Ukraine ’44 — After-Action Report, Part 2: Turns 6–12

Opposed vs Steve, online/VASSAL. Part 1 covers setup through Turn 5. This part carries the game to its end on 2026-08-03. Same conventions: [GAME] for board, [SOURCED] for history.

Play-by-Play — Turns 6 to 12 [Game]

Turns 6–10 — 28 March to 1 April: The long middle

Giving in partially to frustration at not being able to keep pace with the withdrawing Germans and the rest over zealousness in attempting to seize another VP location -Stanislanov, the Soviet Guard Motorised elements get themselves into a spot of bother and while they do chew up a lot of Armoured German steps pay the ultimate price.

I press units out of supply for positional advantage and to force the penny packet allocation of units to thwart roaming Soviet Divisions. Eventually I realize and so does Steve this is a dumb strategy, as once isolated they drop to half defense.

Germans race to thwart perceived threats, while the Soviets kill literally one step at a time over a series of turns and attacks. This CRT is starting to annoy me. I rotate out useless units and bring in fresh fodder in an effort to keep by Guard units at full strength. The pocket shrink across turn 8-10, and Ternopol finally falls after 4 turns of 1/1 losses. I press up a Tank Corp to slow the entry of the enemy. And leave Ternopol lightly defended.

The pressure on Khotin builds up, from three directions now, and the pressure with no stacking and no ‘pass thru’ takes its toll on the Germans, if not in an artificial way, a frustrating way! The Southern approach is a turn by turn beat down. Advance only when there is a R result or the encircling forces, are getting to frisky. Then the German Tigers and Armor slide back a hex and we start over. Grinding, muddy, mess play. The North Western efforts are just mindlessly bad choices by the Soviets. – I need to drink when I play. This entire effort along the Dnestr is mess. Steve finally realized also that he need armor across the river for VPs. This thins his line s abit.
Which brings us to the last two turns.

Turn 11 — 5–6 April: The pursuit runs out of road

Soviet: Ternopol’ fell on Turn 8. Ten victory points banked on the city we had been reaching for since the opening. In the south the ring comes round the Khotin–Kamenets-Podol’skiy corner and closes far enough to eventually isolate three German units inside it. On the board it finally looks like the plan working. But I’m unsure that this was either optimal nor good play. The step losses are massive. The Germans press their armor south again, forgoing the VPs, as the pressure builds on Chernovtsy.

Axis: the body of 1st Panzer Army is already elsewhere. What is caught in the corner is what could not get out in time, not what we were chasing. The 11th Guards attack. Late in the turn, 11th Guards Tank Corps goes in against 10th SS Panzer at 1:2. Nobody attacks armour at those odds expecting to win — this is the victory schedule talking, and Im betting on at least 1 for 1 losses. A Soviet step costs one victory point; a German mobile step costs two. Trading tanks for tanks is profitable even when the attack fails, provided enough of theirs die alongside mine. The die comes up 1. 11th Guards is eliminated outright, having achieved nothing except opening the road to Ternopol’ and putting a question mark over my own rear, a four step loss!!

what shifted: two things at once, in opposite directions. The southern pocket became real, well, partially and the northern position became hollow. We now held Ternopol’ with nothing behind it, against German reinforcements coming down from the north. If this game were to carry on for a few more turns the SS would run amok in the rear juast as Manstein had wanted to do.

Turn 12 — the last turn: One turn short of the verdict

The pocket does not finish closing. Three German units remain trapped in the Kamenets-Podol’skiy corner; a hypothetical Turn 13 isolates them properly. The game ends before that hypothetical resolves.

The one-hex margin. If the Germans had gone East they miss attacking Ternopol by 1 hex, and recouping 10 VP + the killed 2 steps.

The Germans miss twelve victory points because a single hex leaves them too far from supply north of the Dnestr. After eleven turns of arriving late everywhere, the southern half of the game turns our way on an accounting technicality.

Ternopol’ is not secure. German reinforcements in the north are positioned to take the city straight back the following turn. We won it, scored it, and were about to lose it. what shifted: nothing, and that is the point. The game stops mid-pursuit, with the ring one turn from closing and the northern prize one turn from being lost.

Outcome [GAME]

Soviet 144 — Axis 94. A further 20 victory points potentially come off the Axis for being out of supply at Kamenets-Podol’skiy, which would make it 144–74.

The bill, both ways:

Soviet units in the dead pool	51
Soviet units still on the map steps lost	43
German eliminated off-board	21
German on-map mobile step losses	42 (× 2 VP = 84)
German on-map infantry step losses	39
Total German infantry steps	60
Ternopol’	+10 Soviet
German supply miss, north of the Dnestr	−12 Axis, by one hex

A clear Soviet win on points. It did not feel like one, and the reason it did not is what has me rating this upwards to a 6.5 : the Germans retreated well ahead of the slower Soviets for the entire game. Not routed , ahead. Every turn the noose drew tighter around something that had already moved. We spent twelve turns arriving at places the enemy had recently decided to leave. I think that caused them to miss an opportunity to exchange losses. Most German units have as many or often more defense pts as offense points. Your unit is removed when defense pts are gone. So a German unit can arguably lose its combat offensive value and still provide a defense value. Meaning versus a 6-4 Soviet unit, it can afford to ‘out die it’ . Out attrit it. Outlast it.

What story got told here? The VP tally is one story. On the board, the manoeuvre. Hube’s army was never caught; it escaped an encirclement that history also failed to close, and it lost by fifty points. The escape is worth noting a LOT of German panzer formations are in pretty solid shape. They live to fight another day.

Design Notes — what we would/might change [GAME]

Raised jointly with Steve at the end of the game. These are some observations

• Stacking rules. The fiddle with sequencing feel artificial for the scale. I suspect its to make setting up attacks as Soviets is harder, and then at end game, cycling units out of the pocket for the Germans becomes a problem. You cannot pass thru over stack ever.

• Soviet pace. The pursuit problem above. The question is whether the Soviet slowness is historically correct and therefore fair, or correct-but-unplayable — because across twelve turns it never once produced a caught enemy.

• Barrage. The distinction between move-then-attack and attack-then-move. It took a hot minute to see why Combat 1^st then Move was worth it. – The DRM is the reason. That said, I was never or rarely close enough to use it much. It basically mitigates Town/Rough terrain defense value or the tiger value.

• Victory conditions weighted toward the Soviet. The 1 VP / 2 VP asymmetry on step losses is the clearest case: it makes attacking German armour at 1:2 arithmetically correct. A scoring system that rewards a historically absurd attack is telling you what it values. Use the dogma of the Soviet method – bleed your army fast you have plenty.

• And the blunt one: how does the German player win? Steve played the defence about as well as it can be played never caught, rarely decisively engaged, escaped the encirclement, and lost by fifty points.

That last question is not a complaint and should not be seen as one. Ukraine ’44 produced the historically correct outcome through a mechanism that reads true: a fast defender the attacker cannot catch, exactly as in the real campaign. The critique is narrower and fairer being right about history is not the same as being satisfying to play from both sides, and a design can be real about 1944 while leaving the German player without a path to a win that feels like one. The game uses its mechanics and rules to bring about the historical result but without putting you on rails and giving you a LOT of agency. It is on the play again list.

Source Base

Historical citations carried forward from Part 1 (S&T 118 and 164, Osprey Command 22: Zhukov)

Big Board Gaming

Big Board Gaming: Military History & Wargaming AARs