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warhead2 -> RE: Wish list (6/26/2007 11:21:01 PM)
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here it is "the real deal"
http://www.warfarehq.com/index.php?page=articles/cs_articles/real_deal_notes.shtml
"Designers Notes for "The Real Deal" scenario"
by Jim Dunnigan
When Jim Rose asked me to do a scenario for this game, I agreed as long as I could do something a little different. My first idea, to do a 1939 battle between the Russians and Japanese in the Far East, proved impossible because of how the first release of East Front was being designed. My second idea was to do one of the first encounters with the Russian KV series heavy tank. This didn't work out because these encounters tended to go on for hours, or even days, until the Germans were able to bring these beasts down. Then I realized that what east front tactical games tend to ignore is what the troops there spent most of their time doing. Namely, defending and attacking fortifications. The attacks were breaking and entering on a very large scale. Note that the Russians did not give so much provenance to artillery because of mobile warfare, but in order to win at the more prosaic trench battles. Designers, and gamers, prefer the more glamorous, or at least less tedious, armored battles. But most of the action on the Russian front was in the trenches. Not very glamorous, and rather plodding, these set piece battles defined the fighting in the east more than anything else. It was the Russians who set the pace for developments in trench warfare. While the Germans became quite good at it, the Russians were always a little better.
So I decided to do a scenario on trench warfare. Yeah, it's a downer, but most of the other scenarios will cover the dashing mobile warfare. I don't mind doing the less appetizing stuff. Besides, I think I may have broken the game along the way. But enough of that, The Real Deal scenario covers the opening hours of the Soviet 20th army's August, 1942 assault against three divisions of the German 9th army. These three divisions were at about half strength, as they had not yet recovered from the beating they had taken in the previous Spring and Winter. You have two hours (20 turns) to keep the Russians from crashing through your defenses. Historically, it was touch and go in the first two hours and by the end of the day the German lines were breached in many places, especially on the left flank.
Why the Soviet 20th Army? Why August, 1942? Glad you asked. When I decided to go after the KV tank scenario, I promptly came up short on real information. So I went to a friend of mine, Allan Rehm, who, in addition to being a wargamer, has the largest collection of Soviet era Russian language unit histories and staff reports. He's also a lot faster at translating Russian than I am. He checked through his collection and came up with the fact that there were no really exciting encounters between the KVs and the Germans. In the process he began translating the staff report that follows. And then I realized that this was what the war out there was really about and asked Allan to translate all the good parts. He did and it is shown below. An accompanying Excel worksheet gives all the Russian (and most of the German) order of battle. The staff study translated is one of several dozen that were prepared after World War II and used by the Red Army as "case studies" for the training of their staff officers.
After examining this material I decided the right thing to do was show the Soviets' 331st Rifle division's operations in that attack. The 331st had the 17th Tank Brigade attached (which was supposed to have KVs, but that's another story). But I had some trouble getting the map information sorted out and off to Talonsoft, so I ended up having them do the entire 20th Army sector. Came out quite nice. But now I had all this space. Well, might as well fill it up. Let's do the entire 20th Army. Hey, maybe we can break the code. Now working with beta scenario design tools is no fun under the best of conditions and it got worse with East Front. But I kept going. I made a few changes. Rather than putting the German 36th Panzergrenadier division on the right flank, I put them in the middle. Actually, the reason I did that was less in the cause of experimentation but more because at the time the early beta version of the scenario editor had a bug that prevented you from easily deleting units once you had put them down. I started putting down a German unit in the wrong place (actually did that twice, but only re-did all my map work once) and had to switch the two German divisions. No big deal, as the only practical difference is that the Panzergrenadiers have trucks. Anyway, it shows you what you can do with all this material. Using The Real Deal map and abundance of Order of Battle information, you can conjure up any number of scenarios. Change the names of the two supporting files (Pogorelo.map and Pogorelo.org) and start a new scenario.
With The Real Deal scenario itself, keep in mind that you should always let the computer play the Russians. As the German player, you will spend most of your time moving your dwindling supply of mobile reserves around to plug the gaps. The Russians will keep on coming. At this stage of the war, the Russians were losing up to five troops for every German casualty they inflicted. Of the 80,000 Russian troops involved in this campaign, a bit over half became casualties.
To further simplify things, I have left out a lot of the Russian artillery operations. The Germans were well dug in (although you might want to add entrenchments for many of the rear area German units) and the game starts after the Russian preparatory bombardment has finished. I thought of adding a lot of craters, but realized, while realistic, it would have ruined a perfectly good map. Do it yourself.
If you want a more manageable taste of The Real Deal, just do the sector of the Soviet 331st Rifle Division. Just highlight that outfit and do that frontage, back a few kilometers behind the Russian lines and out ten kilometers into German territory. Much more manageable, although not nearly as impressive to view.
I hope you enjoy this scenario. If you don't, you'll at least know the real reason why Germans tried to avoid service on the Eastern Front.
by Jim Dunnigan
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