A new Vassal Opponent from Switzerland!
We are going to try and get thru via PBEM a Ukraine ’43 session. One of my favorite GMT wargame titles they publish thanks to Mark Simonitch! The goal as in most of his titles is to beat the VP clock. The number along the band in the turn track is the VPs accumulated required to be on historical pace. If you exceed the pace you can achieve an auto victory, if you fall too far behind then you can lose. My goal as the German player is to prevent an early embarrassing auto victory, re treat in good order and keep the tally low enough that a deft counter attack might secure me a auto victory by forcing the opponent off the pace enough to lose.
Standard terrain mods in this game, as well as using the ZOC Bond system we have grown to all love so much. You can read the rules online, it’s a clean system that works really well.
Below are the red dot VP locations. A Bit hard to read but obviously Kharkov is a big deal then the river cities along the Dnepr. The Northern area is cluttered and offers some opportunities for resistance and counter attack at the expense of the river defence. The Southern area around Stalino can easily become a death trap for the German player. I’ll need to decide how an when to let those VP’s go, lots of open ground that can be covered quickly if the mud holds off.
The opening turn sees the Soviet setup under the free set up not historical. So we will see how this all pans out. Historical set up was only provided in V1 of this game.
He makes five attacks. All are in essence effective.
He punches a hole north of Sumy. And will advance there. One attack is stalled by a DD [determined defense] NW of Kharkov the rest of the attacks around it are DS results [defense shattered]
In the South we hold but are forced to a 2nd step loss and inflict a second one in the combat East of Stalino. That eliminates the unit.
Advance after combat:
At the open of my German turn I re ord the lines around Kharkov and look to buy some time to do some fortifying. We can only fortify 1 hex a turn at the opening.
I shuffle back, right now more concerned about the Northern sector. If he pivots to focus there I am very thin and have no supporting armor. At the moment I want him to suspect that I am all in on Kharkov, hence my moving the big German Panzer division there. We will as soon as possible, replace that with 2 or 3 inf units and hope to make that a linch pin of the line, and then free up the armor to make some hit and run attacks.
Down south I leave the Soviets with some harder choices to make, throw in some heavy armor into the line to make them pick 1 axis to attack.
On to turn 2