View Full Version : thoughts on kursk scenario
it was probably a bit ambitious of me to try kursk for one of my very first CoW games against the comp., but the WWII historian in me just couldnt resist.
i played as the germans, and while i'm not doing all that well, this scenario has taught me a lot about this game and given me a respect of how well it models things. a few things jumped out at me.
-looking at the situation, it really was insane for the germans to attack at all at kursk in the summer of '43. going over my units before i moved everything and looking at what the russians had, i knew i was in for a tough ride, even BEFORE their huge reserves started to pour forward. it reminded me of a comment hitler made to zeitzler just before the battle- "everytime i think of our coming offensive, my stomach turns over". even at the point of attack, i didnt have huge superiority, and i had nothing like air superiority.
-there just arent enough german units to punch through. i poured everything i had into the two key points of attack, and while i made some headway, i never got closer than 4-5 hexes from prokhorovka in the south, and i got within about a hex of ponyri in the north. my SS formations were able to punch holes but at a big price and they just kept meeting new armoured and AT formations. what was neat to see was how my SS kept getting pushed NE, rather than due north as i was trying to move them- just as they were forced to veer towards the NE historically towards their death at prokhorovka.
-i was surprised to see that i actually made a little better headway in the north with 9th army- the air forces up there seemed to be far more effective, and there were fewer reserves to deal with.
-i made a big mistake committing my reserves too early. i was getting impatient so i threw everything i had into punching through, and i had nothing to deal with the counterattacks down near the bases of my salients. i tried to keep some faster motorized units on the wings as fire brigades, but they got chewed up and worn down and the russians would have broken through easily in a couple of turns if i had continued. bye-bye SS corps farther north.
-i'd LOVE to hear from german players who have actually been able to punch through and cut off the whole salient. i can't see how it can be done. of course, i'm still pretty green and i was playing the comp., but from my limited experience, i can't see how any halfway competent russian player could lose at kursk.
are there any examples out there of that happening?
Against the PO (programmed opponent) you can pretty much win with almost any odds with cheesy tactical maneuvers that the PO doesn't emulate. Using small, broken down units to make limited attack->minimize loss attacks (with arty/air support) will drain the entire Russian stack of readiness/supply while your units retain their health. Then you just start punching through with your high readiness/supply units until you get stopped by the hordes of reserves and repeat. No need for strategy or maneuver doctrine you can just grind away at the PO until he has nothing worth using.
You can do this to a lesser extent against human opponents but human opponents tend to do it back to you.
This is the one real failing of the TOAW system but as far as playing against the PO goes its an easy ticket to win just about any scenario, even when the odds are stacked against you as heavily as they are at Kursk. You can even thrash Israel in all the Israeli-Arab scenarios using these cheesy tactics ;).
If you can look past this flaw TOAW is still probably the best simulation at the operational level out there. Small chance it might be fixed in a future patch, but its sort of still "out there" in terms of whether or not Norm will get the green light to produce another patch for TOAW. I think there is a chance though, as Take-2 recently permitted him to release a small XP patch (1.06) and TOAW is afterall supposed to be Norm's baby/masterpiece, so cross your fingers ;).
I haven't actually played more than a couple of turns at Kursk, but I pretty much guarantee that if you adopt those kinds of tactics as mentioned above you're going to start cruising through the PO in just about everything you play.
thats great advice that maybe i would have been better off not hearing!!! :) i'll give it a shot. i hope it doesnt end up unbalancing everything in my favour against the PO- i was expecting it to kick my ass for quite awhile while i geared up to be able to take my chances in PBEM games! thanks mike.
how does the TOAW community view this tactic? is it generally frowned upon? i guess i could always pledge not to use it and play things straight up if things got boring against the PO.
Hehe you probably would be better off not hearing it but I guarantee if you stick with TOAW for any length of time you will be playing against humans here on the WHQ TOAW ladder anyways and you'd best know about it before you play people.
As for how its viewed.. well this topic comes up every so often here but from what I can tell its generally viewed as acceptable within reason.
There are some die-hard haters of it. I think everyone agrees that it would be nice if it was patched out sometime in the future, but in lieu of the situation right now most people will use this to some degree.
For instance, attacking entrenched or fortified units head-on is really suicide. Its obviously better to add in a flank attack or surround units but if your opponent has a solid, straight line there's really nothing you can do and you're forced to attack head-on. In these kinds of situations attacking heavily is just painful.
Most people will at least make a light probing attack with artillery to try and "dig out" the enemy unit. Artillery (and perhaps air support too, I'm not actually sure) has a chance to undo a units entrenchment status and put them back in mobile, which is a huge plus if you have to attack it head on.
Now, if you start breaking down units into companies to attack enemy divisions (or something absurd like that) all across the front and thats pretty much all you do your entire turn, I can pretty much guarantee some people aren't going to want to play with you.
As far as I'm aware there's no rule on this. Some people agree to house rules where you must have X strength to make a probe on a unit of Y size and so on before they play. Either way, know that everyone does it to some degree, but if it gets really excessive it's just aggravating. Using it regularly seems to be a well-established tactic in PBEM play though, especially because of the way the turns work (10 tactical rounds - trying to get the most rounds out a turn means a lot of light attacks).
There seems to be a distinction between a light attack and a supply/drain attack as well but I'm not even going to try and figure that one out. If you mess around with it a little bit in-game you'll probably figure out what you think is just plain cheesy and whats acceptable given the way TOAW works.
Secadegas
22 Jul 03, 16:24
As i see it MikeJ is 100% right.
Nevertheless when i was in Koreaboy position (before i get adict by this "PBEM thing") these kind of advices (supply-drain attacks, cheesy manouvers, dirty tricks and stuff) were completely nonsense.
Thank god i started in TOAW way before i had the chance of checking WFHQ forum...
Originally posted by koreaboy
it was probably a bit ambitious of me to try kursk for one of my very first CoW games against the comp., but the WWII historian in me just couldnt resist.
If you are interested by the battle of Koursk, there is a scenario about Prokhorovka on RuggedDefense, apparently designed for PBEM. It seems to have a good potential (I haven’t tried it).
La Palice.
thanks, LP. i'll see if i can give that one a shot.
mike- tried your tactic about halfway into my kursk scenario that hadnt gone all that well to that point. it was FANTASTICALLY successful. i couldnt believe it. by that point i didnt even need to split units down into smaller subunits- i already had quite a few that were ground down and i used them. i was shocked at how i was able to grind the PO with almost no cost to myself. it appears to me to be a pretty big flaw in the game. on one attack i checked the losses and i lost ONE "truck", while the russians lost tons of INF, arty, and especially trucks/horses. it doesnt seem to make sense. a little probe to fix the defenders to call down tons of arty seems to be a legit tactic, but i was shredding the reds with almost no losses. it seemed pretty unfair.
so i tried it again in france '40 as the germans- didnt seem to work anywhere near as well. my guess is that the difference was in that scenario, the germans don't have the masses of stand-alone arty that they have in the kursk scenario. the lesson i learned is that the tactic is really effective when you have scads of arty close by to blow things to bits.
that brings up another question- why don't the germans have any arty at all in france '40? i guess it must be within the units themselves, or the germans moved so quickly that they couldnt wait for the horses to drag the big guns behind them. seems to me to be a VERY unbalanced scenario. has that been the general view about france '40? the allies are supposed to get pasted, but not as badly as i was pasting them.
Well think of it more as an artillery bombardment than anything else. Its just the way TOAW works artillery bombardments are much less effective without supporting ground attacks. THe rationale seems to be that if someone is attacking them they have to keep their heads up, whereas if they are just being bombarded they can go underground and into cover.
In either case, causing losses is a bonus. What won't be easily seen in France '40 but will be happening is the Allied units will be losing readiness/supply at unfavorable ratios (eg a stack of 4 Allied divisions will all lose supply/readiness if attacked by even a single German brigade). Losses are kind of a bonus to this. Once units reach 33 readiness/1 supply (the lowest possible in game) they are usually easy pickings for a fully supplied/rested equivelant.
As for where the arty is - it's inclusive in the divisions most likely. Open up one of the units and look for artillery pieces. Smaller scale scenarios (brigade/regiment/battalion/company) usually tend to keep the artillery separate whereas you start dealing with divisions and corps and the artillery is almost always inclusive in the units equipment TOE&Es.
Siberian HEAT
23 Jul 03, 12:58
One thing about that Kursk scenario is that German proficiency is at 100% (or maybe that is the revised version?). Anyway, proficiency plays a big part in how many small attacks you can string together in any one turn. In a scenario with relatively low force proficiency you might get one light attack and have the turn end prematurely. Then it is like you just gave up a turn for nothing.
That is why I ususally only do one or two probing attacks to soften up the enemy...so that I can make SURE I have enough time to conduct the main attack during that turn. With a combination of high proficiency and shock bonuses you can learn to string together 5-10 or even over 30! rounds of these small attacks in a turn. However, for most of us with limited time to play, we are happy to get 3-4 rounds in a turn. :D
Originally posted by MikeJ
If you can look past this flaw TOAW is still probably the best simulation at the operational level out there. Small chance it might be fixed in a future patch, but its sort of still "out there" in terms of whether or not Norm will get the green light to produce another patch for TOAW. I think there is a chance though, as Take-2 recently permitted him to release a small XP patch (1.06) and TOAW is afterall supposed to be Norm's baby/masterpiece, so cross your fingers ;).
Norm *is* working on a new patch, and he has mentioned hexside rivers, the event limit, and (iirc) supply sources as things he's looking at. Time frame, however, is very up in the air, as Norm is doing this for free, in his spare time.
About the limited attack, minimize losses thing...
Mike is right about the arty - the losses caused when bombarding alone, vs losses caused when supporting a ground attack, are insane. Even a brigade attacking 9 divisions will serve to radically increase the damage dealt.
These attacks have (unrealistic) value even when not supported by arty. Let's use the same exmaple as above, a single brigade assaulting 9 divisions that are fortified. This single attack will reduce the entire stack of 9 divisions from 100% supply to 90%!! (Watch the listed strength of the units in the stack as you repeat this, over and over)...
There *is* a general rule about this: ALWAYS discuss this tactic with an opponent prior to beginning a game.
Some 'standard' fixes that players agree upon:
Unrestricted use. (All tournies are played this way!)
Once only per hex, per turn.
'Size' restrictions. A unit can make unlimited attacks on a unit one 'step' larger. (ie: a division is required to do this to a corp; 2 divs vs. 2 corps, etc)
Find the balance that's right for you!
aussiesta
24 Jul 03, 08:38
if I got all this right, one way to get rid in the future of those ugly probing attacks with artillery in a simple way would be to reduce the proficiency of all units in any scenario. In Kursk, for instance, German troops could have an average proficiency of 40-50 and Russian units something like 30-40. And if that's not enough, both sides could start with under-100 shock, say, 50, 60 (or 10), and get bonuses closer to, but never exceeding, 100. Multiple combat rounds would be an entirely different thing this way, I suppose. There's not much we can do with old scenarios, but new scenarios could use this system, I guess. Am I right?
Originally posted by Mantis
About the limited attack, minimize losses thing...
Mike is right about the arty - the losses caused when bombarding alone, vs losses caused when supporting a ground attack, are insane. Even a brigade attacking 9 divisions will serve to radically increase the damage dealt.
These attacks have (unrealistic) value even when not supported by arty. Let's use the same exmaple as above, a single brigade assaulting 9 divisions that are fortified. This single attack will reduce the entire stack of 9 divisions from 100% supply to 90%!! (Watch the listed strength of the units in the stack as you repeat this, over and over)...
There *is* a general rule about this: ALWAYS discuss this tactic with an opponent prior to beginning a game.
Some 'standard' fixes that players agree upon:
Unrestricted use. (All tournies are played this way!)
Once only per hex, per turn.
'Size' restrictions. A unit can make unlimited attacks on a unit one 'step' larger. (ie: a division is required to do this to a corp; 2 divs vs. 2 corps, etc)
Find the balance that's right for you!
IMO this is a design issue. If you want to avoid this, artillery must beintegrated with the supported units: a Bn to a brigade, a battery to a Bn, and only general support artillery be left as independent units. OTOH that brigade is receiving fire from those 9 divisions, and where is the defense in depth...?
Originally posted by aussiesta
if I got all this right, one way to get rid in the future of those ugly probing attacks with artillery in a simple way would be to reduce the proficiency of all units in any scenario. In Kursk, for instance, German troops could have an average proficiency of 40-50 and Russian units something like 30-40. And if that's not enough, both sides could start with under-100 shock, say, 50, 60 (or 10), and get bonuses closer to, but never exceeding, 100. Multiple combat rounds would be an entirely different thing this way, I suppose. There's not much we can do with old scenarios, but new scenarios could use this system, I guess. Am I right?
With negative shock in play (less than 100), entire formations will be dropping in & out of reorg constantly. You've hit the nail on the head as to very low chances of getting in multiple rounds, but the changes go deeper than that. If the level of replacements in the pool is properly balanced now, and then you go in and drop all the units proficiency by a large degree, say taking an 80 German down to 40, you are drastically reducing how much of this unit's equipment will make it back into the pool (from combat losses, evaporation, etc). This can throw a scenario out of balance as well.
Originally posted by JMS
IMO this is a design issue. If you want to avoid this, artillery must beintegrated with the supported units: a Bn to a brigade, a battery to a Bn, and only general support artillery be left as independent units. OTOH that brigade is receiving fire from those 9 divisions, and where is the defense in depth...?
I just used that as an 'overkill' example. In almost all cases, stacking that high is asking for it. But the point remains - why would 9 corps all expend 10% of their supply each to 'defend' against 1/3rd of a brigade of exhausted recon units? Can you really seen anything that the broken down brigade could pull off (especially without arty support) that could cause the 9 corps to expend 50% of their total supply? Yet that can happen in a single turn.
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