sonoran_fox
Posts: 8
Joined: 4/16/2005
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Hi
I am the designer friend vahauser mentions in the post above. His description of the campaign is mostly right. The campaign starts in May of 42 and will go into March of 1943, with 25-30 battles being the target.
"Kampfgruppe Wolff" begins as a scratch team built at Dneprepetrovsk in response to the emergency situation the Soviet breakthrough south of Kharkov has created early in May. The Soviets at one point were threatening the entire position of AGS. Kharkov, Poltava and Dneprepetrovsk were all directly threatened, and if Dneprepetrovsk had fallen all of AGS south of there (including the Crimea) would have had their supply lines cut. Sooo.... Kampfgruppe Wolff is born of desperation and the, ummm, eclectic assortment of auxillaries in your ongoing OB reflects this emergency baptism as a combat unit.
Battles are spaced at a variable rate. Some are only a day or two apart, other times a couple of weeks separates them. The pacing is largely determined by what I as a designer believe is a reasonable possibility of activity. The intent is to roughly simulate what a mobile kampfgruppe attached to Army Group South would experience during the summer of 42 campaign. Outside of your core group both the Axis and Soviet units will normally be "standard issue quality".
This is a good time to note that this scenario will be an "alternative history" and vahauser's assumption that the campaign will go to Stalingrad is his, not mine. I never said anything about Stalingrad in our conversations about this campaign! He has made his own assumptions and automatically wants to follow the same old trail. If you think like vahauser, be prepared for some surprises.
The maps are usually large to very large (some 10s from the custom map builder) with large to very large OBs for the Soviet opponent. The Axis OB features your (not particularly large) core, a set of auxillaries (that eclectic bunch mentioned above) that will be present at some strength in most of the battles and some scenario specific forces that relate to the overall campaign activity occuring right then, i.e. engineers will be present when forcing a bridgehead etc.
The fact that the maps are large and activity frenzied at times mean force mobility and adequate numbers are virtues that will be at a premium in your core group. Everyone that plays Steel Panthers has his own style and will build his/her core to taste. However, as the designer I will say that the usual tension between numbers and quality that is present for any German player will be rewarded by shading toward numbers in your initial buy with the intent to upgrade as you go. The Soviet forces you will be facing initially will be mostly be winter of 41/42 raised and equipped forces. You can expect to see the better equipped and more formidable Soviet forces we all remember from history appear over the summer with a notable improvement in the Red Army as the winter of 42/43 hits.
As a final note I pass on an anecdote an ex-army buddy friend relates. During the 70s he was stationed in Germany and was returning to base using the German rail system with half a dozen of his buddies after a weekend in Bavaria. They mostly had the car to themselves and spent much of the ride discussing (argueing?) amongst themselves why the Germans lost in East during WWII. Sitting quietly in a corner of the rail car and listening was an elderly German. When the oldtimer reached his stop he paused just before stepping out and turned to let my friend know his opinion. "You want to know why we lost? We lost that war because Russia was too big, too cold and there were too d*** many of them!"
Good Hunting
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