SimpleSimon

I'm still reading into it but likely? Totally insufficient manpower availability to meet the aggregate demand faced by both sides fighting a war spanning most of the geographic United States, with huge orders for manpower even out to California. Want reserves General? We all do. The most recent batches of conscripts were sent to fill out depleted regiments and brigades out fighting near Vicksburg and Kentucky.

No I just noticed that opening right up with a war in the early Pre-Dreadnought era frequently led to these laughable exchanges of meekly armed bucket ships that were more likely to sink each other with upholstery fires and accidental collisions ramming attacks than any kind of sophisticated direction or marksmanship. This is entirely what I would've expected out an era when many warships were still more like big Ironclads than proper Battleships-of-the-line. I only rather disliked the ship designer a bit, not because it's excessive micro or anything but because the designer is apparently hidebound by stereotypical ideas of what constitutes a "class" of warship and sticks all these silly penalties and rules on design of a ship. How many navies ever ended up able to universally agree on what a "Destroyer" even was or a "Cruiser" for instance? Typical of warship games there's a tendency to place the cart-before-the-horse and retroactively apply modern definitions and thinking for warships back onto 19th and early 20th century designs. It doesn't break the game, but it's just a bit unfortunate to me that even a well researched game like Rule the Waves makes, for instance, the typical mistake of considering Pre Dreadnought battleships as "inferior battleships" and not "the logical evolution of the Ironclad" if you get what i'm saying.

One extremely interesting piece I found from 37mm's link Civil War armies kept few reserves, and Civil War combat featured little in the way of combined arms cooperation. Unlike the Napoleonic Wars, and more like the 18th century, reserves were a rarity in the Civil War, and a commander had few options once a battle "developed" to maturity. Civil War tactics were NOT Napoleonic, at least not in the sense of Napoleon I. I had never considered this before but in hindsight it's absolutely correct. There were almost no battles during ACW I can think of where Armies on either side just retained a large uncommitted ready reserve of troops. The author of that website also articulates a really interesting point that I think up until now I had only been grasping at. Why were the Civil War's battles so frequently indecisive? This is really valuable 37mm.

How did the US Civil War also compare to some more contemporary conflicts like the Franco-Prussian War or Crimean War? My understanding is that both of those wars followed some similar precepts stuck between the 18th and 20th centuries to various degrees but haven't done much reading on either. The French seem to have been really convinced of the value of extensive fortification after the Franco-Prussian War before reversing this stance just before the Great War. This was a major reason why the Forts around Verdun were so intricate and thorough. Fort Vaux had a roof of steel reinforced concrete that was something like twelve meters thick and it was built in the 1880s. What were they thinking of proofing that Fort against??? The Death Star?

Yet crucially, nothing like the huge and clearly defined frontline between the Confederacy and the Union really existed in the way it would between France and Germany in 1915. Even late into the war the line separating the North and South appeared to be highly permeable, with the Savannah Campaign (ie: Sherman's March) closely resembling a Napoleonic March every bit as as much as Lee's success getting the Army of Northern Virginia as far into the Union as Pennsylvania the year before. This is easy to explain though, since the manpower of each side's forces was far, far less than what would be the norm of World Wars. The force-to-space density was still generally quite low and the US is a big country. Producing an overall situation that was a lot like the Eastern Front. One thing I noticed, almost all of Napoleon's most well known battles were single-day affairs. Battle of the Pyramids was one day. Jena was one day. Battle of Borodino was one day. Battle of Austerlitz? One, single day. Gettysburg was three days. Battle of Fredericksburg? Four days. The Battle of Chancellorsville was almost a week long. Am I missing something? Were any of Napoleon's battles fought over such long periods? Have American historians been mislabeling individual "battles" when in fact they were all really more like campaigns?

Right. Because not only were there lots of stuff that would come to prominence in the next century, but this was still a war where old school ideas like Cavalry and Line Infantry were still extremely useful even if the circumstances of their use were changing. Like it seems insane to imagine that Generals would still use Line Infantry and bayonet charges...but repeating rifles like the Henry and Sharps were actually very rare guns. Repeating rifles existed, but no one could produce them in the kinds of numbers necessary to kit out entire Brigades or Divisions with them. So the musket was still the weapon of choice for an Army. Some quick ballpark numbers... Henry Rifle - 14,000 examples over a 6 year production run. Sharps Rifle - At least 100,000+ examples but over a 30 year production run. Springfield 1861 - Over 1 million produced through a 12 year run. During the crucial war years though around 250,000 were made between 1861 and 1863. I've seen commentary indicating that even rifles as old as the Brown Bess were found frequently in Confederate stocks. Clearly flintlock rifles would not have been valued over newer rifles but the ACW was another case of a war that got so big so fast it completely eclipsed the available logistics for its time. Even if Generals on both sides of the conflict had been hidebound by traditional or out-of-date thinking...fact was Line Infantry were still the most important unit and battles were still thought of in terms of the Line and Bayonet. Certainly cracks in that system were starting to show however, but they were not as apparent as one might think.

So i've been playing Empire Total War lately and it's kind of occurred to me that a major reason Game Labs felt the need to design an entire game around the ACW was because up until the Ultimate General games, there was really no way to directly apply the Total War ruleset to the American Civil War. Mods tried, but I always felt that modders had to alter Total War's gameplay design so fundamentally that it was hardly the same game anymore. Then it kind of hit me, the American Civil War lent itself to a manner of set-piece fighting and pitched battles that had more in common with the First World War than the Napoleonic Wars. This isn't a new idea, scholars have been throwing around the theory that the American Civil War was a proto-typical example of a Pre World War conflict that reflected the upcoming realities of the battlefield in the next century. However, this school of thought neglects to consider that there were a number of "Napoleonic" style campaigns during the ACW such as Sherman's Campaign and Shiloh. If the only measure one was using to determine the nature of the American Civil War as a conflict was that there were trenches and sieges, this alone would not be a convincing analysis I think. Sieges were nothing new in 1860, even sieges uses trenches, heavy howitzers, and steam power were not new. Yet up until the 1860s had any siege in history been so geographically large? The trench lines that came to surround Richmond, Petersburg, and Vicksburg were indeed not new, but had they ever been so comprehensive and large up until that point in history? Armies weren't undermining individual Forts or even Cities now...but entire geographic regions, whole states, in a manner that would become the norm of 1916. The Army of the Potomac was something like 130,000 men by that point. The Ottoman Army that sacked Constantinople 300 years earlier had been half that size. Yet this was a conflict that was opened by campaigning in a very classic Napoleonic sense. Individual battles were fought out in huge set-piece fashion at first, but as the war went on individual battles increasingly became parts of a much larger campaign. Gettysburg was a classic example of what i'm getting at. As a Battle it was fought in the classic style of Austerlitz....yet it wasn't one battle but many fought over several days with an unclear delineation between its peripheral struggles (Stuart and Custard's running cavalry skirmishes) and the main event of Pickett's charge on the 3rd day of overall fighting. The highly continuous and informal nature of much of the overall highly formal Battle of Gettysburg is more characteristic of the kind of prolonged campaigning that would characterize Flanders or the Somme decades later. For a war that featured many attempts by Generals to create the circumstances of a Jenna or Austerlitz the Civil War has many examples...but by the end of the conflict the Siege of Petersburg looked way more like Verdun decades later. I guess what i'm getting at here is how one should view the evolution of fighting at war in the American Civil War. Was the American Civil War a proto-typical Napoleonic Campaign as many of its Generals seemed to practice? Was it in fact that proto-First World War that modern historians often try to describe it as? Perhaps neither of these descriptions are strictly true, and as a conflict positioned half way between the centuries it was simply the junction of many ideas that characterized what came before it and would come into the vogue after it. What do you think?

An item remaining on the "wish list" for me would be a special grenade assault target line or perhaps issuing an "assault" order within about 50m of the squad makes them lead with a grenade assault. It's rather discouraging to see such timidity from infantry when theyve got grenades and dont use em much.

+1 to Rule the Waves. Super crude game, but definitely the best available "Navy Manager" game right now. I was personally loving the tendency for Pre-Dreadnought battles to degenerate into silly train wrecks of under armed Battleships and Armored Cruisers endlessly trying to ram each other because their weak 10in guns run out of ammo quickly and can't hit anything. Damn the torpedoes Gridley, full speed ahead! All 9 of our pathetic knots!

Hyman Minsky the legendary Wall Street analyst and Professor of Economics used to say back in the 90s that Trump was the ultimate Ponzi Schemer. He lived completely check-to-check off of appreciation from borrowed assets, and had nearly been ruined by a recession in the early 90s. By the 2000s Trump had diversified from real-estate into entertainment and branding, and so was far less vulnerable to the 2008 Subprime Mortgage Crisis even though quite a bit of security in 2008 was because his Casino business had failed in 2006 leaving him with fewer real-estate ties than he would've had otherwise. Trump Tower Chicago was his biggest problem in 2008 but he was able to able to win a 5 year extension on payments to the Tower's chief backer, Deutsche Bank AG, (for which he was personally liable by $40 million) by claiming that the 2008 Financial Crisis absolved him of repayment obligations. He was unable to escape paying DB back entirely, but his unscrupulous methods enabled him to survive long enough to come up with enough money to ward them off in an out of court settlement years later. Trump's history in politics is worrying under any light. The man has never held a consistent message or idea since he first began to foray into politics a year or so after Barack Obama's first year as President. In 2009 he described Barack Obama as "a strong guy who knows what he wants" and that "I thought he (Obama) did a terrific job". Trump could not even withhold himself in 2009 from lauding the Obama Stimulus package or American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 saying that "it had to be done" and that "had trillions of dollars not been poured into the banks, you would have an insolvent banking system and then you would have 1929. They did the right thing." This was an act that the rest of the Republican Party decried as Socialism to the core and fought tooth and nail against. Republican leadership was always lukewarm to Trump of course but I doubt it was because of his established history of playing to whatever side suited him at the time. In any case it's well known that the Republican Party and Donald Trump do not have a good relationship with each other, but the Republican Party made a major mistake betting against Trump in 2012 and again in 2016. From 2009 to 2012 though it was hard to perceive the Republican Party's transition away from the party of Globalized Big Businessmen and Greenspan-types into the Party of American Reactionaries. Trump crucially perceived this and needed no greater proof of it than Mitt Romney's humiliating failure against Barack Obama in 2012. Romney never could've failed to achieve victory in 1998 or even in 2004 but like many in the Republican Party he had been every bit as ignorant of what the Tea Party's existence meant, same as the Democrats' ignorance of what Bernie Sanders meant. Both of these parties were suffering from significant bouts of internal factionalism and low-key Civil War emerging from the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis. These flare ups could be expected as routine events for the next several years and Trump could see that a big one was going to coincide with the 2016 Presidential Elections. By 2013 his tone had changed completely and ominously toward the Birther Conspiracy accusing Barack Obama of being a Kenyan national and therefore that his entire Presidency as illegitimate. The very actions the Obama Administration took that Trump approved of in 2009 have now become everything from "Socialist" to "just very bad". I think it's clear that Trump's history is that of a shameless and self important opportunist, adept at escaping any kind of accountability or responsibility for his actions. His single minded preoccupation is entirely anchored, as com-intern says, on selling his brand. Pushing his big, gold encrusted name at every turn. He's no Dictator I think, he's not a strong man and he doesn't directly cultivate any kind of tough-guy image. I don't think he really fits the description of being a Dictator at all really, he doesn't really have the delusions of grandeur necessary for it. All he seems to care about is staying out of trouble and avoiding blame or directing it onto someone else. He's actually quite benign overall, but i'm more worried about what comes after him.

You should be willing to use the game's wooden bunkers and pillboxes/shelters too. I know they look sort of hideous but in fact a strong defense absolutely needs to make use of positions with overhead cover or certainly be destroyed by a heavy bombardment. Everyone from the Germans to the Vietcong has practiced this against enemies wielding superior firepower and it wasn't cuz they just liked living in the mud.

That looks about right actually. You start with a basic screening line, have a second, principle line consisting of outposts and a third line in firm positions behind geographic chokepoints. Supply and HQ elements occupy the back of the map pressed into service as last ditch infantry. The only note here to me is that your outposts are concentrated on geographic "set pieces". If I was the Russian commander you can bet i'm planning on dropping an avalanche of 122mm and 76mm fire on local high ground, *especially* named hills. The villages with the railway station, hospital, and school overlooking the bridges would get the heaviest fire. Perhaps rockets if I have em. Don't get me wrong this is all good and that's just what I'd do. You might consider eliminating some of your positions entirely and just folding them up into other locations to strengthen those positions and decrease the geographic footprint of your defense. If the Russians are supporting this attack properly you should expect them to just smash some locations while mostly ignoring some others. They might set aside smaller field guns for suppressing or pinning fires against suspect locations. Once you get an idea of how AI deployment plans work you can do some seriously diabolical things with randomized AI deployments that can add way more replay value to your scenarios too. You should consider deployment plans that are non-doctrinal or sub-optimal as well to undermine your opponent's expectations a bit.

Chief thing you should consider as you put yourself in the mind of the German commander thinking up his defense arrangement is "what can I do to minimize my own casualties" rather than "what can I do to stop the Russians from winning" if that makes sense. The favorite method, as well known, was the "denuded front" or outpost defense concept which wasn't universal or always desirable. Usually it enabled the Germans to compartmentalize their losses by ensuring most of the Russian's fire support fell on nothing, then hopefully outlying pickets consisting of snipers and machine guns might trick the Russians into deploying prematurely so that the Germans can most efficiently use their own limited fire support assets to inflict a disproportionate weight of casualties on the Russians while they're busy treating a sniper in a treeline like it's your whole force. That's the textbook success anyway. Savvy Red Army Officers knew better than to overthink every encounter they might have. Not every pinprick was worth committing an assault against and things could go wrong quickly for the Germans if the Russians had lots of dead ground to maneuver inside of. The Russians proved ridiculously good at infiltrating huge formations, entire Battalions even, in-between German positions and then just collapsing the defense from inside out by overwhelming enough "nodes" in the German defense that the other locations became irrelevant. Once a big enough hole is torn in the line the rest of the Russian's parent formation can just advance inside the gap and the rest of the German defenders are presented with the ugly choice of attempting to hold out being whittled away by starvation and partisans and the even worse choice of trying to withdraw while being enfiladed from multiple directions. This is a major reason why the Germans had to use "conventional" trench-line tactics on the Leningrad front. Because the forests and swamps were so dense it was impossible for disconnected outposts to protect anything let alone themselves, so the Germans had to use a continuous line of trenches stretched through miles of forest. This is just to give you an idea of what you consider when you look at your map as the German commander. There's times doctrine is right, and times it's very, very wrong.

The best emergency solution in the short term that I can think of MOS? A Command Economy of unprecedented authority in America's history.

Some people in this country are so poor literally all they have is a shirt and pants Erwin, but no place to wash them since they're liable to be kicked out of any public space (which law enforcement can define as just about anywhere) or be arrested for public indecency doing it. It's not like having a criminal record will make it easier for them to get out of poverty by the way. It's just worth pointing out that not only does the US have poverty, but in a number of places the US actively uses people's poverty against them because public policy in the US (especially at local levels) is a total free-for-all for which no one is held to a measure-able or uniform standard. The rational solution is a total reform of the education system from top to bottom, both of which could also be quite handy for offering jobs and putting the public back to work when the service economy retracts like this. Public works and engineering projects should be more seriously considered in the US, especially over the country's humiliating infrastructure bottlenecks (US Airline growth has literally been capped by gate-counts at the hub airports for decades), and the need to consider the impending challenges facing us over climate change and whatever else nature has in store like yes, future pandemics. Education absolutely needs to be publicly funded. Colleges and universities must be required to offer broad options of qualification and cut down on useless basket-weaving degrees that leave students without useful skills and a mortgage worth of debt. Higher education should be left voluntary, the Public School System should remain compulsive but should not hold students and teachers to reaching absolutely unrealistic standards of curriculum. Whole meme pages exist on Instagram joking about how the US Education system teaches kids about the Dewey Decimal System they'll never use again but not how to do their own taxes or hard boil an egg. Nothing is graded, stop expecting schools to submit whole classrooms of A+ students who know how to do basic calculus, recite the theory of relativity, and discuss Cather in the Rye on the metaphorical level all by the 6th grade. The net result of these unrealistic standards is that Americans learn how to be good at faking tests and lying their way through their education. What they actually learn is how to be deceptive and persuasive as a matter of survival in a competitive free market economy which penalizes your failure with everything from homelessness to jail. This is why style is held in such high importance over substance in America. This is why the "Instagram Generation" is the way they are, because they weren't taught anything else! The Attention-Deficit-Disorder of the entire US school system and its inability (or unwillingness) to prioritize skill sets that would enable people to be both more self sufficient and more easily contribute to society is just another result of the total lack of qualification US politicians have for their own responsibilities. Because education is a matter of public policy in the US it is allowed to be interfered with at every level by individuals and interest groups who's interests are not frequently honest or productive. It's another free-for-all of unrealistic standards and goals made by out-of-touch leaders who are more interested in being able to boast of problems they've solved than actually solving any.

Our living standards today are a result of globalized markets and international trade. This crisis very much plays into the hands of Protectionists everywhere, but the world can't go back to the economy of 1940 or 1960 or even 1980. There's too many people now and too many needs to be met that the far smaller scales of history could never meet. Globalized markets are interconnected now for better or worse. This is part of the reason why the US is effectively unable to conduct a 1942 style mass mobilization of resources. There aren't tons of closed factories sitting around everywhere on mothball. They're all in other countries, but not always the countries you might think. Since the end of the Cold War the Democracies have been configuring exclusively on markets of service and speculation, more money in, less money out on payroll and HR. American workers are too expensive, demanding things like health care benefits, pensions, and the audacity of live-able pay! Crazy right? Yet it wasn't to China or India that most of that manufacturing went... https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports China is only the 2nd largest source of imports for the US, the first is the European Union. Combined with non-Eurozone (lots of Eastern Europe) members by the way imports from China are barely one half of the total, and US imports from the rest of North America (ie: Canada and Mexico) also greatly exceed imports from China. This is a major reason why in 2010 the Fed rode to the rescue of the Eurozone and not to the Chinese. (The other major reason was the considerable effectiveness of the People's Bank of China in fighting a financial crisis. Both the Fed and the People's Bank can control interest rates, but the People's Bank can also set the terms of credit issuance to banks.) While it would be mistaken to believe that China's economy is reliant on American markets, the fact that the Yuan is pegged to the Dollar also means China doesn't have anything to gain from depressed American consumption. Trump's trade war came as a real shock to Beijing, for reasons I can guess had a lot do with Beijing's perception that American leadership was bound to be rational where money was involved... Far be it from me to point out the depressing number of times American media and American leaders have historically played up to groundless fear and paranoia of an Asian Nemesis. The upcoming round of China-bashing that is starting to emerge from American media isn't even original, just more canned talking-points from the 2000s that were themselves repackaged nationalist/protectionist cliches from the 1980s against Japan. Communist leaders are often baffled by the concept of "Political Theater" we conduct in the west, but that's because power and mobility in Communist states is usually handled by party insiders and internal lines and not by popular election. Chinese leaders are going to worry about China first, but that shouldn't lead one to believe that they would find it easy to abandon the US, or desirable to compete with it.

Have you ever seen Detroit? Joke is that for an enormous number of people in the West "3rd world living" is still very much reality for them. The US also has a deceptively large homeless population which is rarely reported with any kind of accuracy by the way. Mostly through the difficulty of accounting for people with so few possessions to their name, but more than a little obfuscation by local and state leaders plays a role here. There's an enormous number of dead-end rural towns in America that could easily break the perception that extreme poverty is limited to Communist states though...

Probably the most effective answer to both controlling the spread of the virus and keeping the global economy at a reasonable idle is the answer leaders are under increasing pressure to divert from, which is the current course of action. Discourse is quickly turning into a false dilemma on either releasing restrictions entirely or clamping down more. Probably the course we're on is the most appropriate one at this time but you wouldn't know it from the slippery slopes being dropped by both sides demanding the most extreme measures of either end probably neither of which are appropriate. Release restrictions and the infections will shoot up again, clamp down more and you risk shutting down critical infrastructure and supply flows that many people may well be barely subsisting on as is. We shouldn't forget either that rigidly enforced stay-at-home orders and draconian travel restrictions enter into some very dangerous political territory posing lots of questions that will need good answers one day, if not tomorrow, then someday. Other than that, my own opinion is that unless the European Union takes some seriously unilateral action it will be the most prominent casualty of the crisis on its current course. I don't want to sound too narrow about that from my own American perspective, but Brussels did not set a very strong precedent during the Eurozone Crisis in 2010 and a lot of that rolled out in the long run to things like Brexit. Nothing will happen right away I think, but without some kind of entirely self-owned action I can see the European Union reduced to effectively League-of-Nations status by 2030 if it's still around at all.

Respectfully there's nothing historically accurate about the current system though. The VVS was capable of conducting highly meticulous airstrikes against fixed or known positions thanks to a combination of aerial reconnaissance from above and battlefield reports from below passed to Air Army HQ. There's no good reason the player shouldn't be given the power to abstract this capability in the planning phase as long as the game has air strikes at all. If the idea is that the team just doesn't want air strikes in game, I get that, but then they should just disable the feature entirely and leave it to the scenario designers to abstract. I don't think this is necessary though (and it would be highly disappointing) but the easy fix to me anyway seems to just limit point attacks to the planning phase (not available for call in after the mission starts) and limit area attacks to the action phase. (Loitering aircraft can be given a start time and after a set time will disappear and cannot be recalled.) Certainly the idea that World War 2 air forces conducted immediate, precise point attacks on individual targets with the accuracy of modern JDAMs or guided munitions is wrong, but attacks on point targets were in fact done. They didn't just send one airplane and hoped it got lucky, they sent tons of them and hoped someone got lucky.

Indeed. Neither here nor there and it's not like we don't circulate some misinformation in kind. Yeah I doubt a lot of them went anywhere except to the front, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NKVD were keeping stocks too. Chief thing I want to see restored is the ability to call airstrikes during the planning phase.

State archives are opening up a bit with a recent push by the Putin Government to revisit the victory nostalgia of the 1940s. The greater candor on long obscured details like the precise makeup of Red Army units is an important benefit of this although there should be little doubt that Vlad is also seeking out information that he can use to Chest Thump the Russian military a bit. Quite a few units in the Red Army never matched their ToEs through the entire war although this became much less of a problem for the central and southern fronts as the war crossed into 1944. The Russians produced an absolute glut of SMGs during the war because their production wasn't interrupted by the invasion (Tula arsenal was overrun for a time but it didn't produce any SMGs) and also because the PPSh and later PPS-43 were incredibly cheap and uncomplicated guns. I think the actual unit cost for the PPS-43 was less than half a Mosin Nagant. The Russians produced them in hordes not only because they had plenty of use for SMGs, but also because in the desperation to arm many millions of men right away rifles might well turn out to be more rare in some places than a Pepesha. Out of curiosity what changes or additions are being made to Russian artillery and air support parks?

When you play as the Germans, it really benefits you to use a node/outpost style defense rather than construct a continuous frontline. Unless you happen to have parity or superiority in manpower (you almost never will) you're really better off just ensuring the survival of your own units rather than trying to hold the map. This really means concentrating your men into defensible ground and protecting your sources of firepower. This means doing things like setting up Pak40s into keyhole shots or using a pair of MG42s to just shut down the slit of open ground between a forest and town. Force needs to be economized as much as possible. If you have artillery or fire support assets its crucial that they're kept protected inside the "box" of your defense so they can, without interruption, disrupt the enemy's attempts to kill your men with his artillery. This eventually leads the Russians into situations where they must call upon their infantry to dismount, close with your defense and break your perimeter by infiltration. Hopefully you have another outpost somewhere to prevent that but plenty of the maps have lots of cluttered ground or avenues of maneuver masked by terrain and in these situations you will have to construct a line or lose outright. With the Germans what you're hoping for a "Minor Defeat"...which only forces you make a minor terrain concession and give up your (free) fortifications. Ideally this forces all of the available Russian units to commit their full supply of action points leaving them unable to turn your retreat into a rout. This is less likely to be the case if you suffer a Major Defeat (which forces a disrupted state on the loser) and in a Total Defeat I think your entire force makes a dice roll for outright destruction. Obviously not good for the already manpower-tight Axis...

PS the game has entrenchments and engineers too. The AI is a bit strange about how it uses them (it seems to favor tiny outposts excessively that are easily overrun) but it's great that that this is the sort of game that gives Engineers context for use. Regular infantry can defeat bunkers but they'll use up nearly their entire grenade supply to do it, and it takes more time. Rushing an engineer unit up to bunker gets them within range to instagib it with a charge. They can also cut barbed-wire entrenchments and of course they're extremely handy for fighting in towns and villages if you run into built up structures and defenses. They can and will lob their big TNT charges into the enemy and take a full-health squad of Panzergrenadiers right to a SURRENDERED state. For many Russian units, they may well be the only source of point anti-tank you have other than your usually generous allotment of anti-tank rifles. That pair of 45mm guns is only for killing motorcycles really, not stopping a Panzer Division.

As far as I can tell, it's not omniscient, it's just challenging as it should be. Tubes are the biggest threat to your men on the field and you'll see real massacres happen if the enemy happens to bring an Artillery Brigade. If they did than I hope you brought lots of airplanes and tanks or both. It's all about match ups you know? Yeah, I could agree that the artillery seems a bit quick on the draw for the AI, (the main issues seems to have been that counter-battery fire was super reliable) but it's not distinctly clear to me, after several months of playing mind you, that it's cheating. If it is, it's cloaked well enough to not be a major bother to me. Like I said, if the Russians show up with 12+ 122mm guns and all you've got are some mortars you had better expect a massacre. https://ibb.co/KhPsd2C From a battle in the North sector of the Berezina... The men on the right are an entire Battalion of Osttruppen who ran into Guards advancing toward the farmstead in middle. The T-34s are mine (German) lifted off the Russians at one point or another during previous fighting. I only had 4 of them and I had been positioning them for an advance elsewhere (just behind them was a road I planned on fast moving them up the left section of the map to reinforce a weakening section of frontline. Instead they majorly assisted the Osttruppen advance the forest in the foreground and I redeployed them later on. Had they not been there the Osttruppen might well have lost (the heart icon means that they are brittle and the stars are their Officers). https://ibb.co/gTBFBSq A photo I just like of an 88mm gun from the same battle. The men along the Berezina have the advantage of occupying a sector that happened to be well covered in anti-aircraft weaponry. Given the scale of the Russian attack I naturally ended up pressing these guns into the battle where I was surprised to see them engage and shoot down attacking IL-2s! This was most fortunate, I might well have lost the battle without them and ended up suffering quite a few casualties to roving IL-2s even with them. https://ibb.co/JHPgpJ8 The same gun's field of view. https://ibb.co/X7bvXKy The strategic situation just before the battle. The Russians attacked me with the two Motorized Rifle Battalions and an IL-2 Wing that showed up from outside the picture, the *Disorganized* label was placed over the Russian units after those units botched a previous attack and they could not participate. The flag is an objective for both sides and yes that is a Swastika, not a mod. Eugen has decided to fully depict Axis insignia in the game. The boxed RONA is the deploy area for a group of units, and in that spot the Osttruppen RONA detachment can deploy. https://ibb.co/YtpT155 The situation in the south near Borissof and Studienka. On the left on top of 5th Panzer Division's deployment area is the Festung Borissof, two Battalions of the 13th. Panzergrenadier Regiment, and it's Regimental HQ. In the middle of the road are the nearly depleted French SS and the KG Altmark who I was able to send into reserve. On the right facing the Russian advance is my principle line...which I plan on folding up before the Russians attack. On the right is one Panzergrenadier Battalion, a pair of mixed Security Battalions, another Kampgrupper, the 505th Heavy Panzer Brigade, and an Artillery Brigade. Most of the units at the very front are dug-in...which means if the Russians attack the defending units get free access to an assortment of anti-tank gun bunkers, machine gun bunkers, trenches, barbed wire obstacles, and pits for artillery. Seems secure right? Wrong. The Russians facing them have over 260 tanks ready to absolutely smash that part of the line, but since I was playing against the Easy AI the AI decided to go on a silly flanking maneuver to the south which I was able to check with a spare KG and Security Battalion. Before the Russians attack I will fold up this line and retreat to just outside of Borissof. Sadly, the game has no city maps and fighting in a considered "urban" environment will be auto-resolved. What a shame. You'll see tons of that in Steel Division 2. Note, that the game isn't going to do all that much to help you learn how to play, and for some time you may be needing to save-reload scenarios quite a bit before you figure out what you're doing wrong. On easy it's still very challenging, and the workload can be enormous. I'm not too crazy about the tactical battles effectively just being the multiplayer skirmishes but against an AI. In the tactical mode the game just uses multiplayer maps and unfortunately this leads to many battles fought in the same exact map. The enormous ToE depth and strategy mode mitigate this a lot though, as no two battles ever play alike on the same map. I also think the user interface gets saturated fast and when battles heat up it starts getting rough to keep track of all the units. I found attacking extremely difficult until I started using the smart-commands and more carefully evaluating the maps. I also didn't realize that the game was factoring in casualties on both sides into the score, so I thought that it was one of those (bad) games that was going to punish me for failing to capture every single flag. It doesn't, but that kind of nuance isn't communicated very well to the player. Also I still can't tell what the game's rules are for recovery of men and assets. It seems after battles both sides get a certain amount of men and equipment back based on how well they did but I have found zero reference material to indicate how this is determined.

The game's ability to construct completely natural battles that affect each other over the broad term is really commendable. Ive been playing the Berezina stroke of Barbarossa as the Germans and it opens with a thin German line being held by a mixture of French SS, Security (Sicher) Battalions, and the odd mixed Kampgrupper-Osttruppen. The French SS are very motivated and professional...but not well armed. Only the HQ section has any Panzerfausts. Many of the Security Battalions don't even have MG34s, but the MG08 Spandau's of the Kaiser! The Osttruppen are good for holding rear areas and have no motor transport...in a fight you can only count on them to stand if the local SS Gendarmes are around to keep them from running away and they have absolutely zero anti-tank weapons of any kind. The one benefit of the KG they're in are the 5 or so ready Tiger Tanks....but they won't be able to stop the Russian Tank Corp charging up the road. Rather than try to compose a continuous frontline I decided that, dug-in or not, holding the map and stopping the Russians cold was impossible. So I set up the French SS and Tiger Tanks into defensive "boxes" that would allow the Tigers to snipe any tanks from a distance while shielding them from attempts by infantry to push them out of my strongpoints. The Russians generally opened their attacks with the Motorcycle or Recon Brigades of the Tank Corp behind them and if it wasn't for the Tigers the 10 or Valentine Tanks and mixed armored cars they had might well run the French SS off the map...who have nothing to stop them with. This would be devastating since somewhere along the road to the Berezina I needed to make a stand to await 5th Panzer Division's arrival. The forests along the northern stretch of the Berezina are held mostly by Sicher Battalions who can count on Flak battalions. In a really crazy tribute the ToE mania of Eugen's games, most of those guys are armed with Czech light machine guns and even a few Polish 7TP tanks. The ominous red outline of the front is approaching the initial positions and im weighing retreating or standing. This is all great stuff. I'll start taking screen caps of these battles in the future for better narrative takes. Should be easy since the game records all games for later visual replay. You can really study what was going on.