K62
Posts: 666
Joined: 6/7/2002 From: DC Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Beethoven1 quote:
ORIGINAL: Rosencrantus Agreed with K62, all due respect to the Axis player this game, but any experienced Axis player would be able to punish this strategy pretty easily. People always say this, but nobody actually ever does it. What exactly could an experienced Axis player do to punish this? Let's say in theory that the Axis player could in theory advance as far as Voronezh/Stalingrad/Krasnodar, but if they actually take those cities, then Soviets can re-take them in winter and get +6 bonus VPs for early recapture. So Axis is actually perversely incentivized to NOT take those cities even if they are totally undefended. However, in practice they would not actually be undefended, because in practice this strategy is about having a non-existent-to-light defense in the south in the early turns, not permanently having no real south defense. Meanwhile if our experienced Axis player takes the opposite tack and tries sending Panzergruppe 1 to the center, then Soviets could start actually defending in the south by deploying even relatively meager forces to get in the way of the slow advance of the German infantry. Sorry, I don't have the time to start a new game right now but here's the math: Area VPs HWM Note ==== === === ==== Riga, Minsk, Lvov 41 411 Easy picks T1 Tallinn, Pskov, Smolensk 35 446 Conservative estimate of 5 bonus VPs Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov, D-town, Zaporozhe 80 526 Presumably abandoned by Soviet player Kursk, Stalino 32 558 Presumably first Soviet line of defense Sevastopol, Rostov, Orel, Voronezh 84 642 At least some of these should fall before schedule Tula, Ryazan, Tambov, Rzhev 64 706 Sudden victory stretch I believe the correct strategy for the Axis player is not to send PG1 to the center but rather something on the lines of: - Two infantry armies towards Sevastopol - Some AGC infantry goes through Gomel to help AGS at Rostov - Rest of AGC infantry plus most of AGN infantry grinds towards Rzhev - PG1 leads southern advance - PG2 and PG3 break into the open ground on the Orel - Ryazan direction - PG4 is a strategic reserve Tyronec is probably the expert on the southern strategy and may have a much better setup than what I've described above (if he's willing to share it...). If the Axis player knows where the Soviet lines will be and designs the logistic network appropriately then FBD speed should not be a huge constraint. Also, even if Axis doesn't attain 700 VPs it's still up to the Soviets later on to match a pretty high HWM, possibly well into the 600s.
< Message edited by K62 -- 2/3/2022 5:22:26 PM >
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