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Industrial -> RE: How realistic is TOAW 3? (8/6/2006 11:36:46 PM)
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Well, I think I've played close to 10 games of DnO so far, all got aborted before running the entire length because it was obvious at some point that either the germans got totally bogged down or that the soviets simply had nothing left to protect moscow.
What's indeed really important in this scenario is not only your tactical skill, but especially strategical thinking, you really have to know where you want to be 5-10 turns from now, and not just 1-2 turns. If you focus too much on tactical advantages you tend to throw to many regiments at encirceled soviet forces, killing them for sure, but having to few units advancing, and that often ends in you getting bogged down 5 turns from now because you simply dont have the wight up front needed to blow away the roadblock the soviets will throw at you.
And I somehow disagree with Menschenfresser, I think that it's easier to play the soviets in this scenario, because you simply get so many units, and so many replacements, you can afford to make some mistakes, and time is always on your side. Not so for the germans, they can't afforf to lose much time as every turn a soviet factory isn't overrun means one turn of increased soviet production. Every turn you lose because your advances are too slow gives the soviets one additional turn to strengthen their newest defence line. And the german replacements are nothing compared to the soviets replacements, having a 1:3 loss penalty is simply not enough, the germans have to do much better to fight of the nummerous soviet divisions that will pop up, and that is almost only doable by large scale encircelments.
I do agree that it's a completely different game for the soviets if the german side is played by a competent TOAW grognard, than you are really in trouble. I've played a few games as the soviets (about 5 vs different opponents) and in only one game I was really in trouble, that was vs JAMiAM. To bad that game got aborted early on at turn 4 or so due to real life interferring, just to give you an overview of how different those games can go:
at the end of Axis turn 03 / beginning of the soviet turn 04 JAMiAM had:
captured Riga and penetrated past the Dvina river in force
reached the Velikaya River south of Lake Peipus, pushing for Velikiye Luki
had breached the gap between Orsha and Vitebsk and thereby opened the way towards Smolensk
crossed the Dnepr River south of Orsha in strength
reached the Stalin Line in full strength
in one of my earlier DnOs, but already with some erperience from earlier games, I:
was still struggeling to capture Riga
had just penetrated the Dvina river but not pushed very far ahead
had just taken Minsk and was still almost 200km away from the Vitebsk/Orsha gap
hadn't even reached the Berezina river west of the Dnepr river
hadn't even reached teh Stalin line yet
I got progressively better from game to game, but even now I struggle with recreating JAMiAMs early successes, and my first few games of DnO were a complete disaster I'd rather not talk about [:D]
To make it short: if the german player is average and the soviet player not really tarrible, he should be able to quickly stop the german advances and build a coherent front line which he'll than be able to simply pump reinforcements into whereever it seems to get weaker, this is a almost 99% foolprove way to really frustrate the germans. If the soviet player is too coward as to risk an early defence (maybe becasue of bad experiences with other scenarios) and runs, the germans will make some advances and later grind to a halt, because however weak the soviets are on the offensive, on the defence they are a tough nut to crack!
If the german player really knows what he's doing, it'll be a really tough time for the soviets, because than you can't just retreat at your leisure, you will be smashed from your positions and really have to run, and there will be many tears, lots of blood spilled and many sad letters for the relatives to be written [:)]
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