Wrapping up our game play here of Autumn for Barbarossa.
You can find prior posts at these links: 3   & 2  & 1

Turn 5 Air:
5 air 4/5 +2 1 step kill.

Upon review Orsha North not OOS, so Soviet Cav stays.

Combat:

#1 Zharkovskyy d3r3 by 14^th Motorized

#2 Nth Demidov d2r2

#3 19.20 OOS a1r1

#4 Ridnya [sth] d1 r1

#5  Smolensk OOS -A2 A smack down for the German assault.

#6 Sth of Pochrok d1r1

#7 Yartsovo North d2r2

#8 Yartsovo South d2r2

Soviet Air arrives:

Soviet air arrives – 5 steps. 4/5 DG’s in order to slow down the assault.

Decent results from Soviet air attacks:

This tactic will slow down the German juggernaut along with the piling in of Svoiet forces along key roads and defenisive locations.

They conduct 1 attack:

#1 Zharkovskyy3:1 net  d1r1

 

Smolensk is proving a tough nut to crack. Tying up several units and draining steps in A1/D1 style results.

Turn 6 Germans roll 11 air and 3 for Hitler Roll.

Air hits – 3/7 and 2 step hits.

Germans call a halt to operations end of their Turn 7.

In Turn 6 the Soviet continue jamming up roads, and add more replacements and reinforcements to the the map.

The trick with the SCS system is to beat the double or triple attack capability of the turn sequence. If you can space out and offer up a deeper defense versus strong points this kills momentum. In the early game that is not possible, so you throw or perhaps waste mediocre units as road bumps. If I was playing this again I’d go for lining roads with units in staggered lots to eat up overrun, combat, and exploit attacks.

By turn 6 you have waves of crappy units who can be offered up as sacrifice. In Turn 7 the Germans made very little progress, but it was not easy to conceptualize any sort of major Soviet counter offensive yet.

Thus by end of Turn 7 we have what amounts to a stalemate, especially as brittle Panzer forces are worn down. One aspect of the game is that you do not need consider next month… So as the German you can ‘burn’ through formations with little or no consequence in order to achieve locally immediate victory in a perhaps ahistorical manner.

The game ends in what amounts to a draw or I suppose really a German loss! As best we can tell here, the forces of both sides do not have enough punch to make a meaningful dent in the VP total as far as it matters in game terms.