Odenathus
Posts: 68
Joined: 8/16/2010
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Always been interested in the Russian Revolution and the resulting war, and wondered whether it could be made into a reasonable game. I wanted to cover the whole scope of the fighting, but reluctantly decided that it just wasn't possible to include anything east of the Urals. The fighting there was largely confined to the towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway, but to include that vast area all the way to Vladivostok would mean the area west of the Urals being too small. I used a map originally designed for an ultra-modern game called 'Armageddon 2000' by Frederic Jousse: it needed a lot of trimming to exclude western and central Europe, and obviously the cities, railways, vegetation,etc had to be redrawn. Corps/division/brigade level made it mobile enough for different fronts to be identified and fought over, but prevented a WWI style continuous line of units, which never developed. In any case, really detailed, accurate OOBs are almost impossible to come by, so an FitE style game wasn't feasible. Most of the equipment was WWI vintage, so there was no need to create a separate eqp. file. The timescale was a problem - there was fighting in Russia from the October 1917 Revolution onwards, but a lot of it was very smale-scale and sporadic. By 1919 the Whites had become organised, most of the Interventionist forces had landed, and the Nationalists had consolidated their grip, so that seemed an appropriate starting point. I wanted it to carry on until mid-1921 to cover the period of the final Bolshevik attack against Poland, which was an important war in itself (someone has designed an interesting scenario covering it). Initial playtesting showed that weekly turns led to the largely unmotorised infantry forces moving too slowly to make it interesting, or to carry out flanking manouevres, and meant that the scenario would have run to over a hundred turns, which was too long. The war very broadly consisted of White and Nationalist forces on the periphery of the former Czarist Empire either trying to move towards the centre - the Moscow and St. Petersburg region - or, for the Nationalists, at least trying to retain independence for those peripheral areas, so the PO objectives weren't too difficult. Independent air units were just about justified, although they had little effect, and the small numbers of tanks and armoured cars were never used en masse, so they could be included in the infantry and cavalry units. I lumped most of the heavy artillery and engineers, etc, into large HQ units. There are House Rules and formation restrictions to prevent Whites and Nationalists cooperating. The Anarchists in the Ukraine initially side with the Reds, but the two-player and PO games allow for this alliance to collapse, as it did historically. There are also historical events in the form of the Red's Kronstadt garrison mutinying, the peasant Tambov Rebellion, the Baltic Germans changing sides and the Interventionist forces gradually withdrawing. If I can get the play balance right some players may find it interesting, although I appreciate that it won't appeal to those who enjoy large armoured sweeps, or who like to use really accurate and detailed OOBs.
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Russian Civil War playtest - 
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