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janh -> RE: Alpha AAR - A year at the front with Field Marshal Noob (7/25/2010 9:11:56 AM)
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@Dale H. Comment from personal impressions. I think BigAnorak played with hindsight and performed the 41 campaign extremely well and with lower losses than historically. The Germans also made many mistakes, like not having enough PzDivs up north, and withdrawing armor from HG Mitte to Kiev for the pocket battle there, and subsequent capture of Donbas up to Rostov. BigAnorak has avoided such distractions, and avoided very bloody frontal engagements.
AI might be a bit slow on armored counterstrikes, which I recall from literature happened regularly in 41 by small groups of the new T34 and KV tanks, and cost the germans men, initiative, material and required usually the 88mm or occassionally the 150 to intervene pointe-blanc. I cannot gather from this AAR whether GAIA has performed such local counterattacks to disturb his advance. Maybe they were in fact only a few dozens of those, but made it into the literature.
The question whether the pocket battles seems easy here or not, I think is skewed a bit due to the weekly turn time scale. Historically a lot of the heavy fights in 1941 happened in a day, or a few, especially fighting to close pockets, or russian tries to break out. Of course with a weekly turn, this evens out into "some averagely intense" attack, or defense. If you had dayly turns, or two day turns, the heat would probably be spread very unevenly.
BigAnorak also ended up lucky in Leningrad, and did not extend his lines to Stalino or even Rostov, and managed to get the Crimea including Sevastopol. All this serves to shorten and straighten out his lines substantially better than the Germans did historically manage. I think especially this point is very valuable, and should not be underestimated. He can now use the Finish in the battle line south, and for garrison duty, while he can avoid putting italian, hungarian and romanian units into the line south. Plus he now dug in his well desgined front line for 7 weeks, so I would assume this is an almost perfect plan to win the 41' winter fights.
Had the German done so, and not had such a broken front line with extremely exhausted, bled-down units, severe supply problems due to weather and distance from the rail depots, I would assume it would have been the Russian to bear the brunt of the losses in the Blizzard attacks. I am curioius how this is modeled here and how BigAnorak will come out of this winter. He should be in rather pretty good shape, much better than historically.
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