech divisions. What would have been better was to keep my swamp road armies on a shorter leash to begin with, poised to exploit if possible. The very threat of a supplied counter-thrust would have tied up German divisions, in a swamp no less. As it is, Barth could pocket them with relatively minor numbers and weakened divisions, and keep them bottled in that way. It doesn't matter how strong those armies are in men and tanks if they have no bullets, shells, food, and fuel.


Hey, here's where the failure of the northern sector of North Front happened! -- or the snapshot is endemic of it anyway.



10.) I should not have tried to save Talinn. I know why I did it: to keep the mighty (!!) Finnish army out of the war. But with my reinforcement schedule not favoring North Front at all, I should have accepted that the Finns were going to get into the game eventually, and tried to adjust my plans on that. As it is, all I did was spread out my forces for Bart to eventually eat piecemeal. They should have been kept in a V shaped by (but not necessarily deeper than) the Narva / Luga / Novgorod line.


Not a new error but symptomatic of an older one still ongoing:



Down south in the snapshot there, I'm superstacking forward still trying to prepare for a counter-thrust over the river (!?!?) or to snap the line directly at Dunaberg. They should have been deployed north of Polot around the curve of the swamp/creek line.

(The 48th conscript Army at Ostrov isn't a mistake, per se, nor the 24th Army next door, even though they're superstacked: I just can't move them to spread out yet. Not that I can credit myself with moving them to eliminate superstacking, since I've got a truly horrible one trying to hit Dunaberg, and one not much better right behind it. Also, very soon I'll be able to spread them out of their superstacks but won't. THAT'S an error.)


Here's how close I came to winning the game anyway despite my mistakes, btw:



Those two armored divisions at the far left of the swamp road, ONE OF WHICH COULD HAVE MOVED BUT DIDN'T AARGGHH!, are open to Brest. Just like I had been hoping for. Their HQ is not in proper position yet to support them, and that will be one doom for this plan (already noted); the area I'm "kind of worried about" can't be protected at all, and that'll be the other doom.

(I'm pretty sure I didn't move the capable armored division forward because I didn't want to create two weaker stacks. As it happens, moving it forward by itself wouldn't have helped any anyway, so I don't regard this as an operational error: I did the right thing keeping them together for now.)

Here's a snapshot from the turn Bart closed off the Marsh-mellow pocket, where the labels show the key problem for advancing my quasi-panzers.



See the problem? Most of the armored divs belong to 16th HQ, which is waaaaayyyyy back on the road. They can't feasibly advance beyond its control radius, which they're already at the limit of.

But enough of that. Let's take a look at a brand-new operational error, shall we?




11.) No. No. No. No! NO! NO! NNNNOOO!!!!



Oh you utter moron, me! No, you should NOT be looking for a way to maroon {/bugsbunnyirony} your new conscript army behind a river, unable to escape, in an even-more-vulnerable superstack! You should be pulling back to try to secure the escape of your other somewhat more competent stacks!

But no. The game will give me my opportunity to ruin what little defensive value I've managed to create here. And I'll take it. Because I want so badly to hit back with an amazing genius of amazingosity. And my brain simply cannot be made to believe the Romanians are all that much of a muchness.


The next error is really an extension of a previous one, but it's so teeth-gnashing I'm going to give it it's own number:



12.)Why. Why do I think my activations (or anything else) will allow me to get any farther. All I've done is trap a chunk of my defense on the wrong side of the river, while the German 30th Motorized Division (IN TRUCKKKSSS!!!) trundles ahead into the gap I've left wide open in my backside.

Not that it strictly matters yet: the Germans can't easily cross the front boundaries like I can (whence I conceived this idea in the first place). But still the principle trigger for the collapse of the Central Wall and my loss of the game, while set up much earlier, starts here.


But that's really an old error, albeit one so catastrophically bad that I gave it an extra number. Here's a new one in the planning.



Barth's taunt is actually true. And so is consequently even more taunty! :D

(Note: I'm sure my code is right there, and the image shows up in the actual AAR thread. Huh. Until/unless it shows up, what he's saying is "Blitztreat... I like it... You should do more of it. :) "


This for example is the opposite of a blitztreat, yet demonstrates why my earlier most crucial operational error was so catastrophic:



Since it is literally impossible for Soviet troops to walk anywhere, these armies will die where they stand. And deservedly so -- but I'm the one who opened the gate this way.


Here's a more subtle error:



14.) You might think, well, if I put a bunch of conscript armies on the rail line, that'll be helpful, right? Once I get them spread out?

No. No not really. Admittedly, I was trying to keep some supply open for the Rostov/Stalingrad area eventually, but Kursk should have been my base for that.

And there you can see that instead, I'm plodding most of the first army west 'to the rescue' up there. Those divisions left behind will be weaker without my HQ once it leaves range.

I should have been deploying my new recruit armies around Kursk up there (very top center of the next snapshot) and...



Down on the Rostov line. Yes behind my Front HQ in Stalino -- it would escape and move somewhere, no biggie. That would have slowed down Barth's push a lot more, as he either first would have to split his forces wide to deal with both Rotov and Kursk, or concentrated on the Kursk buildup first to keep them from punching back down into his supply line. {also strategy redacted here for next time maybe}


None of which matters because the total collapse of Central Wall is going to lose me the game, even if the South was his target (and remained that way). Any operational errors I made from here to the end of the game are ultimately meaningless.

Learn from my mistakes.

Learn them.
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 read Jason, as always.  O0

This game has such depth to it that it's great to read afterward what your opponent was agonizing over and see how it meshed, or didn't, with your own worries and concerns.

Every time I thought I had a large clear space to drive my panzers through, one of your conscript armies would appear! It seemed to me that you had a endless supply of men and divisions.  :pullhair:

But it is true that eh game pivotal moment is when you made the dash down the dividing line between my North and Central Army Groups. Up until then I had know idea how I was going to get by the Great Red Wall in the center.
I was able, at great expense, to reassign the 4th Army to Army Group Center to cut off that thrust and then swing 2nd and 3rd Panzer Armies up and around through that gap.
At which point, of course, my objective was switched from Moscow to Rostov!  #:-) But I had to continue, of course, and try to form the largest pocket ever.

It was a fun game and I am sorry it took so long. I had stretched myself too thin in real life and everything was falling behind.  :-\

If we start again I promise to play at a better rate. And I would really like to try again now that so much has been updated since we played.

Crossroads

Thanks Jason, what an excellent post mortem. I followed the DARs you guys did with great interest, but since I don't own this particular game was left guessing at times as why certain things happened, or got you worried at least.

From the point of a simulation, and this is not GG WitE, which I don't own either, how do you feel about it? I'm currently re-reading Glantz's excellent (and extremely tedious unless you enjoy reading Divisional war diaries) Barbarossa Derailed I and II. What Glantz revealed in detail with his studies was the relentless counter attacking the Red Army put from the very beginning. No matter what, the commanders were told to ATTACK. And they did, often with catastrophic consequences, but always wearing the Nazis down. Until they were spent.

Yet, Jason, you mention that as part of the strategic mistakes you did. I assume it should not be too succesful, but is your experience not to counterattack at all?

I was thoroughly enjoying all the encirclements you guys saw taking place, great thing they happened, as encirclements and not certain geographics targets were the goal of Barbarossa, at least in the beginning.

Looking forward to August  :smitten:
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

Crossroads

Quote from: Crossroads on March 14, 2017, 04:00:15 AM

From the point of a simulation

I mean, not as a simulation simulation, but how did this feel as a Barbarossa game, ie. realistic enough to allow enjoying the Barbarossa as a whole?

I understand this game has a very user friendly approach compared to the vast scale of the battle it portrays.
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

Thanks, CR!

I've often said that the toughest thing about designing a Barbarossa game focusing on Barba, is making the game fun to play as a game rather than only curbstomping the Russians, or only being curbstomped. But then unless Russia is being brutally curbstomped, how could it be a "Barbarossa" game?

Unity of Command, for example, gets around this by focusing their Barba missions on playing as Germany, and if you're playing as the Russians in mp (...I think UoC has mp??) you might find things rather too easy because the missions are set up as puzzles with very tight time constraints: you can game the system against the Germans. That can be a game but not necessarily a Barba experience from the Russian side. There's a reason that the DLC is called "Black Turn"; and why single-players aren't encouraged to play the missions as the Russians.

For War in the East, the devs have worked hard from day one trying to balance the game in such a way as to give a proper Barba feel in its early stages, but it really is a simulation and the Russian player is in a position where he can just do things less dumb! Trying to make the game balance out to being a Barbarossa situation anyway, can break WitE in other regards, and kind of requires re-breaking it later and ad hoccing a historical shape to the overall campaign. (I'm basing this on some comments I've read, having never played more than five minutes of WitE.)

There's a Barbarossa game based on the Panzer General engine (more closely so than UoC) from Matrix that I own two editions of but have never played, or ever heard much about, so I can't do any comparison here.



So, does DC3:B feel realistic enough? Yes, to me it did. The game has some clear granularity under the hood, and that helps a lot. The abstractions helped with focus instead of blurring things. The designers do haxor the game to produce a historical-ish result, but they're pretty clear about what the haxors are and why they're in the game and, importantly, the hobbles are reasonable to the situation.

For example, and related to your question about Glantz, the Soviet divisions in the Central and Southern Fronts (and the south part of North Front) start on attack stance, which gives them natural debuffs to defense. But their defensive debuffs are worse than you might otherwise expect, and their 20% attack buffs don't mean much due to the quality of the troops and the inabilities to get everyone moving together: if an army doesn't activate properly, its divisions aren't going to be able to launch effective attacks. Combine this with some generally weak troop types (including actual no-kidding horse-mounted divisions), and an inability for reasonable game reasons to shift easily to some other modes, and the Soviets get pushed around a lot and their attacks are largely worthless. But that wasn't quite enough to generate a generally Barbarish opening, so simulating the shock of the first month and the generals being afraid to go on the defensive at all, and there's a further defensive debuff which slowly reduces over time to the normal horrible debuff! -- which is also connected to their total inability to use entrenchments and fortifications at first, which slowly recovers over the same time period. That inability has a historical justification though: Stalin meant for them to be launching a pre-emptive attack on Germany which never materialized, and so they were caught outside their fine defensive positions and unable (and thanks to threats from Stalin unwilling, at a command level) to get back into them.

Now, comparing these factors to Glantz almost isn't fair, because he's doing cutting-edged research based on Soviet (and I think some captured Nazi) docs, which is greatly expanding our knowledge of what was happening in Barbarossa -- the top three largest tank battles in world history, and yet there remains hardly any direct evidence of their existence for example. If Glantz says their attacks weren't worth poo, and actually made a difference, then I'm inclined to believe him. The game, at the time we played it (and the patch notes I've seen don't seem to change this), simulates a more standard historical story of their counter-attacks being so worthless that all they could do was be punched back and encircled all the time.

So yes, despite his research, as far as the game goes I'd have to say that counterattacks at all in the first month are pointless, and not worth much more when the first serious waves of regular divisions start to arrive (without any lingering defensive maluses and set to neutral stance for no defensive debuffs that way either -- but the ones up near and past Leningrad start that way, too, and can't feasibly deal with the Finns!) Then the emergency recruit divisions start arriving, and they're a joke. The game is trying to set up a situation where the Soviet player is scrambling to slow down the Nazis, while preserving enough forces to attempt a true counter-attack in the winter of 41/42 when the Germans will be at their most defensively vulnerable. Until then, I cannot imagine the Soviets in this game wearing down the German divisions with counter-attacks.

I think Barth would agree with me from his perspective, and look forward to any additional comments from him along this line.

Could the game be updated to Glantz's discoveries? Probably, but this would require an increased German reinforcement schedule I think; and on the Russian side, a lot more early Soviet army activations at least.
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

Thanks Jason! I can imagine creating a proper Barbarossa feel at this scale is anything but easy  :crazy2: But given on one hand you say counter attacks are worthless but on the other hand the early Soviet formations are forced to stick to Attack stance, well that makes great sense.

And I especially liked the encirclements that took place, those looked properly epic, both from the point of view of how Barth tried to achieve them, and how you on the other hand tried to avoid them, while maintaining a as solid overall defence line as possible. Way epic.

And it looked liked it played quite fast too, given the scale.

I just may need to buy this one.
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

Barthheart

Crossroads you need to by this game if have even a passing interest in the subject. The way the Devs have woven the political interference into the game from both sides leaders and army structures in nothing short of amazing. As the Germans I was constantly fight both the Russians and my own leadership.

I agree that most of Jason's early counter attacks were not too much of a nuisance and most of my worries early on were maintain enough forward momentum that I can get far enough to be able to rest and change my army stances. So most of his units were merely speed bumps. But not all. There were times when he made some attacks that IF he'd been able to sustain them it would have caused me lots of trouble. Also if he'd attacked into my very weakened 4th Army the massive game ending encirclement would not have been possible.
Also even though Jason felt that he was not wearing down my units he actually was (hint fer Jason ;) ) . It's not just material that I had to worry about but the build up of fatigue. Each battle, not matter how small, added to the fatigue of my units which in turn makes them less capable in battle. So even though my body count was way ahead of his, my men and vehicles were wearing out at an increasing rate the entire game... well until I rested them and the bug kicked in.

So overall the campaign felt like a very plausible telling of the actually history. The ebb and flow of the battles and front lines felt right for what we were recreating.

Looking forward to a rematch.

Crossroads

Cheers Barth! So those counter attacks were wearing the Germans down  :smitten:  :clap:

I still have my Matrix Anniversary Coupon around somewhere... now where is it again...
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

Crossroads

So that's why I haven't bought this yet. Been here before. Go to the Steam store. Begin to contemplate about really wanting to start with Warsaw To Paris instead. Then procrastinate more, as that one is so much older of a version... Help me out here guys
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

DC1, and DC2 for that matter, are quite different games. The battle mechanics are similar, but the interactive politics in DC3 are waaaay different. I have never played anything like it.

I would love to see DC1 and DC2 upgraded to DC3's level. Not sure that's possible without a massive code rewrite.

I've played games like DC1 and DC2 before. They're great examples of that genre. DC3 isn't just another example of that genre. It builds upon that genre into a new kind of game.
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RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Barthheart

DC1 is a great game. I still play it. The full France campaign is a lot of fun from either side.

DC2 was just too many units for me. The scale was just not fun for me.

DC3 uses similar base mechanics but the new political level added is a fantastic addition. I think it's the best in the series.