I must say, whilst it took a bit of time to get the hang of the play flow, this is a good, yet something is rubbing me the wrong way. I’m not sure what it is yet. PErhaps the built up expectations from the game community? This seems to be less dynamic that I was expecting.
Heavy fighting near Salsk as 1st Pzr attempts to block the river, whilst 4th Pzr envelopes.
The Germans continue to slow the Soviet Advance.
Turn 5 draws
Whilst the Germans look thinly spread the rivers slow down the Soviets enough. As I gather the command system under my wing, I begin to position units for double activations. The Soviets need to focus and punch thru. I should be carrying my lessons forward from recently play of SP II by the Gamers under the SCS system.
Soviets kill a lone Axis HQ that had to be sacrificed. This is due to the fact that while you can activate ANY uit in range of a HQ, the HQ’s not activated may not move.
HQ Overrun!
Some decent progress but it is not going well for the Soviets.
Turn 6 saw a swag of units cut off by the Soviets! None that count for VP’s however.
German Bulge – counter attacks to stem the tide. This counter attack was awesome to see. with a double activation the Germans forced units to retreat and they inflict decent losses. No prized soviet tanks die….grrr.
Soviet counters the push and drives back across the river. Not to be swayed the Soviets pile in taking low odds attacks and push back the Axis. Turn 7 onwards coming soon.
I haven’t played an chit driven impulse game that is at the operational level – how does it handle doing a retirement on defense? It seems that you would leave a big gap all the time when X corps pulled back and the two on the left and right had not acted yet.
Maybe then a tactic is to have all your commands in a kind of scrum formation so that they can survive being isolated without as much risk. This would reduce the frontage they could cover, though.
sounds a lot like the ‘checkerboard’ formation in the old Napoleon at Waterloo games.
yes the problem I found was that you left HQ’s standing alone to be overrun if you activated units from 1 HQ within the command range of another HQ. Seems silly and unrealistic to me. So you are then forced to consolidate or shrink LoC to ensure you can ‘move’ units to avoid being pocketed. Not sure what all the fuss is over this game. I did not like it as much as I hoped.