Kursk, playable?

Could GTS bring the innovation and excitement needed to a re enactment of the Battle of Kursk ?

Company level, 4 maps, Makes me wonder how much of the battle is played?

Some data points:
“For their attack, the Wehrmacht used three armies and a large proportion of their tanks on the eastern front. The 9th Army in the north had 335,000 men (223,000 combat soldiers), the 4th Panzer Army had 223,907 men (149,271) and Army detachment Kempf had 100,000 men (66,000) for a grand total of 778,907 men (518,271).
The Red Army used two Fronts (Army groups) for the defence and one Front as a reserve. The Central and Voronezh Fronts fielded 12 armies. Central Front had 711,575 men (510,983 combat soldiers), Voronezh Front had 625,591 men (446,236) and Steppe Front had 573,195 men (449,133) for a grand total of 1,910,361 (1,426,352).” -Wiki.



I am trying to imagine that many men at company level….on maps.
Sounds like a winner to me, but I would like to know more about what it covers,, ground scale and how Adam envisions this playing out.

Those that are wondering where Kursk is and why it mattered, a little more Wiki based data. Glantz also wrote extensively on this battle.

The Battle of Kursk was a World War II engagement between German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front near the city of Kursk, (450 kilometers / 280 miles south of Moscow) in the Soviet Union in July and August 1943. It was both the largest series of armored clashes, including the Battle of Prokhorovka, and the costliest single day of aerial warfare in history. The battle was the final strategic offensive the Germans were able to mount in the east, and the decisive Soviet victory gave the Red Army the strategic initiative for the remainder of the war.
The Germans hoped to shorten their lines by eliminating the Kursk salient (also known as the Kursk bulge), created in the aftermath of their defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. They envisioned pincers breaking through its northern and southern flanks to achieve a great encirclement of Red Army forces. The Soviets, however, had intelligence of the German Army's intentions, provided in part by the British. This and German delays to wait for new weapons, mainly the Tiger I heavy tank and what would become the first significant battlefield appearance of the new Panther medium tank,[21][22] gave the Red Army time to construct a series of defense lines and gather large reserve forces for a strategic counterattack.[23]
Advised months in advance that the attack would fall on the neck of the Kursk salient, the Soviets designed a plan to slow, redirect, exhaust, and progressively wear down the powerful German panzer spearheads by forcing them to attack through a vast interconnected web of minefields, pre-sighted artillery fire zones, and concealed anti-tank strong points comprising eight progressively spaced defense lines 250 km deep—more than 10 times as deep as the Maginot Line—and featuring a greater than 1:1 ratio of anti-tank guns to attacking vehicles. By far the most extensive defensive works ever constructed, it proved to be more than three times the depth necessary to contain the furthest extent of the German attack.[24]
When the German forces had exhausted themselves against the defences, the Soviets responded with counter-offensives, which allowed the Red Army to retake Orel and Belgorod on 5 August and Kharkov on 23 August, and push the Germans back across a broad front.
Although the Red Army had success during the winter, this was the first successful strategic Soviet summer offensive of the war. The model strategic operation earned a place in war college curricula.[nb 10][25] The Battle of Kursk was the first battle in which a Blitzkrieg offensive had been defeated before it could break through enemy defenses and into its strategic depths.[26]

2 thoughts on “Kursk, playable?

  1. Is this really happening?
    If so it’s excellent news.
    I’d vote for picking one super-interesting sector of The Kursk battle and making a GTS game that has company-scale units fighting over a Corps-sized sector. Way more interesting and playable than trying to replicate all of Kursk.
    Adam was a big fan of Panzer Command (VG 1984) so maybe this is his ultimate tribute — not an exact replica and update of that game, but one that takes the best of PG and GTS and places it in a slightly later period at a different part of the Eastern Front.

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