jubjub
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Joined: 5/2/2021
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Tank armies
Now that I have hopefully saved someone from making mistakes that make me shake my head, I want to start laying out the methods to grind the Axis advance into a slow crawl.
Left unmolested, the Axis armor formations will pierce your defenses and race off into the sunset. It is critical to blunt this spear. Mobile hit squads of tanks and mechanized divisions can play this role and spoil the Axis party. By concentrating all of the best armor into 3-4 armies in the Western and Southwestern Fronts and giving them the best leadership, best SU’s, etc., the Red Army can quickly achieve impressive amounts of mobility and firepower.
These units are excellent quick reaction forces, able to repel advances across the Dnieper, break encirclements, and contain breakouts. In my opinion, these formations are absolutely necessary to slow the game down until the winter breaks down the invaders. It's also just a ton of fun to have huge tank battles and trash panzer divisions 
As seen in this screenshot, I manage to win 1-2 battles against armored formations by turn three and destroy 63 mechanized elements on my turn. Not only was I able to win battles on turn three, but I kept hitting my opponent hard for multiple turns, crippling his offensive. By turn 10, any panzer division left in clear terrain was fair game. You can see the high W/L ratio for these leaders as well, especially Rokossovsky 
How to Develop Your Tank Armies
To develop these armies as quickly as possible, we need to make Southwestern and Western Fronts assault HQ’s on turns one and two respectively. Additionally, we need to allocate our best mechanized units to our best corps leaders (e.g. Rokossovsky’s 9th MC). These corps should all go into the same armies. We want to minimize how often these units change HQ’s, as this eliminates the assault HQ bonuses for the turn.
As the corps go away, replace the army leaders with the best mechanized leaders, with the strongest armies receiving the best leaders. However, I don’t use Zhukov in this role, letting him instead lead one of the assault HQ’s on a later turn.
Refit these units at your own peril. The 41a TD and MD’s are behemoths, and suck up replacement supply at an stunning pace. This is a big problem until the supply backlog clears around turns 3-4. However, since they are so huge, they can still be quite powerful at 50% TOE. I prefer to wait until they change to the smaller 41b TOE to refit them, but may refit the big boys if the supply situation is strong.
A key aspect to developing these armies is to not place them on the front lines except where they are absolutely necessary, and they should never be front line against infantry. They are much more useful in the rear, where they maintain their mobility and firepower, and defend against mobile units instead of infantry. A couple placed on reserve also help immensely as they add a significant amount of uncertainty to the axis attacks, and forces the axis to overcommit to each battle. Keeping them in the rear also helps them to avoid encirclement, which is imperative as each unit can donate 1000+ vehicles to the fascist cause if encircled and destroyed.
Let's Smash Some Tractors
Now that you have built 3 to 4 of these armies, it’s time to gank unsuspecting victims. By this point in the game, the panzer divisions have exhausted most of their combat capability after racing hundreds of miles to the east in a few weeks. Often leaving low CPP, high fatigue panzer divisions in clear terrain, many players underestimate or are unaware of the imminent risk of 1000’s of swarming tanks. We want to prioritize hitting these as hard as we can. While their divisions may still have 8-10 CV, they are nothing our brave tankers can’t face with a bit of vodka and encouragement from the commissars. If you’re lucky, they may leave spare tank regiments lying around. These are terrible on defense and should be attacked mercilessly.
I have found that you need about 4:1 ratio in CV in the initial stages to overpower a panzer division in clear terrain – the only terrain you should attack them in. I’d also recommend bringing along a RD from another army to fill out the attacking force. Solitary panzer divisions are the priority targets, as they are harder to refit and worse on defense, but motorized divisions are also good targets. Don’t bother attacking SS units, however. They are totally OP and never lose.
It’s also a good tactic to cut off the unit you want to attack with the weakest mobile units prior to attacking, as this eliminates the risk of facing additional support units. It’s ok to lose some of these weak units as they take forever to refit anyway, and they should be sacrificed without hesitation if you can cut off the enemy’s advance.
Once you’ve fought and hopefully won the battle, you need to retreat these units and use the infantry for cover, as we don’t want them to get encircled.
The presence of these formations on the map have a couple of knock-on effects. Obviously, they are great at destroying tanks and cutting off advance units. Additionally, once you have given your opponent a couple of bloody noses, they will be forced to either start playing more cautiously or continue to get their most important units trashed. They need to build up CPP and rest before advancing, think twice about fighting with their tank divisions, and generally advance a much more manageable pace until the weather stops them.
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< Message edited by jubjub -- 6/25/2021 11:16:32 PM >
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Soviet Strategies for 1941 - A Brutal Slog - 
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