Flaviusx
Posts: 7750
Joined: 9/9/2009 From: Southern California Status: offline
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Historically, they lost a lot. Two whole tank armies got creamed on the approaches to Stalingrad, and that's not including the Kharkov fiasco earlier on. This isn't well understood today, but Soviet armor bitterly contested the drive on Stalingrad before 6th army got into the city proper, constantly hitting the flanks. The Germans were slowed down, but smoked the Soviet armor, which greatly outnumbered them. Sovs didn't really know how to handle their armor well at this point, alas, and it showed. But they threw it in with wild and desperate abandon nonetheless. In this game the armor has been mostly absent. A few tank brigades here and there, but mostly just a bunch of grunts. Only now is it starting to show up on the front lines. The AI hasn't committed it to combat until very recently, and it should have around two dozen tank corps to play with during this entire period. (Assuming that the order of battle for the game is anything like the historical one, anyways.) I've been following this AAR for a while and have been wondering the entire time: "where are the Soviet tank corps at?" This business at Voronezh is the first serious counterstroke the Sov AI has tried. Pyledriver showed a kill screenshot uptopic, and the exchange rate for the Germans was around 3:1 for armor. That's low. The infantry loss exchange rate is running double that. (And that's rather high.) That reflected the game situation a couple turns ago, so it might be different now, granted. Edit: almost forgot, the Sovs committed a third tank army around this time, namely the 5th around Voronezh. Presumably, that's the one Pyledriver ran into. 1st and 4th were the ones near Stalingrad. The 5th tank army counterstroke alone involved 1500 Soviet tanks, and 7 or so tank corps in an action during early July.
< Message edited by Flaviusx -- 5/9/2010 12:14:36 PM >
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