Activating Ukraine

Activating Ukraine (Full Version)

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CrusssDaddy -> Activating Ukraine (7/2/2014 7:51:02 PM)
Any of you WiF players ever do this in a game? The option is disabled in CWiF, but the counter set is there and you can use debug to drop them on the map, where they behave as if aligned to the controlling major power. Haven't experimented with it yet to see if Kiev is a secondary supply source, blue factories work as intended, etc. The activation cost to GER seems extraordinarily high -- anyone do it and find it worth the cost? Are there any advantages to USSR for activation? (Incidentally, Spanish Republican units behave the same way and you can create a 2x power Spain army for some interesting play.)

AxelNL -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/2/2014 8:22:17 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: CrusssDaddy Any of you WiF players ever do this in a game? The option is disabled in CWiF, but the counter set is there and you can use debug to drop them on the map, where they behave as if aligned to the controlling major power. Haven't experimented with it yet to see if Kiev is a secondary supply source, blue factories work as intended, etc. The activation cost to GER seems extraordinarily high -- anyone do it and find it worth the cost? Are there any advantages to USSR for activation? (Incidentally, Spanish Republican units behave the same way and you can create a 2x power Spain army for some interesting play.) Have you become a customer, Cruss?

CrusssDaddy -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/2/2014 8:31:23 PM)
Yes, I purchased WiF more than 20 years ago. I also bought Planes in Flames, America in Flames, Asia in Flames and Africa in Flames, along with a couple of the annuals.

Ur_Vile_WEdge -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/2/2014 9:06:58 PM)
Can't ever remember this being a good idea in practice. When my (Vassal) group started a new game and we were mulling over optionals, Ukraine got a resounding "Who cares?"

CrusssDaddy -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/2/2014 9:32:54 PM)
Germany gets all the blue factories (assuming they haven't been railed out), a forward supply source, convenient location for Ukrainian reinforcements, extra HQ and a key area free of partisans. Difficult to tell if that is worth an o-chit and losing several SS units (and I think the SS unit cost is clumsily handled and deserves a second look for improvement).

Joseignacio -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 6:48:35 AM)
quote: Have you become a customer, Cruss? quote: ORIGINAL: CrusssDaddy Yes, I purchased WiF more than 20 years ago. I also bought Planes in Flames, America in Flames, Asia in Flames and Africa in Flames, along with a couple of the annuals. So, it means... No. [:D] It's funny how Crussy can complain to no end about something he has not bought...

Joseignacio -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 7:01:11 AM)
About Ukraine: Big pros: - Secondary supply source in an area without partisans that extends till Poland. It means no USSR partisans there anymore. Plus there may be UKR anti URSS partisans. - Get the Blue factories for Axis when conquered. - The USSR cannot rail anymore any of those (5?) factories. It loses them. Big con: - Cost is 1 offesive chit or 15 offensive points Small pros: - You get one or two UKR units for free - UKR unis added to the pool and deployed in UKR - UKR units primary source is UKR. Small con: - Destroy some SS units you most probably don't need to buy and one or two already built.

Joseignacio -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 7:01:49 AM)
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CrusssDaddy -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 1:57:40 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Joseignacio About Ukraine: Big pros: - Secondary supply source in an area without partisans that extends till Poland. It means no USSR partisans there anymore. Plus there may be UKR anti URSS partisans. - Get the Blue factories for Axis when conquered. - The USSR cannot rail anymore any of those (5?) factories. It loses them. Big con: - Cost is 1 offesive chit or 15 offensive points Small pros: - You get one or two UKR units for free - UKR unis added to the pool and deployed in UKR - UKR units primary source is UKR. Small con: - Destroy some SS units you most probably don't need to buy and one or two already built. Are your rankings based simply on guesswork, or have you activated Ukraine in a game?

Ur_Vile_WEdge -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 3:08:38 PM)
Except that the factory will be railed out, it's a forward secondary supply source, no better than an HQ, and partisans rarely spawn in Russia and when they do they have a tendency to get squished the next impulse. IMO anyway, it isn't worth anything near the O-chit, nevermind the SS units you fry away to set up the Ukraine.

Joseignacio -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 3:23:40 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: CrusssDaddy quote: ORIGINAL: Joseignacio About Ukraine: Big pros: - Secondary supply source in an area without partisans that extends till Poland. It means no USSR partisans there anymore. Plus there may be UKR anti URSS partisans. - Get the Blue factories for Axis when conquered. - The USSR cannot rail anymore any of those (5?) factories. It loses them. Big con: - Cost is 1 offesive chit or 15 offensive points Small pros: - You get one or two UKR units for free - UKR unis added to the pool and deployed in UKR - UKR units primary source is UKR. Small con: - Destroy some SS units you most probably don't need to buy and one or two already built. Are your rankings based simply on guesswork, or have you activated Ukraine in a game? They are based in: 1 The rules. 2 The generally accepted considerations of veteran players about what is relevant and what is not. As for wether I did, ... I did once. But I couldn't value it very much because the game was inmediately aborted because of a serious health problema of one of the players.

Joseignacio -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 3:37:13 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Ur_Vile_WEdge Except that the factory will be railed out, it's a forward secondary supply source, no better than an HQ, and partisans rarely spawn in Russia and when they do they have a tendency to get squished the next impulse. IMO anyway, it isn't worth anything near the O-chit, nevermind the SS units you fry away to set up the Ukraine. The Factories will be railed out ... if they can. Odessa usually cannot be saved. That leaves Kiev and 3 more IIRW. The russian player needs to be very attentive to rail one Factory each turn, and needs to use all the rail moves for factories, and would still need 4 more turns. If the GE player can sorround some of the cities, or ZOC the rail out of the city, they cannot. A secondary supply source is like a static HQ, can supply 4 hexes every direction in good climate. And is a primary for UKR. UNlike what you seem to believe, it's not unprobable that partisans appear in USSR, i would give a 40% without looking at the tables, and the partisan value is very high, after the first year of war, so even more tan one partisan may come in a turn, specially when the units are ZOCing each other. Plus, Partisans don�t need to die son, they get a +1 in value in a forest, they can be placed in a swamp, and with time their values improve pretty fast. Plus, it doesn't really matter wether the partisan is screwed if it can cut a rail supply line and leave some GE units OOS or negate a resource or a Factory. Plus, besides the URSS can no longer do this to you in UKR, you CAN do it to URSS in UKR. Plus, it's a Primary Supply Source for UKR units. You can try to produce them preferently (selecting the groups more prone to, or scraping old units in their pools). I have my doubts about wether it's worth it, it depends how bad id the URSS player, if he gets very nervous and forgets some impulses to move some factories out (like it was my game's case...) or if he selects a Combined (to f*ck up my baltic convoys) in a bad wether impulse, you may take away from him several factories, and maybe use them yourself if needed (unprobable until late in the game, of course).

brian brian -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 4:42:36 PM)
There was a long discussion about which SS units are removed on the Yahoo email list this year. The result of the discussion was removals are not from future year pools, I believe, which I had never considered. ??? The upshot of that is it makes trying the option in a 1940 Barbarossa a pretty interesting idea, if you ask me, though I haven't had a chance to try it yet even solitaire. In 1940 you would lose an INF, a MECH, and 3 divisions, including a mountain division, but still less than 1941, or especially 1942, when an ARM and a great MTN would be lost. I never have been sure what to do about the SS GARR City-Based Volunteer units if this rule was used. ? It is a great question of the history of WWII - what if the Germans �. hadn't been so � evil? I don't like this optional rule on historical grounds. If the Germans hadn't had expansionist dreams of colonizing Eastern Europe via simply killing the existing inhabitants, would they have gone to war at all? Perhaps allowing it in the case of a USSR DOW on Germany makes more sense. Exploring a hypothetical is a good thing to have in a game, but this is a HUGE hypothetical. Hitler wakes up one day and decides to be - Nice? I don't think so.

Joseignacio -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 5:24:07 PM)
I was the starter of that discussion... [:)]

Ur_Vile_WEdge -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 5:55:37 PM)
What are you talking about? It's easy to save Odessa. That's what the suicide unit in Chinesau is for. If you're doing a 5 steps back setup, you should have more than enough time to rail out Odessa, Kiev, and then Dnepropetrovsk if the Germans are aiming south, with the possible interpolation of Vitebsk if the Germans are putting a lot of effort north. And you get 3 rail moves on a land impulse for the Soviets. Railing a factory to the Asian map takes 2, so that leaves you one per impulse and then some to move guys. If you don't have to do a lot of railing (which itself is dependant on how many MIL you build, and your just general deployment), you can easily move out 10-12 factories from May to October. As for the supply value, yeah, it's a static HQ, and a primary for the Ukranians. But have you seen the Ukranian force pool? It's terrible. Far weaker per BP than either the Soviet or the German units, which means that generally, you don't want to build them unless you're facing counter shortages. Plus, if Kiev falls, they all vanish in the haze. And I think it's one of the great failings of the game that the German supply situation in Russia is so simple. The width of the Ukraine, from the Pripet to the Black Sea, is about 8 hexes, containing 2-3 parallel railroad lines. And by 1941, the Germans will have X HQs, Bock, Leeb, Runstedt, Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein as the year dies down, not to mention their minors Mannerheim, Antonescu, and possibly Prince Paul. That's more than enough to set up 2-3 supply HQs behind each theater and build redundancy into the supply network. Even if a partisan hops up on a railroad line, you should be able to trace to a HQ and back to Germany. Partisans are flyspeck annoyances, not a serious threat. Certainly not worth blowing an O-chit to slightly ameliorate, I have the big Soviet Amy that needs to be trampled. Those behind the line Rumanian/Hungarian/Bulgarian/weak SS units are more than enough to stop them from appearing in vital places most of the time, and to kill them when they do pop up. RE: 40 barb. The 40 barb works because of speed and fluidity and low unit density. I've rarely pulled it off at all, and never consciously thought about creating the Ukraine, but I would think that losing the O-chit in 40 means more than losing it in 41.

Centuur -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 6:59:00 PM)
The creation of the Ukraine really depends on the situation on the board. I've seen it happened once. The Axis player did put such a pressure on the northern front (and was extremely lucky in land combat), that the USSR was railing factories out of that area as a top priority. Later, the Germans broke out from the Sverdlovsk area to the south, captured Kiev and created Ukraine... It had a devastating effect on the USSR economy and war production, since no factories were railed out of Ukraine at that point (not even the Odessa one, since the war on the Polish/Rumanian border with Ukraine was nothing more than a Sitzkrieg)... His total strategy was based on the creation of the Ukraine against the USSR... Quite impressive, that was...

Courtenay -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 9:54:35 PM)
OK, so there are some reasons the Germans might want to create Ukraine. It is legal for the Russians to create Ukraine, too. Are there any reasons for the Russian player to do so? If there are, I can't see them.

Ur_Vile_WEdge -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/3/2014 10:11:44 PM)
It expands the force pool, I guess.

Extraneous -> RE: Activating Ukraine (7/4/2014 5:52:10 AM)
quote: Immediately that Ukraine is created, the Ukrainian MIL is placed on the production circle to arrive as a reinforcement in the following turn. The remaining available Ukrainian units are added to the force pools and may be purchased from now on. In future years, as more units become available, these units too are added to the force pools (see WiF 4.1.1). Soviet MIL from cities in the Ukraine are removed from the game whenever they are no longer on map. Once created, the Ukraine is treated as a separate minor country with Kiev as its capital aligned with the installing major power (eg. all blue factories are available to the owner, Kiev is a secondary supply source, etc). It can be conquered and liberated in the same manner as any other minor country. Before the Ukrainian minor country is created, Soviet (not Ukrainian) partisans may be placed there. As soon as the Ukrainian minor country is created, remove all partisans in The Ukraine. Soviet partisans may no longer be placed there. Instead, whenever a roll for partisans in the Soviet Union is called for, you also make a separate roll for partisans in The Ukraine. The partisan number in the Ukraine is 10 and only affects enemy major powers (i.e. equivalent to the green partisans on the Partisan table). If the USSR creates the Ukraine This stops the Germans from being able to create the Ukraine. The Ukraine becomes a USSR aligned minor country. Supply, resources, factories, and USSR units in the Ukraine are handled as any other aligned minor country. The USSR adds to its force pool (eventually). The USSR MIL for Ukrainian cities are removed from the game. More partisans are possible. You become a kinder gentler Stalin.

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