EFS Army Group Centre preamble.

AGC is a 4 map Divisional, Regimental and often battalion scale title that focusses on the uber German opening moves in Operation Barbarossa. As nearly everyone now knows it is up for reprint and the entire series – AGN/C/S – North Center and South link up to a planned handful of other modules that all wrap up the game play I think no later than mid July ’42. Maps run from opening through East to Stalingrad and Moscow. Hexes are 7 miles per. As you can imagine the scope and scale is immense. The sweep is nothing short of amazing.

The game system itself given its intent to be all encompassing in scope is straight forward but still 30 odd pages.

Above we can see the real task ahead for the Germans in the early war. Securing supply lines, rail heads and capturing key cities is going to be on the mind of the German player the entire time. While the Soviets will scratch their heads and wondering where is my army? Play will quickly devolve around the road/rail networks and force a somewhat historical effort. As mentioned in a number of prior posts and videos, the Germans can manage sans supply, for a few turns, and also do without the Arty and Air if they focus their efforts.

The red blocks denote areas that require solid Soviet defense. The red discs equal vp value. The dark arrows, show the potential routes of advance of the Axis forces via their lines of departure. ]-Caption.

Combat, attempts take into consideration all the appropriate aspects – Divisional integrity, Armor effects, AT effects, Air and a variety of other aspects. Each of these is represented as DRM +/-3 max.

Another aspect that is key to this system and prevents it reaching into the late war is of course the asynchronous aspect of the sequence of game play. I’ve spoken about this before but in essence the Soviets rarely can mount an effective attack using combined arms as the Infanty do not move until after the combat are declared. So in practical terms the Soviet infantry or non mech/motorized units must start adjacent to the planned attack. The Germans of course can always use the Reaction Move to dilute the attacks even further. In other words….as the soviet unless you are lucky of the german is a rookie expect to almost never attack as the Soviet

Hitler desires a quick win …yes!

At some point the image capture guy replaced the red discs with green, but each Green disc is a VP.

A quick orientation – Top right of the map is Smolensk. Red disc in the middle is Kiev.

The Kiev area.

Note how important the early capture of “XXXX” is key and ‘priced’ appropriately – 3 VP.

The Dnepr line! – Vitebsk, Orsha and Mogilev.

 

Note on Supply that I got wrong:

3 thoughts on “EFS Army Group Centre preamble.

  1. Don’t forget that Russian infantry CAN attack if a Soviet HQ is nearby and operational. So the caveat above about not being able to conduct Soviet combined arms is true only if you interdict those HQ’s along potential counterattack routes.

    1. Kev,

      You playing AGC, or AGC and AGS combined? You have a picture of Kiev there. Wow, you are the MAN if you can pull this off (AGN is kinda boring, are you bothering with that?)

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