North Germany area - swamp or fiction?

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North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/7/2019 10:46:57 PM

mussey

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Below is a screenshot of the north Germany area near Bremerhaven. I changed the terrain to swamp, but I'm not sure if this is correct. In other games I played, the hexes were forest. Below is what I have, another is what it actually is:

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/7/2019 10:49:32 PM

mussey

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Now here is a Google maps of what most of these hexes look like. Canals, ditches, etc., with no forest. Probably farmland. How would you label this terrain?

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< Message edited by mussey -- 2/7/2019 10:51:06 PM >

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 2:01:28 AM

BigDuke66

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Well you already see the word Moor there twice, what is Bog.
Do we have swamp in the game? Editor only shows me marsh what seems ok to depict it.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 2:40:26 AM

Lobster

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It is all cropland. Well drained of any wetlands. Would you make all of Netherlands swamp? Of course not. It is not swamp.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 6:32:22 AM

cathar1244

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Lobster

It is all cropland. Well drained of any wetlands. Would you make all of Netherlands swamp? Of course not. It is not swamp.

Cropland, but not like cropland just a bit further south. All those canals are serious obstacles to movement. Northern Germany and The Netherlands are etched by terrain like that. Perhaps the terrain should show minor canals radiating in all directions. At any rate, it should be terrain that encourages motorized forces to stay on the roads.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 7:31:47 AM

Colinwhittaker

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Although the area wouldn't classify as a tropical mangrove swamp, the going for tracked vehicles will be very poor. On that basis I think it is correct to classify low lying areas like this as marsh.

I am currently revisiting the maps in TOAW for the 1970s and they are uniformly not bad. Errors from the original Next War game have crept in. As a consequence I am 44% through doing my own map at a scale of 10km per hex for the North Europe area covering Afcent's area of operations from Flensberg in the North to Austria in the south, as far west as Dunkirk and East as far as Pozen

I will post the map when I have it finished in a couple of weeks and tell the story about creating it.

Let me know if you are interested

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 11:15:46 AM

Lobster

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Any drained croplands would pose only a minor inconvenience for any invader. True in the Netherlands during WW2. Even more so for the Soviets in any conflict in Northern Germany since they are even more capable of navigating terrain such as this. They are not driving your 4 wheeler.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 11:27:36 AM

cathar1244

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Lobster

Any drained croplands would pose only a minor inconvenience for any invader. True in the Netherlands during WW2. Even more so for the Soviets in any conflict in Northern Germany since they are even more capable of navigating terrain such as this. They are not driving your 4 wheeler.

I would not agree re: 'minor inconvenience'. In MARKET-GARDEN, British 30 Corps did not engage in a lot of off-road maneuver, and the nature of the ground was if anything better than that found in the region identified by Mussey.

The sheer number of canals in that region of Germany force repeated deployment of bridging vehicles, and that in open country easily observed and fired upon by enemy forces.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 6:24:00 PM

BigDuke66

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For those understanding German this might help:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norddeutsches_Tiefland
Marsh terrain is:
61 Ems- und Wesermarschen (D25)
67 Untere Elbeniederung (Elbmarsch) (D24)
68 Schleswig-Holsteinische Marschen (D21)

Others like 63 for example have mixed terrains of sandy geest, untouched river plain and bog. How to depict this is a tough decission.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 6:50:55 PM

cathar1244

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BigDuke66, thanks for the German URL, interesting maps there.

Depiction is a mess. A lot depends on weather and questions such as the condition of dikes. Not sure about all the ditches depicted on the Google map. Satellite imagery doesn't show much there, but there are tell-tale tree lines in cultivated land that indicate the flow of water. Reminds me of Alsace in certain ways, flat farmland with a lot of small waterways. If I had to guess, I'd say the soil there would not support much cross-country military traffic before it turned into a soup.

On edit: This URL has many 1/200,000 topographic maps of Germany. http://geographie.giersbeck.de/karten/

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< Message edited by cathar1244 -- 2/8/2019 7:00:23 PM >

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/8/2019 7:14:23 PM

elmo3

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What time period are you talking about? Using a current Google map might not be accurate if you are making a WWI or WWII scenario. Could have been forest back then that has since been cleared.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/9/2019 10:03:00 AM

mussey

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Very interesting. Before changing those hexes to marsh, I made them as cropland with small river canals for most of the hexes. But game-wise it looked less appealing. It's hard to depict the size of those channels or if they have serious embankments. While visiting Florida in the Bunnell area, they had some drainage culvert/channels that were about 20 feet wide and almost as deep. In winter/spring it could hold a lot of water. When dry they were like man-made ravines. Not easy to cross for man or beast.

Maybe we can consider them as anti-tank ditches with water, and if so, the hexes could be as I did before which was small river canal. A few marsh hexes would represent the true moors.

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/9/2019 1:21:57 PM

Lobster

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The area between Memel and Kretinga has similar terrain. The Germans depicted it as swamp on their 1941 maps. The US Army map service depicted it as a convoluted network of small streams. It was likely something in between depending in the weather. The area around Bremen is a network of mostly small drainage ditches connected to larger drainage ditches like the area of the maps above for the most part. A handful of spots have been left as wetland reserves. Much of the land is dry enough for crops. Others have are used as pasture. Typically land is left as pasture because it is less suitable for heavy farm machinery than other parcels of land. The world has many areas such as this. The East Front is littered with them.

The unfortunate fact is that TOAW has nothing for this. You either have to make it marsh or you have to make it a small river through each such hex.

Marsh has a severe impact on supply (-33%). Marsh has a +2 movement penalty that cannot be mitigated by engineering. Marsh multiplies defensive anti armor by x2. I don't recall at what Frozen Level marshes freeze over. Possibly 1. At the most Level 2.

Rivers (not 'super' rivers) help with disengagement. Rivers movement cost penalty is variable depending on engineering (minor/major ferry level) so that the cost can be for zero to +2. Units attacking from a river hex have their attack strengths reduced by 30%. The supply impact is greater using the new supply rules. Using the new supply rules supply would be greatly impacted by rivers in these hexes, likely more than marsh because the supply 'reach' would be reduced with each such hex not crossed by a road.

I probably missed some things.

So what is done with these hexes depends on what effect you want. In combat today these hexes would have a much smaller impact than in WW2 because combat engineering has become so much more efficient in modern armies not to mention roads are also vastly improved in the West. Scale would also have an impact. I can't see a 50km per hex map bothering with this at all.

< Message edited by Lobster -- 2/9/2019 1:24:31 PM >

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RE: North Germany area - swamp or fiction? - 2/9/2019 2:07:26 PM

cathar1244

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Note to Mussey. Looking at sat imagery of the area, I was startled to see an airfield in the area just to the left of the Google map image you posted. You may wish to add an airfield to the Cuxhaven hex. This is the Nordholz naval airfield.

Cheers

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