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GloriousRuse -> RE: Panzers vs The Bear: A WitE2 MP AAR (Soviet Perspective) (3/15/2021 2:48:39 PM)
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T14
Not much to say that you haven't seen in the German AAR. Counterattacks break open the path to Kursk and the Stalino pocket, cut off a couple panzer divisions down south. A recent Beta update makes showing those battles hard (the old version reports don't show names), but suffice to say the lines are not much shifted. We are still on track to have Tula challenged (and likely lost), Leningrad down to lake only supply, a dangerous run near Moscow/Kalinin, and Stalino lost by October. The game now is about where this will all go in November, the last few weeks of tolerable campaign weather. Well, unless a few early blizzards come out of hihg pressure fronts from the east - you know, the same ones keeping the ground dry right now. Fingers crossed for karma.
But let's look at something else: Production. I've attached both the Soviet screen for this turn and the German screen from one of my other games at roughly the same point.
[img]https://i.ibb.co/YjSCb2G/Production.jpg[/img]
[img]https://i.ibb.co/qN9MC4K/Gprod.jpg[/img]
For those new, the production model is reasonably complex for a game that is not at it's core an economic simulator. Raw resources get shipped to industrial centers, where they are turned into intermediate products - tank or aircraft chassises of a certain model at the right plant, the generic Armaments, generic Supplies, Industry, trucks at truck plants, etc., and manpower gets shipped in from the various population centers under your control. All of those are subject to national modifiers representing the war effort (Germany takes a moment to scale up, the Russians are pretty committed from the start but start to run dry-er by the end of the war), as well as restrictions - the Germans might use captured Russian manpower in "Hiwi" support units, but they won't be driving Tigers. which in turn get welded together into elements. An element can be a rifle squad an IL-2 and anything in between. Those elements cost a set amount of Industry, Supplies, Armaments, Manpower, and an appropriate chassis. A T-34 for example needs a chassis (built at a T-34 plant for a certain industry cost), armaments for its guns (built at an arms plant), an initial fielding cost of supplies, and of course its crew comes out of manpower. And as a final catch, there are certain hard limits on things like artillery to represent historical production rates even if soecific plants for each 82mm mortar aren't modeled.
But those elements don't go straight to the front. They and returning damaged elements are put into a national pool of ready squads, tanks, aircraft, 152mm field pieces and so forth. Those then get drawn on based on need at the front. But not so fast...they still have to get there. These elements are assumed to be at a National Supply Source (the Ruhr, Berlin, Moscow, some near Ural cities and other similar other major centers) and then have to be shipped forward a Freight via the rail or port system, end up in a depot, and eventually get trucked (or horse'd if close enough) the last gap. Those replacement troops are competing with fuel, ammo, and supplies to get to the front and even then their arrival is subject to administrative quality checks for units not specifically designated to refit.
So you have to have the resources industrial and transport links to actually get the things and then the capacity to actually deliver them, and then units postured to actually receive them. By late '41 (or crossing out of Poland the other way in the late war), this chain can get long and tenuous. Especially if you're burning past your production rate to begin with.
Lets look at a few key items:
Manpower. In '41 and through part of '42, this is the effective limit on the Red Army. Even though I am routinely throwing more than 100k conscripts into the force weekly, you may also notice I am losing more than 100k conscripts weekly. Other than reserve formations mobilizing and units arriving from Siberia and Iran, the weekly manpower number vs weekly losses is a pretty good sign as to where the Red Army is going. Every town, every city, even the small ones, slowly chops into this number. Much like history, those losses won't be fatal to the State unless I lose so much of Russia I'm already dead, but they sure don't help.
Getting my happy peasants to the front is relatively easy - I'm being forced right back onto my industrial and population centers - is reasonably easy. Processing enough of them to keep up with the losses is less so. The Germans almost have the reverse of this problem - while their rate of replacements is low as Hitler promises the war will be over soon (it goes up in '42), their real issue is that those replacements have to travel over a shaky rail net, across Russia, and arrive at units that desperately need more fuel and ammo. In many cases a lost squad will stay lost until the owning unit takes an operational pause. That is the other reason you'll see the Germans fall into their historical pattern of lunge, peter out, and recover.
Artillery. Arming those 150k peasants and workers with anything heavier than mortars and machineguns is, thanks to my nascent artillery industry, a desperate affair. Yet another reason early war soviet formations have a rough time. I produce maybe 70x 122mm howitzers a week at the moment, and unlike WitE1 I can't magically decide I want more by converting arms points. You'll have probably guessed I'm losing more than 70x 122mm howitzers each week. Which means that even as my patriots march to the front, they are suffering from a historically accurate shortage of heavy weapons for now. Indeed, one of the biggest effects of saving or losing "regular army" units is that they usually have their full complement of guns, something your new formations absolutely won't.
The Germans are in similar straits. No one saw the war going long, and the artillery industry isn't in full gear yet. So long as they roll forward victorious, it can keep up, if only barely. Once units start retreating and batteries of guns get left behind, der Fuehrer's efforts to keep the civilian population happy are going to start leaving semi-permanent holes in the strength of units as the artillery industry just can't keep up.
Trucks Trucks are life. They carry supplies. You need them in depots to keep They are a pre-req for motorized units like panzers and tank corps actually having their full movement potential. HQ units almost all have a complement for their own movement and final stage logistics. THEY CARRY SUPPLIES. Right now, both sides are getting massive truck influxes. The soviets are basically mobilizing them off the economy. Unfortunately, the Germans are capturing lots of them off the soviets. But the day is coming when each side will be down to a couple thousand trucks a week - and then the relentless toll on these vehicles is going to start becoming a bigger and bigger issue. The trucks you lose in '41 will have real effects on '42.
Fuel The German fuel position is, for the first time ever in a WitX series, real. Suffice to say that while they can run amok now, it'll become painfully clear by the summer of '42 why they went for the oil fields. Assuming the war lasts that long...
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