Broadsword56

Highly interesting to me. A key terrain feature in the area described above is Lake Orekhovsk, the long vertical lake seen in the Google Maps view. It becomes operationally significant because it's a barrier that requires a force attacking E-W to take an axis N or S of it. The road net diverts in those directions, too. The S route has better going and is the fastest route to Orsha. But since the goal was to cut off Orsha and hook around it from the NW, I think the Soviet 2nd Guards Tank Corps took the route N of the lake. That wider arc also pockets the greatest number of German troops. But the lake and terrain pattern here also help explain why the German counterattack with the 14th Infantry Division happened where it did. Just below the lake, there's a fairly open valley running SW-NE from Orekhovsk. It offers a good chance to hit the Soviet left flank as they try to make their deep penetration. In the real battle the Germans were in such a crisis that they ended up counterattacking piecemeal with the 14th. But in a wargame it's interesting to explore what could have happened if, say, the Soviets broke through a bit later, the and the 14th Infantry Division was able to strike in a concentrated and more organized way. That wouldn't have changed the overall result of the operation -- but a "win" for the Germans can simply be preventing the German collapse and the fall of Orsha until later than it happened historically.

What I keep puzzling over is: How did the Soviets force so many troops and vehicles through such a marshy, forested, lake-studded area so quickly, over mostly dirt roads, in primarily wet weather, and not run into the kinds of traffic snarls and bottlenecks that plagued the Germans in the Ardennes, for example? I'm thinking primarily of the Orsha corridor here, which (as previously announced) will be focus of the Soviet campaign in RT. It's easy to overlook the tremendous staff work that had to go into coordinating even routine movements of formations in the field. My sense is that the German defensive crust just disintegrated so quickly that it rendered those other issues moot. The Germans simply didn't have sufficient troops for the frontage, so defense in depth was impossible. The Soviet General Staff study does mention that mines, roadblocks, and small knots of resistance did pose real problems wherever and whenever the Germans managed to make a stand.

Now the bad news: The part of Belarus where Operation Bagration happened is mostly forests. :-)

Having to load troops onto a truck, tell them to acquire the ammo, then dismount them again, may be irritating and fiddly -- but think about the time scale of CM and it's clear that even several turns means unloading ammo from the truck within 2 or 3 minutes. That's breakneck speed in real life. Making it faster or instantaneous would be *more* gamey, not less. I could appreciate making it a simpler process for the player, though, even if it imposes the same time requirement as now.

And if we're talking about Bagration, the Soviets (who had air superiority) didn't use their air assets for interdiction (i.e., denial of roads and bridges and key terrain)although they could have if they had chosen to. Instead their doctrine at this time was to use air for CAS and to bomb targets (like HQ and troop concentrations) in the rear to hit the full depth of the axis position all at once ("deep battle.")

And it allows a mapper to make curvier dirt roads without the annoying zigzag effect of real dirt road tiles.

@emrys: +1 to that. The sum is greater than the parts in creating that magical immersion in a CM map. @sburke: True, but put factory chimneys in the game and I'd sure as shootin' notice them!

If the Soviet AFVs did really carry all those submachinegun ammo discs as the illustration shows, then tank riders in passenger status ought to be able to "acquire" ammo from the tank (but only if it's unbuttoned). I can see how there would be no way to resupply the tank riders under fire. But in an unbuttoned AFV the crew could have tossed additional ammo out to the riders, nyet?

What are some more good sources of hard data for OOB and strength and equipment for units on both sides in Bagration (particularly in the 1st Guards Motorized Rifle Division sector where the Soviet campaign will be located)? In my online searches the ones that come up most often are Glantz's translation of the Soviet general staff study on Bagration, the Soviet Blitzkrieg book, and the Zaloga campaign book on Bagration in the Osprey series. So I have a pretty good roster of the units that would have been there, down to regimental level, but still really no idea of what men and weapons they actually had to fight with on, say, 24 June. The accounts all say that units on both sides were way below their paper TO&E, and that the 78 Sturm Division was the largest and most powerful formation in Army Group Centre. But I haven't found anything beyond those generalities. I'm fine with just using the data of a well-regarded and well-researched wargame on Bagration. Does anyone own Minsk '44 (Noob, i'll bet you do) and are you able to extract any OOB/weapon/strength data for this sector? If so, please PM me. There's also an ASL expansion in this sector called Onslaught to Orsha, although it's super tactical so I don't know how much info it would have about the numbers and kit up to company, battalion, regiment and division. [Maybe I'll get more response if I say why I'm looking for this info: Some of us are working on a Cyberboard scenario for Bagration to the boardgame Panzer Command (Victory Games, 1986). The map will correspond exactly to the master map(s) for the Soviet campaign in RT, so it will give players the ability to play at division/corps level with company-sized counters, then use the situations to stage battles anywhere for RT by just slicing off the part of the campaign master map they need. My plan is to share the scenario on the Repository and elsewhere to give more players the chance to enjoy the operational-tactical experience.]

Can you tell us more about this Soviet campaign? I'd be interested to know more about the actions it covers and where they happen. What about it would make it distinctive and fun to play?

And Canada seems to have excellent bear claws and sticky buns all over the place, too ...maybe all that cold makes everybody want to hole up and eat pastry.

Yeehah! A tree bone!

Much appreciated. The new birch trees, for example, were noticeable in the beta screenshots. Any chance of getting a "pre-destroyed" tree that would have bare branches, mostly shot away, and only a partial trunk, to create a more ghastly atmosphere on cratered and fought-over areas?

Picked this one up in Kindle edition the other day. Good operational detail yet highly readable and vivid. These were originally published in topical US Army training pamphlets, but Tsouras has collected them, put them in chronological order, annotated them, and corrected details like original errors in OOB: Panzers on the Eastern Front: General Erhard Raus and His Panzer Divisions in Russia 1941 - 1945, by Peter Tsouras.

Others know the answer better than I do, but in my experience if you make a long set of HUNT waypoints like Bil's in the photo, "rested" troops will drop to "ready" but pretty much stay there for a good long way. Eventually you'll see "tiring" and then it's best to rest them a minute or two if you want them to stay fresh and not start grumbling about what a martinet you are :-)

Listening halts are extremely important in recon. I think after a number of those HUNT+short pauses, it's also a good idea to have the entire force pause for a full minute -- usually the time to do this is just before the next major terrain feature (say, at a point just before the crest of a reverse slope, or before crossing a road, just before getting in LOS to a cluster of buildings, or to get everyone in place and set up to cover a movement to a new treeline.) I can see that a platoon on point might use HUNT exclusively with the short pauses, as Bil has done. But I also find that pure HUNT can be excruciatingly slow and tires the troops as well. So sometimes I compromise a bit and, after some HUNT+pause, I intersperse some QUICK segment between the HUNT segments. This has served me well as long as some of the fellow squads are on HUNT or pausing while the unit on QUICK is moving. I do this when I need to step up the overall tempo a bit. Sometimes security is the overriding consideration, but other times "get there first with the most men" is paramount and some security has to be risked to achieve it. What do you think about that, Bil? As always, there are no rigid formulas and the tactical situation must dictate which is best at any given moment.

For example, in the battle Sburke and I recently played on my Son-west map for Market Garden, there was a touch objective line for the Allied player drawn in a solid arc about 300m north of the Son bridge. It was invisible to the Allied player, but once touched it would send an "Achtung! Bridge is contested!" message to the German player. That would have been our trigger to pause the battle and dieroll in the campaign boardgame to see if the Germans successfully blow the bridge.

This novel almost never gets mentioned anymore, since it was first published in the late 1940s and is long out of print. But Plievier's novel is the real deal -- a no holds barred story of the German side of the cauldron, from the POV of some long-suffering troops in a penal battalion: http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Theodore-Plievier/dp/0881841080 This is one of those antiwar war novels, like All Quiet on the Western Front. But Plievier made the effort to capture what it was like, interviewing many participants right after the war. The author was a German communist who fled to the USSR when the Nazis came to power, and did propaganda for the Soviets during the war years. But once Germany was defeated, his disillusionment for the Soviet system led him to live the rest of his life in exile. It's interesting to read a novel by a German who intimately understands the German POV, and yet isn't writing from a pro-German stance. But while his sympathies are with the Soviets the novel refrains (mostly) from cheesy propaganda. Anyway, it's a good read if you (like me) want muddy-boots stories on the human level and can't stand those dry map-exercie books with nothing but troop movements and timetables.

And then with the log cabins + dead horses you'll be well on your way to future content for CM:American Civil War :-)

Well, sort of. I asked on the forums for it to be in MG but nobody listened :-(

Yes, but you can bet the commissars would have slapped posters on the walls within hours of occupying any conquered territory. And besides, the game isn't limited to only playing the Bagration areas -- user created maps for RT can and will be in Ukraine and Russia too.

I was looking again at the beta screenshots and appreciating the new wooden village houses, onion-domed church, wooden rustic picket fences, etc. OK, so what might BFC have up its sleeve to make those EF settlements come alive? Will we be getting some classic commie propaganda posters? Statues of Lenin for city squares? How about something for those poor empty railyards, like signals and rolling stock? Any chance of better ruins (i.e., more diverse and partial walls, etc.)? Industrial things like a factory chimney or an oil storage tank? I'm still hoping we'll eventually get tram/trolley tracks on cobblestones because the standard RR tracks don't work for this on urban maps. That would be important in all of E Europe as well as Germany.

But I really would like to see the Soviet troops get those padded jackets once the series gets to winter seasons.

Yes, that one always gets me too. He looks like he's saying "Oh boy, I can't wait, this is going to be a great adventure!" It would be fascinating if somone could ever trace him and find out what really happened to him after this moment. That would actually be a great topic for a WWII TV series, to take some period photo and tell that one person's story before and after, and show the historians as they do their research and interviews to piece it all together. Similar to the PBS shows "History Detectives" and "Dead Men's Secrets." BTW, one excellent and poignant episode of the latter show traced a pocket diary that an American grunt picked up from an NVA corpse just after a battle in the Ia Drang Valley. Decades later he felt remorse about keeping it (it had photos tucked inside too) and contacted the show because he wanted help, in finding out who the enemy soldier was and getting the diary back to his family. These types of shows would so much better than the endless recyclings of Bulge and D-Day highlights that the cable channels keep churning out (from US TV you'd think those two battles were all that ever happened in WW II)

Maybe George or some of the other top mappers can tell us here how best to use RT's editor to create that most Russian of topography types, the "balka" or big gully. I'm sure it's not hard at all, but I always like to ask others and maybe pick up a tip or two to get things looking right. Of course a well done elevation layer to the map will make the basic contours of balkas and other features automatically. But what I'm wondering more about is the variety of terrain tiles to use and the types and use of the right foliage, etc., to get the look. I guess the Ukraine/Poland don't have them much and it's really something found on the steppe. But since I'll be making steppe maps I'd like to know. I kmow I'll be able to discover this for myself soon. But for the moment I'd like to hear from those who have played around with it.