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george1972 -> RE: George vs. Seille - A Russia 1941 AAR over 60 turns (9/1/2008 1:05:08 PM)
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This turn sees the continuation of my offensive, but at great cost. Although the Wehrmacht inflicts a lot of casualties, it doesn't come out of these battles unscathed. Was I a bit premature to start attacking the Red Army on all fronts at this stage? Should I have waited until the Summer Offensive? I'm not sure. At least I inflicted greater losses than I took, which meant the Red Army could only grow at a slow pace.
Seille's forces where still lacking in supporting weaponry, most of all artillery, which meant that his great mass of infantry was not really able to engage dug in enemies. If I had let the pressure off, he might have rebuilt his artillery arm and gone over to a more offensive posture.
This turn also saw the introduction of a new tactic I tried out. Just before Winter came, I got an R&D breakthrough which I spent almost fully on fortifications. Since I didn't have enough to make a useful upgrade, I saved the rest of it. This allowed me to build fortifications in the Center to lessen the impact of Seille's massive air attacks.
The other use I found for fortifications was in support of mobile forces. As can be seen later on in the Ukraine, I have fewer but stronger units, while Seille prefers more numerous but weaker units. This way he can converge on my strong units if they try to punch through his lines and it more or less forces me to either encircle his units and destroy them before they get dangerous (I hardly ever pulled this off in this match) or let the front coalesce into a linear configuration which would degenerate into a slugging match. Obviously, this last option was undesirable from my point of view.
I came up with the idea of having my engineers move with the most vulnerable forward units and create fortifications for those units at their ending positions. Usually the engineers would be mobile enough to withdraw again after building them. The front-line unit would still be susceptible to concentric counter-attack, but since Seille had little or no artillery in the Ukraine, they would have to storm the fortifications. Even if they succeeded, Russian losses would be much higher. In this way I discouraged counter-attacks, while obtaining spring-boards for the continuation of the offensive in the following turn.
Of course, this tactic requires a lot of PP, and I think I easily spent over 60 PP building fortifications in this match, which could have been used elsewhere. But since I had a production disadvantage, preserving my strength while exacting the highest possible toll on the enemy seemed like a smart move.
The following shot shows the location of newly built fortifications.
[image]local://upfiles/29493/35CB80363C6B469F9194E3446C2F1AF9.jpg[/image]
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