DC1: Warsaw to Paris - Jason vs Barthheart

Started by Barthheart, March 20, 2017, 06:25:53 PM

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Sir Slash

It mostly goes like this, "Doom, doom, doom". You'll see what I mean after the dust settles.
"Take a look at that". Sgt. Wilkerson-- CMBN. His last words after spotting a German tank on the other side of a hedgerow.

Barthheart

#31
Sorry all. Once again my ambitions are greater than my will to overcome my laziness. There won't be very many updates here, but I will keep playing the game as Jason is a fun opponent.

I might post something on occasion if there's something really interesting but mostly you'll get more by watching Jason's thread.

Turn 4 sent with a small surprise for JP... I pulled back from the river I front of Lodz. He's already breached it to the south so better to use the troops to protect Lodz and get ready for the fall back to Warsaw.

I'm hoping the the Noth and South fronts have delayed him enough to keep him from winning but it's still going to be a close thing.

Barthheart

Turn 5 back to JP.

Highlights include mauling some of his units up north, mauling the XV Corps HQ in the center, consolidating the defences around Krakow.

He seems to be wasting time picking off units when he should be driving hard. Also seems to be Warsaw focused.... he needs to take Krakow as well or he won't get enough points. I don't see enough of units down there to take it, but I can't see all his stuff either.... ???

Up north I've caused enough trouble that he seems to be sending new stuff up there.... good... good... Just about time to withdraw behind the northern rivers and make him come to me again.....  >:D



Sir Slash

You Poles don't fight fair. You're supposed to just.....lose. What does Poland do with their little airforce in this one? Anything? Or just let it hang-out and play defense?
"Take a look at that". Sgt. Wilkerson-- CMBN. His last words after spotting a German tank on the other side of a hedgerow.

Barthheart

Mostly the Polish Airforce tries not to get noticed. But every once and a while I'll use them to lay a smack down on an HQ that presents itself. It's not much and depending on where it is, can go badly for the Poles....  :(

Barthheart

Turn 6 returned finally.

More destruction up North. More scrambling in the Center. More... sitting in the South....
I did make Krackow a major supply dump so now it doesn't matter if he cuts it off from Warsaw.  ;)

Surrounded the 4th Panzer Div... but that won't last long.

Slowly pulling back for final defence of Warsaw. That and Krackow are where the game will be won or lost.

Barthheart

Turn 7 finally in. Man summer is a bad time for this kind of thing...  :P

Started pulling back in the North. I've caused enough damage and delay up there. I now need to rush all the units back towards Warsaw for the final few turns of the siege.

One of my commanders in the center, in charge of the Lwow defense, keeps ordering all his troops to do nothing!  :pullhair: Means I can't move or fight with them.  :tickedoff:

Just south of there my center is collapsing a little too fast.... I can't let him swing around and get behind Warsaw or I'm cooked.

Large pocket created just outside of Poznan... I'll lose all those troops.... I wonder if he'll just ignore them or waste time and try to destroy them.... ???

He's still not really pushing towards Krackow.... very curious.... ???


Barthheart

Turns 8, 9 and 10 complete.

He's trying to end run around me and get at the cheap points in the back. If he can do that, he doesn't need to take Warsaw, but still needs to take Krakow. Krakow seems likely to fall though, he's got more there than I thought originally.
Still...it should take two more turns at least... I hope.... :P

With only 4 turns left I'm confident he can't take Warsaw. So now it's speed bump time.... throw as many units as I can in front of his tanks to slow them down! Not very glamourous but here you go.  \m/

Gonna be a close one.....

Sir Slash

"Take a look at that". Sgt. Wilkerson-- CMBN. His last words after spotting a German tank on the other side of a hedgerow.

Barthheart

Turn 11 complete.

He's making better headway than I'd hoped but he still has a long way to go. Also I stole a VP location back... at least for now.


JasonPratt

If anyone passing through is wondering why I'm in his thread reading around -- take a guess...  >:D :2funny:   :-"  :peace:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Okay, some post-battle analysis, specifically on why and how I lost.

-2.) No, I didn't let the Poles win.

-1.) Yes, this was my first time playing the game, against a veteran of it, but I've played a version of this system before and I've played strategy games for almost 40 years.

These are not reasons for my loss, but they have topical application, thus their negative designation.

0.) The campaign designer(s?) chose to put the famous 19th Corps with all its famous power and leaders (Rommel, Guderian, etc.), totally out of position. Even Falkenwrath (or whatever his name was, in my headcanon it's this so there  :P ) was largely out of position -- and he was the most competent corps remaining in East Prussia! In their place were a weak reservist division (treated like a corps, Brandt's Gruppe); and a weak corps made of two weak reservist divisions (Wodrig's). Plus some scattered auxiliaries attached to the army HQ, like a sizeable but still reservist garrison division that would take me several turns to a-historically move out of place to try to make up for problems.

I'm counting this as a neutral reason because I could have still won had I played them better. But this adjustment, for game balance I suppose, left me unable to even mount the famous 40:1 attack on Wisna which the Poles famously defended against for a turn and a half. ;) A strong flanking attack from the north makes sense. A weak-ass presentation attack from the north does not. Against an opponent like Barth, these leftovers would have been barely able to mount a defense against a significant push into East Prussia by the Poles, threatening a northern loop-around to cut off supplies to the main thrust (from the northwest). Which not-incidentally is what Barth tried, which leads to the main reason I lost...


1.) ...Barth isn't the Poles.

It isn't just that Barth outplayed me; he played the Poles smart. That means probing forward to screw with my lines of supply, and not even only where I overreached (like with Wodrig's corps) or zigged instead of zagging (like near Zakopane.) He actually ran a cavalry unit behind my lines on the first couple of turns to take one of my cities! -- which left me bewildered in accounting for my score by 1 point for a while (even though I quickly ousted him) because I thought he had started with that city.

Aside from paralyzing my weak-ass northeastern sector's thrust, and my considerably-less-weak southern front, thus delaying their advances into his hinterlands where I would have been able to cut off the supply lines of his main defenders, this had a knock-on effect that, based on Barth's comments in this thread, even he underestimated:


2.) I couldn't safely leave pockets of his troops, of any size, behind. Because I was painfully well aware that all he would have to do is save some supply in those pockets for a fast-mover or two, or even a slow-moving infantry in the right position, and then lurch forward after I'm gone to sit on a key road junction. Here, perhaps, my unfamiliarity with this particular game also hampered me, because I didn't have a true feel for how long to guard these little (and sometimes not-so-little) pocket castles until they could safely be ignored.

Contrast this to the pocketing in our prior game of DC3:Barbarossa. Due to the difference in time scale (I suppose), which was two weeks per turn in that game and only two days here, a group of pocketed troops of any size would be quickly unable to move in that game and then even blip out of existence without relief within a mere handful of turns. Here, I had no clear way of knowing when any pocketed troops would become worthlessly immobile (much less blip out of existence -- that did happen, but as far as I know it only happened to some of my brigades!)

Consequently, as Barth critiqued me about upthread, I had to waste time messing with his pockets rather than pushing toward any orange-dot objectives. But I wasn't doing that because I wanted to. I was doing that because I couldn't trust Barth not to be awesome!


Those were the main two reasons I ran out of time, even though I had bought an extra two turns of time at the beginning! But I can think of some others.

3.) This partly goes back to scenario design, perhaps, but I ended up over-extending Brandt's and Wodrigs groups despite knowing they were a-historically weak, and despite only trying to recon-probe. That's because there were a ton more Polish troops guarding the East Prussian border than I was expecting. Maybe he railed them up there, but he didn't seem to mention that in his first reports.  ??? This left those two gruppes easily surroundable, and with Barth's aggressive counter-blitzing easily surrounded.

I was able to avoid this with Falkenwrath's Corps (on the southwestern corner of East Prussia, annnnnnd now you are insane, sorry  :buck2: ), because I just fought head on with them -- they were strong enough to do that -- allowing me to slip a division or two around the backs of the Polish corps defending against the Falc.

I'm not sure if this is what Barth was referring to upthread when he was confused about one of my divisions turning back north. Even though I made a deep recon probe with a couple of divisions between Falc's group and Wodrig's, I never intended to run them for Warsaw or anything like that -- precisely because I knew Barth would snip off their supply easily. My goal was just to look around west of Mlowa while I still could, and then link up with forces driving eastward from the other side of the Polish coastal salient, to hit the blocking Polish corps from behind. A classic spearwall/cav/sword field maneuver. (This wasn't a reason why I lost; I'm actually proud of this maneuver. But then, I had to make it because I couldn't just pocket his corps there and leave it behind.)

Anyway, once I learned just how many Polish units were coming up against my weak Prussian probe, I bungled pulling back to defend against their counter-push. I managed not to totally lose the game there, but it sure didn't help me; and since the game eventually came down to whether I could invest Warsaw from its eastern side, which I couldn't, then in that sense my bungled defense contributed to my loss.


4.) Related to trying to go around behind Warsaw when I started to have a chance, I made the mistake of focusing a number of my fast-moving divisions on thrusting LITERALLY NOWHERE USEFUL for several turns. In my partial defense for that blunder, I did have another pocket of Bartruppen that I couldn't just leave alone to do whatever he wanted, which in this case would have been to cut off my tenuous supply line to my second (and eventually main) thrust on Krakov. Had I thought a little farther ahead, I might have been able to redirect those fast divisions to run behind Warsaw in time to at least hail mary over-against Warsaw's river defense. Or maybe not, but still that was a major mistake. I might not have won being in better position at the end, but not being there at the end sure sealed my loss; and that's traceable back directly to this mistake.


5.) I should have had my engineers more focused earlier on repairing bridges, instead of being mobile light infantry (handy though that often was). I'm unsure how much that cost me in the end, but I definitely should have focused on that sooner.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Barthheart

Interesting analysis... I guess I should open the last turn to see how I won...?

I really want to see you stuff before I give my summary... Maybe I can go through it all tonight...

JasonPratt

I don't have a final video yet; but you can watch the others now.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Quote from: Barthheart on December 07, 2017, 12:18:33 PM
Interesting analysis... I guess I should open the last turn to see how I won...?

Sure, as far as the turn goes.  O0
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!